Posted on 02/23/2008 8:41:16 AM PST by GVnana
Jonah Goldberg on Liberal Fascism (And how Barack Obama fits in)
Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 8:03 PM
HH: Jonah, reading Liberal Fascism, I come across the recognition, I knew it, but I didn’t really confront it, that Saul Alinsky has two candidates for the Democratic nomination. And not just people who read his books, people who worked for him. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both Alinskyites.
JG: Yeah.
HH: It’s stunning.
JG: They’re both true disciples of Alinsky.
HH: Yeah.
JG: And it’s amazing. And Alinsky was obsessed with power.
HH: Yeah.
JG: Obsessed with power.
HH: A fascist, clearly a fascist, even though he would reject the title, I’m sure.
JG: Right, right. I mean, a rose by any other name.
HH: Right.
JG: If you just read what he writes about power and of winning the institutions, of crushing your enemies, I mean, he just reads like a fascist.
HH: Conflict all the time, conflict all the time.
JG: Right.
HH: Well, listen, here’s some rhetoric not from either of the two, but from Michelle Obama. I want to know if you hear in it any echoes. Cut number one.
MO: In 2008, we are still a nation that is too divided. We live in isolation, and because of that isolation, we fear one another. We don’t know our neighbors. We don’t talk. We believe that our pain is our own. We don’t realize that the struggles and challenges of all of us are the same. We are too isolated. And we are still a nation that is still too cynical. We look at it as them and they as opposed to us. We don’t engage, because we are still too cynical.
HH: Cut number two:
MO: Don’t get sick in this country, not here. Americans are in debt not because they live frivolously, but because someone got sick. And even with insurance, the deductibles and premiums are so high that people are still putting medication treatments on credit cards. And they can’t get out from under. I could go on and on and on, but this is how we’re living, people, in 2008. And things have gotten progressively worse throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations. It hasn’t gotten better for regular folks. JG: Yeah, no it’s an amazing thing. And if we elect the right president, all of a sudden, I’m going to get to know my neighbor (laughing). What?
HH: But the continuing crisis, right?
JG: Yeah, yeah.
HH: Isn’t that part of the playbook?
JG: Right, that we’re on this incredible, inevitable slippery slope to evil, and the only thing we can do is we need a leader who personifies the people, personifies unity, who will unify and rally the nation in his spirit, and be our savior. And that’s how Obama is running, is he’s running as a secular savior.
HH: Cut number three:
MO: We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another, that we cannot measure our greatness in this society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure out greatness by the least of these, that we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I’m here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.
HH: Jonah Goldberg?
JG: Mother of pearl. My God. You know, it’s amazing what it reminded me of, is Hillary Clinton’s speech at Wellesley when she graduates. She says we’re not interested in social reconstruction, we’re…no, we’re interested in human reconstruction. She wants to create, recreate new men. The desire to create new men and fix souls, you know, that gets to the heart of this drumbeat over the 20th Century.
HH: The next Michelle Obama cut:
MO: If we can’t see ourselves in one another, we will never make those sacrifices. So I am here right now, because I am married to the only person in this race who has a chance of healing this nation.
HH: Jonah?
JG: (sigh)
HH: Have you heard this before?
JG: No, I hadn’t. I hadn’t. She’s going to, you know, I mean, my husband will express the Volksgemeinschaft (laughing)
HH: Wait until Duane has to transcribe that one. One more…we’ve got to go to break, or do we have time for one more? Oh, we’ll come back. Jonah Goldberg, when I heard these things after having read Liberal Fascism, I said this is exactly what you were talking about.
JG: Yeah.
HH: These themes to power, to urgency, to crisis, to the one man, and to the mass nationalization…when we come back, can conservatives do anything to stop it? What’s your quick preview?
JG: Yes, but it’s going to be hard.
HH: How do they do it?
JG: It’s a door to door fight. It’s the same fight we had against communism. The idea that government can love you is the central myth that conservatives are always going to have to fight.
- - - - HH: Cut number five for Jonah Goldberg:
MO: Barack, as Oprah said, is one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime. Barack is more than ready. He’ll be ready today, he’ll be ready on Day One, he’ll be ready in a year from now, five years from now. He is ready. That is not the question. The question is what are we ready for? Wait, wait, wait, because we’re ready for change. We say we’re ready for change, but see, change is hard. Change will always be hard. And it doesn’t happen from the top down. We do not get universal health care, we don’t get better schools because somebody else is in the White House. We get change because folks from the grass roots up decide they are sick and tired of other people telling them how their lives will be, when they decide to roll up their sleeves and work. And Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better, and that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
HH: Jonah Goldberg, we’re looking at each other as we hear this, because this is the antithesis of limited government.
JG: That’s right. It is, you know, it is the collective matters, it is this cult of unity. The central theme of the book, in many ways, is that all these isms of the left, socialism, fascism, communism, they’re all political religions. They’re all the misapplication of religious principles to politics. And you know, Obama has said on the stump that we can create a kingdom of Heaven on Earth. His advance people, when they go around, they’re told not to talk…this was in the New York Times yesterday, they’re told not to talk about issue. They’re supposed to testify about how they have “come to Obama”, you know, instead of come to Jesus. And it reminds me a bit of the 1912 Progressive Party convention. They changed the words of We Will Follow Jesus to We Will Follow Roosevelt. And it also, too, was like a religious revival. This has, you know, when you listen to Obama, when he talks about we are the change we have been waiting for, there is this incredible messianic feel to it. And he may be a decent and honorable man, I think he almost certainly is, but I don’t think he has any conception of the kind of emotional and political passions that he’s toying with when he tries to promise people that simply by rallying around a national leader who expresses their national will and their spirit and all the rest, that he can deliver us to someplace outside of history, to this new sunny upland, you know, utopia. That is dangerous stuff, and when you unleash that in politics, it almost never ends well.
HH: You know, he raised $32 million dollars in January.
JG: Yeah.
HH: After the low hanging fruit has been taken for a year.
JG: Yeah.
HH: So it came from new people, and most of it came over the internet, and meant is wasn’t solicited one on one. It was volunteered. That has a mark of something I’ve never seen, and I’ve been doing this since 1974 in American politics. And so the question to you is, just having finished this book, does it worry you? You just sort of indicated it does worry you. It’s not just about Jimmy Carter or beating John Kerry. It’s something very different.
JG: No, I agree. It is, in many ways, it must…the LBJ to JFK comparisons between Hillary and Obama has got all sorts of flaws, but there’s a kernel in there. It must drive Hillary nuts. Hillary is the one who has this politics of meaning. She is the one who wants to say that you should get your meaning from the state, and that the government should serve as essentially a new church, going back, you know, this dream of creating a religion of government that goes back to the New Dealers. She laid it all out on paper. It is her overriding theme from the beginning of her career. But Obama is the word made flesh in a way. He actually inspires people to behave the way she would like them to. And in many ways, she should really be sort of the Paul to his Jesus in this sense, because she can talk about it, and she can think about it, but she doesn’t inspire people. She comes across as like an assistant school principal who’s going to yell at you for eating too much glue. Obama is, as Oprah puts it, Obama is the One.
HH: So can John McCain at 71, and soon to be 72, possibly fight back against this? And how does he do it? Can he do it without an appeal to ideas, I guess is what I’m asking.
JG: Yeah, I think it’s going to be hard, and the contrast between the two of them is pretty glaring, because McCain is, you know, he’s Grandpa Munster. He’s a kind of a cranky old guy. And I think the best hope is that if Obama gets the nomination, which I think we now think he’s going to do…
HH: I agree.
JG: There’s a lot of time for people to realize they’ve been conned, and I don’t mean conned in the sense that I’m calling Obama a grifter. I’m saying that what he is selling cannot be sold, because it does not exist.
HH: And it is not American.
JG: It is not American, and it is false hope. You cannot have what he is promising. And there is time for a sort of where’s the beef moment, or the emperor has no clothes moment.
HH: And I’ve got to clarify. I know you do a lot of this. When I say it’s not American, I don’t mean that he’s not a patriot. I mean, it’s got no predicate in American history. We don’t embrace totalist approaches.
JG: That’s right.
HH: I mean, we have. Your book is about when we did, and the price we paid. They were terrible costs involved.
JG: Right. We flirt with them all the time, because I think it is, going back to this Rousseauian vision, it is a natural human desire to want to recreate that sort of religious, spiritual tribal feeling. And we constantly are looking for it in our politics. The problem is it’s fool’s gold. You can never get it. And so we constantly are following these false prophets. And that’s why in my view, all of these people who sell this stuff…Marxism was essentially selling this, that we’re going to create a Heaven on Earth. Fascism was doing a thousand year reich. All of these guys sell the same thing. That’s why I think they’re all reactionary, because they’re all trying to recreate this feeling that we got when we lived in caves. And the only true radical, revolutionary, inspiring revolution of the last thousand years was the Enlightenment Revolution of Locke, Rousseau, the American founding, which said our rights come from God, and that government is our servant, not our master.
BUMP TO BUY THIS BOOK! Thanks for posting! :-)
Audio here:
Oba-messiah talk, I will make a shrine next to my computer to burn incense and prepare for the change for hope. (Or is it hope for change - it is so hard to keep straight.)
I am about half done with the book. It is fantasitic.
One, I learned much about Italian fascism and second, how much
freedoms were restricted in the US by Wilson and the progressives during WWI.
I highly recommend this book to all FREEPERS.
This brings to mind several nightmarish Marxist visions: the recruiting of young American Leftists to help harvest the sugar cane in Cuba, or Jim Jones' Marxist Jonestown collective farm, or the backyard blast furnaces in Mao's Great Leap Forward, or Pol Pot herding the intellectuals and city dwellers onto his rural slave labor farms.
I saw a TV program the other night on the Mansion family and the interviews with the young, mostly middle class women who followed Charles Manson were interesting. These women said that they didn’t know why they liked Manson, it was just something about him. He offered them a new world that would be better than the existing one. I could not help but be overcome by the comparisons between the young people who followed Charles Manson and the young people today who follow Obama. Like the Manson followers they have no idea why they like Obama, they just do. And they have no idea what Obama stands for or what he would do to this country.
Same old socialism, different package.
Unfortunately, Obama is a 100% pure, unadulterated, collectivist (wearing a smiley-face button).
He goes way beyond the noble concepts of basic human rights and equal opportunity in a free society (very acceptable), to the principle of “access” - to others’ earnings through high taxation and “social programs” (wealth transfers).
This is economic egalitarianism, it’s socialism.
Maybe B.O. slept through his Econ classes. Wealth transfers destroy the economy - the skilled producers (”rich people”) who will lose incentives to continue investing in themselves, and work 80-hour weeks.
Everybody should read Road to Serfdom, and other classic books on how an economy works. Its like those critical principles have been “lost” on the general public. Most voters are 2-year olds — never grew up, and accepted responsibility for their OWN economic fate and future — they treat the income from OTHERS’ hard work lie it’s their parent’s “allowance” to be taken by manipulation or other means (political force).
Grow up, Democrats. Get some morals, live a life of civility, not thuggishness - it’s not YOUR money, create, grow, or make your own! It’s the honorable thing to do in a peaceful, free society.
work lie it’s = work like it’s
“The idea that government can love you is the central myth that conservatives are always going to have to fight.”
Oh, they love you all right. As long as you can pay your taxes...
“Barack, as Oprah said, is one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime.”
Brilliant?...hmmmmm
Interesting, since Oprah was born prior to the death of Albert Einstein. I doubt they met but their “lifetimes” do cross.
I can enumerate several of Einsteins accomplishments.
Thanx for the post-should be a good book-most likely my next purchase.Anyways...anyone who wants to find out a little more about Saul Alinsky and why he’s so popular with the left(Hill+Obama)-pick up “Rules for Radicals”,subtitle-”A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals”.Under 200 pgs.
I read it and I was very impressed by the argument and the saliency of it all. Liberals should read it simply because the book doesn’t blame them, it just shows the logical progression of leftist thought. It is almost a parallel book to “Road to Serfdom.”
Now that the Obama group is saying this, it is easy to understand why he is so dangerous.
Even compassionate conservatives?
I’m thinking he’s more along the lines of Wesley Mouch, the man of no accomplishments who continually desires ‘wider powers’.
mark
“The idea that government can love you is the central myth that conservatives are always going to have to fight.”
That was the sentence I picked up on as well.
LIBERALS - looking for love in all the wrong places.
This interview contains a nit I am compelled to pick, however.
SNIP . . a natural human desire to want to recreate that sort of religious, spiritual tribal feeling. And we constantly are looking for it in our politics. The problem is it’s fool’s gold. You can never get it.
A near miss analogy.
Fool's gold is the stuff that glitters, but is not gold.
You can, indeed, obtain it fairly easily, but it is relatively worthless.
(I wonder if that Hitler smiley is copyrighted?)
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