Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning Summary and Reviews

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
by Jonah Goldberg

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Book Summary Information

Author: Jonah Goldberg
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-01-08
ISBN: 0385511841
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Doubleday

Book Reviews of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Book Review: B for effort; C for attainment.
Summary: 3 Stars

Paraquoting... with my own comments.

Author mistakenly equates all authoritarianism with fascism,

The primary problem I had with this book is not so much the author's associating American liberalism/progressivism with European fascism but with his attempt to say that all authoritarianism and idealization of the State is by definition, his definition, fascism. He goes so far as to say Lenin, Stalin, and Castro are fascists. This is absurd. They were, or are in the case of Castro, certainly authoritarian, but to call them fascist it to miss the clear differences in their economic policies from people like Hitler or Mussolini who were economic centrists--a Third Way between capitalism and socialism.

If one takes into consideration all of the various political ideologies present in western democracies during the 19th through the early 21st centuries and places them on a Cartesian plane with economic issues on the x-axis (left/right) and social issues on the y-axis (authoritarian/libertarian) one can more easily distinguish the differences between various points of view. Authoritarian rightists like the American Republican and Democratic Parties would be in the upper right, authoritarian leftists like Castro and Lenin would be on the upper left, libertarian leftists like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would be on the lower left, and libertarian rightists such as Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand would be on the lower right.

Given a model of political philosophy such as above fascists are close to the centre of the economic axis, though historically they leaned to the economic right, not the left as Goldberg asserts (unlike the BNP, who lean to the economic left!) . Where Goldberg is correct is in associating fascism and American liberalism on economic issues. The Democratic Leadership Council, modern UK Labour, and the German Social Democrats under Schroder (all of whom are representative of economic centrism) have even openly embraced the term the term Third Way to represent their politics. However it must be clearly emphasized that all of these groups are certainly more socially libertarian than any historical or contemporary fascist parties.

Apart from their economic centrism - once again centrism being a cent re between advocates of neo-liberal capitalism and economic policy as advocated by authoritarian Marxist-Leninists or libertarian socialists - historical and contemporary fascists, like the British National Party (They are not Fascist! They are economically socialist & ethnocentrist) or the French National Front, openly embrace a law and order social policy that seeks to empower the police and military while promoting race ("race" does not exist, only ethnicity!) and nationalism as paramount values. American liberals, on the other had, do not advocate for these things or at least not nearly as much as the BNP or the Front national. (Because they are not ethnocentrist or economically socialist - they can't be in the paradigm of an immigrant laissez-faire state!)

In general Goldberg states an interesting case for associating American liberalism with European fascism but he makes some pretty big mistakes by calling all authoritarianism fascism and calling it part of the economic left. The latter can be partially forgive as, in the American context that he is writing, the economic views that liberals and fascists share are the far left to some someone as far to the right economically as Goldberg."

The mock-liberal regime is of course real, but this book is entirely American, and doesn't address the current regime in the UK.

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