Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Book Review: An Unbalanced "Objectivist" thesis
Summary: 2 Stars
Goldberg claims that "Fascists," "Brownshirts," and "jackbooted stormtroopers" are insults typically hurled at right-wingers, and that Republican/Thatcherite politics are falsely equated with Nazism by their liberal opponents.
Jonah Goldberg proffers an old thesis that it is actually the Left who represent modern fascism: which he calls 'Liberal Fascism.' This is hardly a startling 'new perspective' or insight into what defines fascist politics. The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff, a prominent American Objectivist (essentially a libertarian) whose views I'm sure Goldberg shares, promoted this theory some 25 years ago.
Here are some blatant weaknesses in the thesis:
The pagan/heathen American left is indeed against America's ostensible `Star-Spangled God' concept but to equate this with Nazi neo-paganism is misleading and simplistic. Mostly, the Nazi promotion of Wotanism and the Gods of Old Europe was to use mythology to empower Germanic white identity. In Franco's Spain, Fascism consisted of Royalists and good Catholics who both opposed godless / heathen Republican communism.
Goldberg as a right-winger is naturally against homosexuality and opposes its vociferous advocates on the liberal left. He thus needs to present the ludicrous case that there was no systematic Nazi 'genocide' against homosexuals nor had an anti-homosexual agenda. They only apparently destroyed homosexuals! This is a type of holocaust denial, at the very least it is a pathetic attempt to hold his theory together where it is actually crumbling badly.
Fascists absolutely hated 'degenerate [modern] art': we all know about that. Whereas, the art beloved of the left clearly would have found itself in a Nazi bonfire.
In addition, the Nazis were intensely militaristic. Contrarily the American left, epitomised by the Jane Fondas & Shirley MacLaines who oppose ALL the military actions of their own countries. Hardly bedfellows with the Nazi War Machine and its "Prussian fighting spirit" that torched Europe.
The most defining characteristic of Hitlerism was its Teutonic racism. And this pro-white agenda is entirely absent from the American heathen left's manifesto. Goldberg cites the racial quotas demanded for minorities in American universities, as apparently the Nazi's demanded places for whites! Is this meant to be a similarity? The Nazi's wanted white students because they were racists. The lefties want racial quotas because they believe this is the way to combat racism. Never the twain shall meet.
There are too many clashes between reality and Goldberg's theorem. The only merit of Liberal Fascism is to remind Anti-Nazi League student types that right-wing laissez-faire politics and Thatcherite economics have little in common with either Communist or Fascist totalitarianism. However, it's dumb to equate the American heathen lefties with the National Socialists. Why, oh why, Mr Goldberg did the Reds and Brownshirts do battle on the streets of 1930's Germany if they held the same body of ideas. No we haven't all forgotten what fascism is, and yes you're guilty too of using anti-fascist hysteria for your political ends.
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.
Book Review: A Non American perspective.
Summary: 4 Stars
Liberal in the American political sphere means left, Socialism was and is a dirty word in America thus the American left adopted the word "liberal" thus you have to be aware of the American meaning of "Liberal" as you read this book.
To a large degree this book is nothing new, Both Karl Popper and his friend and noble prize winner, Friedrich Hayek both pointed out the roots of Nazism, popper in his "open society" and Hayek in "the road to surfdom", both were Austrians and saw at close quarters the birth of Nazism.
The difference between the two most evil ideologies of the 20th centruy is written in their respective names, "international Socialism" and "national socialism" both although manifesting themselves in different guises they both come from the same well of philosophical thought, as popper pointed out Hagel
As a "classical Liberal" myself I can recommend this book, it is sure to upset the right and left kind of people, its a good introduction to the issue of "statism" but to truly understand the sources of the killing fields of the 20th century, Belsen to Cambodia, Gulags of Siberia to the cultural revolution you will have to go much further than frothy American politics, but in essence Goldberg is right, Fascism is off the Left, thats not to say people on the left are authoritarian or anti-libertarian but they can be and they have been.
Book Review: Reclaiming Liberalism
Summary: 4 Stars
This remarkable book has been a huge hit in the USA, less so in the UK as most of the potent examples Jonah Goldberg deploys in pointing up the explicitly authoritarian roots in much modern Leftism are primarily American.
The book's sheer density of grisly examples of 'progressive' oppressiveness is maybe a problem - after a while there is Just Too Much to cope with comfortably. But what gruesome and spectacular examples many of them are.
For me the best part of the book (apart from the gushing praise for the likes of Mussolini from so many seemingly clever people at the time) is the demolition job done on 60s radicalism in the USA. Goldberg nails down in convincing detail how these people managed to veil their openly vicious revolutionary drivel behind all the blathering about 'peace', and (worryingly) how a strain of their totalitarian thinking is still with us, mutating into ever more ingenious ways of extending state control over all aspects of our lives.
This for me is the main danger in the UK's current binge of Big Statism as inflated by unrelenting EU requirements.
Not just a sly erosion of responsibility and our freedoms. Much worse, erosion of the very idea of responsibility, of freedom as something worth having - and worth fighting for.
Arrangements of an astonishingly subtle sort which have helped define some of the highest standards for public life and process ever seen in human history might casually come to be dismissed as boring, old-fashioned - not part of the `contemporary narrative'.
Is there a point at which Liberal Fascism via Big Government wins?
Has an unrecognised tipping-point been reached - and (worse) been passed? When state-sponsored passive cynicism and attendant public spending are so enormous a part of our lives that instead of our owning the state, the bland state owns us?
How would we tell? Would we care? Read the book, think, and decide for yourself.
Book Review: Alternate Title: How to De-Program a Liberal Arts Graduate...
Summary: 5 Stars
I suspect that the ivory tower elites will despise this book. University acadamia and the media always equate conservative governments such as the USA under Dubya and Canada under Prime Minister Harper as being the equivalent to Nazis Germany under Hitler. Jonah Goldberg deftly exposes the fact the the Liberal Left have more in common with the National Socialists than just the term "socialist".
It all boils down to individual rights ie the true conservative view that each person is of infinite value vs the socialist view that the worth of the individual must be sacrificed for the "good" of the State. Which is a paradox unto itself, considering that Liberalism/Socialism does not recognize the concepts of good and evil, only moral equivalence.