Author Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American conservative writer and the editor-at-large for politics and culture at the National Review Online. He regularly appears on television making the rounds on various political round-table shows. In his first book, Liberal Fascism, The Secret History of The American Left, he corrects a misperception about the origins of fascism. While it is a common trope to claim that the far right is the home of Fascist thought, Goldberg goes to great lengths proving that it actually is part of the history of the left.
The title brings to mind a style of book that is common in today's marketplace, namely the red-meat partisan, boiler plate work that aims to reinforce previously held opinions of those of compatible political persuasions. However, Goldberg goes further than this, creating an intriguing look into the political history of the twentieth century. This fact, coupled with a highly lucid writing style, allows for an eminently readable book on complex political theory for the layman.
Definition of Fascism
Fascism has always been a word that is difficult to define, and Goldberg uses this ambiguity as part of his premise. Because the word is not easily digested, it has been vulnerable to an injection of emotional rhetoric: anything bad must be fascist. Overtime the left has been able to equate the right with much that is bad, thus the right with fascism.
Therefore, Goldberg's first task is to posit a rational definition of the word fascism. Using a wide variety of scholarly sources he comes to the following conclusion. The word fascism means any system of government that exalts nation above the individual, uses censorship, propaganda and violence to suppress political opposition, engages in severe economic and social regimentation and promotes corporatism.
Mussolini, Hitler and The Birth of Fascism
The original Fascists were revolutionary Italians lead by Mussolini. Benito Mussolini was a socialist who founded the Fascist Party, calling for such things as a minimum wage, taking property via eminent domain, eliminating the nobility, creating state-run schools and imposing a progressive tax. Goldberg correctly points out that many of these ideas are concepts of the modern political left.
The Nazi Party, or The National Socialist German Workers' Party, also had its roots in leftist political thought. The Nazis were “enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system,” according to the party’s ideologist Gregor Strasser. They strove to overturn tradition, replacing both religious and secular traditions with an all-powerful state. Goldberg recognizes that it is hard to see beyond the horrors of the Holocaust when thinking about the Nazis, however, if one looks at the whole of their history they came to power as a party of socialism.
America's Version of Fascism: Progressivism
Liberal Fascism strives to make the point that socialism, communism, progressivism and fascism were all part of an interconnected movement that abounded in the early twentieth century and that America was not immune to its influence.
He uses the example of Woodrow Wilson showing that before Mussolini came to power, the Democratic president had already imposed a militarized state. As the United States entered World War I, Wilson and the progressives used the war as an excuse to arrest dissidents, close newspapers and recruit tens of thousands of neighborhood informers. “Wilson, along with the vast majority of progressive intellectuals, believed that the increase in state power was akin to an inevitable evolutionary process.”
FDR continued the progressive trend using The Great Depression as the moral equivalent of war, reviving the idea of war socialism. Goldberg gives the example of Hugh Samuel Johnson, who ran the National Recovery Administration. He was an open admirer of Mussolini, and promoted the many New Deal agencies that had the fascist desire to mobilize society by putting it on a wartime footing.
Liberal Fascism goes on to connect the radicalization of the 1960's, Johnson's “Great Society,” Hillary Clinton's “it takes a village,” and Obama's messianic politics to their inevitable debt to the swirling political theories of the left during the early twentieth century.
This book presents a warning to those who would empower the state to the point of “statolatry.” Totalitarian and Fascist impulses lie under the surface of many of the progressive and socialist movements in modern society.
Readers who enjoyed this article may like to read Josef Pieper on Liesure.
Steve Brady - Steve is a freelance writer, a middle school English teacher and the owner of Quality-Resumes, an online resume writing and editing ...
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