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Loading... Liberal Fascism (2007)by Jonah Goldberg
I read the first few chapters and that's about all I could take....The authors argument that liberals are more fascist than conservatives is ridiculous. Under Wilson he talks about the government taking away privacy and spying on neighbors...and calling sauerkraut "liberty cabbage". That all sounds similar to the PATRIOT Act and "freedom fries", which happened under a conservative POTUS. The liberal examples he uses, such as health care, are true, they are "fascist", but that's because fascism is a radical take on SOCIALISM! I feel the author couldn't get anything else published so he wrote a book full of ridiculous theories. (  ) melissarochelle | Apr 13, 2013 |  Goldberg claims this is not an academic book yet the tone is reasoned and scholarly and not at all what I expected from his more strident although reasonable appearances on Fox News. He has an interesting thesis which has been strengthened by the machinations of the Obama regime. Liberal fascism is alive and well and appears in a straight line from the insidious progressivism of Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt through FDR, LBJ, and infects the country today in Obama. The afterword on Obama is particularly appropriate given his analysis which was written during Obama's ascent into sainthood. The central thesis of the book is that the Progressive element in American politics is our smiley-face benevolent home-grown fascism that has as its roots the fascist totalitarianism of Europe. Goldberg takes his title from H.G. Wells, the eminent liberal essayist and science fiction writer who coined the term "liberal fascism," or as he also called it, "enlightened Nazism." Modern, big-government liberalism has come home. The Progressives were the first generation of Americans to criticize the United States Constitution, especially for its limits on government's scope and ambition. They rejected the American Founders' classical or natural rights liberalism, offering instead a vision of the modern state as a kind of god with almost limitless power to achieve "social justice." In America, the origins of modern liberalism lie at the end of the 19th century, when Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and a host of others argued that the Constitution was outdated, that it was incompetent to deal with contemporary economic and social ills, and that, if applied at all, it ought to be applied as a "living" document. Like their European counterparts, American Progressives championed der Staat over the individual, seeking to redistribute wealth and use the national government to superintend the economy and society. This agenda was at odds with the founders' natural rights principles and the Constitution's limited government. Scholars such as James Ceaser, John Marini, and Ronald J. Pestritto have been calling attention to the progressive origins of modern liberalism for the past 20 years. Goldberg's focus may help free right-wingers who are obvious to the problem of conservative statism, e.g., Bush's "compassionate conservatism." Cf. A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery, Larry Schweikart, http://www.librarything.com/work/58447/summary/57946093 gmicksmith | May 14, 2011 | I would have liked to have enjoyed reading this book more than I did. The topic is of interest and has interesting applications in the present post modern life of politics and polemics. But, could the thesis not have been told in fewer pages and with less repetition and back tracking? I think so. Nonetheless, there was much of history and of politics to learn from the seemingly oxymoronic juxtaposition of liberalism/progressivism over against facism/communism. The basic thesis itself is cogently presented and carefully argued, and Goldberg makes every effort not to fall into the trap of A=B=X - i.e., liberals (prgressives,as they now fashion themselves) are Nazis/communists. He makes sufficient distinction between the factual, historical record of the crimes of facism/communism and the present-day misdemeanors and sillinesses of the liberal/progressive movement to keep the discussion clear of a false syllogism, but at the same time makes clear the potential for things to get worse. I enjoy Goldberg in a shorter format - his columns. The longer format lost its effectiveness in form and content. (  )1  BlaueBlume | Jul 4, 2010 | Reading this book helped me understand 20th century politics and culture like few others have. (  ) TomDHall | May 29, 2010 | Jonah Goldberg details how fascism is truly born out of progressive/liberal politics and that the current political climate of the Mommy State in the US (where the gov't is supposedly better at taking care of you than you are) is a descendant of this ideology - just in a nicer looking package. (  ) baleclerc | Dec 22, 2009 |
 It is undeniable that the best way to have avoided complicity in the horrors of the last century would have been to have adopted the politics of Jonah Goldberg. Much can be said against moderate conservatives, but it has to be admitted that their wariness of grand designs and their willingness to place limits on the over-mighty state give them a clean record others cannot share. Few of Goldberg's contemporaries will grant him the same courtesy. . . . Behind the insults and the self-righteousness is the assumption that politics runs on a continuum from far left to far right; that if David Cameron were to keep moving rightwards, he would end up a Nazi. Goldberg sets out to knock down this false paradigm and show that much of what Americans call liberalism, and we call leftism, has its origins in fascism. I say "knock down", but that is too mild a phrase. Liberal Fascism is not a clean blow to the jaw, but a multiple rocket launcher of a book that targets just about every liberal American hero and ideal. The title comes from HG Wells, the most strenuous intellectual advocate of totalitarianism on the early-20th-century British left. "I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti," he told the Oxford Union in 1932, "for enlightened Nazis. The world is sick of parliamentary democracy. . . ." Liberal Fascism is a bracing and stylish examination of political history. That it is being published at a time when Goldberg's free market has failed and big government and charismatic presidents are on their way back in no way invalidates his work. Hard times test intellectuals and, for all its occasional false notes, Goldberg's case survives.  The Progressives were the first generation of Americans to criticize the United States Constitution, especially for its limits on government's scope and ambition. They rejected the American Founders' classical or natural rights liberalism, offering instead a vision of the modern state as a kind of god with almost limitless power to achieve "social justice." When modern liberals like Senator Clinton call themselves progressives, therefore, they are telling the truth, even if their audiences don't fully understand the implications. How gratifying it is then to have Jonah Goldberg's new book . . . to pursue these half-forgotten, if not exactly secret, implications. Although liberals throw around the term "fascist" to abuse conservatives (just as they do "racist"), Goldberg . . . persuasively shows that today's progressives are fascism's true descendents, embracing the statism at the heart of the 20th-century's most notorious outlaw regimes. . . . Goldberg's Afterword is so good, in fact, that one hopes for a book on the problem of conservative statism from this excellent writer. In order to defeat liberal fascism, American conservatives will need to awaken their own ranks from the progressive spell. With his new book, Jonah Goldberg has renewed for them, and for all friends of constitutional government, a vital argument for the political battles ahead. Goldberg goes beyond this conventional wisdom, however, to construct a much more ambitious theory of fascism as a kind of über-ideology. His broad thesis is that the decades from the early 1900s to the 1950s were “the fascist moment.” Across the advanced world, intellectuals lost faith in limited government, free market ideas, political democracy, diverse and competing social and cultural institutions, and all the higgledy-piggledy messiness of a free society. Groups as different as “progressives” in America, Fabians in Britain, Bismarckians in Germany, and the Futurists in Italy all sought to replace laissez-faire with state control and regulation. . . . [W]hen H. G. Wells coined the term “liberal fascism” in a 1932 speech that called on his audience to replace the “dilatory indecisiveness” of democracy with bodies that would “end as the sustaining organizations of a reconstituted mankind,” he was not limiting his aims at all. No time limit or lack of ambition there even if in the service of liberal ideas. Herein lies the significance of Goldberg’s long list of current liberal attitudes—mocked by some reviewers—that mimic past fascist ideas. From the young Hillary Clinton’s attempt to collectivize children under the banner of rights through the authoritarianism of political correctness and “sensitivity training” to the post-religious “politics of meaning,” modern statist liberalism exhibits an itch to regulate the lives—and increasingly the minds—of others that seems both boundless and boundlessly self-confident. If Goldberg exagerrates he exagerates something real.
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