Liberal Fascisim

Jonah Goldberg, “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change”, Broadway Books (2014) 422 pp

In this best-selling book the author argues that modern liberalism is the off-spring of twentieth-century progressivism, which in turn shares intellectual roots with European fascism.  He states that fascism was an international movement expressing itself differently in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture.  In Europe this communitarian impulse expressed itself in political movements that were nationalist, racist, militarist, and expansionist.  In the US the movement known elsewhere as fascism or Nazism took the form of progressivism—a softer form of totalitarianism that, while still nationalistic, and militarist in its crusading forms and outlook, was more in keeping with American culture.  It was, in short, a kind of liberal fascism. (pg. 391).  US liberalism has succumbed to the totalitarian temptation: the belief that there is a priesthood of experts capable of redesigning society in a ‘progressive’ manner. (pg. 392)

My Notes: 

 website for this book: www.liberal-fascism.com

Definition of Fascism (pg. 23): Fascism is a religion of the state.  It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people.  It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good.  It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure.  Everything, including the economy and religion must be aligned with its objectives.  Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy.  American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.

Pg. 7:  Fascism, properly and historically understood, is not a phenomenon of the right; it is, and always has been a phenomenon of the left.  This is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites.  In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents.  In terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.  It is difficult now, in the light of their massive crimes and failures, to remember that both were, in their time, utopian visions and the bearers of great hopes.  Fascism and Bolshevism were heresies of Marxism. (pg. 139).

Pg. 8:  This book presents an alternative history of American liberalism that not only reveals its roots in classical fascism but also shows how the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand.  In fact, conservatives are the more authentic classical liberals, while many so-called liberals are ‘friendly’ fascists.

Pg. 11: During WWI America became a fascist country, albeit temporarily.  The first appearance of modern totalitarianism in the Western world wasn’t in Italy or Germany but in the U.S.  More dissidents were arrested or jailed in a few years under Wilson than under Mussolini during the entire 1920s.  Wilson created a better and more effective propaganda ministry than Mussolini ever had.  Wilson had unleashed literally hundreds of thousands of badge-carrying goons on the American people and prosecuted a vicious campaign against the press that Mussolini would have envied. (pg. 81).  Wilson’s Sedition Act banned uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the U.S. government or the military.  The postmaster general was given the authority to deny mailing privileges to any publication he saw fit—effectively shutting it down.  At least seventy-five periodicals were banned.  No campaigns against conscription or the Draft Law were permitted.

The Justice Department created the APL (American Protective League).  Members were given badges—many of which read ‘Secret Service’—and charged with keeping an eye on their neighbors.  The APL had an intelligence division, in which members were bound by oath not to reveal they were secret policemen.  Members of the APL read their neighbors’ mail and listened in on their phones.  In 1917 the APL had branches in nearly six hundred cities and towns with a membership approaching a hundred thousand.  By the following year, it had exceeded a quarter of a million.  (pg. 114).  If we are to believe that ‘classic’ fascism is first and foremost the elevation of martial values and the militarization of government and society under the banner of nationalism, it is very difficult to understand why the Progressive Era was not also the Fascist Era. (Pg. 119).  Wilson’s war socialism was temporary, but its legacy was permanent.  The War Industries Board and cartels closed shop after the war but the precedent they set would prove too attractive for progressives to abandon. (pg. 221).

Pg. 55:  Hitler was a pure opportunist devoid of loyalty to men or ideas—unless you call hatred of Jews an idea—and willing to break oaths, liquidate people, and say or do anything to achieve and hold power.  Nazi ideology cannot be summarized in a program or platform.  It can be better understood as a maelstrom of prejudices, passions, hatreds, emotions, resentments, biases, hopes, and attitudes that, when combined, most often resembled a religious crusade wearing the mask of a political ideology. 

Pg. 61:  American conservatives seek to preserve both traditional values and the classical liberal creed enshrined in the Constitution.

Pg. 70:  The tectonic divide between the National Socialists and the communists wasn’t over economics at all but over the question of nationalism.  Marx’s most offending conviction to Hitler was the idea that the ‘workingmen have no country.’

Pg. 118:  In the liberal telling of America’s story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and ‘America’ writ large; progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants.  For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were progressive phenomena.  These are sins America itself must atone for.  Meanwhile misdeeds like McCarthyism are always the exclusive fault of conservatives. 

Pg. 132:  When FDR was elected president in 1932, three events were viewed as admirable experiments: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Fascist takeover in Italy, and the American experiment in was socialism under Wilson. By 1932 admiration for the Russian ‘social experiment’ had become a definitive component of American liberalism.

Pg. 134:  In 1932 H.G. Wells delivered a major speech at Oxford University in which he called for a ‘Phoenix Rebirth’ of Liberalism under the banner of Liberal Fascism.  Fabian socialism had failed, he explained, because it hadn’t grasped the need for a truly revolutionary effort aimed at the total transformation of society.  The advocacy of piecemeal “Gas, Water and School-Board socialization” was simply too boring. 

Pg. 151:  For the first two years of the American and German New Deals, it was America that pursued militarism and rearmament at a breakneck pace while Germany spent relatively little on arms.  The American Public Works Administration paid for the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise as well as four cruisers, many smaller warships and over one hundred army planes.  Perhaps one reason so many people believed that the New Deal ended the Depression is that the New Deal’s segue into a full-blown war economy was so seamless.

Pg. 158:  It seems impossible to deny that the New Deal was objectively fascistic.  Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies.  G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents.  Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed.  FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the US into war, and undermined Congress’s war-making powers at several turns.  (He intended to bypass the then current Supreme Court by packing the court with his supporters; that attempt failed). 

Pg. 215:  Today’s liberalism is a religion of state worship whose sacrificial Christ was JFK and whose Pauline architect was LBJ.

Pg. 262:  What is today called liberalism stands, domestically, on three legs: support for the welfare state, abortion, and identity politics (blacks, gays, immigrants, women, etc.).

Pg. 265:  The Davis-Bacon Act was passed in 1931 in order to prevent poor black laborers from taking jobs from whites.  By requiring that contractors on federal projects pay prevailing wages and use union labor, the act would lock black workers out of federal jobs projects.  Devotion to Davis-Bacon is more intense today than it was thirty years ago although the reason for its popularity has changed.

Pg. 266:  In 1907 Indiana passed the first sterilization law for confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.  In the subsequent thirty years, twenty-nine other American states passed similar laws, as did Canada and most of Europe.  Many European countries—and Canadian provinces—remained committed to eugenics decades after the fall of the Third Reich.

Pg. 276:  African-Americans constitute little more than 12 percent of the population but have more than a third (37 percent) of abortions. 

Pg. 397:  The problem with values relativism—the notion that all cultures are equal—is that important questions get decided via a contest of political power rather than a contest of ideas, and every subculture in our balkanized society becomes a constituency for some government functionary.  Aztecs and Athenians are considered equal—at least in the eyes of public school teachers.  In an open society, best practices win.  And the conservative case is that best practices are best not because they are white or Christian but because they are plainly best.  Much as with state interference in business or other realms of life, once the classical liberal vision of the state as a dispassionate arbiter and adjudicator is discarded in favor of a mommy state that plays favorites  it is only reasonable for people, groups, and businesses to compete for Mother’s love.

Pg. 402:  Under George W. Bush Medicare has increased nearly 52 percent, and spending on education went up some 165 percent.  From 2001 to 2006 antipoverty spending increased 41 percent, and overall spending reached a record $23,289 per household.  Federal anti-poverty spending has surpassed 3 percent of GDP for the first time ever.  Total spending (adjusted for inflation) has grown at triple the rate under Clinton.  Moreover, Bush created the largest entitlement since the Great Society (Medicare Part D).

Pg. 402: A conservative in America, as Friedrich Hayek and others have noted, is one who protects and defends private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines.  The American founding stands within this tradition. 

Pg. 417:  Ever since William James penned his essay “The Moral Equivalents of War,” progressivism has dedicated itself to the cause of mobilizing society as if we were at war.  The New Deal was nothing if not the moral equivalent of a war program, intended to de-mothball Woodrow Wilson’s ‘war socialism’ and aim it at the Great Depression.