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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.533
Edition: 1
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Doubleday
Manufacturer: Doubleday
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: January 08, 2008
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: January 08, 2008
Studio: Doubleday
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?
Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.
Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.
Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I was looking forward to reading this book as a one volume treatise shattering the myths about progressivism & putting political history into its proper perspective. However, I found that Goldberg's writing suffers from ADD. The author starts off on one topic, let's say Hillary Clinton & "It Takes a Village" for example, and then runs off to chase down the life story of a minor historical character/political influence -- and then never really return to the interesting premise he set-up. The whole book reads like a bunch of great false-starts in terms of story-telling and then gets distracted by its own copious research. The author would have been better suited to slowing down and writing several books covering this broad subject, or focusing one book on the most relevant historical incidents cited in the book. I now find myself creating a new reading list to go back and read about Woodrow Wilson & FDR's New Deal on their own rather than in the messy way he explored the topics in this book.
Rating:  -
I have purchased and read this important book. Goldberg correctly depicts fascism as a cocept and tool deployed by the left and not the right. In its most diabolical form it was deployed by such believers in nationalism and socialism as Mussolini, Hitler, Peron, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro in Utopean dreams to improve mankind. True believers were and are motivated by a desire to impose their own preferences in order to perfect the nature of man, to collectivise mankind in pursuit of nationalist, imperialist, often racist goals, and to organize individuals into malevolent public and private assocviations designed to override the economic discipline of free markets. Liberal fascism is defined by Goldberg as a softer but no less evil brand of the same product, pursued in the United States by progressives of the left, epitomized by Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in direct attacks on the United States Constitution and the laissez-faire basis of its market economy. Any person who is concerned to defend property rights, individual freedom, limited government and the rule of law should look to the right, not to the left to support him in this ideal. Goldberg's book is courageous and effective in outlining the true nature of fascism as the definition of the American Left since the early twentieth century.
Charles Rowley, Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and co-author of Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of GovernmentEconomic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government
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Very Good History book that is also informative and applicable to the situation in the world today. The third chapter is especially enlightening about the current administrations motives and method of operation.
Rating:  -
"Liberal Fascism" is an example of a genre of right-wing tracts, in which the author takes a radical or absurd idea, assembles a bunch of factoids that seem to support it, and sees how far he/she can go with it. The tone of this one is more intellectual and less vicious than certain others (Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh, et al.), but the formula is the same. "Liberal fascism" is, of course, an oxymoron; fascism is by definition illiberal or anti-liberal. Fascism is generally characterized by authoritarianism, dictatorial one-party rule, suppression of dissent, extreme nationalism, racism, militarism, aggressive foreign policy, and central economic control (but private capital). Liberalism is generally characterized by democratic government, tolerance and acceptance of minorities, civil liberties, an orientation toward peace and international law, and moderate economic regulation by government. Liberalism is NOT socialism or communism. Goldberg never manages to precisely define what he means by either fascism or liberalism, which is one reason that the result is such a muddle.
Goldberg's entire argument can be demolished in two words: Francisco Franco. If you do not understand why this refutation is so devastating, here is a nutshell sketch. In the early 1930s, a series of centrist to left-wing governments, generally known as the Republic, were elected in Spain. Franco was a general in the Spanish Army and led a military revolt against the Republic in 1936, eventually achieving victory in 1939. Franco ruled Spain as a repressive dictator until his death in 1975. Although he did not call himself a fascist, Franco was clearly ideologically, as well as politically and militarily, allied with Fascism and Nazism. Franco was supported by conservative sectors of Spanish society--e.g., landed aristocrats, industrial interests, the military, and the Church. He was opposed by "Republicans": liberals, labor interests, socialists, and communists. Hitler and Mussolini supported Franco, to the extent of sending tens of thousands of "volunteers" to fight, while liberals and leftists generally opposed him. Interestingly, socialists and Trotskyites were much more enthusiastic supporters of the Republic than was Stalin. Other than Germany and Italy, most western governments adopted a policy of neutrality. "International Brigades" of volunteers were formed to fight for the Republic and many foreign liberals and leftists, including Americans, gave their lives for the cause. The very title of Goldberg's sophomoric exercise is an insult to their memory.
Here is what Goldberg has to say about Franco: he did not deport Spanish Jews the way Hitler wanted him to. That's it. Goldberg's mentor, William F. Buckley, was a big fan of Franco. It is impossible to believe that Goldberg did not notice this elephant in the room of his thesis. The fact that he has next to nothing to say about it is a tacit admission that he has no answer.
Rating: -
Jonah Goldberg has written a very important book in "Liberal Fascism, the Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change."
Goldberg carefully documents (there are hundreds of footnotes) the close ideological, tactical, and even linguistic connections between European fascists and the American Progressive movement of the late-1800s through Woodrow Wilson's "War Socialism" and Roosevelt's New Deal. That this is not well known today is largely due to the American left's selective amnesia and the Stalinist tactic of labeling as "fascist" any leftwing movement not under the direct control of Moscow. Hence, Moscow even labeled Leon Trotsky and Franklin Roosevelt "fascist."
In fact, Goldberg points out, that communism, socialism (including Hitler's Nazi Party, "Nazi" standing for the National Socialist German Worker's Party), fascism, the American Progressives, and modern American liberals, all stand for the same thing: control in the name of improving society. Mussolini himself, Goldberg reminds us, coined the term "Totalitarian." At the time, "Totalitarian" wasn't the bad term it's come to mean. For Mussolini "Totalitarian" was defined as: "Everything inside the State, nothing outside the State." A totalitarian world view meant that all is within the State's interest: religion, health, culture, and even people's private lives.
In "Liberal Fascism" Goldberg asserts that Hitler's Nazis can't be defined solely by their irrational hatred of Jews that led to the Holocaust. Rather, if one strips away the uniquely German aspects of Nazism, or the uniquely Italian aspects of fascism, one is left with a core set of beliefs that elevate the State above the individual - for the supposed good of both.
And what are those core beliefs that Goldberg so readily identifies? From the start, American Progressives and European fascist theorists admired each other and exchanged ideas. From William James to Georges Sorel, from eugenics to the militarization of society ("War on Poverty" anyone? It was William James who penned the "Moral Equivalent of War" in 1906), both the American left and European fascists sought to remake society using crises to urge action to justify bigger government at the expense of individual liberty.
Ronald Reagan had it right in 1981, when he remarked that Roosevelt's New Deal had much in common with Mussolini's fascism, including frequent words of praise from Roosevelt's brain trust directed towards Italy in the 1930s.
So, read "Liberal Fascism" and be confident that, if you're an American conservative (meaning that you're a classical liberal) and a modern-day liberal/progressive calls you a "fascist" that they truly have no clue of what they speak.
Reviewer: Chuck DeVore is a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010, a California State Assemblyman, he served as a Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs in the Department of Defense from 1986 to 1988, retired from the Army National Guard as a lieutenant colonel, and is the co-author of "China Attacks."
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