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Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning Hardcover – January 8, 2008

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“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.


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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this provocative and well-researched book, Goldberg probes modern liberalism's spooky origins in early 20th-century fascist politics. With chapter titles such as Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left and Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism—Goldberg argues that fascism has always been a phenomenon of the left. This is Goldberg's first book, and he wisely curbs his wry National Review style. Goldberg's study of the conceptual overlap between fascism and ideas emanating from the environmental movement, Hollywood, the Democratic Party and what he calls other left-wing organs is shocking and hilarious. He lays low such lights of liberal history as Margaret Sanger, apparently a radical eugenicist, and JFK, whose cult of personality, according to Goldberg, reeks of fascist political theater. Much of this will be music to conservatives' ears, but other readers may be stopped cold by the parallels Goldberg draws between Nazi Germany and the New Deal. The book's tone suffers as it oscillates between revisionist historical analyses and the application of fascist themes to American popular culture; nonetheless, the controversial arc Goldberg draws from Mussolini to The Matrix is well-researched, seriously argued—and funny. (Jan. 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Brilliant, insightful, and important.” —New York Sun


“Well-researched, seriously argued, and funny.” —
Publishers Weekly“Bold and witty… [Goldberg] makes a persuasive case that fascism was from the beginning a movement of the left.” —New York Post“Jonah Goldberg is the first historian to detail the havoc this spin of all spins has played upon Western thought for the past seventy-five years, very much including the present moment.” —Tom Wolfe

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday; 1st edition (January 8, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385511841
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385511841
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.61 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.41 x 1.54 x 9.55 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 out of 5 stars 1,474

About the author

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Jonah Goldberg
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JONAH GOLDBERG is the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute and is a Senior Editor at National Review. A best-selling author, his nationally syndicated column appears regularly in over a hundred newspapers across the United States. He is also a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a member of the board of contributors to USA Today, a Fox News contributor, and a regular member of the “Fox News All-Stars” on “Special Report with Bret Baier.”

He was the founding editor of National Review Online. The Atlantic magazine has identified Goldberg as one of the top 50 political commentators in America. Among his awards, in 2011 he was named the Robert J. Novak Journalist of the Year at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He has written on politics, media, and culture for a wide variety of leading publications and has appeared on numerous television and radio programs. He is the author of the forthcoming "Suicide of the West" (Crown Forum, 2018), as well as two New York Times bestsellers: “The Tyranny of Clichés” (Sentinel HC, 2012) and “Liberal Fascism” (Doubleday, 2008).

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Jonah is a great writer that tells the truths of the liberal debauchury infecting this country.
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2008
And boy, does Jonah Goldberg have himself some enemies.

It was inevitable that the review section for Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" would degenerate into the Mother of all Flame Wars. The advance dislike for this book simmered for months, and now the floodgates for negative reviews are open. I'd advise all potential readers of this book to bear in mind how few of the negative reviews appear to reflect a reading of the book.

For those willing to give Goldberg the chance, he offers the following thesis: that the label fascist has its roots in the governing philosophies of Italy's National Fascist Party and Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) Party. He argues that there has been a false duality created between the Soviet Socialists of the USSR and the socialists united under the fascists in Italy and Germany. He argues that the totalitarian impulse, the philosophy of state control of decisions taking priority over individual freedoms, is the core uniting principle behind these movements, and he argues that the ongoing home of such statism is in what has come to be known as the "liberal" politics of the modern progressive movement. As you can imagine, that doesn't sit very well with the targets of his argument (hence the rain of 1-star reviews).

I'd encourage open minded readers of all backgrounds to read Goldberg's book and address his arguments. I find his conversational and somewhat informal style to be witty and readable. That said, longtime Goldberg fans should know that this is not a book-length "G-File" (the hip and irreverent column he wrote for National Review Online). This is a serious scholarly work, and it deserves to be read and judged as such. Goldberg is attempting to right a historical injustice. This book is not attempting, as many seem to think, to say that all liberals are closet Nazis, but rather that, contrary to popular misconception, it is not conservatism, but liberalism, that traces its roots to the fascists. In some ways it is a book-length extension of the question conservatives sometimes pose to liberals: "If you leave out the parts about killing all the Jews and invading Poland, what specifically about the Nazi political platform do you disagree with?" (That platform is handily provided in the appendix.) After Goldberg's book, this question is much harder to simply shrug off.

Still, one doesn't need nearly 600 citations just to allow conservatives to say "I'm rubber, you're glue" the next time they are called a fascist. Goldberg argues that our focus on the atrocities committed by fascists in Germany obscures the fact that the fascist drive is, to a degree, universal in modern politics. The heritage and institutions of America lead it to manifest itself in a different form here. Whether it is the smothering embrace of the "It Takes a Village" mommy state or, to a lesser degree, the big-government, "compassionate conservatism" of Bush, fascism in the U.S. is well-intention, "smiley face" fascism, but it still looks first to the state, last to the individual.

In the end, that's what I liked best about this book. Yes, it's great to have a 5-pound rebuttal to the next person who tries to use "fascist" as an epithet to end criticism of a liberal program. However, what comes through in the end is not so much Goldberg's hatred of fascism, but his love of liberty. Fascism in all its forms is the enemy of liberty, and recognizing it for what it is will always be a prerequisite for stopping it. Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" clears away decades of obfuscation to allow that recognition in both the past and present day politics. Those who continue to fight for individual freedom will enjoy and appreciate this book.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2008
I rate this book 5 stars for its content. I have read it cover-to-cover, word-for-word. That seems to be an important point to make as many of the 'lesser' reviews in this blog are by people who proudly [and stupidly] claim they haven't read this book but are still 'qualified' to review it. Other reviews make it painfully obvious that the posters have read little if any of the book, though they are intent on 'faking' their review ... which is far less honest than those who admit 'not reading' !

'Liberal Fascism' can become a serious academic work if all of Goldberg's referenced material proves to be accurate. There is some marked weakness in its bibliographic referencing that makes it a bit more difficult to trace sources. Perhaps Mr. Goldberg could rectify this problem with an on-line link to a more thorough bibliography. Certainly any future editions should contain references for all source material. Also, I wish Mr. Goldberg would have abandoned the Political Correctness routine that says you can't offend someone by writing the truth about their politics and philosophy. Mr. Goldberg apologizes too often for stating reality, as if he is worried that the truth might hurt too much ... or that some modern Liberal might accuse him of a 'hate crime' ! This is one of those subjects that requires you let the 'chips fall where they may'.

I am confident from my own long obsession with pursuing an understanding of Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and all the other 'ism' variants of Collectivism, that greater than 90% of Goldberg's material is indeed accurate. I am a physical chemist/chemical physicist by education and occupation. I have watched many years of government planning in science/engineering lead to corruption of projects [and even death] ... and still more years of crisis-management in corporations and academics as they waste time and money to the point of absurdity. I began 15 years ago a passionate quest to understand 'good' and 'evil', 'right' and 'wrong', 'just' and 'unjust'. The search led quickly [and ultimately] to philosophy ... over 2000 years of it recorded in books written by men [and women]. In that search I have read many dozens of texts on Socialism and its variants, most of those texts being very 'deep' and requiring many hours of reading and re-reading and introspection to assemble an accurate assessment of the author's thoughts and mindset. Few laymen would invest this amount of time or effort, as most people just don't have that amount of time available to them with today's 'busy schedules'.

Jonah Goldberg's 'Liberal Fascism' is an excellent treatise of the concept of Fascism, making Fascism and its history accessible to understanding by the serious layman. He does perhaps 'bend' the concepts somewhat in his assessments of modern derivative political concepts ... but points out when key characteristics of the Fascist concept are present in those derivative systems. Ludwig von Mises himself had difficulty in defining explicitly what Socialism is when he first wrote 'Socialism' in 1922 as Fascism was just becoming known. Von Mises ultimately defined Socialism as any system of economic and political philosophy that advocates centralized planning of the economy. Fascism has always been vague in its core definition, even when first coined by Mussolini. But though Mussolini may have 'invented' the term, key elements contained in the concept, and recurring over-and-over through to present times, existed and were practiced by authoritarian governments and parties prior to Mussolini ever coming to power. Thus Hitler and Mussolini were able to express their gratitude and admiration of Woodrow Wilson's ideas and other American academicians ... and ultimately F.D. Roosevelt. That is precisely the history Goldberg is communicating within the body of his book. What the book 'should do' is inspire interested persons to dig deeper ... and force critics to justify their opposition with facts, not vitriolic invectives.

The 'Ace' of economists, Noble Laureate Ludwig von Mises, wrote in his 1950 'Preface to the 2nd Edition' of his 1932 book 'Socialism --- an Economic and Sociological Analysis' regarding Communism and Socialism, "No longer should individuals by their buying or abstention from buying determine what is to be produced and in what quantity and quality. Henceforth the government's unique plan alone should settle all these matters. 'Paternal' care of the 'Welfare State' will reduce all people to the status of bonded workers bound to comply, without asking questions, with the orders issued by the planning authority. Neither is there any substantial difference between the intentions of the self-styled 'progressives' and those of the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis. The Fascists and the Nazis were no less eager to establish all-round regimentation of all economic activities than those governments and parties which flamboyantly advertise their anti-Fascist tenets." von Mises was born and raised in Austria during the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. The above excerpt was written after he had migrated to America.

I would also point out that last year on Tim Russert's 'Meet the Press', Mr. Russert asked Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic Party, if he was a Socialist. Mr. Dean was stunned at the question, but did answer that he is 'a Democratic Socialist'. Just last fall in one of the Democratic Presidential debates, Hillary Clinton was asked if she is a 'liberal' ... she responded that she is a 'proud modern Progressive'!! Jonah Goldberg's book is very relevant to contemporary political times!!

I strongly recommend Jonah Goldberg's 'Liberal Fascism'. I also recommend the above book by von Mises ['Socialism'], along with Leonard Peikoff's "The Ominous Parallels: A Brilliant Study of America Today and the Ominous Parallels with the Chaos of Pre-Hitler Germany" [1982]. Additionally, a 1988 work by F.A. Hayek: "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism" is a not-too-difficult yet significant treatise. It is always interesting to read the 'later' works of learned men to see how their views have solidified [or changed] later in their lives [Hayek died in 1992].

Kudos to Mr. Goldberg !!
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Top reviews from other countries

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effepi
4.0 out of 5 stars Informativo, super partes, colto e documentato, attuale anche se non recente
Reviewed in Italy on April 24, 2022
Illuminante sull’origine di fascismo e nazismo (e sul perché l’Europa dei tedeschi rifiuta le origini cristiane). Come sulla storia USA del 900 da Wilson ai Roosevelt a Bush, poco nota in Italia tra semplificazioni e propaganda (JFK era davvero come sembrava a me ragazzo “tabula rasa” e non come raccontavano gli entusiasti del presidente cattolico). Certo, e’ scritto per l’America, e non tiene conto che le cose vanno anche peggio in Europa, e accredita ai “Liberal” una buona fede che almeno qui non sembra esserci in chi cerca solo e continuamente di cambiare le regole per avvantaggiarsene (una rilettura della Citta’ aperta di Popper sarebbe più che opportuna). Tra le poche sbavature, poco comprensibile la severità con la Rerum Novarum.
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Juan
5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended for everyone.
Reviewed in Spain on December 17, 2019
Interesting book with many unknown facts silenced by the socialist academics and media.
Humberto Sandmann
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente
Reviewed in Brazil on July 3, 2017
Com referências bibliográficas, o autor apresenta um histórico do "movimento" liberal americano, inclusive sua tentativa de descolamento do rótulo de progressista, que agora volta com forma nas palavras de Clinton e Krugman.
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armstrong
5.0 out of 5 stars Well sourced information, that could be appreciated by open minds, but perhaps upset some political bigots.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 1, 2018
Before I bought and read this book I first looked at the low rating reviews and then the high rated reviews. Having now read this book I conclude the higher rating comments to be if not more honest then at least more accurate. Thus since there are so many excellent higher rating reviews I see no great need to add more to what has been said in them.

By way of a more personal observation I would say that perhaps those ordinary people who religiously believe they are good fair minded socialists; this book may upset them because they probably not only won't know the roots of their political ideology, but probably won't want to know it either. For those who only wish to make sense of Western socialism it may shed some light on the inexplicable. Those who look and listen with an open mind and are bewildered by the world the find themselves in, may gain some new knowledge but not necessarily be surprised. Any expert opposed to socialism may appear biased in focusing on the negative aspects and staunch defenders of socialism as they see it will accuse such experts of outright lying as is the case with some negative commentators of Goldberg. This I believe is due to laziness on the part of these critics who seem to fail to notice that Goldberg actually quotes fascist socialism principles enunciated by the innovators and proponents of the ideology, with 52.5 pages checkable of references. Thus he has no need of lies or cranky opinions to make his case.

I believe in a socialist society but not as we know it,"Jim" (Captain Kirk of the star ship Enterprise.).
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book
Reviewed in Australia on June 26, 2018
Enjoyed it all the way through. A brilliant and compelling political/historical/philosophical view on the development of the American left. Highly recommended. I need two more words to finish this review.