The Book: Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg. 409 pages, plus another 70-some pages of endnotes.
The Gist: Goldberg aims to do one thing with this book: to present an alternative to the usual left-wing historical narrative that casts fascism as a right-wing phenomenon, and make explicit the genetic debt that modern-day liberalism owes to its indubitably left-wing forebears.* He argues
...that modern liberalism is the offspring of twentieth-century progressivism, which in turn shares intellectual roots with European fascism...that fascism was an international movement, or happening, expressing itself differenty in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture.
As such, the vast majority of the book is largely a game of connect-the-dots between the philosophical forerunners of liberalism--Marx, Engels, Sorel, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzche, Robespierre, and others that I haven't named--with the fruits of their scribblings that live on today. Goldberg draws a common thread between the philosophy and methodologies of the first totalitarian** revolution that gave birth to Jacobin France, the first modern welfare state run by von Bismarck, to the Progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt that resulted first fascist government of the twentieth century run by Wilson, to the Leninist and Stalinist Communists in Russia, to the Classical Fascist Mussolini, to the National Socialists in Germany, to the New Dealers led by FDR, to the social upheavals in America in the 1960s, and finally to the smiley-face fascists on the American Left today.
Definition of FascismGoldberg starts this exercise by attempting to take the word fascist away from the liberals, who abuse the word as an all-purpose epithet meant to denote anything not desirable or anyone who opposes their agenda as "bad" and therefore not worthy of being taken seriously. In doing so, he defines fascism, an inherently difficult task since there are so many variants, not so much by what it is, but by what features it is likely to contain: Populist ultra-nationalism. A divinized totalitarian State which is the ultimate source of power as well as morality. An ever-present state of war. A quest for holistic, unified community, brotherhood, or nation that elevates the group while subordinating the individual. A cult of youth, emphasizing action. Spiritual rebirth. A utopian faith in the perfectability of men. A politicized culture where nothing is outside the sphere of political influence. Rule by an infallible papacy of "experts", "whiz kids", or "policy wonks" whose mission is to impose progress on the masses for their own good. "Otherizing" opponents. Partial or total nationalization of industries. Blurring of the lines between public and private in a "state capitalism", aka "corporatism" or "mercantilism".
Using this definition, he delves into the histories of various fascist governments the early 20th Century, starting with
Il Duce's Italy and
der Fuhrer's Germany, showing how the slide toward totalitarianism progressed in each country, each with its particularly Italian and German character, eventually resulting in Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany (not reviewed in detail by Goldberg was the totalitarian revolution in Russia that resulted in Marxist-Leninism there).
Fascism in America, 1860 - 1950What I found particularly interesting was the latter half of the book dedicated to fascism in America, starting with a chapter on Progressivism. For it may come as a shock to some that not only did fascism, Americanized as it was via Progressivism, happen here in America, it just so happened to occur first here. That's right--the United States, the country that takes pride in itself as being the land of the free and home of the brave, was the first country in the world to manifest fully realized political fascism. Goldberg cites that the United States under Wilson had the first propaganda minister, that the political opposition was harangued, harassed, spied and beat upon, and 175,000 were imprisoned for being insufficiently loyal. That more dissidents were jailed or arrested during the Wilson administration than under Mussolini during the entire decade of the 1920s. That Wilson loosed hundreds of thousands of badge-wearing agents on Americans for the purpose of ensuring loyalty to the government (examples:
Espionage Act of 1917 and
Sedition Act of 1918), and prosecuted a campaign of intimidation and control and censorship of the media. That a national leader accused foreigners and immigrants of injecting treasonous poison into the political discourse. That the United States under Wilson administered loyalty oaths, and whipped the nation's industries into the fetid embrace of the state long before the Hitler or Mussolini conceived their first iota of corporatist/mercantilist thought. In short, Wilson was the twentieth century's first fascist dictator, and the Progressives gave it to us.
Goldberg contends that the Progressives were the American branch of the same political movement that spawned collectivist revolutions in countries around the world: Classical Fascists in Italy, National Socialists in Germany, and Communism in Russia. In fact, it was fascinating to read about the concurrent development of fascism and its related movements on both sides of the Atlantic, and how each variant of fascism both admired and cross-pollinated the others. All shared the same core philosophies:
social Darwinism, eugenics, noblesse oblige imperialism, hostility to individualism, religion as a political tool, politics as religion, and the worship of the exercise of power for its own ends. Fascism was an idea whose time had come across the globe; the evil twin as it were of the the radical Enlightenment idea of individual freedom coupled with religious faith and a limited, distributed government. Thus, just 14 years after the American Revolution, history's first fascist movement roiled France in a bloody terroristic dictatorship. Quickly and mercifully, Jacobin fascism burned itself out, but not before infecting other politicians with utopian dreams of national unity and totalitarian glory.
It took time for representative republicanism to die in America. One could say that it died during the War of Southern Independence, and Lincoln was the undertaker that hammered the final nail in the coffin at Appomattox. A relentless centralizer, he and his Republican cohorts suspended habeus corpus and stamped out dissent in a drive for national unity at the point of a gun. Forty years later, Roosevelt would take
Manifest Destiny a bit further, aggressively expanding both the size of the American empire through wars of conquest abroad, as well as the size scope and influence of government at home. And why not? Under Progressivism, which melded the totalitarian aspects mentioned above with Social Gospelism and holds that the State is the right arm of God, the messianic God-State would redeem not only Americans, but the entire world at the point of a sword in some sort of holy war, if given half a chance. Furthermore, it became the duty of all to supplicate to this new civic religion that stressed a pious duty to the god-state. Wilson was the heir to this philosophy, which had reached a fever-pitch worldwide in the early 20th century; it was his administration that used the pretext of the Great War to midwifed the fascist baby in America. Despite retreating somewhat during the post-war inflationary boom of the 1920s, Progressivism came back guns blazing in 1928 with the election of Hoover, another fascist aspirant in the style and manner of Wilson who laid the ground work for what Goldberg asserts is the blatantly fascist New Deal. Progressivist Hoover was followed immediately by a Progressivist FDR, elected in 1933 (coincidentally--or not--the same time as Hitler), and who stayed the fascist course the Hoover had laid out for him for him.
(It is interesting to note here that both political parties shared the same basic philosophy in the interwar period through the end of WWII; both rejected Classical Liberalism for the more Progressive variety. It was only after WWII that the conservatives started to recover their Classical Liberal heritage and become an opposition party once again).
Anyway, it is this Progressivist heritage that Goldberg claims modern-day liberalism inherited and continues to inspire their governance today. Yet American Progressivism--liberal fascism--was not yet self-sustaining, it was a movement that once it achieved governmental power, it stopped and dissipated. What it needed was a mechanism of renewal, of regeneration. It found that mechanism in the American schooling system, itself a collectivist and totalitarian institution seemingly designed to teach submission to authority and suppress independent thought. With the schools, the secular humanist majority making up the Progressives could shed the social gospellers it needed to gain power and relevancy when their movement was embryonic. They had their new church, a church funded by the State and which the State enforced attendance, and through which liberal fascists could teach their religious dogma in a five-days-a-week Sunday School to millions of new acolytes each year.
The Fascism of the 60s and the Great SocietyAfter chronicling the liberal purges and retrenchment of the 1950s--including the very public fight for political supremacy between the staunchly Progressive liberal Joseph McCarthy and the Communists in American government, a fight in which McCarthy's image (and that of any who dared question liberal theology) is transmogrified from that of a Progressive in good standing to a hateful right-wing fascist all but responsible for the Holocaust--Goldberg addresses the 1960s in America, a decade which he considers the third fascist moment in the 20th Century. At that time, American university students, in a striking parallel with their German forebears in the 1930s, rebelled against the stodgy conservatism of their parents and educators. Once again, a radical youth cult was agitating for power and control, seeking to replace the pre-existing Liberal culture with another imbued with mysticism, paganism, and collectivist idealism. Also accompanying the youthful insurgents, as in the 1930s in Germany, was a resurgence of racism and racial identity politics masquerading as authentic scholarship that eventually spilled out into the streets and igniting domestic unrest, domestic terrorism, and riots. When it was all said and done, young liberal fascists had successfully wrested control of the educational institutions in a blatant power grab. They were convinced that might was right, and that whomever won the battle of ideas by force of arms had earned the right to dictate morality to the masses. In this manner, the liberals forcibly converted college campuses into factories where the receptive and compliant products of compulsory public schooling would be imbued with liberal fascist philosophy. The chief lesson of which is all that matters is a Nietzchean will to power and the choice to wield that power toward one's own ends. Gone was the Classical Liberalism that birthed America. Forgotten was its focus on individual liberty and minarchism. It was replaced by a totalitarian, utopian, overtly racist, messianic governance philosophy convinced that it knew best and believed it had a right to impose its views on the remainder of a backward society. It was nearly a verbatim repeat of history thirty years earlier; the only thing missing was the overt militarism that characterized the fascist collectivist movements of the early twentieth century. These young fascists had gone to school on the failures of their more abrasive predecessors and realized a more subtle militarism would avoid the political opposition that a more overt style would attract. But militarism it still was, only the militant coercion of a suffocating nanny state that would first ask you nicely to submit, with a truncheon in plain view for encouragement. Thus Progressivism became liberalism, and replaced the existing Liberal cultural hegemony established by the Founding Fathers with one more to a liberal's liking in a Gramscian
kulturkampf, and poised itself to assume control of the levers of power of government once again.
Goldberg also documents the fascism of LBJ who hijacked Kennedy's cult of personality and the hero worship that JFK cultivated to promote his Great Society programs, themselves a re-warming of the very same fascist program that gave us the New Deal. In fact, LBJ is quoted as considering FDR to be his "political daddy". No surprise then that the fascism of the New Deal would be warmed over and given a new face: the Great Society, a term itself coined by Fabian socialists in the UK. Consider how the great society has all the fascist elements: A crisis through which a war mentality would be maintained (via a War on Poverty, and end to racism, and eventually a war in Vietnam). It was totalitarian, in that it sought to satisfy all wants and needs; the State would grant
legitimate happiness in her caring embrace. It was unifying, in that the masses were exhorted to reject the climate of hate (sladerously misattributed of course, to big-l Liberals like Goldwater). It leveraged a cult of restless youth. It was utopian in that it believed that with enough love and enough resources, all would be happy. And it was religious in character: it had its martyr in JFK, it featured waves of spiritual awakenings toward implementing a postmillenialist kingdom of god on earth, and it had it apocalyptic vision of a cold and harsh Hell marked by capitalist depredation. But it was also a state religion, as the line between formal religion and politics was blurred nearly beyond all recognition, as many white mainline churches and most black churches--both groups striving to be "authentic" to their "true selves"--agitated to use governmental force to effect their visions of social change. Furthermore, religious-style guilt could be assuaged by purchasing indulgences through welfare state spending. In fact, about the only fascist requisite that appears to be missing from the Great Society complexion was an overt nationalization of capital industries. Yet when one looks hard enough, one realizes that the Great Society endeavored to further blur the lines between public and private via increased regulation and direct interference with, and influence upon, corporate affairs. Administered of course by the quasi-judicial powers of a burgeoning administrative bureaucratic state. (I wonder if people realize in that calling for more regulation, they are essentially acting fascistically).
The Fascism of Today's Liberals, or How We're All Fascists NowGoldberg concludes his book by demonstrating how today's liberals inherited the psychological freight of Progressive-fascist thought. For instance, Goldberg highlights how liberals have never really fully exorcised the eugenic
deus ex machina from their psyche--as evinced by their enthusiastic support for abortion and the social Darwinism of the welfare state. Another holdover from a Progressive past, abortion is obviously eugenic in nature, as it was conceived (no pun intended) as a eugenic tool against the darker, feebler races. The welfare state joins abortion as a eugenic measure, too. The narcotic of the dole serves as a subtle form of social control that keeps its victims mentally and socially enfeebled and therefore little threat to the better races at the top of the social Darwinist pile.
Goldberg also documents how it is liberals and not conservatives who are the modern day haters, racists, sexists, and bigots. He claims that they are the chief exponents of racism and sexism, and it is they who aspire to organize the state according to racial and sexual identity politics and divvying up spoils along the same along racial and sexual lines. He also shows that they didn't come by inclination by accident; no, they inherited said racial animus from the American Progressives of the early twentieth century. It is interesting to me that these same policies are not materially unlike the same as those promulgated by German National Socialists, the same group whose label liberals love to tar their opponents with.
Switching to matters of economics, Goldberg highlights the sweet irony of liberal posturing on economic matters. For while they rail against "right-wing" corporate fat cats who want to predate upon the consumer and spout populist rhetoric about soaking the rich in favor of the little guy, it is they themselves who create the fat cats in the first place. Goldberg writes:
...the more government regulates business, the more business is going to take an interest in regulating government
And take an interest it does. Not only do corporations lobby the government to keep from being hurt by government, they also lobby government to oppress their competitors. Thus while corporate support for costly legislation such as meat-packing plant inspections, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Family Leave and Medical Act, and affirmative action may seem counter to their interests, it is actually beneficial for them times two. For not only does their support for such "kindness" garner them public goodwill, the economic effect of said legislation is to squeeze out smaller competitors who can't keep up with the onerous compliance costs such legislation imposes. In the end, the net effect of such legislation is to make big corporations bigger; another effect is that with greater size, some corporations become 'too big for government to let fail'. Thus the phenomenon we're currently seeing today, as companies scramble to make the case for taxpayer bailout money lest they go under, or in the past when companies lobbied Washington for protection from "unfair" overseas competitors, was in some way created by supposedly anti big-business liberals themselves.
Goldberg also discusses how some businesses are so heavily regulated that they cannot make a decision without a by-your-leave from (again) a quasi-judicial executive branch bureaucrat (who may have their own agenda to work), clearly an example of the blurring of the lines between public and private. This leaves open the possibility that government agents could use Big Business to push their own social agendas--say, for instance, promoting employer-provided day care, green technology, recycling, minority hiring preferences, etc--and a fewer number of bigger companies are much easier to control and influence than many smaller ones. Taken far enough, heavy regulation actually creates government-sponsored and -enforced cartels, as is the case with Big Tobacco, which bought protection from the government in the form of billions paid to government in exchange for a protected market in which they are free to set prices at will. As a result, we have the interesting situation where liberal politicians' calls to rein in and control business "to protect the little guy" or some such trope actually promotes the collusion of government and corporations to the disadvantage of the common man.
Thus, if the Far Left defined by outright socialism, and the Far Right by laissez-faire, it is liberal fascists who occupy the third-way center that acts to blends the public and private together. This blurring and blending is a defining characteristic Classical Fascism of the sort that Mussolini himself promoted, and it characterizes our supposedly "free market" today.
The penultimate topic that Goldberg tackles is the
kulturkampf, the liberal guerrilla war intended to bring about communitarianism, toward a fascist bundling, and away from Liberal indvidualism. He asserts that there is no denying that liberals are waging a war to impose their collectivist values on us, to replace the present hegemony with one of their own liking. For instance, liberals promulgate the Hegelian idea that freedom is only realized by living in harmony with the State, and that individuals only find identity and meaning relative to the group or the collective. But in order to effect this conversion, liberals have to undermine the existing religious beliefs of the people. Which helps explain liberals' hostility toward the Christian religion (which defines the individual by his relationship to God) and toward the Faithful in general; liberals want to push traditional religion out of civil society--where their religion without a god can fill the vacuum left behind--and plant the seed that independent sources of Faith not derived from the collective are divisive and therefore bad. They want to position the State in such a way that the State solves your problems, thus leading the people to depend on it instead of on a heavenly Being.
Besides religion, liberals have to undermine the other power center that existed prior to and competes with the State for authority over the individual, particularly the children, the influence over whom liberals covet terribly. But they have to compromise the family to do this, and one way in which the family is weakened is through compulsory public schooling. Another way in which the family is purposefully undermined by liberal fascists is through the availability of easy, usually one-way divorce which typically exiles the father and makes mother and child dependent on the god-State for their sustenance. This phenomenon is promoted by liberal cultural and legal measures wrt to marriage that invert the power structure in the family so as to coronate the mother the queen of the castle, and demote the father to, at best, a figurehead, and at worse, a house nigger. A third method is by creating an army of busy-body social workers with police powers, "for the protection of the children", the effect being that a parent's rights to his/her children are contingent upon the mother-may-I of the State. And fourth is the phenomenon of female paid employment, which creates a cohort of stressed-out mothers dependent on day care; as in compulsory schooling, once again families turn over their children to what is effectively an agent of the State for indoctrination. The necessity of paid is promoted by the one-two punch of deliberately suppressed wages that all but require a second wage earner, and feminist Brownshirt "encouragement" for women to work and shun the homemaker lifestyle.
Lastly, Goldberg illustrates how we all live in an "unconscious civilization of fascism". Whether through vaguely or overtly fascist themes in Hollywood movies; or through cultural exhortations to live a live of "authentic" passion, not of the head or the heart, but of the crotch; or through a decoupling of sexuality from procreation and returning it to the pagan view of sex for gratification; or through viewing debates of right or wrong not through the lenses of objective morality, but through the prism of empirical evidence; or through allowing ourselves be ruled by experts who know better than we; or through tolerating "health Nazis" in our midst who attempt to ban smoking and fatty foods and force us to wear seat belts and get immunizations all in the name of better public health, we live and breathe fascist residue each and every day. So much so that even those citizens naturally predisposed to opposing fascism, large-c Conservatives, must be on their guard so as to not absentmindedly promote fascism themselves. For just as strong is the temptation to use the machinery of the State to impose a sort of small-c "conservative" fascism, like, say, compassionate conservatism, to use an example.
Mechanisms of FascismIn his book, Goldberg highlighted some mechanisms by which fascism operates, which I found interesting enough to highlight. The first is a constant state of war or crisis, which is meant to keep the population focused and unified in purpose. War in fascist theory is the source of moral values, of moral imperatives. It is also meant to create an "industrial army" of sorts out of the population by instilling a type of martial discipline in thought, word, and deed. Since war is a good, those that object become automatically bad, and are labelled unpatriotic or castigated for disturbing the harmony of the group or beaten, imprisoned, or worse. Martial language is often used, usually by declaring a war on this-or-that. We see this today with our various wars-on-a-concept, such as the "War on Drugs", the "War on Poverty", "Global War on Terrorism", etc.
A second mechanism that Goldberg discussed is the need for a good story or narrative to motivate the masses. In the United States in the early twentieth century, the story was a religious crusade to rid the world of evil, such as alcohol, the infirm or stupid, or, in the case of World War I and II, the Hun and the Jap. In modern times, it is an equally religious crusade to rid the world of evils such as "hate", unhealthy foods, religious superstition, "racism" and "sexism". If a sufficiently compelling story wasn't available, simply invent one, as Hitler did by merging ancient fables about a glorious pagan Aryan past with scapegoating of various peoples who have conspired to keep the Aryan down. Or as modern liberals do by pinning all of America's evils on proto-fascist conservatives, thus making their enemy evil obstructionists of a glorious future, if only conservatives would get out of the way.
Third is the coupling of demagoguery to the truism that humans respond to ideas and to symbols, and not necessarily to reason. Thus, a fascist leader must recognize and play to the fact that people want to rally to an idea or a cause that makes them fill with pride or a sense of satisfaction. An effective fascist leader must almost always be a skillful demagogue and orator, so much better to stir the passions of the masses. Even better if he is able to construct a cult of personality or mythological narrative around himself, to make him the central priest or messiah figure in the idolatry of the state.
The fourth technique is an appeal to tribalism, be it the supposed call of a nation, culture, race, or ethnicity. Totalitarians like Mussolini and Hitler recognized that allegiance to family, kin, and ethnicity is stronger than an allegiance to an abstract political system or a distant leader or a system of government. That is, unless the political system or the government is comprised of, and defined by, the nation, culture, ethnicity, or race, in which case that allegiance will be very strong indeed.
The Quote: "If there is ever a fascist takeover of America, it will not come in the form of stormtroopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'"
The Good: I found this book to be an excellent dose of counter-theory that ably deflates the liberal myth that fascism is a right-wing phenomenon, and that all the ills associated with fascism are also right wing.
The Bad: I found Goldberg's frequent "I'm not accusing such-and-such of being a Nazi by ascribing such-and-such fascistic tendencies to them" distracting. I realize that he is simply pre-empting the liberal ad hominem riposte to his arguments--knowing that the first thing they'll seize on is that he is accusing them of being Nazis--but it happens so frequently that it becomes clear that he is worried about how the angry reactions that his iconoclastic argument will be received by those on the left (it would be ironic that a book that rightly accuses the left of being heirs to the fascism of the past garnered a fascistic response).
I also thought that he let the Enlightenment off the hook as a causal factor in the development of fascism, particularly in his discussion of the first fascist movement, the French Revolution. He contends that the French Revolution was not a product of rationalism; rather that it was a Romantic spiritual revolt that rejected the Christian God in favor of a Jacobin one. In other words it was anti-intellectualism that gave us the French Revolution. I contend, however, that it was the God-is-dead nihilist atheists in the post-Enlightenment and post-Reformation era that germinated secular humanist philosophy uninformed by Biblical morality. It was the vacuum of Belief created by these nihilists that permitted aesthetic Romanticism to gain sufficient power as to generate a revolution.
Furthermore, while I thought that Goldberg did an excellent job tracing the roots of fascism from the French Revolution forward, once he finished discussing the 60s and LBJ's Great Society, he started to fizzle.
Lastly, I thought that Goldberg's text wandered from time to time, which makes his argument sometimes hard to follow. This is particularly true toward the end of the book.
The Recommendation: Good read. I found myself having several "a-ha" moments as niggling uneasiness about the usual historical narrative suddenly snapped into focus. If you have the time, pick this book up. You won't regret it.
* I use the word "liberalism", with a small-l, to denote a governing philosophy that promotes a strong, centralized, totalitarian, and mercantilist government. This is quite different from
Classical Liberalism, which is a governing philosophy that promotes individual freedom, a limited and decentralized government, and natural and property rights.
** Totalitarian (as Mussolini himself described it): not a tyrannical but a humane system of government that takes care of everyone equally and everyone contributes equally. An organic concept where every person was part of the greater whole.
