Jonah Goldberg is in big trouble. Who is Goldberg? He’s a nationally syndicated columnist and a National Review contributing editor who has just published his first book. That’s why he’s in trouble. The book is called Liberal Fascism, The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Prior to publication (and before anyone had read it) the book was given scathing reviews on Amazon.com which was hacked, replacing Goldberg’s picture with one of him with a Hitler moustache. Since publication, it has frequently been placed behind other books in unrelated sections of the bookstore and on more than one occasion people who purchased it were scolded by bookstore staff for doing so. Despite this it has reached #1 on the NY Times bestseller list.
Here’s why the book has caused such controversy: Conservatives are so frequently referred to as fascists by liberals that we sometimes think it must be our middle name. Google the word Bush and Hitler and you get over 800,000 pages where they appear together. Goldberg wondered about the reason for this. He couldn’t think of any policies that conservatives held that seemed even vaguely Nazi-like. So he started researching. Liberal Fascism was the result.
The book presents the history of fascism from its roots in the Jacobins of the French revolution through the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler to the countercultural 60’s to the current Politics of Meaning so beloved by Hillary Clinton. This is not the history the Left wants you to know. According to the prevailing interpretation as presented in the media and academia fascism is a Right-wing phenomenon. It isn’t. Like communism, and socialism, its ideological cousins, fascism is another “ism” of the Left. And Goldberg has the goods to prove it.
When liberals make their frequent claims that various actions of the Bush Administration are historically unique acts of fascism they are either being ignorant or dishonest because nothing that Bush has done can even come close to the actions of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, among whose fans was Benito Mussolini, instituted a propaganda ministry, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) which among its activities hired 100,000 men to spread out over the country to restaurants, theaters, street corners etc. to spread the Administration’s gospel. He passed the Sedition Act, which makes the Patriot Act look like the Bill of Rights in comparison as it banned “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or military.” Magazines and newspapers were regularly subjected to government censorship, the radical magazine, Masses not being allowed to be distributed due to offenses such as publishing an “anti-American” cartoon. The American Protective League, created by the Justice Department employed at its greatest strength over 250,000 Americans to spy on their neighbors and often act as muscle to physically crack down on “seditious street oratory”.
Liberal icon, FDR was an enthusiastic member of Wilson’s administration and populated his own administration with many other like-minded Wilsonians. Mussolini was an early supporter of Roosevelt’s, seeing many similarities between their policies, once admiringly stating that “America has a dictator” referring to Roosevelt.
Fascists and progressives (the name by which liberals were known until the middle of FDR’s years in office) did (and still do) in fact have much in common; the raising of the State to quasi-religious status and the corollary need to diminish religion’s place in the public square; the use of the tactic of making each issue a “crisis” requiring military-style mobilization, (Think War on Poverty or the need to Save The Earth.) including the need for mass communal action. They also both see the need for the virtual ideological take-over of the universities and believe that the “old ways” are corrupt and outmoded. They believe in “new ideas”, “new ways of doing things” and a “new politics of meaning”. They frequently agitate for “change”.
One of the interesting aspects of fascism is that unlike communism which has always held itself out as being universal, fascism often adapts itself to the culture of the country in which it has taken root. This explains Germany’s and the Nazi’s anti-Semitism while Italy’s fascists weren’t anti-Semitic at all. Mussolini frequently tried to protect Jews until he started taking his orders from the Germans.
There are many reasons that fascism has come to be known as a Rightist phenomenon but virtually none of them have anything to do with any philosophical kinship or policy similarities. There were no small-government Nazis. The philosophical heritage of the Right comes to it from Edmund Burke, James Madison and the Federalists. Their pedigree has no connection with fascism. Liberalism’s does.
Goldberg has written a book that is being and will continue to be vilified by those who refuse to read it. But to those who do much of what they hear in current public discourse will sound uncomfortably familiar. The United States is highly unlikely to evolve into a Nazi-like fascism. It isn’t within the American character. If it comes at all it may come the way comedian George Carlin (of all people) says, as quoted in Liberal Fascism, not in “jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley-shirts. Smiley-smiley.” And it won’t be Right-wing at all.
Cross linked at Liberty Pundit
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Why I Am A Nazi - A Surprising Confession
I have dreaded this moment for a long time, knowing that someday it would certainly come. But I am worn down, tired of the denials, tired of being defensive, trying to hide. The evidence has been mounting for a long time and I must face the facts and state the truth boldly and admit it to the world: I am a Nazi!
How do I know? Well many powerful and influential sources have been saying it for a long time. I've heard it from virtually any movie that even touched on a political topic or deals with social issues in any way. The liberal blogs tell me daily. I hear it from magazines, college professors and Democrats. I hear it from TV. For a long time I'd see people like me, who believe that the government's role should be far more limited than it is today but who believe that national defense is one of the those things government should be doing and that that defense should be muscular and effective, portrayed as goose-stepping Jew, Black, Gay killers. I've seen those of us who believe that the US has a right to defend its sovereignty, make and enforce laws respecting who gets to come and go, live and work in the US shown as being swastika-tattooed, zeig-heiling murderers. I resisted what the media has been saying about me for so long now but I've grown weary and after watching an episode of CBS's series, Cold Case last night I finally broke down and have accepted the fact that yes, I am a Nazi.
The episode in question, Spiders, revolves around Tamyra Border, an abused seventeen year old girl who we see in flashback because we find out that ten years ago she was murdered and the case has gone cold. She had run away from her abusive father who burned her with cigarettes and beat her. Desperate she falls into the arms of "Spider" Leland who befriends her and takes her home to stay with him, his mother and loner, Elliot Leopold, another apparently lost and sympathetic soul. Once having settled in and starting to feel comfortable with Spider he reveals the reason for his extending Tamyra his and his mother's sympathies: Spider wants to her to join his group which believes that laws should be enforced, the government should be smaller and illegal immigration is bad...just like I do. Oh yeah, he also doesn't believe the Holocaust ever happened and all manner of bad things should happen to Blacks, Gays, Jews, etc. none of which I agree with for even a nano-second but I've learned from years of being told by the media, if you believe in the first group of things, you also believe in the second. By the time Spider took off his top shirt revealing the swastika on the T-shirt underneath I knew what CBS was telling me: I'm a Nazi!
Well as it happens Spider was lucky enough to find an Hispanic woman whose car had broken down. She was, of course a lovely, sweet (we're made to assume) illegal immigrant whose son was hiding in the car, watching as Spider got out of his car and beat her unconscious. He gave Tamyra a gun and told her to shoot the Hispanic woman but Tamyra refused so Spider did it instead. Tamyra was brought back to Spider and Spider's Mom's where she tried to escape and go to the police. As it happens Mom, who is some sort of combination of Nurse Ratchett and the Wicked Witch of the West tells Tamyra that "You're either with us or against us" in killing those danged Hispanics. Well those are the exact same words that Republican President George W. Bush has so famously used. So it is obvious that George W. Bush and the Nazi mom think exactly alike!! And I voted for him! So, I'm a Nazi, too!
Well, I have to admit that I was a little confused here as no president has been more welcoming to illegal aliens than GWB has been. I mean I think that he's been far too lax in enforcing immigration laws, which I guess means I'm an even bigger Nazi than George W. Bush. Also, GWB has done more to prevent AIDS in Africa than any other president and is actually very popular in much of Africa, but still CBS said it so it must be so: he just wants to kill all those Hispanics and Blacks etc.
Nazi-mom also quoted Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, who said, "We can have no "50-50" allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all." Well, there you have it: Nazis just love Republicans and that's because Republicans are just like them. See? I'm a Nazi.
Well, ok it may be true that, as Jonah Goldberg points out in minute detail, in Liberal Fascism, Nazism is really a Left-Wing phenomenon, which was much admired by many people in FDR's administration and that anti-semitism is spreading like wildfire in all the strongholds of socialism in Europe and that it was Democrat, Jimmy Carter who, according to his own Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, was going to "sell Israel down the river" if he'd been reelected, but still: I'm a Nazi.
Oh yeah, as it turned out it was Elliot who turned out to have been Tamyra's murderer; had to kill her to shut her up. It turns out he wasn't so nice after all. In the present it seems he is one of those right-wing college economics professors. They're everywhere, you know.
So there you have it. It is irrefutable and I'm through protesting. I'm a Nazi. I must be. CBS told me so. But you want to know the only solace I have? I think you might just be a Nazi, too.
