Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of...

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning | Jonah Goldberg | A Student of Eric Voegelin

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Liberal Fascism: T...

	Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning Jonah Goldberg Doubleday, 2008 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 349 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

should be required reading

I bought two copies. One to lend and one to keep. This is one long and excellent retelling of how the left has subverted history and done a fair job of subverting America. It is to weep to consider that this isn't common knowledge and shouted from our rooftops. Freedom!

A Student of Eric Voegelin

Jonah Goldberg's _Liberal Fascism_, (Doubleday, 2007), finds that the elites in the US espouse fascism, and have done so from Theodore Roosevelt onwards. He actually concludes that we are all fascists now, more or less.

I would characterize the book as a continuation of Eric Voegelin's _The New Science of Politics_ at the level of a catalog of evidence rather than at the theoretical level. So I highly recommend it to my friends. There are problems with it. For instance, it is deficient in theological insight and understanding of such documents as _Rerum Novarum_ and _Quadragessimo Anno_, and one must imagine what a society of three hundred million people would look like without fascist elements, for the author is silent on this important consideration, but nevertheless the detail is enthralling, especially if you were raised, like me, on an account of America's past that was largely harmonious mythopoesis, with, as Goldberg so nicely puts it, the unpleasant details "air brushed" from the story.

Many will be interested in the dominance in the American academy of Bismarckian educated academics (Apparently 9000 studied nach Deutschland by 1900 AD and, for instance, at one time, all faculty at Johns Hopkins had received their training there.)

One historical clarification made by Goldberg: What was called fascism in Italy was called progressivism in the US., and Benito Mussolini borrowed freely from Wilson; fascism was highly admired in the US until Italy invaded Ethiopia. Fascism was a left wing socialist phenomenon which the Comintern denominated "right wing" because it was an obstacle to Stalin's expansionism.

Here is his mention of Eric Voegelin, although Voegelin comes to mind hundreds of times as one reads:

"As mentioned before, Richard Pipes described Bolshevism and Fascism as twinned heresies of Marxism. Both sought to impose socialism of one sort or another, erase class differences, and repudiate the decadent democratic-capitalist systems of the West. In a sense, Pipes's description doesn't go far enough. While Fascism and Bolshevism were surely heresies of Marxism, virtually all collectivist visions at the end of the nineteenth and be ginning of the twentieth centuries were heresies of Marxism in the sense that Marxism itself was heretical. All of these isms, as the philosopher Eric Voegelin argued, were premised on the idea that men could create Utopias through the rearrangement of economic forces and political will. Marxism, or really Leninism, was the most influential and powerful of these heresies and came to define the left.

"But just as Leninism was a kind of applied Marxism, so, too, was Fascism (as well as technocracy, Fabian socialism, corporatism, war socialism, German social democracy, and so on). Collectivism was the "wave of the future, " according to the title and argument of a book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and it would be known by different names in different places. The fascist moment that gave birth to the Russian-Italian method" was in reality a religious awakening in which Christianity was to be either sloughed off and replaced or "updated" by the new progressive faith in man's ability to perfect the world." (p 139) (Interestingly Voegelin's name is NOT found in the index!)

A few other bits:

"Rexford Guy Tugwell, an influential member of FDR's Brain Trust, said of Italian Fascism, "It's the cleanest, neatest most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen.It makes me envious." (p.11)

"The one thing that unites these movements is that they were all, in their own ways, totalitarian. But what do we mean when we say something is 'totalitarian'? The word has certainly taken on an understandably sinister connotation in the last half century. Thanks to work by Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others, it's become a catchall for brutal, soul-killing, Orwellian regimes. But that's not how the word was originally used or intended. Mussolini himself coined the term to describe a society where everybody belonged, where everyone was taken care of, where everything was inside the state and nothing was outside: where truly no child was left behind.

"Again, it is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice,not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian--or 'holistic,' if you prefer--in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend 'nontraditional' beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberalfascists speak of a 'Third Way' between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are 'false choices.' "

The idea that there are no hard choices--that is, choices between competing goods--is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservative or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real Utopia, waits for us in the next life." (p 14)

"In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueveille warned: "It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones."(p 20) [For me this was the most compelling quote.]

"Almost every program of the early New Deal was rooted in the politics of war, the economics of war, or the aesthetics of war emerging from World War I. ...Many New Deal agencies, the famous "alphabet soup," were mostly continuations of various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the war." (p 151)

Particularly interesting is the account of the founder of the New Republic, Herbert Croly, who was baptized in the religion of August Comte, converted by William James to progressive Christianity at Harvard, and became the progessive guru for Wilson.

The progressives, who later changed their name to "liberal," were also, by and large, eugenicists and provided Germany with a great deal of theory and practice. Progressives were in favor or compulsory sterilization of the "unfit" rather than waiting for evolutionary sorting. Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr: "Three generations of idiots is enough!" (You will remember the quote in "Judgment at Nuremberg" spoken by the defense lawyer played by Maximilian Shell.)

Herbert Hoover, "the great engineer," was offered the Democratnomination in 1920 because he was the most admired member of the most admired technical class at that time. He was only damned as a right wing capitalist later in the New Deal when they needed a bogie man to account for the failure of the anti-depression measures. Of course the New Deal has become the untouchable "cargo cult" of current liberalism, in Goldberg's memorable phrase.

A worthwhile read.

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Awesome!!!!

What an Opus Magnum! I promise you will never look at the left the same again and you will never be lied to again that fascism is right wing. Fascism is nothing but a fellow heresy, along with bolshevism, of Marxism,competing for the hearts and minds of the left who want all power centralized within the government. Read and be informed.

The truth is in here.

This has answered so many questions I had concerning liberals in America. Things that didn't make any sense now do, like why some the wealthiest people in America support a Marxist system.
Fascinating and scary at the same time. America, we've been warned.

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