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Liberal Fascism (2007)

por Jonah Goldberg

Outros autores: Ver a secção outros autores.

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1,1992616,236 (3.89)25
A startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing myths with research, journalist Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left. 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. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and campus speech codes were all the rage. These striking parallels don't mean that today's liberals are genocidal maniacs, yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. 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.--From publisher description.… (mais)
  1. 00
    Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America por Bertram Myron Gross (elenchus)
    elenchus: Gross & Goldberg each provides a critique of liberalism for its parallels to fascism with a new presentation, Gross predating Goldberg by a few decades. I have not read either book in full (rather, know them from secondary reading of each) but anticipate it will be instructive to read both and compare their treatment of similar material from different perspectives.… (mais)
  2. 12
    The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power por Gene Healy (gjn)
    gjn: Both books describe the increasing power the american gathered over the 20th century and that his power increase is in deep contrast with the founding fathers ideas and the american constitution. Both are very interesting reads.
  3. 04
    America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction por Jon Stewart (mikeg2)
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Mostrando 1-5 de 27 (seguinte | mostrar todos)
Still haven't finished it (nor added to shelf the other books I'm reading instead), but I have read more than I read when I first reviewed it. This summary still goes: Seems to be an update and American perspective of the classic "The Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek. Goldberg discusses the Progressive movement of 100 years ago, how it influenced modern liberalism and how much it admired Mussolini. ("Well, at least he made the trains run on time," was a great Progressivist cop out.) Goldberg like Hayek recognizes that a political spectrum that runs all the way from Communism to Fascism is like an alphabet that goes all the way from A to B.

My additional take: Goldberg recognizes that the chief difference between fascism and communism is, respectively, nationalism and internationalism. Beyond that, both promote socialist, centralized economic policies. Both can use coercive tactics to suppress dissent. He is on firm ground in pointing to the fascist tendencies of the early progressives and their heirs. Theodore Roosevelt embraced these tendencies but more so after he had already been president. T. Woodrow Wilson is probably rightly defined by Goldberg as the most fascistic president in U.S. history. As Goldberg points out to those who would say "It can't happen here," it already happened. He is also right to point out that the New Deal of FDR had its dark, fascistic side. This is one of the most interesting sections of the book. (Compare Vardis Fisher's autobiographical novel "Orphans in Gethsemane," which gives a first-hand account of the WPA by someone who was inside and found it oppressive.)

That JFK had a tendency toward fascism is a little more of a stretch, although I think there was that nationalistic, centralized tendency in his policies, which came out in various ways, especially in his rhetoric. He wasn't consistently fascistic, though, crushing the U.S. steel industry on the one hand and lowering taxes on the other. But certainly he was strongly nationalist if mildly socialist.

When Goldberg portrays sixties radicals as facists, however, he seems to be missing his own point. The most radical and violent of these people--Weathermen, Black Panthers, etc.--don't have to be compared to fascists because they were already communists; compare them to the Bolsheviks battling their opponents in the streets of St. Petersburg--that's how they saw themselves. The reason this makes a real difference is that these leftist radicals departed from the NATIONALIST fascism of their supposed predecessors. Wilson and maybe even FDR would have called out the troops and shot them long before Kent State. The sixties radical movement was not monolithic. There were various trends within it, including an instinctive individualist rebellion, but to the extent that they were socialists, most '60s rads got their socialism from their parents who had been '30s communists or other varieties of internationalist socialists. So Goldberg is straining his own conceit to make '60s internationalist socialists fit with earlier fascists. Not to say that the Kennedy/Johnson era did not lead to a climate in which socialist/communist radicals felt empowered and in which they could ally themselves with the Great Society as a platform for further radicalism, but they departed from nationalism, which you can't do and properly still be called a fascist.

Goldberg can always defend George Bush against charges of fascism by saying, at least he is not as bad as Woodrow Wilson. (One might as well say, at least he isn't as bad as Genghis Khan.) This is not for lack of trying on President Bush's part, however.

We live in an era in which even Wilson would be hard pressed to make everyone submit to his vision of nationalism. Each of us now tends to march to the beat of his own drummer, or failing that, we gravitate toward one of various drum-masters available in our fractious society. The president can't tell everyone what to think in the age of the Internet. He has too many competitors.

I would recommend reading this book in combination with "The Cult of the Presidency" by Gene Healy and "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein, because they are dealing with some of the same material but spinning it according to different agendas. ( )
  MilesFowler | Jul 16, 2023 |
The structure is muddled and most topics are only mentioned and never exhaustively explored so doesn't really work as a history book. As a polemic it's poor as it's mostly arguments by insinuation. There's even a passage where the author states that he's not saying liberal are bad because of their history yet most of the book serves no other purpose. There's nothing wrong with the book, it's just not very good and none of those things are secrets (at best they are forgotten facts). ( )
  Paul_S | Dec 23, 2020 |
This book would have been better if the author would have stuck to history rather than mix in Right-Wing advocacy. His ad-hominim attacks on Left-Wing positions undermines the intellectual appeal of the book IMO. ( )
  PedrBran | Aug 6, 2020 |
Great historical info and illuminating of the Democrats (and some Republicans) of today. Flow was a bit off for me but that was a minor detail. ( )
  Gryph82 | Feb 6, 2020 |
Preaching to the choir, alas. Author Jonah Goldberg is a National Review contributor and Liberal Fascism reads like a greatly elaborated version of a National Review article: erudite, extensively researched and documented, and never read by the people who should. Goldberg falls all over himself apologizing; he doesn’t really think Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Barack Obama are Fascists, just that their programs have some things in common with Fascist programs. He’s rather handicapped here because the John the Baptist of Fascism, Benito Mussolini, didn’t really have any programs – Mussolini said “Our program is to govern”. This has historically allowed Leftists to define Fascism as “anything we disagree with”. Lots of Fascist/NSDAP goals and accomplishments – guaranteed employment, abolition of interest, confiscation of war profits, nationalization of trusts, profit sharing, old-age pensions (all these come from the NSDAP party platform) – would be counted as “progressive” if they had come from any other political entity. In fact, as Goldberg points out, they were counted as progressive at various times by Lincoln Steffens, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw and others with impeccable leftist credentials.


Goldberg’s deconstruction of Woodrow Wilson is particularly enlightening and should be required reading for anybody who thinks George W. Bush was “the worst president ever”. The Wilson administration was responsible for the Espionage Act and Sedition Act, which allowed it to arrest anyone who criticized WWI. The Postmaster General was empowered to prohibit mailing any “seditious” publication (and did so for over 75), and the War Resources Board interdicted supplies of newsprint to any critical newspaper.


There are a lot of eyebrow raising quotes here. Cole Porter: “You’re the top, You’re the Great Houdini; You’re the top, You are Mussolini!” (original version). Woodrow Wilson: “I am an advocate of peace but there are some splendid things that come to a nation through the discipline of war”. Clarence Darrow (speaking of Wilson and WWI): “Any man who refuses to back the President in this crisis is worse than a traitor.” Walter Lippmann (speaking to FDR): “The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers”. Völkischer Beobachter (about FDR): “A man of irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will.” Mussolini: “Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress.” (They meant that as a compliment).


This just skims the surface of a 400+ page book. Every quote and claim is documented. The problem is nobody who needs to is going to pay any attention to this. This isn’t Goldberg’s fault; it’s just the way things are. You can explain all you want that Hitler was a Socialist, and what “Nazi” is short for, but all it invokes in the typical liberal is cognitive dissonance.


I have some gripes. From time to time Goldberg blames various liberal excesses on “Darwinism”, as if that were a political philosophy (what he actually means is “Social Darwinism”). And Goldberg goes a little overboard when he comments on McCarthyism: “…under McCarthyism a few Hollywood writers who’d supported Stalin and then lied about it lost their jobs in the 1950s.” – the problem being that they shouldn’t have been forced to lie about it in the first place. But on the whole, recommended. ( )
1 vote setnahkt | Dec 15, 2017 |
Mostrando 1-5 de 27 (seguinte | mostrar todos)
It is undeniable that the best way to have avoided complicity in the horrors of the last century would have been to have adopted the politics of Jonah Goldberg. Much can be said against moderate conservatives, but it has to be admitted that their wariness of grand designs and their willingness to place limits on the over-mighty state give them a clean record others cannot share. Few of Goldberg's contemporaries will grant him the same courtesy. . . .

Behind the insults and the self-righteousness is the assumption that politics runs on a continuum from far left to far right; that if David Cameron were to keep moving rightwards, he would end up a Nazi. Goldberg sets out to knock down this false paradigm and show that much of what Americans call liberalism, and we call leftism, has its origins in fascism.

I say "knock down", but that is too mild a phrase. Liberal Fascism is not a clean blow to the jaw, but a multiple rocket launcher of a book that targets just about every liberal American hero and ideal. The title comes from HG Wells, the most strenuous intellectual advocate of totalitarianism on the early-20th-century British left. "I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti," he told the Oxford Union in 1932, "for enlightened Nazis. The world is sick of parliamentary democracy. . . ."

Liberal Fascism is a bracing and stylish examination of political history. That it is being published at a time when Goldberg's free market has failed and big government and charismatic presidents are on their way back in no way invalidates his work. Hard times test intellectuals and, for all its occasional false notes, Goldberg's case survives.
adicionada por TomVeal | editarThe Observer, Nick Cohen (Feb 8, 2009)
 
The Progressives were the first generation of Americans to criticize the United States Constitution, especially for its limits on government's scope and ambition. They rejected the American Founders' classical or natural rights liberalism, offering instead a vision of the modern state as a kind of god with almost limitless power to achieve "social justice." When modern liberals like Senator Clinton call themselves progressives, therefore, they are telling the truth, even if their audiences don't fully understand the implications.

How gratifying it is then to have Jonah Goldberg's new book . . . to pursue these half-forgotten, if not exactly secret, implications. Although liberals throw around the term "fascist" to abuse conservatives (just as they do "racist"), Goldberg . . . persuasively shows that today's progressives are fascism's true descendents, embracing the statism at the heart of the 20th-century's most notorious outlaw regimes. . . .

Goldberg's Afterword is so good, in fact, that one hopes for a book on the problem of conservative statism from this excellent writer. In order to defeat liberal fascism, American conservatives will need to awaken their own ranks from the progressive spell. With his new book, Jonah Goldberg has renewed for them, and for all friends of constitutional government, a vital argument for the political battles ahead.
 
Goldberg goes beyond this conventional wisdom, however, to construct a much more ambitious theory of fascism as a kind of über-ideology. His broad thesis is that the decades from the early 1900s to the 1950s were “the fascist moment.” Across the advanced world, intellectuals lost faith in limited government, free market ideas, political democracy, diverse and competing social and cultural institutions, and all the higgledy-piggledy messiness of a free society. Groups as different as “progressives” in America, Fabians in Britain, Bismarckians in Germany, and the Futurists in Italy all sought to replace laissez-faire with state control and regulation. . . .

[W]hen H. G. Wells coined the term “liberal fascism” in a 1932 speech that called on his audience to replace the “dilatory indecisiveness” of democracy with bodies that would “end as the sustaining organizations of a reconstituted mankind,” he was not limiting his aims at all. No time limit or lack of ambition there even if in the service of liberal ideas.

Herein lies the significance of Goldberg’s long list of current liberal attitudes—mocked by some reviewers—that mimic past fascist ideas. From the young Hillary Clinton’s attempt to collectivize children under the banner of rights through the authoritarianism of political correctness and “sensitivity training” to the post-religious “politics of meaning,” modern statist liberalism exhibits an itch to regulate the lives—and increasingly the minds—of others that seems both boundless and boundlessly self-confident. If Goldberg exagerrates he exagerates something real.
adicionada por TomVeal | editarThe New Criterion, John O'Sullivan (Feb 1, 2008)
 

» Adicionar outros autores (5 possíveis)

Nome do autorPapelTipo de autorObra?Estado
Jonah Goldbergautor principaltodas as ediçõescalculado
Collica, MichaelDesignerautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Heller, JohnnyNarradorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
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A startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing myths with research, journalist Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left. 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. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and campus speech codes were all the rage. These striking parallels don't mean that today's liberals are genocidal maniacs, yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. 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.--From publisher description.

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