'Liberal Fascism' by Jonah Goldberg

What a great blast this was. From page one you feel Goldberg is a high octane New Yorker who just knows too much and hasn’t got time to get it all out. So loath or love the thesis – that all fascism has its roots in the left – the sheer energy of the writing and volume of fascinating historical detail makes it a ride not to miss. And the thesis has a lot going for it. Socialists and liberals always imply that lurking behind Conservatives and Republicans are ‘right wing fascists’, when ironically all the actual fascism that both Europe and America has experienced has come not from the right, but the left. Mussolini started off as a radical socialist, and then moved to populism; Hitler was the leader of – the National Socialist Party, which had originally been, The German Workers’ Party. And if you look at the manifesto, it’s very left-wing: clause 11, abolition of unearned incomes and rent slavery; clause 13, nationalization of all associated industries; clause 14, division of profits of heavy industries; clause 15, expansion of old age welfare; and much more, such as universal health care. Goldberg shows that the idea big business supported Hitler is a myth. Big business loathed the Austrian.
Not only are the fascist policies left wing economically as they want to interfere with the market, they are left wing in terms of always wanting a ‘revolution’, a new age, a third way which is beyond politics - so going against the what Burke, father of conservatism, taught us. He took one look at the terror coming out of revolutionary France and argued it is better to slowly reform the existing order rather than let the mob destroy all in the name of progress. Left wingers and their fascist offspring forget this: they always want to rip down institutions, neuter them to get their ‘expert’ hands on all the power to build a society where the state, for the good of the ‘people’, is allowed into ‘every nook and cranny’ of our lives, or as Mussolini said ‘Everything in the State, nothing outside the State’. That has never been a conservative idea: but it is certainly a socialist one, indeed it is exactly what Lenin and Stalin aimed for.
After proving that European fascism belongs to the left Goldberg crosses the Atlantic and looks at Wilson and Roosevelt, two heroes of ‘progress’ and argues they both brought traces of fascism to the USA. Wilson was a great admirer of Bismarck, and used the First World War as a crisis to justify a great remodelling of society, as the Prussian had done, under the auspices of the War Industries Board which took control of the economy – just as Hitler did later in Germany. For persuading the people, Wilson created a formidable propaganda machine which aimed to create, ‘100 percent Americanism’, helped along by 100,000 four minute men who could deliver passionate speeches in town squares around the nation. The other side to propaganda was silencing dissent – and this happened a lot. In fact Wilson locked up more dissidents than Mussolini, and closed down many papers. Under Wilson, any criticism of the government – even in your own home – could earn you a prison sentence. Behind it all was not xenophobia against Germans – but, as one of their own said, ‘The great European War is striking down individualism and building up collectivism.’ It was all about control – and it was coming not from the conservatives, but the progressives. Or as Goldberg says, ‘To see the threat (of fascism) you must look over your left shoulder, not your right.’ With Roosevelt, who was involved in all that Wilson did, there is more hero worship, akin to what was happening in Europe with Hitler and Mussolini, (‘Every house I visited had a picture of the president’, wrote one journalist) and the same use of a crisis, the depression, to increase state power. Goldberg is pretty scathing about the supposed New Deal, arguing that just as Hitler was doing in Germany, Roosevelt was getting away with whatever was pragmatically possible for the state to do. It was not some grand design, but a hotchpotch of initiatives However shocking the idea that Roosevelt, who later joined Churchill to defeat the fascists, had much in common with them, Mussolini at least thought there was something in it. Reviewing FDR’s book ‘Looking Forward’ he writes, Roosevelt calls his readers to battle…reminiscent of the ways and means which Fascism awakened the Italian people’…in other words, ‘He’s one of us’! And FDR returned the compliments, writing in a long supportive letter to ‘that admirable Italian gentleman….I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he had accomplished.’ Many years later, a man who had been a great supporter of FDR, Ronald Reagan, insisted that Roosevelt’s New Deal smacked of fascism, and refused to back down.
With those peace loving hippies of the 1960’s it’s not difficult for Goldberg to show the links with 1930’s fascism. The mystical assumption there was a ‘Wrong Turn’ in history away from tribal/environmental roots into Christian industrialism; a sentimental lurch back to communing with nature; a demand for ‘action’ with a blurring of the lines between revolutionary action’ and violent crime; hostility to marriage, the family; pure hatred for the church; extreme emphasis on victim identity politics – the blacks, the Hispanics, the gays. It’s not very difficult to see the links. And their heroes prove the point even more. Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung were all men of violence: fascists.
Goldberg’s pounding of the goody liberal image continues as he looks as eugenics: it is rooted in the left. The Fabians in England, the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Laski, H.G. Wells were ‘devoted to the cause’, all standing on Darwin, whose cousin was the father of eugenics. And they in turn look back to Malthus, the population control theorist. The bottom line of the movement is exterminate the ‘unfit and darker races’ (Wells) and introduce ‘selective breeding’ (Shaw). All of this went to America and was keenly adopted by the ‘progressives’ so Wilson, a ‘forthright defender’ of eugenics’, became ‘the most racist president of the twentieth century’. And of course it was all soaked up by Adolf Hitler – and tragically implemented.
All of this is definitely not history, as Goldberg makes clear as he looks at environmentalism, abortion, health foods, and even an analysis of recent Hollywood films such as Brokeback Mountain with its call for a return to the wild. Fascism ideas are alive and well. And perhaps now its seeds are installed in the White House. He has a fascinating chapter ‘Brave New Village’, which looks at Hilary Clinton’s political philosophy. In a nutshell it is that the village, the community, the state – is more important than the individual and the family. Having spent over three hundred pages explaining where that takes us, this is a bit disturbing. And now we know the hallmarks of fascism three other things have happened since the book was published which should also make us worry. One is the religious like fervour Obama whips up by his outstanding oratory, he is definitely a hero; then there is his talk of a ‘third way’, of moving beyond Washington, as if we can get beyond this mundane business of discussion and political horse trading. Thankfully it seems things are back to normal: but the wish was there. And finally, there is this deliberate attempt of both Obama and Brown to model themselves on Roosevelt and the New Deal. Goldberg shows Roosevelt was making it up as he went along in terms of policy, and you sometimes feel it is the same now. But whether the policy worked or not the state still got more power. In the UK under Brown that has definitely happened. Once there is a majority, parliament has no power to hold the government to account; and in the government all power now resides in Downing Street, cabinet rule went long ago.. And so with hardly anyone noticing, Brown has decided to force everyone to stay in full time education till they are 18. That means the state dictates what someone does for a third of their life! The measure is definitely fascist…and very tragically nobody seems to have noticed.
But we drift from Goldberg’s superb book. Though it is packed with history it is primarily about political ideas. And without any appeal at the end, there was for me at least a feeling that a decision had to be made. Goldberg argues that liberals, some fanatically, others cunningly, are intent on building another ‘religious’ bridge, not between God and man, like Christianity, but between men and the state, the new God. This faith in ‘progress’ gives them the right to take power away from the traditional institutions they always attack – marriage, the family, the church, small business - and pass it to ‘experts’ from the state, brick by brick. The intellectual fathers of this mission are Rousseau (loyalty to the state and the divine is the same); Heidegger (good and evil are childish notions, we must reject religion and make our own truth); and Hegel/Darwin (history is about progress, evolution, so expect revolution). And this is where ‘decision time’ kicks in; because we don’t have to look to these false prophets whose ideas have wrecked such havoc. We can look to the fathers of classical liberalism – John Locke (emphasis of equality of all men before God, and role of property), Adam Smith (division of labour, free markets, ‘invisible hand’), and especially Edmund Burke (tradition less blood-thirsty than revolution). Two things are worth remembering about these political thinkers. First of all their ideas have been behind conservatism with a small c, and have on the whole brought stability and prosperity to people. These ideas work. And secondly, all of them are theists, indeed they are Christian, and in their political architecture there is plenty of space for God – and crucially absolutely no attempt to blur the lines between what man can do, and what God can do, which is the liberal fascist obsession. Let’s end this longer than usual review with reference to the apostle. He said, ‘now we see through the glass dimly’. That’s true politically. It’s mainly a mess, and we have to learn to do what we can. Fascists deny this. They claim they can see through the glass clearly to the new earth and so have the right to drag us all there. Let’s stick with Paul and be very wary of these so called liberals who think they have all the answers.