The Ninth Chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.

Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism

As he says in an early paragraph of this chapter, Goldberg intends to give us “a group portrait of Hillary and her friends – the leading proponents and exemplars of liberal fascism in our time.” In doing so, he divides the main body of the material presented into the following named sections:

• The Politics of Human Reconstruction,
• The Totalitarian Temptation,
• The First Lady of Liberal Fascism,
• Everything Within the Village,
• Eternal Corporatism, and
• Think of the Children.

The two passages that struck me most strongly are from the 4th and 6th sections. Within the context of thorough documentation and careful development, they show Hillary’s devotion to 1.) the growth of the state, and 2.) the destruction of individual liberty.

From Everything Within the Village:

In Clinton’s village, however, there is no public square where free men and women and their voluntary associations deal with each other on their own terms free from the mommying of the state. There are no private transactions, just a single “spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose” managed by the state.

And from Think of the Children:

What Clinton means when she says we cannot permit ideologues to “subvert” the discussion on children is that there can be no debate about what to do about children. And what must be done is to break the unchecked tyranny of the private home,…

Time constraints have forced me to fall behind in our reading of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and have prevented me from posting in recent weeks. As a matter of fact, I’m only now half-way through Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine.

However, my schedule has loosened up and I’m once again turning the pages at a healthy pace. It looks like I’ll be able to finish Chapter 7, read through Chapter 8, and have Chapter 9, Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism, completed in time to post my thoughts on it next Sunday or Monday.

And now, back to the book.

Reading the Sixth Chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism then posting our thoughts about it is our 6th week’s assignment in Red State’s Book Notes project.

Chapter 6: From Kennedy’s Myth to Johnson’s Dream: Liberal Fascism and the Cult of the State

Between this chapter’s introductory and concluding pages, Goldberg divides the main body of his material into the following named sections:

• He Died For Liberalism,
• The Birth of the Liberal God-State,
• Purging the Demons Within, and
• The Great Society: LBJ’s Fascist Utopia.

A paragraph I found most interesting (being the long-time comic book collector that I am) comes from the early pages:

Indeed, Kennedy was almost literally a superhero. It is a little-known but significant fact that no president has appeared more times in Superman comic books than JFK. He was even entrusted with Superman’s secret identity and once pretended to be Clark Kent so as to prevent it from being exposed. When Supergirl debuted as a character, she was formally presented to the Kennedys. (Not surprisingly, the president took an immediate liking to her.) In a special issue dedicated to getting American youth to become physically fit – just like the astronaut “Colonel Glenn” – Kennedy enlists Superman on a mission to close the “muscle gap.”

A similar tactic is being employed today not only to enhance the images of our current POTUS and FLOTUS, casting them as heroes in a number of comic books, but to besmirch those who oppose their policies. Characters clearly based on Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin are portrayed as villains in comic books that feature Obama as a triumphant superhero. These particular comic books disgust me, by the way, and are not to be found in my collection.

However, I am following one mini-series, the 6th volume of Bomb Queen books, that feature Obama. But this is because I’m a fan of Jim Robinson’s Bomb Queen character, not because the POTUS is in the story.

Reading the Fifth Chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism then posting our thoughts about it is our 6th week’s assignment in Red State’s Book Notes project.

Chapter 5:

Sandwiched between this chapter’s introductory and summary pages, Goldberg presents his discussion in three named sections:

• The New Left’s Fascist Moment,
• The Action Cult, and
• Building a Politics of Meaning.

Particularly memorable for me are a few money quotes that made me shout “YES!” (in a metaphorical sense – I’m really a very quiet reader), two from the chapter’s early pages and another near its end.

Youth politics – like populism generally – is the politics of the tantrum and the hissy fit. The indulgence of so-called youth politics is one face of the sort of cowardice and insecurity that leads to the triumph of barbarism.

What was once the hallmark of Nazi thinking, forced on higher education at gunpoint, is now the height of intellectual sophistication.

Today the liberal left’s version of the 1960s makes about as much sense as it does to remember Hitler as the “man of peace” described by Neville Chamberlain.

Reading the Fourth Chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism then posting our thoughts about it is our 5th week’s assignment in Red State’s Book Notes project.

Chapter 4:

Following his now-familiar structure, we find between the several introductory and summary pages that Goldberg has divided the main body of this chapter into the following named sections:

• Progressive From the Beginning,
• An “Experimental” Age,
• Stealing Fascist Thunder,
• Remembering the Forgotten Man, and
• The Fascist New Deals.

Having been born in the 1940s, I can relate to much of the material presented here almost as “current events” rather than “old history.” And I find it particularly frightening that individuals I’ve known all my life actually participated, on one side or another, in the terrors here described.

Before reading this chapter, I didn’t know that the Philadelphia Eagles NFL football team was named after Roosevelt’s horrendously oppressive “Blue Eagle” program. Did you? That’s not something that’s talked about anywhere, is it? I can remember as a boy seeing Blue Eagle signs and stickers still openly displayed, but no one anywhere or at any time ever explained to me exactly what they meant. History is so quickly white-washed, isn’t it?

The ease with which Roosevelt and his cronies consistently acted both extra-constitutionally and unconstitutionally to exert governmental authority over every aspect of the lives of American citizens slightly over half a century ago makes me think they’d be proud of what their big-state brethren in the federal government are doing today.

Maybe it’s just me, but the realities of what today’s Progressives are doing, especially when considered against the backdrop of what they did during the 1930s and 1940s, make me mighty damned glad for the Second Amendment to our Constitution!

Darn it! Events off-line have totally wrecked my schedule for the last few days and I’m unable to post this week’s assignment today as I should. And I’m sorry ’bout that. (Does this mean I’ll have to go sit in the corner?)

However, I will be posting my thoughts re: Franklin Roosevelt’s Fascist New Deal, the 4th Chapter of Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism right here in this diary soon, hopefully sometime within the next couple of days.

Reading the Third Chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism then posting our thoughts about it is our 4th week’s assignment in Red State’s Book Notes project.

Chapter 3:

Though I’m an amateur student of history and have long considered Woodrow Wilson to be the worst President the U.S. has ever had (though the current resident of the White House might outdo him, and Jimmy Carter tried to) the presentation of material in Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism sent shivers down my spine. The realities of our history are quite different from the white-washed version taught in our schools and preached from the pulpits of the media.

This 42-page chapter opens with a four-page introduction in which a brief biography of Wilson and the nature of the ideas he held is presented. We’re also given a glimpse of what the rest of the chapter will document in detail, and the statement:

“…Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator.”

The main body of the chapter follows, and is divided into the following named sections:

• The Idealism of Power Worship,
• How It Happened Here, and
• Wilson’s Fascist Police State.

Honestly, little that I read here was new to me (possibly because I skimmed this chapter when the book was first published?), but I can’t remember ever having seen it all laid out so vividly and documented so thoroughly.

Following the last named section, Goldberg gives us a six-paragraph summation of the points made in this chapter.

Most memorable in this summary is the statement regarding the intent of Woodrow Wilson and his fellow Progressives:

“Their chief desire was to impose a unifying, totalitarian moral order that regulated the individual inside his home and out.”

And the chapter’s final paragraph:

This is the elephant in the corner that the American left has never been able to admit, explain, or comprehend. Their inability and/or refusal to deal squarely with this fact has distorted our understanding of our politics, our history, and ourselves. Liberals keep saying “it can’t happen here” with a clever wink or an ironic smile to insinuate that the right is constantly plotting fascist schemes. Meanwhile, hiding in plain sight is this simple fact: it did happen here, and it might very well happen again. To see the threat, however, you must look over your left shoulder, not your right.

Reading the Second Chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism then posting our thoughts about it is our 3rd week’s assignment in Red State’s Book Notes project.

Chapter 2:

Titled Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left, this chapter does offer a brief biographical sketch of the man but focuses much more on just exactly what National Socialism (Nazism) was (and is), how it is so closely related to both Fascism and Socialism, and how Hitler used it to achieve power.

Goldberg stresses Hitler’s use of “German identity politics,” as a core principal of his Nazism: the favoring of one race as substantially superior to all others, and the identification of another race as the enemy. It was impossible to read through the section where that was discussed without thinking of the obvious use of “identity politics” by American politicians on the Left today, and how they insist that certain minority groups must be given preferential treatment over others.

I was most struck, however by a point introduced early in the chapter, developed in more detail, then summarized somewhat differently near it’s end.

Early in the chapter:

The popular conception that Hitler was a man of the right is grounded in a rich complex of assumptions and misconceptions about what constitutes left and right, terms that get increasingly slippery the more you try to nail them down.

And just two paragraphs later:

For decades the left has cherry-picked the facts to form a caricature of what the Third Reich was about. …the desired effect was to cast Nazism as the polar opposite of Communism.

Late in the chapter:

The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. … Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. All such ideologies — we can call them totalitarian for now — attract the same types of people.

Or, put another way, another thing the ideologies of the Nazis, communists. and fascists all share is the end result of implementation of their polices. They all lead to a larger, more expansive government: one which seeks to exert control over every aspect of society and proceeds to snuff out individual liberty and freedom.

The Nazis and communists are not polar opposites of each other, but they sure as hell are opposites of me!

Reading the Introduction and First Chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism then posting our thoughts about it was our 2nd week’s assignment in Red State’s Book Notes project.

Working my way through Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is an experience very similar to working my way through a serious college textbook. I find myself underlining phrases and passages, writing notes in the book’s margins, and marking pages with little yellow stick ‘em notes.

Since this diary entry won’t pretend to be a technical “book report” nor an academic analysis, I’ll keep it short and to the point: the sharing of my thoughts. Firstly, I like this book very much. Secondly, I agree with Goldberg’s premise that Fascism is not a phenomenon of the political right, but of the political left.

This proper positioning of Fascism is also explained and graphically displayed in Rethinking the Political Spectrum, David Muller’s excellent essay recently published in the American Thinker, a short but important article I recommend highly.

Introduction:

While reading through the Introduction I often found myself with the sense that it was written today, not a few years ago. The points made aptly fit the news stories currently featured in our daily Drudge, or talked about here at RedState.

After discussing the nature of Fascism and its historical development, Goldberg offers his working definition of the term:

Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all these aspects of fascism.

Chapter 1:

Titled Mussolini: The Father of Fascism, this chapter offers a biographical sketch of Benito Mussolini, explains the development of his political thought and rise to power. Toward the end of the chapter we find two subsections that explore related ideas with more focus: Jacobin Fascism, and War: What Is It Good For?.

It was chilling to read just how warmly Mussolini and his Fascism were embraced by prominent Americans. But it was heartening to read that “Ernest Hemingway was skeptical of Mussolini almost from the start.” Now I have the desire to reread some Hemingway!

Elbert Hubbard’s short book, A Message to Garcia, written over a century ago, was a very quick and easy read. More than anything else it is a treatise about the different types of workers there are in society, and the spirit of dedication a worker should bring to his job, whatever that job might be.

The first few sentences of the book’s Apologia section, titled Horse Sense, set the tone of the work.

If you work for a man, in Heaven’s name work for him. If he pays wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him, speak well of him, think well of him, and stand by him, and stand by the institution he represents. [...]

Defining initiative on the job as “doing the right thing without being told,” the author describes different classes of workers on a scale ranging from those who display initiative properly at the one end, to those who simply refuse to do so at the other end.

Retired now, with my working life behind me, I can look back at the different jobs I held with different companies, large and small, and remember my coworkers. I’m happy to say that most of the folks, though not all, with whom I shared work environments were clearly at the upper end, the self-motivated, responsible end of Hubbard’s scale.

Simple advice I was given when I was a boy about how to conduct myself on the job always stayed with me and always served me well. It was:

• 1.) to always arrive at work early, ten or fifteen minutes before the scheduled start time, and begin preparing for the day ahead,
• 2.) when working, try to be cheerful and efficient, always doing my best at whatever task I was assigned, and
• 3.) remain at the workplace for ten or fifteen minutes after finishing, to clean up after myself more thoroughly than may be required, and to be available for critique, suggestions, or comments that my employer may want to share.

Interested in the newly mentioned “RedState Book Notes,” I’ve visited my RedState account for the first time in years. This will probably be where I upload my posts re: that project.

Next step for me will be getting and reading a copy of A Message to Garcia, our first Book Notes reading assignment.