Liberal Fascism: A Discussion of the book by Jonah Goldberg

Intro and Chapter One

Jonah Goldberg repeatedly, almost ad nauseum, provides caveats that he is not calling any contemporary (liberal) figure a genocidal dictator, a Nazi, a murderer or a rascist.  I’m only going to say it once.  I’m reviewing the precepts contained in an important book.  If I think someone is a Nazi or Nazi-like, I won’t hesitate to say so.  However, it is not to be inferred from the following comments and I won’t waste my time responding to anyone who mistakenly sees themselves or their hero described herein.

Goldberg’s book was copyrighted in 2007 which means it was being written during the heart of the G.W. Bush years.  Mr. Obama had barely come on the scene and is only mentioned by name twice in the book.  Yet, Goldberg not only nails him cold, but the author’s comments are prescient as to the entire playbook of the leftist agenda.  I guess with Saul Alinski’s “Rules for Radicals” around it’s not so hard to pinpoint modern leftist political strateeegery (as Limbaugh puts it), but the accuracy of what came to pass only a few short months after the book’s release is uncanny.

Take this from page 14: “…liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond significance…”, i.e. the post-Vietnam (in the U.S.) “everything is political” leftist meme.  As examples, he suggests further, “Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists.”  Almost a Nostradamian take on the Rush-NFL mess.

Obama is as predictable as the sunrise to Goldberg.  Later on in the same paragraph, he states, “…liberal fascists speak of a “Third Way” between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are “false choices”.  This is almost verbatim of Obama’s oft repeated accusation that we are dealing with “false dichotomies” when it comes to difficult trade-offs.

On page 15 Goldberg nails the left’s elevation of statism/fascism to the level of a secular religion complete with quasi-theological jargon.  Hillary’s “politics of meaning” and Obama’s “Hope and Change” are obvious examples.  If there were any doubts about this, Obama’s constant deification by the minion media and portrayal as some kind of latter day religious saint come to save us from ourselves should be enough to dispel it.

Speaking of syndicalism and the importance of Sorel’s myth-making as a means of motivating and captivating the masses, he again describes the NPR crowd with amazing accuracy.  From page 38 he reveals that “…a small cadre of professional intellectual radicals – who were prepared to reject compromise, parliamentary politics, and anything else that smacked of incremental reform – were indispensable to any revolutionary struggle.”  Does that sound eerily like the current playlist of healthcare reform, the stimulus package, cash for clunkers and everything else this administration is trying to cram down our throats without “compromise” or “incremental reform”?  It should.  It could easily be a contemporaneous description of Obama, Emanuel, Pelosi, Reid, et al in some sort of wild-eyed socialist planning session.

Moving on to page 43, Goldberg describes another favorite weapon in the libs arsenal of national self-destruction, “…its’ tendency to maintain a permanent sense of crisis.  Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation.  Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.”  Rahm Emanuel call your office.

Citing the program of Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento, page 46 looks like a talking points memo e-mailed from the DNC to its’ unholy minions yesterday.  Included are, briefly, enactment of a minimum wage, strict regulations on land use, a huge tax on capital, the nationalization of many industries, confiscation of the wealth of the church and on and on.  Coincidence?  Somehow I don’t think so.

Moving along to page 51, when describing the doctrinal Fascist economics which Mussolini was finally called upon to put on paper, that too had a strangely familiar and contemporary ring.  Goldberg states, “…it looked fairly recognizable as just another left-wing campaign to nationalize industry, or regulate it to the point where the distinction was hardly a difference.”  Pay close attention to this latter description.  It really doesn’t have to meet some lawyerly burden of proof to be a gubmint take-over, it only has to result in ultimate gubmint control.  You can call it “a co-op”, “ a single payer system”, “the public option” or “Santa Claus”, but if it results in gubmint control it really doesn’t matter, now does it?

What a huge indictment of modern day liberalism – and we’ve only covered the Intro and Chapter One of Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.  One could conclude from this brief discourse that modern liberalism is far more deserving of the moniker “Fascist” than almost any brand of conservative.  Stay tuned next week for Chapter Two, “Adolph Hitler: Man of the Left”.