Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg
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Book Reviews of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Book Review: This book will change your opinion about fascism, FDR, and liberals.
Summary: 5 Stars
Liberals are fascists.
They are *not* Nazis, as Goldberg repeats thought out the book. They are fascists. All Nazis are fascist. Not all fascists are Nazi. Being a fascist is not about hating Jews but its about government control on daily life.
It's a bold statement, but by the end of the book it makes sense. Goldberg first describes Mussolini and Hitler's regimes, slicing the fascism from Nazism and Communism. Then he compares it to turn-of-the-20th-century Progressivism and FDR's New Deal. Then he looks at the protests of the 1960's and LBJ under the fascist lenses, and then Hillary Clinton and the like. Throughout the book he goes back to Italian fascism, German Nazism, and Progressivism and unpeels more and more about their politics and philosophies like an onion. He uses this to discuss economics, race politics, and abortion.
His discussion on FDR and the New Deal was the biggest shock to me. I didn't know that the NRA (National Recovery Administration) employed Nazi tactics like big demonstrations and sanctioning non-NRA aligned businesses. I also didn't know that FDR received a personal letter from Hitler commending him on his New Deal. Before I read the book I thought FDR was the best president ever, followed by Ronald Reagan. Now I'm not so sure he was that great or the closest we have had in the USA to a fascist dictator.
However, by the end of the book you start to wonder if fascism is really that bad after all. Political correctness has made us all accept a "happy fascism," hence the smiley face with the Hitler mustache on the cover of the book. Goldberg discusses this towards the end of the book in a chapter "We're all Fascists now."
The section on abortion and race politics was hard to read, not because they were poorly written but because they are sensitive subjects for me. I also waited to the end to read the Nazi platform in the appendix, which was a let down. It's underdeveloped with it's 25 planks compared to modern standards and doesn't describe all the public policies that the Nazi's eventually implemented.
Liberals are going to revolt at the thought of them being the fascists instead of conservatives being the fascists. But then, do you think conservatives liked that label for the last 30 years? It may not be college textbook quality but it is well researched and referenced. I give it five stars.
Book Review: Interesting read that should at least bring up discussion
Summary: 4 Stars
I think people should read this book. Why? It touches on various topics that are not well understood by most people and many that are considered taboo. For example: How many people out there know about eugenics and the fact that we had several states that had eugenic laws? Moreover, how many people know that several revered people in our History we not only supporters, but also funded eugenic research?
I read various reviews, especially the negative ones, and many people charge the book as having erroneous facts and cherry picking. I have not seen one specific fact listed in the book properly challenged by any of these reviewers with actual facts that can be verified.
Even if the author cherry picked passages of speeches, it does not make them untrue. It is part of the public record and anybody should be able to access them. If your interpretation of such passages or given definitions differs from that of the author's, that\s fine. That is what books are for. This is the nature of humans: to question, to search.
May this book and other books serve the purpose of instigate open, honest conversations about things that are relevant.. and not inspire a meaningless finger point bickering between left and right. Maybe if we stop bickering and start reading and researching a bit more about our past, we will stop making the same mistakes over and over again. Or, at least, recognize the warning signs of trouble and have a real discussion.
I don't give 5 stars to the book only because the prose is not that fluent, which can make for difficult reading and loose the reader on what is being discussed. But again, I praise the author for being able to publish a book that brings out various topics that should be discussed into the mainstream.
Book Review: Liberal Fascism Book
Summary: 5 Stars
This was a very deep and historical book. There is a lot of stuff in here I didn't know. I didn't know that the lady that originally started the Family Planning organization did not believe in abortion at all but only believed in birth control. Hitler got many of his ideas from people right here in our country! The true goal of abortion is eugenics, which means to eliminate the unwanted people from earth to create a great race of people. Abortion was not originally created to help people. This is similar to what Hitler's people did. They killed all the old and handicapped people first because they were considered un-useful to society. This book is highly informative and tells you who progressives and liberals really are and their true intentions. Book Review: A Deft Expose on the Hidden History of Fascism and Its Connection with Modern American Liberalism
Summary: 5 Stars
Jonah Golberg's book is a deft expose of the hidden history of fascism in America, tracing its roots back to the leftist totalitarian regimes of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Golberg connects all the arcane, hidden, obscured dots to give the reader a factual account of the rise of modern American liberalism, which he calls "smiley-face facism-'nice' facisism."
No, he does not call modern liberals Nazis or deny the Holocaust (with his Jewish roots this would be bizarre indeed). What he does do is to examine how the word fascism is used by people who have no idea what it actually means, then provides a working definition of the term. He then points out that, minus the death camps, gulags and racial predjudices, modern liberalism shares a lot of the same ideology with historic Fascism, Nazism and Communism, (I always thought this was obvious) further pointing out (what I also always thought was obvious) that these three are all decidedly left-wing ideologies. It was the leftist Stalin who, reinventing the terminology, accused any leftist not sharing all of his particular leftist views of being right-wing. However underneath the rhetoric all of these ideologies shared very similar basic assumptions. So one service Mr. Goldberg has done is to explode the myth that Fascism and Nazism were/are right-wing ideologies.
Goldberg traces the rise of American liberal ideology from Benito Mussolini, through Adolf Hitler, and American Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. Again, he doesn't argue that these American presidents were, or modern liberals are, genocidal racial purists, he simply points out that racial purity was merely one plank in the Nazis' liberal leftist platform, and that there are many other ideological similarities between modern liberalism and these historic ideologies.
At 405 pages of text the book is fairly hefty, however it reads rather quickly (at least to me.) Further, the book also has 53 pages of footnotes, so Goldberg's references can be checked by skeptics. All-in-all its a fascinating history of the rise of fascism and modern liberalism's debt to this leftist ideology. Goldberg's book should act as a corrrective to a lot of sloppy scholarship, generalizations and misunderstandings.
I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Book Review: History and Theory
Summary: 5 Stars
The title of this review pretty much says it all. Goldberg begins the book with an examination of fascist theory that gets to its true roots. Communism, fascism, totalitarianism, and other isms are reviewed in a historical context along with the misuse of the word fascist in contemporary American society. Goldberg writes from a noticeably conservative stance but supports his arguments with historical facts, documents, etc. Conservatives will love it while liberals will probably hate it, although Goldberg gives liberals credit where credit is due, and he argues his point in mostly an objective and factual manner rather than from a political/partisan point-of-view.