LIBERAL FASCISM: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN LEFT FROM MUSSOLINI TO THE POLITICS OF MEANING Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday)
Can fascism be nice? What about the secret police, the pogroms, the concentration camps? To Goldberg, none of that is intrinsic to fascist ideals; theories of racial purity, fanatical nationalism, and a militarized state were merely the particular form taken by fascism in one country, Germany, at one time. In Italy, on the other hand, Fascism—capitalized because it was coined there—was about nationalism but not race. Goldberg tells us that Jews were in fact overrepresented in the Italian Fascist Party until late in the 1930s, and that Mussolini and Spain’s Generalissimo Franco, another archfascist, each did his best to keep his country’s Jews out of the hands of the Nazis. The seed of fascism, planted in different soils, yields different fruits. In America it yields not the gestapo but the politically correct; not “Jewish science” (their brains are different), but diversity and ethnic studies (their perspectives are different); not The Triumph of the Will (youth, beauty, and passion crush the bourgeois moral order), but Brokeback Mountain (the bourgeois moral order crushes youth, beauty, and passion); not the jackboot, in brief, but the Birkenstock.
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Regarding its two biggest icons in the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, his case is a good one. Most of us know that Wilson campaigned against involvement in WWI and then, following his reelection, immediately went to war. In Liberal Fascism you may be surprised to learn how he used the war as an opportunity to centralize control over not only industry but also public opinion. Goldberg calls Wilson’s Committee on Public Information “the West’s first modern ministry for propaganda.” Its object, according to its director, was to inflame the American public into “one white-hot mass” of “100 percent Americanism.” In addition to its printed output, the CPI assembled an army of 100,000 “Four-Minute Men,” patriots prepared to give a short speech about the war anytime and anywhere. (Several million such speeches were delivered.) The Department of Justice likewise created the American Protective League, more than a quarter-million vigilantes who spied on neighbors, read mail, listened to phone calls, and rounded up draft dodgers. Wilson’s crowning achievement in this line was his Sedition Act, which made virtually any criticism of the war illegal. Under its authority several hundred periodicals were denied use of the mails, and 75 were banned outright. Most impressive of all, some 175,000 people were arrested simply for expressing their opinions.
The Kennedy Administration, for example, follows the “fascist playbook” with its crises, appeals to unity, martial language, use of mass media, technocratic solutions, and, of course, its “cult of personality for the national leader.” (On Ronald Reagan, however, Goldberg maintains a discreet silence.) When runners John Carlos and Tommy Smith raised their fists at the Olympics in Mexico City it was “derivative of fascist aesthetics.” The Black Panthers, paramilitary racial fanatics who viewed murder as a legitimate tool of politics, were American brownshirts. Plus Hitler was a vegetarian, hated smoking, and worried about the humane treatment of animals, so Goldberg has a jolly time there, too. Student radicals of the 1960s read Marcuse, who was a protege of Heidegger, who was an unrepentant Nazi—presto!—more fascists.
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