Book Review by Fritz Wagner

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday, 2007)

Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism finds that the elites in the US espouse fascism, and have done so from Theodore Roosevelt onwards. He actually concludes that we are all fascists now, more or less.

I would characterize the book as a continuation of Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics at the level of a catalog of evidence rather than at the theoretical level. So I would recommend it for its recitation of neglected history. Nevertheless it has problems. For instance, it is deficient in theological insight and understanding of such documents as Rerum Novarum and Quadragessimo Anno, and one can scarcely imagine what a society of three hundred million people might look like without fascist or statist elements; yet the author is silent on this important consideration although he is not, after all, a libertarian or an Ayn Rand type. Despite its shortcomings, the detail is enthralling, especially if you were raised, as I was, on an account of America's past that was largely a harmonious mythopoesis, with, as Goldberg so nicely puts it, the unpleasant details "air brushed" from the story.

Many will be interested in the late 19^th century dominance of Bismarckian educated men in the American academy. Apparently some 9000 American academics had studied in Germany before 1900 AD.  An example given: at one time all faculty at Johns Hopkins had received their training there. Such education implies an attitude in which technical expertise wielded by specialists should be employed to solve the major social questions of the time.

One historical clarification made by Goldberg: what was called fascism in Italy was called progressivism in the US., and Benito Mussolini borrowed freely from Woodrow Wilson; ample evidence is given that fascism was highly admired in the US until Italy invaded Ethiopia. Fascism was in fact not a right wing but rather a left wing socialist phenomenon which the Soviet Union’s Communist International (Comintern) denominated "right wing" because it was an obstacle to communist expansionism.

Here is his mention of Eric Voegelin, although Voegelin comes to mind often as one reads:

As mentioned before, Richard Pipes described Bolshevism and Fascism as twinned heresies of Marxism. Both sought to impose socialism of one sort or another, erase class differences, and repudiate the decadent democratic-capitalist systems of the West. In a sense, Pipes's description doesn't go far enough. While Fascism and Bolshevism were surely heresies of Marxism, virtually all collectivist visions at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries were heresies of Marxism in the sense that Marxism itself was heretical. All of these isms, as the philosopher Eric Voegelin argued, were premised on the idea that men could create Utopias through the rearrangement of economic forces and political will. Marxism, or really Leninism, was the most influential and powerful of these heresies and came to define the left.

But just as Leninism was a kind of applied Marxism, so, too, was Fascism (as well as technocracy, Fabian socialism, corporatism, war socialism, German social democracy, and so on). Collectivism was the ‘wave of the future,’ according to the title and argument of a book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh [originally famous as the wife of Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic alone], and it would be known by different names in different places. The fascist moment that gave birth to the ‘Russian-Italian method’ was in reality a religious awakening in which Christianity was to be either sloughed off and replaced or ‘updated’ by the new progressive faith in man's ability to perfect the world. (p 139)

Interestingly Voegelin is not mentioned in the index, which is otherwise more than adequate.

A few other bits:

Rexford Guy Tugwell, an influential member of FDR's Brain Trust, said of Italian Fascism, "It's the cleanest, neatest most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious.” (p.11)

The one thing that unites these movements is that they were all, in their own ways, totalitarian. But what do we mean when we say something is 'totalitarian'? The word has certainly taken on an understandably sinister connotation in the last half century. Thanks to work by Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others, it's become a catchall for brutal, soul-killing, Orwellian regimes. But that's not how the word was originally used or intended. Mussolini himself coined the term to describe a society where everybody belonged, where everyone was taken care of, where everything was inside the state and nothing was outside: where truly no child was left behind.

Again, it is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian–or 'holistic,' if you prefer–in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend 'nontraditional' beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a 'Third Way' between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are 'false choices.'

The idea that there are no hard choices–that is, choices between competing goods–is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservative or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real Utopia, waits for us in the next life. (p 14)

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warned: "It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones."(p 20) [For me this was a most compelling quote.]

Almost every program of the early New Deal was rooted in the politics of war, the economics of war, or the aesthetics of war emerging from World War I.... Many New Deal agencies, the famous "alphabet soup," were mostly continuations of various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the war. (p 151)

Particularly interesting is the account of the founder of the New Republic, Herbert Croly, who was baptized in the religion of August Comte, converted by William James to progressive Christianity at Harvard, and became the progressive guru for Wilson. Voegelin had a great deal to say about Comte and his religion, but it is not likely he knew about Croly. He surely would have been vastly amused!

The progressives, who later changed their name to "liberal," were also, by and large, eugenicists and provided Germany with a great deal of theory and practice. Progressives were in favor of compulsory sterilization of the "unfit" rather than waiting for the slower “evolutionary sorting.” Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr: "Three generations of idiots is enough!" (You will remember the quote in "Judgment at Nuremberg" spoken by the lawyer played by Maximilian Schell when defending judges who ordered forced sterilization.  And I remember reading the brutal opinion in law school and never quite getting over it.)

Herbert Hoover, "the great engineer," was offered the Democratic nomination in 1920 because he was the most admired member of the most admired technical class at that time. (He accepted the Republican nomination in 1928.) He was only damned as a right wing capitalist later in the New Deal when they needed a boogie man to account for the failure of the anti-depression measures. Of course the New Deal has become the untouchable "cargo cult" of current liberalism, in Goldberg's memorable phrase characterizing the p0litically correct appreciation of the Roosevelt era.  (Having personally been taught labor law by one of the icons of the New Deal I can attest to his demi-god status on the campus at Wisconsin, with even his obiter dicta being treated with reverence.)

This book has created quite a stir. There are a number of passages, some quoted here, which anticipate with remarkable prescience, the rhetoric of the successful candidate for the US presidency in 2008.

Goldberg writes with effortless grace. The best seller status is well earned.

[This review was adapted from one that originally appeared at Amazon.com]