Modern, big-government liberalism has come home
When she was asked in one of last fall’s presidential debates whether she still considered herself a liberal, Hillary Clinton sidestepped the question. She called herself, instead, a “proud, modern, American progressive,” and boasted that her “progressive vision” for the country had roots going all the way back to “the Progressive Era, at the beginning of the twentieth century.”
Modern, big-government liberalism has come home. The Progressives were the first generation of Americans to criticize the United States Constitution, especially for its limits on government’s scope and ambition. They rejected the American Founders’ classical or natural rights liberalism, offering instead a vision of the modern state as a kind of god with almost limitless power to achieve “social justice.” When modern liberals like Senator Clinton call themselves progressives, therefore, they are telling the truth, even if their audiences don’t fully understand the implications.
How gratifying it is then to have Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, to pursue these half-forgotten, if not exactly secret, implications. Although liberals throw around the term “fascist” to abuse conservatives (just as they do “racist”), Goldberg, the editor-at-large for National Review Online, persuasively shows that today’s progressives are fascism’s true descendents, embracing the statism at the heart of the 20th-century’s most notorious outlaw regimes. What’s more, for all the past century’s liberal hand-wringing over the supposedly impending right-wing takeover of America, Goldberg maintains that the country has already suffered a quasi-dictator or two, but historians have looked the other way because these strongmen—Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt—are certified heroes of the Left.
No wonder that liberals often have such a blinkered interest in their own intellectual heritage. Reviewing this book, for example, Michael Mann in the Washington Post, Michael Tomasky in the New Republic, and David Neiwert in the American Prospect so badly confuse classical liberalism and modern liberalism (by equating them!) that they can make little sense of Goldberg’s account, dismissing it as “Bizarro history,” “ignorant nonsense,” and an attempt to shock readers and sell books. Neiwert even writes, missing the irony, that it is “the consensus of historical understanding that anti-intellectualism is an essential trait of fascism.”
But Goldberg’s charge is no mere exercise in name-calling. He takes his title from H.G. Wells, the eminent liberal essayist and science fiction writer who coined the term “liberal fascism,” or as he also called it, “enlightened Nazism.” It was common at the time for progressive intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to see Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler as kindred reforming spirits, struggling to find a third way forward between the extremes of capitalist individualism and Communist collectivism. Mann believes this connection merely proves that “fascism contained elements that were in the mainstream of 20th-century politics,” as much for Democrats and Republicans at home as for fascists and social democrats abroad. But Goldberg is getting at something deeper: he is trying to trace the quiet revolution that took place throughout modern thought when politicians of all stripes, led by the Progressives, were wooed by the power of a limitless State. To his credit, he stresses right from the start that he is not accusing American progressives, past or present, of being the kind of moral monsters associated with European fascism. Still, at some level the family resemblance asserts itself. As Goldberg aptly puts it, Progressivism “may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.” (Hence the book’s stark cover featuring a smiley face with the Hitler mustache.)
In his account of fascism, Goldberg even shows how some fairly prominent American liberals expressed real admiration for Mussolini, whom they saw in the 1920s as a kind of hero sticking up for “the little guy.” Indeed, the Italian fascist movement, far from being a mere appendage to German Nazism, actually predated it and had a serious course of development all its own. Goldberg does well to set the record straight on this score, contending that fascism grew out of il Duce’s left-wing statism. The first World War seems to have been decisive in this respect, teaching him that his radical socialist inclinations could profitably tap into both populism and nationalism as a means of becoming a major force in Italy. Goldberg moves from his account of European fascism to the origins of modern liberalism in America, and suggests that the two movements, for a time at least, tracked one another in their development.
A review of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg
Read the entire review at the Claremont Institute >>>>> http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1529/article_detail.asp
