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 enlarge | Author: Jonah Goldberg
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  340 reviews
Sales Rank: 352
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.6
ISBN: 0385511841
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.533
EAN: 9780385511841
ASIN: 0385511841
Publication Date: January 8, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 Excellent Primer on the Development of Modern Liberalism September 26, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Over the past decade, the ideological battle between liberals and conservatives has been fought on the internet and in the local bookstore. Whether it is Al Franken calling conservatives liars, or Ann Coulter imploring her followers to refrain from speaking to liberals, the public has been inundated with many opinions from which to choose. Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg has recently joined the fray with Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Though Franken, Coulter, and others like them are long on opinion and short on truth, Goldberg's contribution is well thought out and based on facts. In Liberal Fascism, Goldberg traces liberalism from its origins in the nineteenth century through its maturity in the twentieth century while cleverly showing how it fed off the European Fascism movement. He then brings the reader to the Liberal Fascism of today.
Although this is Goldberg's first book, he is no stranger to the written word. According to his biography on the web site National Review Online, where he is an editor,Goldberg is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and his syndicated column appears in the Chicago Tribune, New York Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and many others. He also appears as a political commentator on a number of television shows including "Good Morning America," "Larry King Live," and "Special Report with Brit Hume." Though a writer since his college days, his big break came when he wrote about the media frenzy surrounding his mother, Lucianne Goldberg and her role in the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton scandal of the late 1990s. She advised Linda Tripp to tape record her conversations with Lewinsky and to convince her to save the now-infamous "blue dress."
From the introduction, entitled "Everything You Know About Fascism is Wrong," Goldberg grabs the reader's attention. He quotes the late George Carlin, "When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts...It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts." (1) This statement should remove any question about the artistry of the book's front cover: a large yellow smiley face complete with a Hitler mustache. While lengthy, the introduction spells out exactly what Goldberg is going to tell the reader in the remainder of the book. It is no mystery that he believes we are living in a time where the fascistic bent of Italy's Mussolini and Germany's Hitler are being blended with the quasi-socialistic policies of presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
After the introduction, Goldberg leads the reader through a fascinating history of the rise of fascism in Europe. Although Benito Mussolini, the leader of Italy, has been vilified, mostly due to his association with Hitler and the Third Reich, we are reminded that for the good part of a decade, he was considered a great leader. In 1923, the New York Times boasted that, "Mussolini is a Latin [Teddy] Roosevelt who first acts and then inquires if it is legal. He has been of great service to Italy at home." (27) Noted Americans such as humorist Will Rogers, Hollywood mogul Lionel Barrymore, and legendary journalist Lowell Thomas proclaimed his greatness. On the international scene, Sigmund Freud and Winston Churchill were quite smitten with him. In addition, James A. Farrell, the president of U.S. Steel Corporation, said he was "`the greatest living man' in the world." (29) Goldberg concludes the Mussolini chapter with a brief description on how Mussolini gained his beliefs, first as a socialist then as a fascist, ending with his ill-fated attempt to flee to Switzerland in 1945 when he was captured by Italian partisans and executed.
Mussolini might have been remembered more favorably had he not associated himself with the subject of the next chapter, Adolph Hitler. Goldberg leads the reader on a brief history of the rise of Hitler and how he became so enamored with socialism. Students of history will be familiar with the 1923 "Beer Hall Putsch" and his subsequent imprisonment where he wrote the infamous Mein Kampf, as well as the efforts to promote Germany in the 1936 Olympics and the murderous "Kristallnacht" of 1938. Here, Goldberg begins to paste together how today's liberals use the term Nazi to describe those who call themselves conservatives. He says that the left "cherry-pick[s] the facts to form a caricature of what the Third Reich was about...[with] the desired effect to cast Nazism as the polar opposite of Communism." "[The] roles of industrialists...[are] greatly exaggerated, while the very large and substantial leftist and socialist aspects of Nazism..." are minimized. (57) Rather than being a right-wing conservative as many on the left would proclaim, Hitler should be considered a leftist because Nazism "...emphasized many of the themes of the later New Lefts...the primacy of race...an emphasis on the organic and holistic - including environmentalism, health food, and exercise - and...the need to `transcend' notions of class." (59)
Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are the subjects of the next two chapters and each provides a bridge from which fascism in Europe crosses over to the United States. One could argue, as Goldberg does, that Wilson was the grandfather of modern liberalism in America. Back then, liberals were called progressives and Wilson led the way with a progressive agenda, including proclaiming the Constitution's series of checks-and-balances as outdated and by furthering the Darwinian cause of a "living Constitution." Wilson also formed the "West's first modern ministry for propaganda" in the Committee on Public Information (CPI). This group implored Americans against protesting the country's involvement in World War I. Another Wilson organization, the War Industries Board (WIB), was fascist in that it dictated to the business community what would be produced by the nation's industries under the banner of nationalizing the people for war. Throughout the section on Wilson, Goldberg paints a bleak picture of how America was nearly swallowed up by a type of benevolent dictatorship. Goldberg is equally repulsed by the Roosevelt years. He reminds the reader that Roosevelt was the only president to break with the tradition of George Washington by serving more than two terms. Moreover, he compares Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration with Wilson's WIB, saying that the former was modeled on the latter. Throughout these two chapters Goldberg deftly cites example after example of how these two presidents, considered great by many - Wilson for his Fourteen Points and Roosevelt for supposedly ending the Great Depression - did more than anyone up to that point to introduce socialism and fascism into American culture.
Before bringing the reader into the latter half of the twentieth century, Goldberg shifts to the decade of the 1960s. On its face, the chapter is important because it lays the groundwork for upcoming criticism on John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Unfortunately, for the reader, it is here that he provides minutia that keeps an otherwise informative and entertaining book from flowing by chronicling the histories of radical organizations such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panthers, and the Weathermen. If one were to skip this chapter, however, one would miss the author's wry sense of humor that was disbursed throughout the book. For example, Goldberg laments the fact that one of Fidel Castro's closest compatriots, Che Guevara "...has become a chic branding tool... [representing] a disgusting indictment of...American consumer culture." (193) He goes on to say that Guevara's likeness has made its way onto shirts and even toddler onesies. Depending on one's viewpoint, Guevara could be described as a misunderstood revolutionary or a mass murderer, but he is popular with the left because he is associated with an idol of the left, Fidel Castro. He arguably killed more people than Mussolini and was as despicable as Nazi SS Chief Heinrich Himmler. Nevertheless, Goldberg wittingly asks, "Would you put a Mussolini onesie on your baby? Would you let your daughter drink from a Himmler sippy cup?" (194)
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the two presidents from 1961 to 1969, are thoroughly dissected and each given their own chapters. Johnson's "Great Society" certainly gives Goldberg plenty of fodder for blasting a program that was built upon the New Deal. No political commentator who wants to keep his conservative credentials supports Johnson's program in any way, and Goldberg lives up to the task of describing how the Great Society has been detrimental to the country.
Tying fascism to modern liberalism is the task of the remaining third of the book. Chapter Seven discusses the subject of eugenics. One of the staples of modern liberalism is the support for unfettered abortion. Margaret Sanger, the woman credited with the founding of Planned Parenthood and who is one of the heroes of the Left, "...sought to ban reproduction for the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else." (271) In 1939, she created the "Negro Project" where she attempted to control the black population's ability to reproduce. Her plan was to eventually allow the black race to die out. One could find similarities in her ideas and those of Hitler's Nazi Party.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the current junior senator from New York, former first lady, and recent presidential candidate, is the focus of Chapter Nine, "Brave New Village." When this book was published in 2007, she was the likely Democratic Party nominee for president. As of this writing, it does not appear that she will meet that goal. Her competitor, Barak Obama, a senator from Illinois, will take her place on the ticket. Goldberg must have been sure that she would get the nomination (Barak Obama is only mentioned on two pages) as he chronicled her history and picked apart her designs on moving the country even farther to the left. It would be a stretch to call her book, It Takes A Village, her version of Mein Kampf, but Goldberg does emphasize that part of her plan for America includes early governmental involvement with children and reeducating them in the elementary and secondary public school system, similar to the plan that Hitler used in 1930s Germany.
For the student of the period's historiography, Goldberg does an excellent job of highlighting the ways that liberal scholars have been able to slant history in a way that puts the New Left in the best light. With over fifty pages of notes and hundreds of references, his documentation is sound. He has successfully demonstrated that much of what has been accepted American history has been distorted. Students of an earlier generation were taught that Woodrow Wilson died of a broken heart because the Senate did not ratify his League of Nations. Goldberg teaches us that we nearly went down a path that changed the Constitution. Similarly, we had been taught that Roosevelt got the country out of the Great Depression. Again, we learned here that Roosevelt's initial plans were not that much different from those of Hitler and Mussolini. In Liberal Fascism, the myths are exposed and the foundation upon which modern liberal fascism has been built is shown. Goldberg, of course, is an anti-Liberal Fascist and would like to bring the country farther to the conservative side. He is saying through his book that the only way to understand how to dismantle the New Left establishment is to know how it was first put together.
Not read the book yet September 23, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
i've read only part of this book,
my husband is reading it with great fervor,
and whatever he quotes from it sounds intelligent to me,
I'm coming from an ex socialist country, Hungary,
I was 19 when the socialist/comunist block got destroyed by Ronald Reagen, God Bless him for it,
and I find it quite funny how american people get crazy over this book,
all those people who are for social actvism, big goverement, carbon print taxing, they should have tried to live in any of the countries of the ex communist block, even in the last years of its exsistence....I bet they would become quite libertarian in a week...
but seriously, comon, being kicked out of a college because you have a different view on a subject, wow, well those kind of things happened in our country and in Russia, ok, there you would have gone to jail for it in the 50's, and never be able to have a BA from the 70's on,but in the USA in these years? it does not sound very liberal/fair/ nice/ people friendy/ socially sensitive to me.
REVEALING AND THOUGHT PROVIKING September 21, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This nice, new book will be revealing and thought provoking for those who will read it, and while it may not have all of its facts and linkages "technically" correct (some "big time" reviews are suggesting this) and maybe it would not earn "special honors" from the Harvard Department of Political Science as the "Most Politically Correct" book of the season, this new book makes a very important point : the so-called "Liberals" are apt to misuse power, and to trample on individual freedoms, just as brutally as the "Fascists" that we have all been trained to recognize as a clear and obvious danger to freedom and liberty. The author is taking something of a risk to put out a book like this : it tells too much about a topic that some people and groups would prefer to keep "under wraps"; so there will be some who will want to review the book and heap criticism upon it; but that is the fate of a book, or an author, when uncomfortable truths are openly and unsparingly "aired". Now, as America is seeing its so-called "Democrat" party, which at the national level is in fact captured and controlled by the Hard-Left, campaign for power, is a good time to read books like this one which will give a perspective to the reader that cannot be found in the "mainstream" press. Maybe somehow Americans quietly realize that the mainstream press is letting them down. Maybe somehow this new book will assist those Americans to get a broader perspective on the politics of our times. And when the reader has digested this nice, new book of purported fact, then he or she might also want to read a book of fiction that is equally timely, entitled THE EMPRESS PROJECT.The Empress Project
Finally Someone Did It September 21, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is a book that was waiting to be written. For the longest time it seemed odd to me that Communism was placed on the left and Fascism on the right in the ideological continuum. The two systems always seemed more alike than different. In this book, the author explains why there is so much confusion on this point. The author argues, and I believe persuasively, that Communism and Fascism are not polar opposites but more like cousins. In doing so, the author goes back and examines the early history of Fascism and it ties to the Progressive movement in the U.S. The title of the book, allow provocative, is actually a phrase coined by Progressive and Fascist, H.G. Wells. The main point of the book is that the legacy of the modern day left in the U.S. is the Progressive movement which is philosophically rooted in Fascism.
The only criticisms of the book are that it was a little too academic, it jumped around with too many names/quotes/etc., and didn't flow smoothly. As a whole though, the book was well researched and a courageous effort.
A well researched book that really opened my eyes. September 19, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
I won't summarize this book since dozens of other reviewers have done so.
I will say that it is an extremely well-researched and incisive history of fascism and the left's relationship to it. I read a lot of pre-WWII fiction and was often surprised when I heard progressive-seeming characters utter fascist sounding viewpoints. Now I know why.
What keeps this book from getting 5 stars is that, in his zeal, I don't think Goldberg always consistently keeps to his definition of fascism as a "religion of the state." A few times Goldberg characterizes something as fascist because it displays an incidental quality of fascism rather than an essential one. For example, in one chapter he argues that certain films are fascist because they display Nietzschean themes, rather than because they advocate worship of and dependence on the state. While it could be argued that Nietzsch influenced fascism, he was not essential to it, or to state worship.
Despite it's flaws, however, I found this to be an excellent book that really opened my eyes to the authoritarianism of many liberal leaders.
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