Jonah Goldberg has taken a bit of a beating in conservative circles over the last few years because he deeply dislikes Trump. Yet he has still written some great books. Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy is extremely good, and Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is a masterpiece.
Liberal Fascism is centered around the idea that fascism/Nazism are not rightward-leaning ideologies at all. On the contrary, they’re a kissing cousin of modern liberalism/progressivism.
Before I echo Goldberg’s arguments, let’s drop a few quotes from Liberal Fascism to help you get an idea of where he’s coming from:
* “Before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States…”
* “Heinrich Himmler was a certified animal rights activist and an aggressive promoter of ‘natural healing.’ Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, championed homeopathy and herbal remedies. Hitler and his advisers dedicated hours of their time to discussions of the need to move the entire nation to vegetarianism as a response to the unhealthiness promoted by capitalism. Dachau hosted the world’s largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey. In profound ways, the Nazi anti-smoking and public health drives foreshadowed today’s crusades against junk food, trans fat, and the like. A Hitler Youth manual proclaimed, ‘Nutrition is not a private matter!’”
* “What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics. This was what distinguished Nazism from doctrinaire communism, and it seems hard to argue the marriage of one leftist vision to another can somehow produce right-wing progeny. If this was how the world worked, we would have to label nationalist-socialist organizations like the PLO and Cuban Communist Party right-wing.”
* “Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state. ‘Everything in the state, nothing outside the state,’ is how Mussolini defined it. Mussolini coined the word ‘totalitarian’ to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally.”
* “Today, liberals remember the progressives as do-gooders who cleaned up the food supply and agitated for a more generous social welfare state and better working conditions. Fine, the progressives did that. But so did the Nazis and the Italian fascists. And they did it for the same reasons and in loyalty to roughly the same principles.”
* “One of the most illuminating symptoms of left-wing revolutionary movements is their tendency to blur the difference between common crime and political rebellion. The Brownshirts beat up storekeepers, shook down businessmen, and vandalized property, rationalizing all of it in the name of the ‘movement.’ Left-wing activists still refer to the L.A. riots as an ‘uprising’ or ‘rebellion.’”
* “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was in every respect a grassroots populist party. Party leaders spouted all sorts of socialist prattle about seizing the wealth of the rich. Mein Kampf is replete with attacks on ‘dividend-hungry businessmen’ whose ‘greed,’ ‘ruthlessness,’ and ‘short-sighted narrow-mindedness’ were ruining the country. Hitler adamantly took the side of the trade union movement over ‘dishonorable employers.’”
* “Upon seizing power, the radicals in the Nazi Party Labor Union threatened to put business leaders in concentration camps if they didn’t increase workers’ wages.”
* “The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today’s left plays against ‘Eurocentrism,’ ‘whiteness,’ and ‘logocentrism.’ When you hear a campus radical denounce ‘white logic’ or ‘male logic,’ she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced ‘Jewish logic’ and the ‘Hebrew disease.’”
* “The Nazis were among the first to put fighting air pollution, creating nature preserves, and pushing for sustainable forestry central plants in their platform.”
The core principles of Nazism, fascism, communism, socialism, and progressivism/modern liberalism are all the same, and they all differ from conservatism. A “small government fascist” is just as much of a contradiction in terms as a “communist capitalist.” Look at the central tenets of all these systems, which I had ChatGPT compare, and it becomes obvious which one is the odd man out:
As a conservative, I want to reduce the size of the government, weaken the power of the state, and fully embrace capitalism. This all runs completely counter to what progressives/modern liberals, socialists, communists, fascists, and Nazis believe.
Furthermore, with the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America in particular, it’s hard to miss that progressive/modern liberals and socialists may have minor disagreements, but they share the same voter base and are ultimately supported by the Democratic Party. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between socialists and progressives/modern liberals when you look at the policies they support.
Fewer people openly admit to being communist because it’s unpopular, but it has never been a secret that socialism and communism are just different pathways to the same goals:
As for fascism and Nazism, only a tiny number of fringe weirdos are willing to adopt those labels today.
Back when it mattered, in the run-up to WWII, most of the left or right in America disliked the Nazis, but the left was downright warm to fascists and considered them fellow travelers until they started to more closely ally with Hitler. In fact, some of the most significant leftists of the time had some very nice things to say about fascism:
At the end of the day, if you gave people like me total charge of America for 20 years, the federal government would be much smaller, we’d have no deficit, you’d have more freedom, and we’d be more pro-capitalist, with lower taxes, and fewer welfare programs. Our Republic would be the strongest it has been in decades.
If progressives/modern liberals were in total charge of America for 20 years, at the end of that time, the country would be a cross between China under Mao and Italy under Mussolini, the government would be all powerful, pretty much everyone reading this (along with the Jews and anybody that was a threat to the regime) would be dead or in a gulag, and you wouldn’t be able to so much as buy a potato without the permission of the government, which you would never get to vote out of power.
We are not the same kind of people as them.
But modern liberalism/progressivism, socialism, communism, fascism, and Nazism? They’re all just different roads that ultimately lead to the same horrifying destination, and nobody smart wants to go there.
I am moving out of California to Montana. We already have our house in Montana and are almost ready to put our California house on the market. I have been searching for some property in Montana that I can use for hunting, shooting, or parking my travel trailer on for a few weeks of peaceful and quiet living.
I found two promising properties and then when I looked further into them, I found that they have a HOA that controls what you can and cannot do.
HOAs are similar to liberal government. They want to control what you can do with your privateproperty. They are run by people who know what is best for the common good and want to rule over the less enlightened.
The left is so sure they are more intelligent than others and know how everyone should live their lives. They just cannot stay out of other people's business. The welfare state is a way to exert control over those who have little and are too lazy to improve their life. They prefer to be taken care of so they do not have to make the hard decisions in life. They want to live the life of leisure they believe the rich are living. They do not comprehend that the rich became rich because they worked harder than most. They also provide a pathway for others to live better lives by creating job opportunities in pursuit of their goals.
I dislike political science with its too convoluted and complicated "ism" list and definitions when there is a clear binary spectrum where on the right-side extreme is complete anarchy, and the left side extreme is complete collectivist totalitarianism.
Personal preferences falls somewhere on that spectrum.
The right-side is oriented toward individual sovereignty. It better supports a male/fathering/patriarchal worldview. It is a producer-favoring worldview. It rewards merit, hard work, self-reliance, self-determination and persistence. It is in practice a "leave me the hell alone and let me live my own life." worldview.
The left side is oriented toward the common good. It is largely female/mothering/matriarchal. It is a looter and moocher favoring worldview.
The right side limits the government corruption attraction as there is less support for government rule. However, it forms more crooks and criminals that seek advantage in the private socioeconomic system. So, most more center-right-side libertarian types are good with strong law enforcement as a primary government power while cringing that this too is an attraction for growing totalitarian power.
The extreme right-side tends to discount government service and oversight that is required to help ensure their independence and freedom. For example, lacking government rules and enforcement to prevent American corporations from offshoring jobs... and lacking government enforcement of immigration laws, both contribute to a reduction in economic opportunity for people to support their family and live an independent good life.
The left side has the populist advantage in offering mothering... something that weak people remain attracted to even as adults. These are people that accept a loss of individual sovereignty to feel better cared for, less fearful and less challenged to make their own way in the competitive world. The claim is to seek more governance that ensures the common good, but most people more aligned with left-side ideology are considering their selfish want to be cared for by others, or to seek power in their advocacy to care for others.
The left side is a more dangerous corruption risk because there is no higher administrative power than government (other than God... which collectivists tend to want to eliminate for obvious reasons). When we have crooks in the private sector that fester from the lack of government oversight, at least we have the potential lever we can pull to add rules and enforcement as needed. When government grows corrupt enough, we are screwed.
There is a need for balance, and the tug-o-war is good and needed to help society maintain balance.
However, other than the risk of government corruption, there is a great cost to left-side ideology that can be explained by a decline in human capability and productiveness from the soft bigotry of low expectations, and the tendency for "from those that can to those that cannot", naturally corrupting to "from those that do, to those that don't".
Collectivism always runs out of other people's money.
And we have been pulled far too left of the spectrum since the end of WWII. FDR started the drift, and our elite political class just kept it rolling because it was the lazy and lucrative situation for them. And, on queue, we have been running out of other people's money.