Fascismo de esquerda de jonah goldberg biography

Cachoeira do Sul 1. Campinas 3. Campo Grande 1. Curitiba 2. Guarulhos 2. Natal 1. Porto Alegre 1. Recife 2. Rio das Ostras 1. Rio de Janeiro 4. Academia do Saber Passos 2. Bagagem Cultural Virtual 1. Book Outlet 1. Ciranda do Saber 1. Daniel F Luz 1. Estrela dos Livros 1. Letras e livros 1. Livraria Albelo 1. Livraria Eureka 1. What is the danger you foresee if this country pursues what you believe is liberal fascism?

What is your nightmare scenario? For a long time it was assumed that was the more prophetic tale. That made sense. The totalitarianism of was a product of the age of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini, the dictators of a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Now Brave New World seems like the more plausible threat.

It was a dystopia based on an American future, where the cult of youth defines society. Everyone is happy. Democracy is a forgotten fad because things are so much easier when the state makes all your decisions. I think we see all sorts of developments on the horizon, and much closer to us, that point in that direction. The old model rationalized dictators who fed the poor much like Hugo Chavez.

We have scientists at major research universities trying to figure out why conservatives are, in effect, so sick in the head. Mike is the Editor of the California Literary Review. Flaxseed Oil. Steel Buildings, Structures, and Bridges. FaceBook I also run a couple more sites. You must be logged in to post a comment Login. The seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophical movement that came to be known as the Enlightenment was So why did Eddington savage his young colleague nine years later?

A threat to Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address. Connect with us. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. What is the overall theme of Liberal Fascism? Like this: Like Loading Continue Reading. You may also like When I first read the book, I was a little impatient to get to current issues as the author was establishing historical perspective, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, in the first chapters.

Please, please, please read this book. It will change your understanding of our world. John Freeman. My son, a far-right conservative loaned me this book and I was fascinated with it. I'm a history buff with middle of the road views and started the book with much enthusiasm. The book's discussion of fascism, Mussolini and Hitler is written in a brilliant almost breezy style by a highly intelligent man who has clearly researched his subject thoroughly and is well read.

I wondered a little at his saying Hitler is a left-winger but then it's just a matter of definitions. His history of the Wilson presidency was a revelation to me, I had not been aware of how repressive the Wilson era was. At this point I trusted Goldman. Now I don't know what to believe about Wilson. As I got farther into the book it began to seem to me he was critical of "liberals" and "progressives" and never mentioned conservatives.

When I got to his discussion of McCarthyism he disappointed me. This is something I know a little about. To quote Goldman " But nothing that happened under the mad reign of McCarthy remotely compares with what Wilson and his fellow progressives foisted on America. McCarthy, an opportunist rabble-rouser with presidential aspirations was willing to ruin careers to advance his ambitions.

Further the appropriately named House of Unamerican Activities' witch-hunts is one of the most shameful periods in American politics and a stain on the Republican party. Many people thought communism might have answers during the dark days of the depression and to dismiss the matter as a few Hollywood writers who'd supported Stalin and then lied about it and lost their jobs is simply another injustice heaped on young men who were searching for answers during a time our economic system appeared to be collapsing.

They represented little or no danger to America. The investigation into the army was, mercifully, the beginning of the end for McCarthy when Joseph Welch successfully challenged his character. I continued reading for a while but I finally gave up on him after I got to his tepid attempts to drag Roosevelt's name through the mud. I thought Jonah Goldberg had written a scholarly, intelligent history book.

He has not, he has written more of the biased and unfair conservative propaganda I so often find during my research. Besides I still don't know what fascism is. What's more what am I going to tell my son? He is passionate on the subject and mailed me this thick book in an attempt to open my eyes to the truth and save me from myself.

He has high hopes here. This is a matter close to his heart. I wish I had never heard of Jonah Goldberg. As Jonah Goldberg says, having heard to many times how blithely Conservatives are equated to fascists, he set out to prove the philosophical, ethical, and historical continuity between the modern liberal who makes such accusations, and concrete fascism.

He makes the point that the word itself doesn't mean much except a synonym for evil with a connotation of the Holocaust. Gets better with every page you turn. Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont. Indeed, I begin to wonder if it ever had any meaning. It serves as an insult, an f word greater than the f word, the more frequently used the more meaningless it has become.

The other word was mostly a matter of pure speculation…or personal knowledge. So, you may wonder, what has brought this on? The first thing that struck me was the title, not the Liberal Fascism part but the rest. There is a story here. The book was actually in preparation when the outcome of the Democratic primaries for the presidential election had still to be decided.

As a polemic I found it not just enjoyable but highly informative. I was never sure whether to trust Coulter or not, as some of her wilder statements are unreferenced, a mistake that Goldberg does not make. Let me give you one small example. Liberal Fascism is a right hook, and a powerful one, delivered against the left by an author who is a well-known conservative commentator.

As conservatives have long been the recipients of the f word, Goldberg decides to return the favour, throwing it back with considerable panache. The title of his book comes from a now forgotten address H. This is the essence of the thing: communism and fascism are twins, both collectivist movements of the left, both opposed to classic laissez-faire liberalism, both opposed to the freedom of the individual.

In a hybrid form they find expression in movements, again invariably of the left, that seek state solutions for social problems, all those who would magnify the power of the state in everyday life, even into the most intimate areas of personal choice. All those who would, if you like, politicise and manage everyday life, beginning in the American context and the book is chiefly set in an American context with President Woodrow Wilson, a fascist before fascism!

It seems to me that this is where the book is at its most effective, exposing so much of the cant and hypocrisy on the state-loving, do-gooders of the liberal establishment. I agree that his targets, from JFK to the Clintons, are perfectly beastly, but he has a tendency to let his hate unman him at points, the argument breaking down into a empty and somewhat repetitive rant, particularly towards the end.

My admiration for Edmund Burke is as unlimited as my contempt for Jean Jacques Rousseau, the father of modern isms. I hate communism as much as I hate fascism; I hate liberalism as much as I hate both. But perhaps it really is time to move beyond the labels. I recently discovered some impressive words in Cursed Days, the journal of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, who had more reason that most to hate the vile ideologies that overwhelmed European civilization in the last century.

In , as he was on the point of leaving Russia forever in the wake of the communist takeover, he wrote; "I am not of the left or the right. I have been, am, and will be an implacable enemy of everything that is stupid and divorced from life, of all that is evil, false, dishonest and harmful, whatever its source. I think I shall call my next dog Fascist.

Just imagine what fun it would be to shout Fascist! I've got my new bumper sticker- "Fascist: what liberals call people with whom they disagree. Hilter was NOT a conservative, nor was Mussolini. They were BOTH liberal, socialists and our current day "Progressives" owe much to their tactics, every bit of which echoes the Hitlerian machine. It is very frustrating that conservatives are labeled as fascists in such a way that is purely fascist in its modus operandi.

Those in the "masses" that believe their propaganda are likewise ignorant. America has been on a slippery and sickening slope of increasing fascist doctrine since Woodrow Wilson's day, but unlike the militaristic European expression of such doctrines, ours is a "smothered by mother" version, where the ignorant masses are too weak to govern themselves.

According to the Left, we need the State to give us direction and meaning. Individualism is to be crushed; small businesses that do not walk in lock step with "progressive" politics and policies are simply crushed. Big business isn't bad, so long as it pays off the politicians and pays homage to them through lobbying and excessive butt-kissing.

Sound like all we've heard about conservatives? Well, read the book! I just wish conservatives had the moxie to stand up and shout down Mother with some good old fashioned "Paternalistic," "I'm sorry, I know this is going to hurt for a bit, but it is for your own good" tear down of Big Government intrusion. Not even every dime in the world could do that.

Poverty and social differences are not just about money, they are about mindset. And I am sick to death of the smiley faced fascism of the Left wanting to do everything to help me feel better, and even worse, the masses that willingly give up their autonomy for Government handouts instead of working their butts off to improve their own state.

We cannot help all, for not all WANT to be helped. Father knows what Mother does not. The main thing I learned from this book: The political spectrum can not easily be divided into Christian vs. Fascism is about using government to create an ideal or evolved state, at the cost of freedom or taxes or what have you vs. Fascism isn't about racism, or Nazis or military power.

So a lot of liberal action and progressive ideas fit into this, but what Goldberg fails to mention is that many Conservatives do as well. The book is unabashedly written from a conservative viewpoint. I thought the subject matter was interesting, but I thought the author's analysis of past ideologies wasn't clear enough. Mainly his terminology was explained fully enough for me, and I'm not a politics buff, so I kept having to look up some of the political terms.

If you took political science and actually liked it, this book would be a breeze. If you don't like FDR or any of the 20th century democrats, you're in heaven. Chris Fellows. I really wanted to like this book.

Fascismo de esquerda de jonah goldberg biography

The first bit, comparing the dinki-di fascists of Europe with the stated aims and documented actions of Woodrow Wilson and the early 20th century Progressives that shared his ideology, makes a good case. There are some excellent quotes of mutual admiration back and forth across the Atlantic, and Goldberg lifts the rock on a nasty squirming mass of human rights infringments and creepy propaganda from Wilson's war administration.

The section dealing with FDR is less convincing - Goldberg has a bad tendency to pile on brief quotes out of context that reminded me uncomfortably of Evangelical 'Bible Study' programs I was exposed to in high school. For example, this quote of JBS Haldane's is introduced into a discussion of the Progressive attitude to eugenics: "The dogma of human equality is no part of Communism The brush of 'liberal fascism' is applied more and more broadly until it nearly mirrors the use of 'fascism' by the Left to mean 'anything I don't like'.

This section reminded me the treatment of the same period in Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" - which is not a good thing. The missing aspects are illustrated with reference to groups that thought LBJ was the devil incarnate. It doesn't make sense. A problem I had at the end was that Goldberg does not seem to recognise anything as 'conservative' except a narrow 'classical liberalism' which does not have any characteristics distinguishing it from libertarianism.

Not that I could see, anyhow. The idea of a social conservativism that might validly be interested in using the power of the state to provide a minimal level of support for the disadvantaged and enforce traditional social norms, in the absence of an established Church and class structure to do those things, is to him a chimera; it is 'statolatry' and just another manifestation of fascism.

This blind spot might not be his fault. He comes from a country where conservatives were expelled or driven underground in a utopian revolution to such an extent that William Marina, writing in , can say that it is a "widespread, persistent, and dangerous myth" that they ever comprised a significant part of the population! Goldberg briefly draws a distinction between a 'good, conservative' American revolution and a 'bad, radical' French revolution, but this is untenable.

If you violently sever your connections with a country that is universally considered to be the most free, the most classically liberal, currently in existence, in order to make a polity that is more free and classically liberal, is that conservative? Is it not instead utopian, an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good? If, instead of forming the political institutions of your new polity on incremental modifications in the directions of freedom and classical liberalism of the existing ones, you create de novo an experimental system modelled most closely on republican Rome, is that conservative?

Is it not instead wildly radical and utopian? The American revolution let the genie out of the bottle and began all this trouble. I found the wit and sparkle of Goldberg's briefer works in National Review almost wholly absent from this book. Which was a great pity. Finally, Goldberg doesn't like "Dead Poets Society". This tragic discovery will haunt my dreams forever.

Tim Pendry. This is an insightful but ultimately flawed polemic from a traditional American conservative who identifies, with some justification, the 'fascistic' tendencies within American progressivism. Unfortunately, he over-eggs his pudding, is highly selective in his evidence and he clearly does not understand the European philosophical tradition very well.

The book is not going to be of enormous use outside America except in one respect - his criticisms of the third way progressive mentality do hold up surprisingly well in the context of the Blair phenomenon and its European cognates. The flaws are a shame because some of what he says is important and needs to be said more often - that various forms of statism which he rather stupidly insists on lumping under the fascist label have many things in common and that these are bad and stupid things.

One of the things they certainly have in common is a methodology of acquiring power within a democracy and maintaining it. Many of those methods are deeply dishonest and corrupting. I am persuaded, for example, by Goldberg that Woodrow Wilson was a fascist 'avant la lettre' not merely because of the brutal techniques used under war socialism but because his ideology was one that cohered with the fascist moment in Europe.

Indeed, it has to be said that the early Mussolini comes out of a comparison with Wilson rather well. Similarly, the circle of academics, old war socialists and progressives around FDR whose New Deal looks less impressive with each passing decade seem to have had some disturbingly authoritarian and corporatist characteristics well in tune with what was happening in Europe.

Goldberg reminds us that the inclusion of the labour unions in the New Deal coalition meant a major step back for the black population through their exclusion and that it was policies designed to keep prices high for farmers that helped throw many blacks off the land and into the ghettos. We fast forward to the s and to Goldberg's real 'bete noire', the baby boomer liberals - with his special 'bete' being Hillary Clinton who he clearly loathes we have Harriet Harman!

He is surprisingly kind to Bill as if sub-consciously commiserating with him. Again, his insights are good if his choice of evidence increasingly selective as he nears the election for which he was writing He is right that the hard left of the student movement showed distinctively proto-fascist, indeed proto-Nazi, traits, that identity politics is dysfunctional and brutal, that the Big Society has not achieved its purposes and has neutered innovation in the working population and that much of the Americal liberalism that emerged out of that era shared with progressivism and with some forms of fascism the fervour of a religious awakening.

His most powerful insight is that the difference between the progressive-fascist moment in the first half of the century and the liberal-progressive moment in the second half was one almost of gender orientation. True fascism was highly masculinised as a live white male, I cannot but see in irrational moments its aesthetic attractions but the baby boomer liberalism that emerged as neo-progressivism in the age of Clinton and Blair was deeply feminised - not just feminist but matriarchal in its desire to create a all-encompassing nurturing state.

His marker for this is a common conservative complaint - the intrusion of public aspiration whether for a strong nation or that 'no child should be left behind' into private and family life. That intrusion is at the heart of the phenomenon that puzzles feminists - the conservative female who still turns out to vote for Mitt Romney. Without soft liberal males, feminism would not stand a chance in the modern world.

Again, he has a point. A form of matriarchal fascism of a nurturing kind on the Left does seem to have displaced a patriarchal fascism of a forceful kind on the Right yet with many remaining similarities in form and function. Here, in the UK, the last Labour Government had an uncanny ability to fail to help the most seriously disadvantaged we think of the care homes scandals in its efforts to 'help' the general run of the population, a community which probably did not need much more than some increased income and better schools and hospitals.

The social engineering aspects of fascism and progressivism do seem very similar and, prior to the later love of war and racism, there is sometimes more in terms of respect for actual human autonomy and private liberty to be said for early Mussolini than late Blair. From this stimulating perspective, the book is worth reading as a series of 'detournements', reversals of accepted history that are mostly but not always entirely plausible.

Unfortunately the weaknesses of this polemic overwhelm its insights and stimulating analyses. As polemic, it is so partisan as to caricature itself after a while - it eschews context for effect and repeats some points like a sledgehammer required to crack the complacency of some angry right-wing nuts and get them to engage. We have to pass over much of this in silence but the total and often accurate critique of American and by implication British progressivism is ruined by Goldberg's refusal to be detached in that criticism.

Instead, while criticising the Left for creating a new secular religion a fair criticism , he seems desperately to want us to see Christianity as some kind of noble victim or higher cause lost to the 'nice Nazis'. This is laughable but is typical of the American transcendentalist or is it human mind-set that needs to believe in some nonsense or other by its very nature.

He is, of course, writing before the hideous appearance of Christian politics at its most rampant under the aegis of the Tea Party a direction in which our UKIP threatens to go if Farage loses his ranting grip and the conservatives fail to connect with the wider population. Seen in that light the book looks at best naive and at worst as villainously manipulative as its opponent.

American cultural politics mystify the rest of the world as so much sound and fury that seems incapable of dealing with fundamental economic, welfare and security problems. Our concern in the UK is with infection from either camp so American lack of self-knowledge becomes our problem quite quickly. Goldberg, despite his thesis being laid out with insightful anecdotes, collapses into a puddle of ideology.

One leaves this book deeply saddened that this great country is divided between two broad sets of partisan fool, neither of which really seems to understand the difference between private belief and public order though Goldberg nudges in this direction before he loses himself in partisan position-taking. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg takes a look at what real fascism is and who today most closely meets that definition!

Calling someone a fascist today is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst? This author offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education.

They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. In short, they promoted policies that are standard dogma for any socialist regime. The left has done a thorough job over many years portraying fascism as primarily a right-wing, conservative philosophy when its roots are firmly planted in socialism and communism.

This has been backed up in several other books that I have read. The author then compares the standard tactics of political correctness, intimidation, rioting, and violence practiced by Hitler's and Mussolini's followers to the leftist activist organizations of today! With a Hitler-esque smiley face and the title "Liberal Fascism" gracing the cover, a casual political observer might view Jonah Goldberg's new tome as a work of contradictory hyperbole.

But after reading the introduction, it becomes clear that Goldberg is laying out a serious and somewhat-scholarly argument that modern American liberalism is a sibling of the Fascist movements that swept Italy and Germany prior to World War II. His central thesis is that, while "fascism" is a political movement with no agreed-to definition, it can best be summarized as "the religion of the state.