This brief excerpt from the show perfectly showcases the vast ignorance that exists in popular culture concerning the nature of fascism.  Unfortunately, Maher and Carlin are not the only liberal dunces who are completely ignorant about what fascism is and isn’t. While Bush was president, it was common to hear liberal pundits and know-nothing Hollywood celebrities decry his latest action or policy proposal as fascist or to compare Bush’s rule to Hitler’s regime. Indeed, in the current American political climate, it is all too common for conservatives to be labeled as fascists. 

 

This is because a common myth persists that when liberalism is extended to a radical degree to the left the resulting government is communism but that when conservatism is extended to a radical degree to the right the resulting government is fascist. The perception, then, is that fascism and communism are philosophical opposites when the truth is that they are closely related; distant cousins at best. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this perception persists and Jonah Goldberg resolves to set the record straight in Liberal Fascism. Early in the book, Goldberg writes:

 

Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact – an inconvenient truth if there ever was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space…In terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.

 

In other words, as Rich Lowry writes of Liberal Fascism, “How we think of the ideological spectrum — socialism to the left, fascism to the right — should be forever changed.”  It was enlightening to discover that left wing liberals formerly embraced the term fascism; in fact, the progressive science-fiction author H.G. Wells was the one who first actually coined the term “liberal fascism.” Indeed, if Goldberg’s book serves no other purpose than stopping ignorant Hollywood liberals from calling everyone to the political right of Barbara Streisand a fascist, then Goldberg’s time and effort spent in writing this work was well worth it.

 

Before Goldberg traces the twentieth century history of fascism, demonstrating the philosophical roots it shares with communism and modern-day liberalism, he gives us his own “working definition” of fascism:

 

Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives.

 

 Goldberg then devotes the rest of the book to argue that “contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.”

 

Beginning with Mussolini, Goldberg’s book tours the major fascist governments of the last century, identifying hauntingly similar objectives and values those governments share with today’s liberals. To prove that fascist governments occupied the left wing of the political sphere, Goldberg constantly examines their policies and the platforms they ran on during elections. For instance, Goldberg notes that when Mussolini first ran for office in 1919 his party’s platform included an establishment of the minimum wage, a law sanctioning an eight hour work day, a large progressive tax on capital that amounted to little more than a vast redistribution of the country’s wealth, an establishment of “rigidly secular” public schools and various other pro-labor measures.

 

 It doesn’t take a policy wonk to realize these goals almost perfectly mesh with the current platform of the Democratic Party. As Goldberg sarcastically notes, “Ah yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!”

 

Hitler’s Nazism was a different strain of fascism, as its focus on racism and “scientific” anti-Semitism was unique to Hitler’s brand of fascism in Germany. Goldberg states that even Mussolini “considered anti-Semitism a silly distraction and, later, a necessary sop to his over-bearing German patron.”   Yet, many of Hitler’s other goals and policies obviously come from the political left. Included in an appendix at the end of the book, is the Nazi’s, or National Socialist’s, party platform. There you will find calls for the profit-sharing of industries, nationalization of trusts, the expansion of “old age” welfare and the expansion of health services. Yep, sounds right wing to me. 

 

After devoting chapters to Mussolini and Hitler, Goldberg turns his attention to America, where he says the first quasi-fascist leader the world ever saw assumed power in 1912: Woodrow Wilson. Goldberg writes, “Call it what you like – progressivism, fascism, communism, or totalitarianism – the first enterprise of this kind was established not in Russia or Italy or Germany but in the United States, and Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator.” Though it sounds heretical, Goldberg backs this seemingly outlandish claim with damning fact after damning fact.

 

Goldberg documents several of Wilson’s policies to make his case that Wilson was a fascist leader but three, in particular, stand out: the commissioning of the War Industries Board (WIB), the establishment of the Committee on Public Information (CPI), and Wilson Sedition Act. Using World War I as an excuse, Wilson declared a time of crisis to move quickly to establish complete control of the nation and circumvent many of America’s built-in check and balances. 

 

The WIB was an attempt to nationalize different industries and businesses, bringing American business into “the loving embrace of the state.” Groveson Clark, a former member of the board and historian, wrote years later, “It was an industrial dictatorship without parallel – dictatorship by force of necessity and common consent…”

 

The CPI, effectively Wilson’s own ministry of propaganda, openly used fear as a tool to motivate American citizens to think and act in tandem with the government. George Creel, the head of the newly created agency, stated fear was “an important element to be bred into the civilian population. It is difficult to unite a people by talking only on the highest ethical plane.” An army of former journalists set out to purposely manipulate the American public under this agency. 

 

Finally, Wilson’s Sedition Act banned “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or the military.” Goldberg writes:

 

The postmaster general was given the authority to deny mailing privileges to any publication he saw fit – effectively shutting it down. At least seventy-five periodicals were banned. Foreign publications were not allowed unless their content was first translated and approved by censors. Journalists also faced the very real threat of being jailed or having their supply of newsprint terminated by the War Industries Board. “Unacceptable” articles included any discussion – no matter how high-minded or patriotic – that disparaged the draft. 

 

To further clarify when a publication could be banned, Goldberg quotes Wilson’s Postmaster General Albert Burleson explaining that a periodical could be banned anytime it “begins to say that this Government got in the war wrong, that it is in it for the wrong purposes, or anything that will impugn the motives of the Government for going into the war.” Wilson himself stated, “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way.” That wasn’t just angry rhetoric. The Espionage Act of 1917, coupled with the Sedition Act of 1918, meant that any criticism of the government, even in one’s own house, could earn one a trip to prison. 

 

Throughout the book Goldberg gives further examples of fascist initiatives enacted in the United States by over-zealous liberals, effectively putting a stop to the revisionist history so often accepted as fact in American culture today. He takes a careful look at FDR’s New Deal policies to mobilize society, showing that FDR copied more than a little from Wilson’s playbook. Goldberg also writes scathing critiques of the radical student and interest groups of the 1960’s, where terror and coercion were commonly used as a way to secure concessions and political gain. 

 

The scariest section of the book, though, focuses on the shockingly similar intellectual defense put forth by progressives in the defense of eugenics in the 1920’s and still used by liberals to defend abortion today. It is by exploring the links between liberal support for eugenics and abortion that the racist history of the left is finally revealed. Briefly, eugenics was a particular form of “science” popular in the early twentieth century which called for the sterilization of people and races deemed “unfit” to reproduce. The leading proponents for this brutal pseudo-science reads like a who’s who of progressive intellectuals from the era including Woodrow Wilson, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), John Maynard Keynes, Julian Huxley (founder of the World Wildlife Fund), Harold Laski, Oliver Wendell Holmes and even the Bull Moose incarnation of Theodore Roosevelt.

 

George Bernard Shaw, for instance, stated “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of man.” While Woodrow Wilson was governor of New Jersey, he founded a board that could decide when “procreation is inadvisable.” Those declared to be unfit for procreation ranged from criminals and prisoners to the poor. H.G. Wells, one of the most influential progressive thinkers and authors, wrote in a chilling moment of clarity that “swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people” would “have to go.” Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote in a letter, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” while organizing the Negro Project, which aimed to stop blacks from breeding. Of course, it was the Germans’ fascination with eugenics that led them to first exterminate the handicapped and mentally ill of their country and eventually led to their rationalization of the Holocaust. 

 

Goldberg does a masterful job of tracing the philosophy within Progressive ranks from past support of eugenics to the current support of abortion. Today, a disproportionate amount of abortions are done to black and Hispanic babies. In the 1970’s Jesse Jackson stated abortion was akin to the “genocide of the black race.” He later changed his stance on abortion when he ran for president. In his book Freakonomics, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt wrote that “Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.” In 1992 Nicholas Von Hoffman wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that abortion would “save ourselves from being murdered in our beds and raped on the streets.” 

 

Goldberg then connects the dots:

 

The issue here is not the explicit intent of liberals or the rationalizations they invoke to deceive themselves about the nature of abortion. Rather, it is to illustrate that even when motives and arguments change, the substance of the policy remains in its effects. After the Holocaust discredited eugenics per se, neither the eugenicists nor their ideas disappeared. Rather, they went to ground in fields like family planning and demography and in political movements such as feminism. 

 

He continues:

 

So forget about intent: look at results. Abortion ends more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, AIDS, and violent crime combined. African-Americans constitute little more than 12 percent of the population but have more than a third (37 percent) of abortions…Revealingly enough, roughly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion centers are in or near minority communities. 

 

It should be pointed out that throughout Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg takes pains to ensure his readers that he is not comparing today’s Democrats to Nazis. He readily concedes that Nazism under Hitler’s leadership was unique in how extreme it carried out its fascist philosophy, especially the brutal crimes the Nazis committed in the Holocaust.

 

Goldberg concludes his look with a scathing look at the modern day Democratic Party and popular American culture and a timely warning for conservatives. Indeed, it is these closing chapters that Goldberg’s familiar wittiness and humor is on full display after the more academic nature of the book’s earlier chapters. One such example, while explaining why he felt the need to write this book:

 

Ever since I joined the public conversation as a conservative writer, I’ve been called a fascist and a Nazi by smug, liberal-know-nothings, sublimely confident of the truth of their ill-informed prejudices. Responding to this slander is, as a point of privilege alone, a worthwhile endeavor.

 

Those familiar with the works of other conservative writers such as Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin need to be warned: this book is deeper, longer and more scholarly than their typical writings; less one-liners, more substance. Goldberg digs deep in the annals of history to uncover popular myths and the revisionist works of liberal academics to show that it is not conservatives who are in danger of turning America in a fascist direction, but liberals. All in all, Liberal Fascism is a book that meets an immediate need; not only within conservatism, but for all Americans. It is time to take a closer look at our past to better understand where today’s political leaders want to take us in the future. Liberal Fascism does just that.