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Liberal Fascism
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Liberal Fascism (2008) (edit title/settings)

The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

by Jonah Goldberg (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist 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? ... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people”
  • “It is difficult to unite a people by talking only on the highest ethical plane”
  • “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of man”
  • “I can't save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.”
    Hillary Clinton
  • “We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”
    Hillary Clinton
  • “Not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that’s left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic.”
    Adolf Hitler
  • “The parsons will be made to dig their own graves. They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.”
    Adolf Hitler
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 443 Kindle customers
  • 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. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalsim embodies all of these aspects of fascism.
    Highlighted by 289 Kindle customers
  • The utility of terror was multifaceted, but among its chief benefits was its tendency to maintain a permanent sense of crisis. Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.
    Highlighted by 202 Kindle customers
  • What unites them are their emotional or instinctual impulses, such as the quest for community, the urge to “get beyond” politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth, the cult of action, and the need for an all-powerful state to coordinate society at the national or global level. Most of all, they share the belief—what I call the totalitarian temptation—that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of “creating a better world.”
    Highlighted by 193 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 185 Kindle customers
  • Mussolini himself coined the term to describe a society where everybody belonged, where everyone was taken care of, where everything was inside the state and nothing was outside: where truly no child was left behind.
    Highlighted by 166 Kindle customers
  • What is today called liberalism stands, domestically, on three legs: support for the welfare state, abortion, and identity politics.
    Highlighted by 164 Kindle customers
  • The conservative or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life.
    Highlighted by 146 Kindle customers
  • The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it. It cannot be done, and even if, as often in the case of liberal fascism, the effort is very careful to be humane and decent, it will still result in a kind of benign tyranny where some people get to impose their ideas of goodness and happiness on those who may not share them.
    Highlighted by 145 Kindle customers
  • America’s political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.
    Highlighted by 140 Kindle customers
Show all 17 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

George Carlin:...and the poor have been systematically looted in this country. The rich have been made richer under this criminal, fascist president and his government.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Introduction: Everything You Know About Fascism Is Wrong
1. Mussolini: The Father of Fascism
2. Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left
3. Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism
4. Franklin Roosevelt's Fascist New Deal
5. The 1960s: Fascism Takes to the Streets
6. From Kennedy's Myth to Johnson's Dream: Liberal Fascism and the Cult of the State
7. Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine
8. Liberal Fascist Economics
9. Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism
10. The New Age: We're All Fascists Now
Afterword: The Tempting of Conservatism
New Afterword to the Paperback Edition: Barack Obama and the Old Familiar Change
Acknowledgements
Appendix: The Nazi Party Platform
Notes
Index

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Jonah Goldberg (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Doubleday
Country: United States of America
Publication Date: 2008
ISBN: 0385511841
Page Count: 496

Classification edit see section history

Movie Connections edit see section history

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  • All in the Family (IMDb): A working class bigot constantly squabbles with his family over the important issues of the day.
  • American Beauty (IMDb): Lester Burnham, a depressed suburban father in a mid-life crisis, decides to turn his hectic life around after developing an infatuation for his daughter's attractive friend.
  • As Good as It Gets (IMDb): A single mother/waitress, a misanthropic author, and a gay artist form an unlikely friendship after the artist is in an accident.
  • Braveheart (IMDb): When his secret bride is executed for assaulting an English soldier whom tried to rape her, a commoner begins a revolt and leads Scottish warriors against the cruel English tyrant who rules Scotland with an iron-fist.
  • Brokeback Mountain (IMDb): The story of a forbidden and secretive relationship between two cowboys and their lives over the years.
  • Cradle Will Rock (IMDb): A true story of politics and art in the 1930s USA, centered around a leftist musical drama and attempts to stop its production.
  • Dave (IMDb): To avoid a potentially explosive scandal when the U.S. President goes into a coma, an affable temp agency owner with an uncanny resemblance, is put in his place.
  • Dead Poets Society (IMDb): English teacher John Keating inspires his students to a love of poetry and to seize the day.
  • Death Wish (IMDb): A New York City architect becomes a one-man vigilante squad after his wife is murdered by street punks in which he randomly goes out and kills would-be muggers on the mean streets after dark.
  • Dirty Harry (IMDb): When a mad man calling himself 'the Scorpio Killer' menaces the city, tough as nails San Francisco Police Inspector Harry Callahan is assigned to track down and ferret out the crazed psychopath.
  • Easy Rider (IMDb): Two counterculture bikers travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans in search of America.
  • Falling Down (IMDb): An unemployed defense worker frustrated with the various flaws he sees in society, begins to psychotically and violently lash out against them.
  • Fight Club (IMDb): An insomniac office worker and a devil-may-care soap maker form an underground fight club that transforms into a violent revolution.
  • Footlight Parade (IMDb): Chester Kent struggles against time, romance, and a rival's spy to produce spectacular live "prologues" for movie houses.
  • Forrest Gump (IMDb): Forrest Gump, while not intelligent, has accidentally been present at many historic moments, but his true love, Jenny Curran, eludes him.
  • Gabriel Over the White House (IMDb): A political hack becomes President during the height of the Depression and undergoes a metamorphosis into an incorruptible statesman after a near-fatal accident.
  • Gladiator (IMDb): When a Roman general is betrayed and his family murdered by an emperor's corrupt son, he comes to Rome as a gladiator to seek revenge.
  • Good Times (IMDb): A poor Afro-American family make the best of things in the Chicago housing projects.
  • Hans Westmar (IMDb): This Nazi propaganda film purports to show the story of a Nazi Storm Trooper named Horst Wessel--here called "Hans Westmar".
  • I Am Sam (IMDb): A mentally retarded man fights for custody of his 7-year-old daughter, and in the process teaches his cold-hearted lawyer the value of love and family.
  • JFK (IMDb): A New Orleans DA discovers there's more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story.
  • Life Is Beautiful (IMDb): A Jewish man has a wonderful romance with the help of his humour, but must use that same quality to protect his son in a Nazi death camp.
  • Maude (IMDb): This "All In The Family" spin-off centers around Edith's cousin, Maude Findlay.
  • Million Dollar Baby (IMDb): A determined woman works with a hardened boxing trainer to become a professional.
  • Pleasantville (IMDb): Two 1990's teenagers find themselves in a 1950's sitcom where their influence begins to profoundly change that complacent world.
  • Regarding Henry (IMDb): Henry is a lawyer who survives a shooting only to find he cannot remember anything.
  • Sanford and Son (IMDb): The misadventures of a cantankerous junk dealer and his frustrated son.
  • The Birth of a Nation (IMDb): The Civil War divides friends and destroys families, but that's nothing compared to the anarchy in the black-ruled South after the war.
  • The Da Vinci Code (IMDb): A murder inside the Louvre and clues in Da Vinci paintings lead to the discovery of a religious mystery protected by a secret society for two thousand years
  • The Eternal City (IMDb)
  • The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (IMDb): A propagandistic view of the First World War, showing the political greed of the German Kaiser Wilhelm, the resistance of some of his own soldiers, and fanciful prediction of the nature of the war's end.
  • The Last Samurai (IMDb): An American military advisor embraces the Samurai culture he was hired to destroy after he is captured in battle.
  • The Matrix (IMDb): A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers.
  • The Prussian Cur (IMDb)
  • The West Wing (IMDb): Inside the lives of staffers in the west wing of the White House.
  • Triumph of the Will (IMDb): The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.
  • Unforgiven (IMDb): Retired Old West gunslinger William Munny reluctantly takes on one last job, with the help of his old partner and a young man.
  • V for Vendetta (IMDb): A shadowy freedom fighter known only as "V" uses terrorist tactics to fight against his totalitarian society.
Show all 39 movie connections

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
  • Fascism
  • The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States
  • The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists
  • Right-Wing Extremism in Contemporary Germany (New Perspectives in German Studies)

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