sds:
A selection from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. It’s quite long, but well worth the read. I’m 160 pages into it, and it’s very informative.
[…]
_____________________________________________________This kind of skewed rationale gets to the heart of liberal fascism. Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism. The anti-dogmatism that progressives and fascists alike inherited from Pragmatism made the motives of the activist the only criteria for judging the legitimacy of action. “I want to assure you,” FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”
This exerpt does not even begin to capture just how deep this book is. I highly recommend it to all our lefty friends out there. If you call yourself a progressive, you should know what the word means and its historical context.
Actually I’m just thrilled to know that there are people like SDS on tumblr.
gwb & the neoconservative regime have shown us that such grasping for power is not for liberals alone, but for anyone in - and drunk on - power. even so, due to the “more government is better government” mindset, i think the liberal movement would more easily head that direction.
Ordinarily I refrain from commenting on material I haven’t read in full, so I apologise in advance. Hilker’s remark about “more government is better government” speaks, I think, to the particular, and popular, American fear of “big government”, and I think it’s as well to acknowledge that specific cultural context. Here in the UK, as current events demonstrate, an aversion to an overweaning state is not the sole preserve of the right, while a welfare state - the bogeyman of the “small government” US right - continues to coexist alongside fullblooded neoliberalism a century after it first put down roots in the UK.
Then there’s this idea that it was FDR and the New Deal that was supportive of fascism, if not fascist itself. The support of the ruling class in the US, the UK and elsewhere for Hitler is well-documented, while the democratically-elected FDR administration was itself the target of a military coup planned, and backed, by wealthy industrialists. So it’s hard to square that with a characterisation of the New Deal as fascist.
In any case, the US ruling class has spent the past 30 years or more dismantling the vestiges of the New Deal and discrediting everything it represented, so it’s a little hard to see why anyone should spend time and effort trying to do it all again in 2008. Given the economic hurricane (collapsing banks, the domestic and foreign debt crisis, the oil and food shocks) that the right has whipped up, and the fact that its full force won’t be fully unleashed for a while yet, I suspect that the libertarians will have rather more to worry about, ere long, than setting FDR up as a straw man.
