The Sunday Times review by Dominic Lawson
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I have never seen the F-word used so liberally in a book. According to Jonah Goldberg, presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt, John FKennedy and Lyndon Johnson were all fascists. He says that Hillary Clinton is a fascist, too - although, we are assured by the author, she represents the "maternal side" of fascism: an adjective that perhaps will offend the feminist new secretary of state even more than being described as fascist.
The phrase Goldberg uses of all of them is "liberal fascist". This is something that could make sense only to a reader familiar with the language of American political discourse. For reasons that are mysterious, that country persists in using "liberal" to mean "left-wing". Once you understand that, the book's title seems less absurd.
After all, Benito Mussolini, credited with the invention of fascism as a mass political movement, was originally a man of the left; having disowned the socialism of his youth, most of Il Duce's views remained compatible with what we would normally describe as a left-wing agenda. His fascist programme included universal suffrage (Italian women hadn't got the vote before Mussolini), repeal of the titles of the nobility, a minimum wage, secularisation of education, the abolition of ecclesiastical privileges and a highly progressive tax on capital.
In that context it is not so surprising that there was much mutual admiration between FD Roosevelt and Mussolini - and indeed the New Dealers openly borrowed from the Italian fascist dictator's ideas. Goldberg's point (which he makes so often that one sometimes wonders if he is paid by the word) is that fascism does not necessarily have to include racism, still less the propensity to exterminate Jews. His definition of fascism is, broadly, the impulse that seeks to impose uniformity of thought or action throughout all society, making even the personal political.
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It's a PC World by Edward Stourton
On his account, political correctness is an example of fascism in action. It's certainly true that PC is an invention of the left. However, although the harridans of PC can make life unpleasant for those (such as members of the British royal family) who dare to use "inappropriate language" in the public forum, it's not the case that children are expected to inform on parents who utter "incorrect thoughts" in the home. To this extent, it is simply frivolous to compare it with the thoughtpolicing methods employed in the 1930s, whether in Germany or, indeed, in the Soviet Union.
Goldberg's assault on the green movement is a better attempt at linking 1930s fascism with a modern political trend usually associated with the left. He is not, of course, the first, or even the 21st, writer to note that Hitler was a passionate environmentalist, obsessed with imposing "organic" foods on the German population; but I hadn't realised that Himmler, the architect of the extermination of the Jews, had denounced the killing of animals for sport, asking: "How can you find pleasure in shooting...poor creatures... innocent, defenceless and unsuspecting? It's really pure murder."
It is obviously ludicrous to argue that, as modern animal-rights campaigners share Hitler's and Himmler's views, they are, therefore, "Nazi"; there is, however, a sinister strain of political intolerance in the green movement that Goldberg is right to seize on: note, for example, the way in which it is now habitual for greens to refer to those who dispute the significance of man-made climate change as "deniers", as if they are psychiatric cases, like the lunatics who say the Holocaust never happened.
Goldberg's main targets are much closer to the political mainstream. In particular, he lasers in on the "third way", the phrase used so lovingly by politicians such as Tony Blair in this country (although modern British politics are absent from this book). It turns out that the term was patented by the fascists of the 1930s, to indicate that they were forging a path that was neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism, but a synthesis of the best of both. This, most conveniently, meant that you did not require other parties, because they had been made ideologically redundant. Hence, in new Labour's 1997 election manifesto, Blair declared that his reinvented party was "nothing less than the political arm of the British people as a whole". I found this at the time profoundly creepy, although it fitted well with the former prime minister's "big tent" - a similar overt attempt to hoover up all opposition into one big party, representing the National Will.
Dominic Raab's The Assault on Liberty is as useful a guide as you could want to the consequences to a judicial system of a prolonged absence of proper parliamentary oversight or opposition. The author, a former Foreign Office legal adviser and chief of staff to successive shadow home secretaries, points out that new Labour's infatuation with creating thousands of new criminal offences, often passed into law without debate, has given us a penal system that is both overreaching and incompetent. As Raab says: "A latent Marxist contempt for liberty" (new Labour is full of former communists), "an electoral strategy of triangulation, a fixation with the 24-hour news cycle and a large parliamentary majority combined to create the conditions for an unprecedented assault on British liberty." Thank goodness for the House of Lords - the sort of politically independent, inherently conservative institution that would have been abolished as a first step by a proper fascist.
Liberal Fascism by Jonah GoldbergPenguin £9.99 pp496The Assault on Liberty by Dominic Raab Fourth Estate £8.99 pp304
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I have never seen the F-word used so liberally in a book. According to Jonah Goldberg, presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt, John FKennedy and Lyndon Johnson were all fascists. He says that Hillary Clinton is a fascist, too - although, we are assured by the author, she represents the "maternal side" of fascism: an adjective that perhaps will offend the feminist new secretary of state even more than being described as fascist.
The phrase Goldberg uses of all of them is "liberal fascist". This is something that could make sense only to a reader familiar with the language of American political discourse. For reasons that are mysterious, that country persists in using "liberal" to mean "left-wing". Once you understand that, the book's title seems less absurd.
After all, Benito Mussolini, credited with the invention of fascism as a mass political movement, was originally a man of the left; having disowned the socialism of his youth, most of Il Duce's views remained compatible with what we would normally describe as a left-wing agenda. His fascist programme included universal suffrage (Italian women hadn't got the vote before Mussolini), repeal of the titles of the nobility, a minimum wage, secularisation of education, the abolition of ecclesiastical privileges and a highly progressive tax on capital.
In that context it is not so surprising that there was much mutual admiration between FD Roosevelt and Mussolini - and indeed the New Dealers openly borrowed from the Italian fascist dictator's ideas. Goldberg's point (which he makes so often that one sometimes wonders if he is paid by the word) is that fascism does not necessarily have to include racism, still less the propensity to exterminate Jews. His definition of fascism is, broadly, the impulse that seeks to impose uniformity of thought or action throughout all society, making even the personal political.
Related Internet Links
Buy the books here
Related Links
It's a PC World by Edward Stourton
On his account, political correctness is an example of fascism in action. It's certainly true that PC is an invention of the left. However, although the harridans of PC can make life unpleasant for those (such as members of the British royal family) who dare to use "inappropriate language" in the public forum, it's not the case that children are expected to inform on parents who utter "incorrect thoughts" in the home. To this extent, it is simply frivolous to compare it with the thoughtpolicing methods employed in the 1930s, whether in Germany or, indeed, in the Soviet Union.
Goldberg's assault on the green movement is a better attempt at linking 1930s fascism with a modern political trend usually associated with the left. He is not, of course, the first, or even the 21st, writer to note that Hitler was a passionate environmentalist, obsessed with imposing "organic" foods on the German population; but I hadn't realised that Himmler, the architect of the extermination of the Jews, had denounced the killing of animals for sport, asking: "How can you find pleasure in shooting...poor creatures... innocent, defenceless and unsuspecting? It's really pure murder."
It is obviously ludicrous to argue that, as modern animal-rights campaigners share Hitler's and Himmler's views, they are, therefore, "Nazi"; there is, however, a sinister strain of political intolerance in the green movement that Goldberg is right to seize on: note, for example, the way in which it is now habitual for greens to refer to those who dispute the significance of man-made climate change as "deniers", as if they are psychiatric cases, like the lunatics who say the Holocaust never happened.
Goldberg's main targets are much closer to the political mainstream. In particular, he lasers in on the "third way", the phrase used so lovingly by politicians such as Tony Blair in this country (although modern British politics are absent from this book). It turns out that the term was patented by the fascists of the 1930s, to indicate that they were forging a path that was neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism, but a synthesis of the best of both. This, most conveniently, meant that you did not require other parties, because they had been made ideologically redundant. Hence, in new Labour's 1997 election manifesto, Blair declared that his reinvented party was "nothing less than the political arm of the British people as a whole". I found this at the time profoundly creepy, although it fitted well with the former prime minister's "big tent" - a similar overt attempt to hoover up all opposition into one big party, representing the National Will.
Dominic Raab's The Assault on Liberty is as useful a guide as you could want to the consequences to a judicial system of a prolonged absence of proper parliamentary oversight or opposition. The author, a former Foreign Office legal adviser and chief of staff to successive shadow home secretaries, points out that new Labour's infatuation with creating thousands of new criminal offences, often passed into law without debate, has given us a penal system that is both overreaching and incompetent. As Raab says: "A latent Marxist contempt for liberty" (new Labour is full of former communists), "an electoral strategy of triangulation, a fixation with the 24-hour news cycle and a large parliamentary majority combined to create the conditions for an unprecedented assault on British liberty." Thank goodness for the House of Lords - the sort of politically independent, inherently conservative institution that would have been abolished as a first step by a proper fascist.
Liberal Fascism by Jonah GoldbergPenguin £9.99 pp496The Assault on Liberty by Dominic Raab Fourth Estate £8.99 pp304
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