Liberal Fascism The secret history of the American left from Mussolini to the politics of meaning
Liberal Fascism The secret history of the American left from Mussolini to the politics of meaning. Jonah Goldberg Double Day 2007.
Fascism is when corporations become the government. Bill Maher.
Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. Fascisms differ from each other because they grow out of different soil. 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”.
Liberal fascism shares with classic fascism, and indeed with Naziism, a concern about health, nutrition, and the environment. Does that automatically make you a fascist if you care about health, nutrition, and the environment? Of course not. What is fascist is the notion that in an organic national community, the individual has no right not to be healthy; and the state therefore has the obligation to force us to be healthy for our own good. To the extent that these modern health movements seek to harness the power of the state to their agenda, they flirt with classical fascism. Even culturally, environmentalism gives license to the sort of moral bullying and intrusion that, were it couched in terms of traditional morality, liberals would immediately denounce as fascist.