Liberal Fascism

“Liberal Fascism – The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” by Jonah Goldberg (2007)

Definition:
“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. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy.” (p 23)

He argues that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.

“How is it – considering that most liberals and leftists believe they were put on this earth to oppose fascism with every breath – that many if not most American liberals either admired Mussolini and his project or simply didn’t care much about it one way or the other?”

“The answer resides in the fact that Fascism was born of a ‘fascist moment’ in Western civilization, when a coalition of intellectuals going by various labels – progressive, communist, socialist, and so forth – believed the era of liberal democracy was drawing to a close. It was time for man to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image. … Mussolini, a lifelong socialist intellectual, was a warrior in this crusade, and his Fascism – a doctrine he created from the same intellectual material Lenin and Trotsky had built their movements with – was a grand leap into the ear of ‘experimentation’ that would sweep aside old dogmas and usher in a new age. This was in every significant way a project of the left as we understand the term today, a fact understood by Mussolini, his admirers, and his detractors.” (30-31, emphasis mine)

“Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. .Hence all fascistic movement s commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.” (p 43)

“The Nazis rose to power exploiting anti-capitalistic rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even it Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible ot deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank an d file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic – including environmentalism, health food, and exercise – and most of all, the need to ‘transcend’ notions of class.” (p59)

“What is indisputable is that Hitler was in no way conservative – a point scholars careful with their words always underscore. Certainly , to suggest that Hitler was a conservative in any sense related to American conservatism is lunacy. American conservatives seek to preserve both traditional values and the classical liberal creed enshrined in the Constitution. American conservatism straddles these two distinct but overlapping libertarian and traditionalist strains, whereas Hitler despised both of them.” (p 61)

“What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects form the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics.” (p 73)

“One of the great ironies of history is that the more similar two groups are, the greater the potential for them to hate each others. …But what Hitler hated about Marxism an communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communist. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the the people calling themselves communists wser in fact in on a foreign , Jewish conspiracy. ..Hitler never cared much about economics anyway. He always considered it ‘secondary.’ What mattered to him was German identity politics.” (p 74-5)

“Fascism is middle-class Socialism and we cannot persuade the middle classes to abandon it until we can prove to them that it only makes their condition worse.” Karl Radek quote on p 76

“Call it what you like – progressivism, fascism, communism, or totalitarianism – the first true 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.” (p80) “…consider the evidence. More dissidents were arrested or jailed in a few years under Wilson than under Mussolini during the entire 1920s. Wilson arguably did as much if not more violence to civil liberties in this last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first twelve. Wilson created a better and more effective propaganda ministry than Mussolini ever had. In the 1920s Mussolini’s critics harangued him – rightly – for using his semiofficial Fascisti to bully the opposition and for his harassment of the press. Just a few years earlier, Wilson had unleashed literally hundreds of thousands of badge-carrying goons on the American people and prosecuted a vicious campaign against the press that would have made Mussolini envious.” (p81)

“The Progressives were the real social Darwinists as we think of them today. They believed in eugenics. They were imperialists. They were convinced hat the state could, through planning andn p;ressure, create a pure race, a society of new men. They were openly and proudly hostile to individualism. Religion was a political tool, while politics was the true religion.” (p81)

About the Wilson era:
“Then there were the inevitable progressive crackdown on individual civil liberties. Today’s liberals tend to complain about the McCarthy period as if it were the darkest moment in American history after slavery. It’s true: under McCarthyism a few Hollywood writers who’d supported Stalin and then lied about it lost their jobs in the 1950s. Others were unfairly intimidated. But nothing that happened under the mad reign of Joe McCarthy remotely compares with what Wilson and his fellow progressives foisted on America. Under the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918, any criticism of the government, even in your own home, could earn you a prison sentence (a law Oliver Wendell Homes upheld years after the war, arguing that such speech could be banned if it posed a “clear and present danger”). In Wisconsin a state official got two and a half years for criticizing a Red Cross fund-raising drive. A Hollywood producer received a ten-year stint in jail for making a film that depicted British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn’t want to buy Liberty Bonds.” (p113-114)

“The Justice Department created its own quasi-official fascisti, know as the American Protective League or APL. …Members of the APL read their neighbors’ mail and listened in on their phones with government approval. In Rockford, Illinois, the army asked the APL to help extract confessions from black soldiers accused of assaulting white women. The APL’s American Vigilante Patrol cracked down on ‘seditions street oratory.’ One of its most important functions was to serve as hed crackers against ‘slackers’ who avoided conscription. (p 114)

“Roosevelt saw himself as a popularizer of intellectual currents. He spoke in generalities that everyone found agreeable at first and meaningless upon reflection. He could be – or at least sound – Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian, internationalist and isolationist, this and that as well as the other thing. … Too many liberals subscribe to the myth that the New Deal was a coherent, elightened, unified endeavor encapsulated in the largely meaningless phrase “the Roosevelt legacy.” This is poppycock. …When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked – in 1940 ! – whether ‘the basic principle of the New Deal’ was ‘economically sound,’ he responded, ‘I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.” This raises the first of many common features among New Deal liberalism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialis, all of which shared many of the same historical and intellectual forebears. Fascist and Nazi intellectuals constantly touted a ‘middle’ or ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and socialism. … FDR’s ‘middle way’ had a very specific resonance, seemingly contradictory to its philosophical assumptions. … That the Third Way could be cast as an appeal to both utopians and anti-utopians may sound implausible, but political agendas need not be logically coherent, merely popularly seductive. And seductiveness has always been the Third Way’s defining characteristic.” (p 130-131) (emphasis added)

Father Coughlin
“Coughlin was in no meaningful way a conservative or even a right-winger. He was a man of the left in nearly all significant respects.” … “He [Father Coughlin] railed against a federal government that could help the starving of Belgium and even pigs in Arkansas but wouldn’t feed Americans because of its antagonism to welfare. As the presidential election loomed, Coughlin threw all is weight behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The left-wing theocrat swore that the new Deal was “Christ’s Deal” and that the choice Americans faced was “Roosevelt or Ruin.” (p 138)

“From the dawnof the Progressive Era through the 1930s, the intellectual and ideological landscape was fractured within this larger camp. The fight between left and right was for the most part between left-wing and right wing socialists. But virtually all camps subscribed to some hybridized version of Marxism, some bastafdization of the Rousseauian dream of a society governed by a general will. It was not until the late 1940s, with the revival of classical liberalism led by Friedrich Hayek, that collectivism of all stripes was once again fought from a right that did not share the core assumptions of the left.” (p 139)

Quotes from Coughlin, Jan 17, 1934: “God is directing President Roosevelt,” and “he is the answer to our prayers.” “Our government still upholds one of the worst evils of decadent capitalism, namely that production must be only at the profit for the owners, for the capitalist, and not for the laborer.” (p 141)

“So how did Coughlin become a right-winger?. … On this the historical record is abundantly clear: liberals started to call Coughlin a right-winger when he moved further to the left.” “ … he decided FDR wasn’t radical enough.”(p 141)

“In the 1930’s what defined a ‘right-winger’ was almost excliusively opposition ot Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.” (p143)

“Senator Huey Long, the archetypical American fascist, is likewise often called a right-winger by his detractors – though his place in the liberal imagination is more complicated. Many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, still admire Long and invoke him very selectively.” “ … what cannot be denied is that Long attacked the New Deal from the left. His Share the Wealth plan was pure booboisie socialism.” (p143)

“The core value of original fascism, in the eyes of most observers, was its imposition of war values on society. The chief appeal of war to social planners isn’t conquest or death but mobilization. …During the campaign FDR promised to use his experience as an architect of the Great War to tackle the Depression. … Almost every program of the early New Deal was rooted in the politics of war; the economics of war, or the aesthetics of war emerging from WWI. … Many New Deal agencies, the famous ‘alphabet soup,’ were mostly continuation sof various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the war. … Perhaps no program better represented the new governmental martial outlook than the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. Arguably the most popular program of the New Deal, the CCC mobilized some 2.5 million young men into what ccould only be called paramilitary training…. After the CCC was approved by Congress, FDR reported, ‘it is a pretty god record, one which I think can be compared with the mobilization carried on in 1917.’” (pp 150-152)

Property and Freedom

Harvard professor Richard Pipes explores the history of property rights and their relationship to freedom. His thesis is that freedom is essentially defined as the ability to exercise property rights “What a man is, what he does, and what he owns are of a piece, so that the assault on his belongings is an assault also on his individuality and his right to life.” (p 210)

"Aristotle argues possessions enable men to rise to a higher ethical level by giving them the opportunity to be generous: 'liberality consists in the use which is made of property' " (p 8)

“[Communism] was born halfway through the mid eighteenth century…It was a pure intellectual construct, conceived in the imagination of thinkers who looked backward to a Golden Age. It held an irresistible attraction for those intellectuals who liked to blame their personal problems on the society in which they happened to live.” (p 43)

“Suffice it to say that in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels asserted that ‘the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.’” (p 51)

“While acquisitiveness is natural, respect for the property – and the liberty – of others is not. It has to be inculcated until it sinks such deep roots in the people’s consciousness that it is able to withstand all efforts to crush it.” (p 208)

“Thus the modern government not only ‘redistributes’ the possessions of its citizens, it also regulates their use. It invokes environmental laws to limit the use of land and housing. It interferes with the freedom of contract by legislating minimum wages and enforcing ‘affirmative action’ hiring practices. It imposes rent controls. It interferes with virtually every aspect of business, punishing any action that looks like price fixing, setting rates for public utilities, preventing the formation of trusts, regulating communications and transport, pressuring banks to lend to designated neighborhoods, and so on. The Task Force on Reinventing Government appointed by President Clinton and chaired by Vice President Gore estimated in 1993 that the ‘cost to the private sector of complying with [external] regulations is at least $430 billion annually – 9 percent of our gross national product!’” (p 231)

“The American revolution was carried out for the protection of property, the bastion of liberty, because it was believed that by taxing the colonists without giving them the opportunity to assent to taxation amounted to confiscation. At every stage in the controversy to 1776 and beyond, Americans claimed to be defending property rights.” (p 240)

“In 1923 the Supreme Court nullified these state laws when it upheld the decision of a District of Columbia court in the case of Children’s Hospital v. Adkins that minimum wage laws represented ‘an unconstitutional interference with the freedom of contract included within the guarantees of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.” (In 1937 during the Depression the Court declared minimum wages to be constitutional) (p 262)

“The close relationship between property and prosperity is demonstrated by the course of history, which shows that one of the main reasons for the rise of the West to the position of global economic preeminence lies in the institution of property, which originated there and found there its fullest development. … countries that provide the firmest guarantees of economic independence, including private property rights, are virtually without exception the richest. They also enjoy the best civil services and judiciary institutions.” (p 286)

"Within a month of taking control of the German government, the Nazis suspended constitutional guarantees of the inviolability of private property." (p 221)

Richard Feynman in "What Do YOU Care What Other People Think?"

"We are at the beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. but there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming "This is the answer, my friends, man is saved!" we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before."

"It is our responsibility as scientists knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."

More Consilience

Short of reproducing the last 100 pages of Wilson's book I will not be able to do it justice. A few juicy tidbits:

"As Kurt Voggegut, Jr. master fantasist once pointed out, the arts place humanity in the center of the universe, whether we belong there or not. ... In both the arts and sciences the programmed brain seeks elegance, which is the parsimonious and evocative description of pattern to make sense out of a confusion of detail." (p 239)

"Imitate, make it geometrical, intensify. That is not a bad three-part formula for the driving pulse of the arts as a whole." (p 241)

"As Louis Armstrong is reported to have said about jazz: If you have to ask, you'll never know. Scientists, in contrast, try to know." (p242)

"..every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals. The swiftest road to success has always been sponsorship by a conquering state." (p 267)

"A better life later on, either an earthly paradise or resurrection in heaven, is the promised reward that cultures invent to justify the subordinating imperative of social existence. Repeated from one generation to the next, submission to the group and its moral codes is solidified in official doctrine and personal belief. But it is not ordained by God or plucked from the air as self-evident truth. It evolves as a necessary device of survival in social organisms." (p 268)

"Meanwhile, the melanges of moral reasoning employed by modern societies are, to put the matter simply , a mess. They are chimeras, composed of odd parts stuch together. ... Little wonder then, that ethics is the most publicly contested of all philosophical enterprises. Or that political science, which at foundation is primarily the study of applied ethics, is so frequently problematic. Neither is informed by anything that would be recognizable as authentic theory in the natural sciences. " (p 278)


""Fear," as the Roman poet Lucretius said, "was the first thing on earth to make gods." ... If the religious mythos did not exist in culture, it would be quickly invented, and in fact it has been everywhere, thousands of times through history." (p 281)

"People need a sacred narrative. ... If the sacred narrative cannot be in the form of a religious cosmology, it will be taken from the material history of the universe and the human species." (p289)

"The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics." (p 291)

"..most people ... respect science but are baffled by it. ... The productions of science, other than medical breakthroughs and the sporadic thrills of space exploration, are thought marginal." (p 293)

"Science, however, is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity... Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." (p 294)

Free to Choose

"A Personal Statement" says the subtitle, but this 1979 treatise on the workings and development of economic systems by Milton and Rose Friedman, is a celebration of laissez-faire capitalism and libertarian philosophy. The Friedmans explode numerous myths about the benefits of government, unions, Ralph Nader, and environmentalism, with abundant clear examples from history.


Every society has dissatisfaction and must find someone to blame:
"In every society, however it is organized, there is always dissatisfaction with the distribution of income. ... In a command system envy and dissatisfaction are directed at the rulers. In a free market system they are directed at the market." (p 22)


The Tragedy of the Common:
"When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition." (p 24)

Who's to blame for inflation?:
"The recogition that substantial inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon is only the beginning of an understanding of the cause and cure of inflation." (p 254)

What caused the Depression?:
"We now know, as few knew then, that the Depression was not produced by a failure of private enterprise, but rather by a failure of governmet in an area in which the government had from the first been assigned responsibility - To coin money, regulate the Value therof, and of foreign Coin, in the words of Section 8, Article 1 of the U. S. Constitution." (p 71)


Is government regulation of drugs a benefit to the public?
"..it is desirable that the public be protected from unsafe and useless drugs. However, it is also desirable that new drug development should be stimulated, and that new drugs should be made available to those who can benefit from them as soon as possible. As is so often the case, one good objective conflicts with other good objectives. Safety and caution in one direction can mean death in another. The crucial questions are whether FDA regulation has been effective... By now, considerable evidence has accumulated that indicates that FDA regulation is counterproductive, that it has done more harm by retarding progress in the production and distribution of valuable drugs than it has done good by preventing the distribution of harmful or ineffective drugs.
Put yourself in the position of an FDA official charged with approving or disapproving a new drug. You can make two very different mistakes:
1. Approve a drug that turns out to have unanticipated side effects resulting in the death or serious impairment of a sizable number of persons.
2. Refuse approval of a drug that is capable of saving many lives or relieving great distress and that has no untoward side effects.
If you make the first mistake--approve a thalidomide--your name will be spread over the front page of every newspaper. You will be in deep disgrace. If you make the second mistake, who will know it? ....is there any doubt which mistake you will be more anxious to avoid?"
...for these reasons the FDA should be abolished..."(p 205)

Ain't Nobody's Business

Peter McWilliams' 1993 treatise on consensual crimes such as prostitution, gambling, drug use, etc. has aged well. A veritable treasure trove of pithy quotes from ancient Greek philosophers to Milton Friedman and Jimmy Durante (!), and useful facts and statistics make this an all-time favorite. McWilliams philosphy boils down to: You should be free to do whatever you damn well please as long as it doesn't harm the person or property of another.

"Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?" - Jimmy Durante

"That which we call sin in others is experiment for us" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues" - Abraham Lincoln

Ironically, or perhaps prophetically, McWilliams contracted AIDS and was growing his own weed to help combat the effects of his AIDS meds, like nausea etc. Our benevolent Federal government raided his home and held his mother's house as collateral for his bail. If McWilliams were to fail a weekly urine test she would lose the house!

Tragically on June 14, 2000 this champion of liberty, confined to a wheelchair due to the advance of AIDS, choked to death on his own nausea-induced vomit while attempting to take a simple bath.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0931580587/ref=reg_hu-wl_item-added/103-0862137-1671034

Consilience - E. O. Wilson

E. O. Wilson, renowned entomologist, covers a broad range of subjects with the aim of developing a unifying knowledge system. His prime focus is human intellect, its development, limits, influences, and relationship to the biosphere.

On creativity, quoting Herbert Simon:
" "What chiefly characterizes creative thinking from more mundane forms are (i) willingness to accept vaguely defined problem statements and gradually structure them, (ii) continuing preoccupation with problems over a considerable period of time, and (iii) extensive background knowledge in background and potentially relevant areas." To put that in a nutshell: knowledge, obsession, daring." (p70)

On society:
"In mammals, social life is a contrivance to enhance personal survival and reproductive success."

On the direction of scientific funding:
"Science, like art, and as always through history, follows patronage." (p 101)

"For the immediate future the genetics of human behavior will travel behind two spearheads. The first is research on mental disorders, and the second is research on gender difference and sexual preference. ... They fit a cardinal rule in the conduct of scientific research. Find a paradigm for which you can raise money and attack it with every method of analysis at your disposal." (p170)

How often have we seen that played out! Through the 60's with cancer and space, the 70's and 80's with alternate energy, artificial intelligence, and cold fusion, the 90's with nanotechnology and genome research, and now with 'global warming/climate change', stem cells, energy independence, biofuels, etc. In one sense this is the ideal of a market- or needs-driven process, in another sense that market is woefully uninformed and hijacked by political hacks exploiting societal whims.