You Decide

This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines fascism and Nazism -- their ideological premises, their worldviews, and their ultimate objectives. In his 2007 book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg offers the following working definition of fascism:


"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.... [C]ontemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism. (Goldberg, p. 23)


Also in Liberal Fascism, Goldberg makes the following vital observations:

[F]ascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact ... is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space. The fact that they appear as polar opposites is a trick of intellectual history and (more to the point) the result of a concerted propaganda effort on the part of the "Reds" to make the "Browns" appear objectively eviland "other".... But in terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal....

Before [World War II], fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States; the horror of the Holocaust completely changed our view of fascism as something uniquely evil ... After the war, the American progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism. Accordingly, leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as "right-wing" and projected their own sins onto conservatives ...

For starters, it is simply a fact that, in the 1920s, fascism and fascistic ideas were very popular on the American left.... In many respects, the founding fathers of modern liberalism, the men and women who laid the intellectual groundwork of the New Deal and the welfare state, thought that fascism sounded like a pretty good idea ... a worthwhile "experiment." ... [Sometime after 1930] Stalin stumbled on a brilliant tactic of simply labeling all inconvenient ideas and movements fascist. (Goldberg, pp. 7-10)"