Quotes from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today’s left plays against 'Eurocentrism,' 'whiteness,' and 'logocentrism.' When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' and the 'Hebrew disease'...The white man is the Jew of liberal fascism.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises—of class, nation, or race—and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn’t want to behave, let alone “evolve.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“American Progressivism—the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent—is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“In short, “fascist” is a modern word for “heretic,” branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic. The left uses other words—“racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “christianist”—for similar purposes, but these words have less elastic meanings. Fascism, however, is the gift that keeps on giving. George Orwell noted this tendency as early as 1946 in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“So, we are supposed to see a party in favor of universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the aged, the expropriation of land without compensation, the nationalization of industry, the abolition of market-based lending—a.k.a. “interest slavery”—the expansion of health services, and the abolition of child labor as objectively and obviously right-wing. What the Nazis pursued was a form of anticapitalist, antiliberal, and anti-conservative communitarianism”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to understand why anyone doubts the fascist nature of the French Revolution. Few dispute that it was totalitarian, terrorist, nationalist, conspiratorial, and populist. It produced the first modern dictators, Robespierre and Napoleon, and worked on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the “general will.” The paranoid Jacobin mentality made the revolutionaries more savage and cruel than the king they replaced. Some fifty thousand people ultimately died in the Terror, many in political show trials that Simon Schama describes as the “founding charter of totalitarian justice.” Robespierre summed up the totalitarian logic of the Revolution: “There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man…[W]e must exterminate all our enemies.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“These two visions—Darwinian organicism and Christian messianism—seem contradictory today because they reside on different sides of the culture war. But in the Progressive Era, these visions complemented each other perfectly. And Wilson embodied this synthesis. The totalitarian flavor of such a worldview should be obvious. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn’t want to behave, let alone “evolve.” Your home, your private thoughts, everything was part of the organic body politic, which the state was charged with redeeming.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress’s war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they’d deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). In 1942 he flatly told Congress that if it didn’t do what he wanted, he’d do it anyway.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Fascism’s success almost always depends on the cooperation of the “losers” during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes—the people who have just enough to fear losing it—are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this “status anxiety” as the source of Progressivism’s quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against “fat cats,” “international bankers,” “economic royalists,” and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“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.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man—or, in the case of Leninists, the right party—can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything “all better” if they just trust him.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“[T]he United States in the 1920s,” writes William Leuchtenburg, “had almost no institutional structure to which Europeans would accord the term ‘the State.’” Beyond the post office, most people had very little interaction with or dependence on “the government in Washington.”38 The New Deal changed all that. It represented the last stage in the transformation of American liberalism, whereby the U.S. government became a European “state” and liberalism a political religion.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“only because so many were determined to label fascism right-wing that populism under Mussolini was redefined as such. After all, the notion that political power is and should be vested in the people was a classical liberal position. Populism was a more radical version of this position. It’s still a “power to the people” ideology,”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“fascism, 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—an inconvenient truth if there ever was one—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.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“The particular content of the idea was decidedly secondary. The ultimate utility of ideas is not their intrinsic truth but the extent to which they make a desired action possible—in Hitler’s case the destruction of your enemies, the attainment of glory, and the triumph of your race. This is important to keep in mind because Hitler’s ideological coherence left a great deal to be desired. His opportunism, pragmatism, and megalomania often overpowered any desire on his part to formulate a fixed ideological approach.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Debates about economics these days generally enjoy a climate of bipartisan asininity. Democrats want to “rein in” corporations, while Republicans claim to be “pro-business.” The problem is that being “pro-business” is hardly the same thing as being pro–free market, while “reining in” corporations breeds precisely the climate liberals decry as fascistic.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“In his unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, Wilson explained that the “true leader” uses the masses like “tools.” He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellects. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“There is at least one official voice in Europe that expresses understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt,” began a New York Times report in July 1933. “This voice is that of Germany, as represented by Chancellor Adolf Hitler.” The German leader told the Times, “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“It is a little-known but significant fact that no president has appeared more times in Superman comic books than JFK. He was even entrusted with Superman's secret identity and once pretended to be Clark Kent so as to prevent it from being exposed. When Supergirl debuted as a character, she was formally presented to the Kennedys. (Not surprisingly, the president took an immediate liking to her.) In a special issue dedicated to getting American youth to become physically fit — just like the astronaut 'Colonel Glenn' — Kennedy enlists Superman on a mission to close 'the muscle gap'.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“In a famous interview with Emil Ludwig, Mussolini reiterated his view that “America has a dictator” in FDR. In an essay written for American audiences, he marveled at how the forces of “spiritual renewal” were destroying the outdated notion that democracy and liberalism were “immortal principles.” “America itself is abandoning them. Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“The village may have replaced “the state,” and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“in America, as Friedrich Hayek and others have noted, a conservative is one who protects and defends what are considered liberal institutions in Europe but largely conservative ones in America: private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines.9”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“There is no word in the English language that gets thrown around more freely by people who don’t know what it means than “fascism.” Indeed, the more someone uses the word “fascist” in everyday conversation, the less likely it is that he knows what he’s talking about.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

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