Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

Liberal Fascism: Why Fascism Has Always Been a Leftist Movement, And How to Recognize Its Flavor -- Sott.net

Luc, great job!

Reading about the history of the West's descent into fascism, it seems that each little step in the development of this fascist mindset and the implementation of its program were successful because even though most people didn't like it, they also looked the other way because it seemed unimportant or they thought it didn't really affect their lives that much.
 
It's interesting that the article got so many comments. There are some triggered lefties and one triggered Jew-hater, but many are quite thoughtful. I thought a lot about all of this and I think what Goldberg does in the book (and what the article attempts) is a great service: to provocatively stir these labels up a bit and show that it's just not as simple as people think and that there IS a mind-job being carried out to confuse us and that there IS something like a "meta-pathological" ideology and corresponding, evil actions that have nothing to do with left/right, fascism/communism etc.

But then again, it seems you can only go so far with this game, and I find it kind of frustrating that there seems to be no solution here in 3D land. Maybe that's the sort of thing the Cs meant when they talked about the futility of 3D life. The more I look at such problems, the more it feels like running in circles - like the flatlander who can wander around a 3D shape in 2D land and forever scratch his head looking at it from all 2D directions, but he'll never ever understand the source of this shape or perceive the 3D shape.

For example, when you think about fascism, communism, today's liberal insanity etc. you realize you can go only so far pinning down and analyzing ideologies. So you end up thinking about psychopathology. But then you realize that a health/disease distinction can only get you so far either because ultimately, it's a spiritual issue: what is "pathology" if not a moral claim - something we describe as "evil"? This then leads to pondering STS and its wishful-thinking, lazy, reality-bending and destruction-causing nature. Then you think about STS vs. STO and the question of what these are, exactly, precisely? This then brings you back to studying psychopathology and psychological health, and on it goes. Like the flatlander circling around some weird object, always ending up at square one again.

It's just that it seems there is an infinite amount of perspectives from which to look at the "human condition" and each reveals an infinite depth. Even the seemingly simplest fact turns out to contain the whole universe, the closer you look. But I guess that's just an excuse and all we can do is keep digging and observing and digging some more. And maybe we are getting somewhere, only that it's hard to see from where we are.
 
Thanks for posting the article, luc - it was very well written and I have circulated it amongst some friends, who were quite astonished about the roots of fascism.

But I also need to agree with your assessment of things here on the BBM. I also feel like we are going in circles - and no matter what you touch, it also ends up more complex, ramified, and ultimately ponerized. But as you said, that’s probably just our lot here in 3D.
 
Brilliant! And yeah, it just highlights how much "gray" exists in a world that many wish was black and white. Reality is not simple and easy, and every step has to be thought about.
 
Some more thoughts on this: one aspect of this whole left/right discussion is "small government" vs. "welfare state". I think F. A. Hayek, a darling of libertarians/the "American right", made the argument that socialism of any kind inevitably leads to tyranny - hence the title of his famous book, "The Road to Serfdom". And if you think about it, he has a point and many leftist ideas really do have a fascist element to them.

Let's take health care for example. Who would be against providing "free" healthcare for the sick? Not so fast. Think about it: the whole medical mess we are in has a lot to do with the various systems of "free" healthcare. Because once you have some sort of insurance bureaucracy in place, you can dictate what kind of treatments people can and should get, and what is off the table. You have your little "expert clique" that decides everything, which of course is easily corrupted. Also, this whole "free" healthcare system quickly degenerates into a scam where Big Pharma and cohorts find a way to plunder the "free" money.

I mean, patients on some health care plan often aren't even aware of the high costs of the various treatments. But if you had to pay for them yourself, would the various medical scams work? If you were diagnosed with cancer, and you had the option of either selling your family home to get a year of conventional therapy, or try an alternative therapy involving let's say diet and supplements - wouldn't you have a great incentive to try the low-cost route first? Wouldn't this create a market for doctors who offer effective treatments that are way cheaper than the Big Medicine scams?

Another hugely important aspect to the socialist health care model is this: if you have a discussion with a lefty about whether the government should reeducate people in terms of smoking or pushing the food pyramid or what have you, or making various things mandatory "for people's safety" such as wearing helmets, seat belts etc., and you press them, their argument always collapses into "but the system would have to pay for those guys when they get sick because of their own stupidity, this would be unfair and therefore we shouldn't tolerate it". Without socialist health care, there simply is no valid argument for stifling people's freedom to "hurt themselves" or make their own decisions about stuff. But with health care, all those laws and regulations to "protect people from themselves" have completely gone out of control. Nowadays you don't ask yourself anymore "what's prohibited", you ask yourself "what am I still allowed to do"!

Another example are the various business regulations leftists love so much: union rights, environmental protection regulations, diversity laws, hygiene rules, price controls, fixed wages, workers' rights, bio certificates etc. While well-intentioned, these things tend to give Big Business a huge advantage over small businesses, because the big players have big legal departments and the cashflow to comply with this insane level of bureaucracy. Small businesses stand little chance, when in theory, the market should decide. A good example are small farmers raising grass-fed cattle that get closed down by the authorities because they don't have this or that expensive equipment "necessary" to keep everything hygienic and safe. It all benefits the big players and as such creates massive collusion between Big Business and Big Government - ironically the very definition of fascism leftists often use!

Having said all that, I don't believe for a minute in some libertarian utopia where everything is fixed by having a "small government with minimum regulations", whatever that is. The world is way too complex for such ideologies to work and the devil is in the details.

The thing is, the more you think about such matters, the more our 3D reality seems to collapse, so to speak. There is no solution. The only thing we can do is work on an individual level on the mundane things that are in front of us and make things a tiny bit better over time. If we think about an alternative on the macro level, we would have to think about a world where everyone is responsible on an individual level and strives towards truth and service, i.e. a world where everyone is STO-oriented in one way or another. Now think about what such a society would look like if it developed for a couple of millennia. We have absolutely no clue! This would be another universe entirely!

Maybe that's partly what the Cs meant when they said that at some point we will see the traps and limitations of 3D reality. Maybe one day we will "graduate" to a different reality to learn new and different lessons where everyone is kind of on the STO path. Only then could we maybe begin to understand what a truly good model for society would look like. But before that, I think we are prisoners of the "traps and limitations" of this 3D STS reality and we'll always run in circles when thinking about how a non-fascist, good and truth-oriented society would look like. What we can do though is recognize fascism/ponerization, and at least see the bad stuff we want to get away from.
 
Generally, osit, the left tend to see, as the saying goes, 'perceived' problems as being nails for them to hammer.

Take what you said here:

...While well-intentioned, these things tend to give Big Business a huge advantage over small businesses, because the big players have big legal departments and the cashflow to comply with this insane level of bureaucracy. Small businesses stand little chance, when in theory, the market should decide.

The very bureaucracy seems to be geared for exactly this. While small business does the bulk of the heavy lifting, they are not able to contain the mounting regulatory requirements that often cripple them. However, it is variegated in terms of problems, which are often addressed by industry (common sense big and small) themselves as 'best practices' and adopted. Be that as it may, the bureaucracy gets involved at the same time, and industry groups consult with the regulators who are drafting legislation, and it is here that although it may sound reasonable, it works in favor of bigger players, as you infer.

In any functioning civil society (forget left/right for a second) somehow a balance is desirable e.g. a capitalist society has some type of commerce and it needs some type of controls to protect society from those who would scam it from both the inside and outside. The very demographics of people, those with a conscious and those without, those with means and those without; the young and elderly for instance, do require some assistance in the basic ways society is structured to give them a leg up. In the past, these latter things seemed more to do with individuals, families and community help, with charity etc. and today it is enacted in law and regulation for the state to supersede, for the public to become reliant on them.

As for unions let's say, having been in and out of them, on the one hand some within will be protected at all costs who otherwise would have been drummed out long ago. On the other hand, business does this to themselves wherein a good business never needs a union and the workers never need the protection of same.

Your medicare points were good ones. Having been a payer in universal healthcare, I now find myself actually not using it and paying for services that I've some personal control of what it is that is being asked for and received. However, when it comes to traumatic cases (accidents or imminent risk of death) some sort of public system comes to bear responsibility; however that is structured.

The thing is, the more you think about such matters, the more our 3D reality seems to collapse, so to speak. There is no solution. The only thing we can do is work on an individual level on the mundane things that are in front of us and make things a tiny bit better over time. If we think about an alternative on the macro level, we would have to think about a world where everyone is responsible on an individual level and strives towards truth and service, i.e. a world where everyone is STO-oriented in one way or another. Now think about what such a society would look like if it developed for a couple of millennia. We have absolutely no clue! This would be another universe entirely!

Yes, on the macro that seems so, to strive for STO orientation. Now, looking around at our 3d plain I'm often amazed that societies can even function as it is personally and externally managed, and as JP points out, in the micro and macro, amazing things take place to keep it all running and the fact that it can be taken for granted – he reminds people of this. That said, however, this also brings up something that Collingwood alluded to while reading Collingwood's IoH (had made a note in the margin on the 'idea of historical progression' that was particular to progress). In this case, Colllingwood brings up the idea of the fisherman. Not sure why, yet my notation in the margin included JP's notion also, as progress can be seen on many levels and it does not make the past that had differences any less viable. The analogy Collingwood used was in improving fish catches - more mechanized, from five to ten fish in this case:

"But from whose point of view is it an improvement? The question must be asked, because what is an improvement from one point one of view may be the reverse from another; and if there is a third from which an impartial judgement can be passed on this conflicts, the qualifications of this impartial judge must be determined.

Let us first consider the change from the point of view of the persons concerned in it: the older generation still practicing the old methods while the young has adopted the new. In such a case the older generation will see no need for the change, knowing as it does that life can be lived on the old method. And it will also think that the old method is better than the new; not out of irrational prejudice, but because the way of life which it knows and values is built round the old method, which is therefore certain to have social and religious associations that express the intimacy of its connexion with the way of life as a whole. A man of the older generation only wants his five fish a day, and he does not want half a day's leisure; what he wants is to live as he has lived. To him, therefore, the change is no progress, but a decadence.

It might seem obvious that the opposite party, the younger generation, the change is conceived as a progress. It has given up the life of its fathers and chosen a new one for itself; it would not do this (one might suppose) without comparing the two and deciding which one is better. But this is not necessarily the case. There is no choice except for a person who knows what both the things are between which he is choosing. To choose between two ways of life is impossible unless one knows what they are; and this means not merely looking on one as a spectacle, and practicing the other, or practicing one and conceiving the other as an unrealized possibility, but knowing both in the only way in which ways of life can be known; by actual experience, or by the sympathetic insight which may take its place for such a purpose. But experiencing shows that nothing is harder than a given generation in a changing society, which is living in a new way of its own, to enter sympathetically into the life of the last. It sees that life as a mere incomprehensible spectacle, and seems driven to escape from sympathy wit it by a kind of instinctive effort to free itself from parental influences and bring about change on which it is blindly resolved. There is here no genuine comparison between the two ways of life, and therefore no judgement that one is better than the other, and therefore no conception of the change as a progress.

For this reason, the historical changes in a society's way of life are very rarely conceived as progressive even by the generation that makes them. It makes them in obedience to a blind impulse to destroy what it does not comprehend, as bad, and substitutes something else as good. But progress is not the replacement of the bad by the good, but of the good by the better. In order to conceive a change as a progress, then, the person who has made it must think of what he has abolished as good, and good in certain ways. This he can only do on condition of his knowing what the old ways of life was like, that is, having historical knowledge of the society's past while he is actually living in the present he is creating: for historical knowledge is simply the re-enactment of past experiences in the mind of the present thinker. Only thus can two ways of life be held together in the same mind for a comparison of their merits, so that a person choosing one and rejecting the other can know what he has gained and what he has lost, and decide that he has chosen the better. In short: the revolutionary can only regard his revolution as a progress in so far as he is also an historian, genuinely re-enacting in his own historical though the life he nevertheless rejects.

Let us now consider the change in question, no longer from the standpoint of those concerned in it, but from that of an historian placed outside it. We might hope that, from his detached and impartial point of view, he would be able to judge with some chance of fairness whether it was a progress or not. But this is a difficult matter. He is only deceived if he fastens on the fact that ten fish are caught where five fish were caught before, and uses this as a criterion of progress. He must take into account the conditions and consequences of that change. He must ask what was done with the additional fish or the additional leisure. He must ask what value attached to the social and religious institutions that were sacrificed for them. In short, he must judge the relative value of the two different ways of life, taken as two wholes. Now, in order to do this, he must be able to enter with equal sympathy into the essential features and values of each way of life: he must re-experience them both in his own mind, as objects of historical knowledge. What makes him a qualified judge, therefore, is just the fact that he does not look at his object from a detached point of view, but re-lives it in himself.

So, JP rightly reminds the students of how ‘hard’ it was going back in time comparatively. He reminds those of the incredible processes involved today (e.g. of them arriving at university by transportation networks and how all the networks are maintained etc.). All this is natural in technological and civil structural advances, however, this also comes back to what Collingwood said of taking “into account the conditions and consequences of that change.” Did our grandparents say that to us – they experienced both aspects as some of us have now experienced both aspects of our time and today’s time. So, the consequences of these progressions are a factor, and as amazing as the provisions of our time now provides, the advances (here and now) come with the consequences that we see. What of the “leisure” time, what of the uses of progress?

Why bring this up at all, does it matter? I guess in order to see some of that one would have to look at each progress – medicine, agriculture, pollution, complexities of systems (e.g. when they breakdown only a very few can now fix them - has anyone worked on their car these days?), science and technologies for our betterment are often changed to our detriment; weapons systems, financial control, social control and on and on.

So, these were the questions when reading IoH while at the same time thinking about what JP was saying. It is extremely hard, osit, to measure progress as just a better thing when clearly, if experienced, things can be seen progressing in an unhealthy way, too - which you point out. And I think, going back to what you posit of the left, this is where the left's 'progress' relies on them bringing out their hammer at every opportunity (like identity politics) and then dictates the controls needed.







 
I'm about halfway through this one and am enjoying it as a good history lesson. A few things bother me. First, while there is a lot of citations there still are a great deal of his declarative statements that have no citations to them. This bothers me mostly when he's talking about historical situations, things that happened a long time ago. How does he know these things? He speaks as though they are actual fact but how do we know what he's saying is true? I'm not about to just believe it cuz he says it.

Also, he seems to be fully behind the US Empire's foreign policy actions. He basically denounces the world leaders who have stood up to the US or otherwise tried to improve the lives of the people they ruled over. Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba (who was assassinated by the CIA/Deep State without JFK's approval) and Che Guevara are all basically referred to as fascists. What the author doesn't understand or is unwilling to see is that they were all mostly standing up to the US and the reason they nationalized so much of their industry was to keep out the western corporations who wanted to steal all of their country's resources. He has no nuance on that subject IMO.

He also drags JFK into the dirt as a liberal fascist. Unfortunately I've already read way too much into his administration and what he had to deal with vis a vis the Deep State, so I just had to shake my head reading his account on JFK. For the author to claim that he was responsible for the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis shows how little historical accuracy he has on that subject. And of course the author believes the official story behind JFK's assassination, which fits nicely for him since, in his words, Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist. A leftist assassin!

So while I'm continuing through this book and enjoying getting a better perspective on the role liberal, progressive politics has played in the world since 1900, there certainly are some bumps in the road for the author.
 
So while I'm continuing through this book and enjoying getting a better perspective on the role liberal, progressive politics has played in the world since 1900, there certainly are some bumps in the road for the author.

Oh yes! He even praises George W... :rolleyes: Here his ideological stance gets the better of him and he really forces reality to fit his narrative. Still, I thought it was interesting to think about the negative aspects of all those leftist leaders, and there are plenty - good intentions and standing on the right side in terms of foreign policy, for example, does not make the problems of authoritarian leftist ideas go away.

I think Putin is a good yardstick and reality check here. He definitely is a conservative in many ways: he emphasizes free enterprise and free and fair competition (as Alex Krainer mentions in his book, it is now much easier and unbeaurocratic in Russia to found a business than in the US, according to surveys), he is a traditionalist in terms of family and values, he also says that the state cannot and should not impose moral values because that's up to the individual etc. Yet he doesn't buy into any conservative/libertarian ideology either and recognizes that the state needs to actively fight corruption and collusion, he organizes programs to advance science, makes sure that the Russian people get their basic needs, pensions etc. covered - even against business interests at times and so on. A shining example of a conservative, non-ideological leader with a deep moral compass.

As I said before, reading Liberal Fascism through the lens of ponerology is fascinating - Goldberg really nails the pathological mindset of the radical (now mainstream) left that seeks to escape what they perceive as the tyranny of normal people. Hence their drive to use the state to "liberate" them from "oppressive" families, communities etc., i.e. liberate them from morality, from having to work hard, from the judgment of common sense etc. It's worth reading it till the end, I think there's plenty of food for thought in the book, Goldberg's ignorance on certain issues and ideological bent notwithstanding.
 
Maybe a critical review is in order? Some excellent points brought up here. How easy it is to be overtaken and fooled by psychopaths in power!
 
As I said before, reading Liberal Fascism through the lens of ponerology is fascinating

I fully agree. It is not only fascinating but quite enlightening in many respects if you have this knowledge in mind while reading it.

Maybe a critical review is in order? Some excellent points brought up here. How easy it is to be overtaken and fooled by psychopaths in power!

I think that is a good idea. I was astounded when Golberg said the following:

Obviously, the Jews bore the brunt of the Gleichschaltung. They were the “other” against whom the Nazis defined their organic society. Given Jewish economic success, the business community of necessity played a central role in the “Aryanization” of society—a convenient excuse for businesses to seize Jewish holdings and for German professionals to take Jewish jobs in academia, the arts, and science. A great many Germans simply refused to make good on their debts to Jewish creditors. Banks foreclosed on mortgages. Vultures seized Jewish businesses or offered to pay pennies on the dollar for them, knowing full well that Jews had no recourse. Or they informed on their competitors, charging that Firm X was insufficiently committed to purging the stain of Judaism from its business.

Nothing so horrific happened in the United States, and it’s unlikely that it would have, even if Hugh Johnson’s darkest fantasies had been realized. But the practices of the Nazis and Johnson’s NRA were more similar than different. Johnson’s thugs broke down doors and threw people in jail for not participating with the Blue Eagle. Hitler’s goons did likewise. “Those who are not with us are against us,” Johnson roared, “and the way to show that you are a part of this great army of the New Deal is to insist on this symbol of solidarity.” The New Dealers’ slogan “We do our part” echoed the Nazi refrain “The common good before the private good.” After all, it was Stuart Chase, not Albert Speer, who argued in his Economy of Abundance that what was required was an “industrial general staff with dictatorial powers.”

Notice how he made a point before the bolded part about the fascist Hitler State back then and how it operated via Gleichschaltung and creating "others as enemies" defined by this state as "the jews", followed directly by, Goldberg saying; "Nothing so horrific happened in the United States, and it’s unlikely that it would have, even if Hugh Johnson’s darkest fantasies had been realized."! And then Glodberg compares Johnsons (appointed by Roosevelt in 1933 to head the NRA) handling of the NRA directly with Hitlers Fascist practises there, followed by Johnsons quote “Those who are not with us are against us,” Johnson roared, “and the way to show that you are a part of this great army of the New Deal is to insist on this symbol of solidarity.” to back it up!

FAILING to realize that Bush said AND put into practice the exact same fascist thing following the 9/11 attacks by saying "every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." extending that doctrine to pretty much everyone on the planet an dividing the world into "the axis of evil" and the "peace-loving democracies in the west".

Yes, it is astounding "How easy it is to be overtaken and fooled by psychopaths in power!"!!!

I mean, that similarity should stare you right into your face, even if you believe the official 9/11 narrative, except if you have a unconscious bias running and an intellect that is not throughly informed about Ponerology.
 
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I’m only a third into the book and find it quite fascinating, despite his obvious bias towards the American system.

The thing is, the more you think about such matters, the more our 3D reality seems to collapse, so to speak. There is no solution. The only thing we can do is work on an individual level on the mundane things that are in front of us and make things a tiny bit better over time. If we think about an alternative on the macro level, we would have to think about a world where everyone is responsible on an individual level and strives towards truth and service, i.e. a world where everyone is STO-oriented in one way or another.

This is pretty much the conclusion I have - painfully - come to as well. For years I still had the illusion that things could - theoretically - be fixed, even if that was not likely to happen. But in the last six or so months I have had to disabuse myself from this notion. There is no collective solution, only an individual one. All we can do is to strive to be a better person today than I was yesterday, which may or may not influence those people you are in contact with on a daily and close basis. Everything else is a pipe dream. This realization has been quite painful for me, but then it has also given me an outlook on what I can really do - work on myself. And lets face it, that is hard enough to do, in fact it’s way harder than to tell everyone else how to behave, so that I am happy and content.

It kind of reminds me of the environmental discussion, where the general idea is that the climate changes we are faced with is human made. This gives people at least a sense that if we did it, we can potentially undo it, even if unlikely. But there is still some sort of hope. If on the other hand we acknowledge that there are higher forces at play, whatever these are, and that we have no control over these whatsoever, this can be ground for despair and fear.
 
FAILING to realize that Bush said AND put into practice the exact same fascist thing following the 9/11 attacks by saying "every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." extending that doctrine to pretty much everyone on the planet an dividing the world into "the axis of evil" and the "peace-loving democracies in the west".

To be fair though, this is a book about liberal fascism, not right-wing fascism, and Goldberg says as much (he obviously doesn't deny the danger of right-wing fascism). He also makes the distinction - like Jordan Peterson - between a more masculine fascism that we all know and a more feminine fascism (he writes in detail about Hillary as a prime example) that is much harder to pin down.

At the end of the book, he also criticizes Bush and many other conservatives, although not so much with the arguments that the left often levels at him (and for good reason) like the patriot act, foreign interventions etc., but because he is in favor of Big Government and bought into many progressive talking points in a kind of biblical Social Gospel way. Goldberg also warns of the danger of the right playing identity politics "for the white race", "for christians", "for conservatives" etc.

Although he doesn't talk a lot about these issues in the book, I get the feeling he is sort of in favor of foreign interventions and protecting America - his argument is that the protection of the people from physical violence like terrorism is something the state must do, as opposed to meddling with people's lives, values, health etc. "to protect them from themselves". I don't see anything wrong with this reasoning in principle, but the problem is that Goldberg is simply ignorant of some key facts, such as the Deep State's role in creating and sponsoring terrorism, or the crimes that are US foreign interventions etc. His blind spots are similar to Jordan Peterson's blind spots I think - in fact, the whole book reminds me a lot of JP's positions and arguments, although Goldberg gets at it from a political/historical perspective as opposed to Peterson's psychological approach. Peterson is a bit more on track though IMO because his knowledge of psychology lets him see the pathological spectrum more clearly independent of political philosophies.
 
There's a new documentary out by Dinesh D'Souza that looks quite interesting. It seems to run parallel with the idea of liberal fascism. He claims that it's really the progressive Democrats that are the fascists and it could have just as well been Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who wrote the Nazi party platform. Below is a short clip where Vice (yes, I know... :barf:) inteviews D'Souza but what he says is notable.


It's currently in theatres but might be worth a look. Funny enough, on Rotten Tomatoes the movie got a 0% score by the 'critics' and a 90% user audience rating.... :lol:

Here's the official trailer:

 
I stopped abruptly about halfway through Liberal Fascism. I had recently finished JFK and the Unspeakable. Liberal Fascism at the halfway point started criticizing JFK, believing Oswald was a lone gunman communist instead of a CIA/MIC patsy, and arguing that JFK would not have prevented the Vietnam war. This shows me that the author does not know important, basic facts, so then what am I supposed to do with his arguments based on his misunderstanding of the facts. I guess it's like evolution where I have to mentally correct the author's mistakes as I am going through the text.
 
The book really made me rethink many things about all those labels thrown around and gave me a new picture of modern intellectual and political history.
Thanks Luc for your post, you've peaked my interest and will add to my reading pile.
 
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