Liberal Fascism
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| Author | Jonah Goldberg |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Subject | Politics |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
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Publication date
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January 8, 2008 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 496 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 123136367 |
| 320.53/3 22 | |
| LC Class | JC481 .G55 2007 |
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is a book by Jonah Goldberg, in which Goldberg argues that fascist movements were and are left-wing. Published in January 2008, it reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list of hardcover non-fiction in its seventh week on the list. Goldberg is a syndicated columnist and the editor-at-large of National Review Online.
In the book, Goldberg argues that both modern liberalism and fascism descended from progressivism, and that 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". Goldberg writes that there was more to fascism than bigotry and genocide, and argues that those characteristics were not so much a feature of Italian fascism, but rather of German Nazism, which was allegedly forced upon the Italian fascists "after the Nazis had invaded northern Italy and created a puppet government in Salò."
He argues that over time, the term fascism has lost its original meaning and has descended to the level of being "a modern word for 'heretic,' branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic", noting that in 1946, the socialist anti-fascist writer George Orwell described the word as no longer having any meaning except to signify "something not desirable".
Goldberg has said in interviews that the title Liberal Fascism was taken from a 1932 speech by science fiction pioneer and socialistH. G. Wells at Oxford. Goldberg quotes Wells as stating that he wanted to "assist in a kind of phoenix rebirth" of liberalism as an "enlightened Nazism." In the book, however, Goldberg writes that he "did not get the title of this book from Wells's speech, but ... was delighted to discover the phrase has such a rich intellectual history". This apparent contradiction was clarified in a subsequent interview where Golberg states "The truth is that Liberal Fascism was originally a working title I came up with independently for the proposal. But the idea was always that we might change it for the actual book since it is such a bloody shirt. But then I read up on Wells and his call for 'Liberal Fascism,' and I was like, 'What the hell, this is more apt than I realized.' So in a way, the title comes from Wells and in a way it doesn’t." Before being published, alternative subtitles included The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton and The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods.
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