Smiley-Face Fascism

From the forward of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg

“Americans like to think of themselves as being immune to fascism while constantly feeling threatened by it. 'It can’t happen here' is the common refrain. But fascism definitely has a history in this country, and that is what this book is about. The American fascist tradition is deeply bound up with the effort to 'Europeanize' America and give it a 'modern' state that can be harnessed to utopian ends. This American fascism seems--and is--very different from its European variants because it was moderated by many special factors—geographical size, ethnic diversity, Jeffersonian individualism, a strong liberal tradition, and so on. As a result, American fascism is milder, more friendly, more 'maternal' than its foreign counterparts; it is what George Carlin calls 'smiley-face fascism.' Nice fascism. The best term to describe it is 'liberal fascism.' And this liberal fascism was, and remains, fundamentally left-wing.”

“This book will present an alternative history of American liberalism that not only reveals its roots in, and commonalities with, classical fascism but also shows how the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex slight of hand. In fact, conservatives are the more authentic classical liberals, while many so-called liberals are 'friendly' fascists."

“Now, I am not saying that all liberals are fascists. Nor am I saying that to believe in socialized medicine or smoking bans is evidence that you are a crypto-Nazi. What I am mainly trying to do is dismantle the granitelike assumption in our political culture that American conservatism is an offshoot or cousin of fascism….”

“(B)efore the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left wing-wing adherents in Europe and the United States; the horror of the Holocaust completely changed our view of fascism as something uniquely evil and ineluctably bound up with extreme nationalism, paranoia, and genocidal racism. 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, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre-fascist thought.”

“Much of this alternative history is quite easy to find, if you have eyes to see it. The problem is that the liberal-progressive narrative on which most of us were raised tends to shunt these incongruous and inconvenient facts aside, and to explain away as marginal what is actually central.”

Jonah has a blog where he interacts with both supporters and detractors of his book.

I can’t use enough superlatives to describe this book. It is even-handed and sober, while being incredibly entertaining. It is a devastating critique of “the roots and fruits” of the inherent fascism of much of the political left’s present-day agenda for the US.

As I presently don't have the time or energy to write a review of this book, you might want to check out Thomas Sowell's review. There is an interview with Jonah that is quite interesting over at the California Literary Review, as well.