So, How Come You're Still A Leftie?

[Bfgrn]

A good point. I think there are some niches where volunteerism impresses me, like time spent with the old and young, or family members, or weekend dads for kids.

For President Kennedy it was joining the Peace Corp he created or taking a lower paying job in public service. I heard the late Ted Sorensen, JFK's adviser and speechwriter say that everywhere he traveled around the world, all these years later he would have people come up to him and tell him how President Kennedy was a personal inspiration to them. One man said it was first time a president asked him to serve his country and not have to shoot at somebody or fight a war.

That's the biggest problem plaguing Americans these days. NOBODY is willing to sacrifice the comfort of their own little worlds to a bigger cause. Maybe the difference in leadership today is asking for the sacrifice instead of trying to outline a requirement for it. When only 8% of all Americans sacrificed in the name of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were the troops and their families, it's a sad, sad, sad commentary on our attitudes. When Kennedy announced the Apollo project, he also made it clear that it was going to be expensive, but very few people turned away from supporting it simply because they might have to actually PAY FOR IT over the years.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
President John F. Kennedy - September 12, 1962


Excerpt from:

Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort

President John F. Kennedy
Houston, Texas
September 12, 1962

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation¹s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half a century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.

Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America¹s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.

So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space.

William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouRbkBAOGEw"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouRbkBAOGEw[/ame]

 

[PoliticalChic]

And I consider myself a leftist and as such don't vote for the Democrats because they don't represent my views at all. This is true of all the genuine leftists I know.

There are a lot of people out there who are loyalist to the Democratic party and think that's the same thing as liberalism, so they call themselves liberals, but that's not the case.

In the same sense, the Republican party during Bush's term wasn't particularly conservative (sure, they cut taxes, but they were also intrusive into people's private lives, dramatically expanded the federal government, spent with abandon, and a million other things diametrically opposed to conservative principles) but is just lazily labeled as such.

The conflation you made is a common one in our discourse, people use Democrat/liberal/left and Republican/conservative/right interchangeably, but they are demonstrably not the same thing.

Liberalism, progressivism, leftism, like conservatism or libertarianism, is an ideology that can be defined and demonstrated throughout history. The ideology behind leftism is not the same ideology as the Democratic party and the agenda of liberals is significantly different than the agenda of the Democratic party, in fact they're directly opposed.

I suggest perhaps you check out this thread on the subject, and how Democrats and those in power who enable them have long abandoned any significant traces of liberalism:

http://www.usmessageboard.com/politics/139598-the-world-liberal-opportunist-made.html



This "liberal class" - those in positions of power generally in or directly tied to the Democratic party who call themselves liberal- are not actually liberals since they don't believe in, support, or act on behalf of liberal values or policies. Words have meanings. I could go around calling myself an elephant, but my mere proclamation wouldn't make it so and anyone paying any attention would quickly catch on that what an elephant is and what I am are wholly incongruous.

In the same sense that there has been a legitimate backlash among genuine conservatives against the Republican party and its abandonment of many traditional and fundamental conservative ideas, there is a legitimate backlash going on for decades now among genuine leftists against the Democratic party for the same.

A bailout for corporations who raped the economy, a bailout for insurance companies and secret quid pro quo deals with the pharmaceutical and hospital industries disguised as "health care reform" that leaves the same corrupt corporate thieves in place and just funnels them money, a refusal to restore habeas corpus, not only the continuation but the escalation of foreign wars now in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and still in Iraq (the only place they scaled down, but are still very much active in combat despite the rhetoric), the lack of respect for civil rights seen in the refusal to repeal DOMA or DADT, the continued use of Guantanamo Bay and many more secret, lawless prisons throughout the world, the indication that counterproductive and senseless federal drug laws will be enforced even if and when citizens vote directly to repeal them, the constant invocation of State Secrets to hide any government wrongdoing even if it is not in any sense a state secret, and lack of transparency generally, the use of orders to assassinate American citizens far from any battlefield without due process, I could be here all night describing all of the policies actively pursued or enacted by the Democratic party that are simply anathema to liberal values, ideology, and goals.

Clinton is a corporatist, just like Obama who Axelrod represents, just like her husband was, just like most Democratic party politicians are. Yes, they proclaim themselves to be liberals or progressives to appeal (mostly but not always successfully) to the many people who consider themselves liberal but either don't know that the policies put forth by those politicians aren't liberal or those who don't care because they're actually Democrats and not liberals. But there's a simple lesson most people learn early on that applies here: don't trust what politicians say, watch what they do.

And what Democratic politicians do, what they advance, the vast, vast majority of them including the last two Democratic presidents, is not in any meaningful sense leftism. It's contradictory to the basic tenets of leftism in fact.

It may be "to the left" of what you like and support, but that's not the same thing. Lining up the primary policies associated with leftism and the policies enacted by Democrats would produce a vast disparity on most issues. I'm with you if you say the Democratic party sucks, but you're wrong if you think it's leftist.

Therefore, what the Democratic party does, the policies it enacts that then frequently fail, should have no effect on deciding to continue to be a leftist (and may even offer further support as a demonstration that non-leftist policies don't work) because they aren't a reflection of leftism. Again, it'd be like asking a libertarian why they're still libertarian after the Bush era or a Communist why they're a Communist considering North Korea - the two just aren't related.

1. "And I consider myself a leftist..."
Let's begin with the necessity for definition of terms...Leftist: socialist, syndicalist, progressive, liberal, fascist, nazi, commuist, statist, collectivist...pick your poison...now tell how you differ from the other eight. I see all as being totalist philosophies.

"How ironic that the way [H. G.] Wells refers to the fascists and Communists could apply to today’s liberals: “they embody the rule of a minority conceited enough to believe that they have a clue to the tangled incoherencies of human life, and need only sufficiently terrorize criticism and opposition to achieve a general happiness,…” And even more prescient, when we consider the current administration against the backdrop of Wells’ criticism of Soviet Communism as central-planning with “police-state thuggery.”
“The Godfather of American Liberalism”
The Godfather of American Liberalism by Fred Siegel, City Journal Spring 2009

2. "... Bush's term wasn't particularly conservative .."
No argument here.

3. "Liberalism, progressivism, leftism, like conservatism or libertarianism, is an ideology that can be defined and demonstrated throughout history."
Let's begin our argument here.
First, the classical liberalism
a. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw government as a necessary evil, of simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the liberalism of which you speak was of the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn’t want to behave, let alone ‘evolve.’

b. “The American intellectual class from the mid 19th century onward has disliked liberalism (which originally referred to individualism, private property, and limits on power) precisely because the [classical] liberal society has no overarching goal.” War Is the Health of the State

c. After the resounding rejection of Wilson's progressivism, the progressives changed their title to 'liberal.'
“Finally, Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m.../ai_n45566374/

4. Now, that "...throughout history..."part: this is only true if history begins with the French Revolution.
The Enlightenment gave impetus to the French Revolution, which was an attempt to cast off both the oppression of the monarchy, and of the Church.

a. In France, there was the development of an apparatus of ideological enforcement for ‘reason.’ But rather than necessitate liberty, Edmund Burke was prescient enough to predict that ‘enlightened despotism’ would be embodied in the general will, a formula for oppression as in ‘tyranny of popular opinion’ or even ‘a dictatorship of the proletariat.’

b. Although attributed to Rousseau, it was Diderot who gave the model for totalitarianism of reason: “We must reason about all things,” and anyone who ‘refuses to seek out the truth’ thereby renounces his human nature and “should be treated by the rest of his species as a wild beast.” So, once ‘truth’ is determined, anyone who doesn’t accept it was “either insane or wicked and morally evil.” It is not the individual who has the “ right to decide about the nature of right and wrong,” but only “the human race,” expressed as the general will. Himmelfarb, “The Roads to Modernity,” p. 167-68

c. Robespierre used Rousseau’s call for a “reign of virtue,’ proclaiming the Republic of Virtue, his euphemism for The Terror. In ‘The Social Contract’ Rousseau advocated death for anyone who did not uphold the common values of the community: the totalitarian view of reshaping of humanity, echoed in communism, Nazism, progressivism. Robespierre: “the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration and, if I may express myself so, of creating a new people.” Himmefarb, Ibid.

d. In this particular idea of the Enlightenment, the need to change human nature, and to eliminate customs and traditions, to remake established institutions, to do away with all inequalities in order to bring man closer to the state, which was the expression of the general will. Talmon, “Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,” p. 3-7


There are, according to Talmon, in "Totalitarian Democracy," three stages in the development of “totalitarian democracy” in the French Revolution. First, there was the Rousseauist intellectual background, which rejected all existing institutions as relics of despotism and clerical obscurantism, and which demanded a complete renovation of society so that it would be an expression of the General Will—this last being no mere consensus but an objective standard of virtue and reason that imperfect humanity must be coerced into obeying in order to enjoy a bonheur de médiocrité for which it was as yet ill-prepared.

Second, there was the Reign of Terror, when an “enlightened” vanguard of Jacobins undertook to impose the General Will—when Robespierre acted out his role as “the bloody hand of Rousseau,” as Heine called him.

Third, there was the post-Thermidorean conspiracy of Babeuf and his associates, which added to political messianism the doctrine of economic communism, thereby pointing the way to Marx. The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy, by J. L. Talmon

5. "The ideology behind leftism is not the same ideology as the Democratic party and the agenda of liberals is significantly different than the agenda of the Democratic party, in fact they're directly opposed."

Here are some of the more important aspects of all of those:
a. The Constitution is outdated and must be repolaced with a 'living Constituition.'

b. The collective, or the state is superior to the individual. There is no private property beyond the needs and wishes of the state.

c. The result of the correct governmental polices, laws, leaders will be a utopia on earth.

d. There is no aspect of the life of the citizen which is beyond the purview of the state.

6. "...disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced."
Absolute left-wing nonsense.
a. no one is barred from choices that will improve or destroy their lives.
b. corporations are public, and owned, almost entirely by ordinary folks:

“Exxon Mobil, in fact, is owned mostly by ordinary Americans. Mutual funds, index funds and pension funds (including union pension funds) own about 52 percent of Exxon Mobil’s shares. Individual shareholders, about two million or so, own almost all the rest. The pooh-bahs who run Exxon own less than 1 percent of the company.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/business/02every.html

The rich folk pay almost all of the taxes, and those evil corporations?

In 2006, the oil industry paid $81 billion in income tax, and while Exxon’s earnings increased 89% from 2003 to 2007, their income taxes increased 170%. Exxon: Profit Pirate or Tax Victim?

. Exxon's tax bill breaks down like this: income taxes, $36.5 billion; sales-based taxes, $34.5 billion; "all other" taxes, $45.2 billion.” Exxon, Big Oil Profits Evil Only Until You Weigh Their Tax Bills - US News and World Report
If Exxon’s 2008 tax bill of $116.2 billion were split equally among all tax filers who pay income tax, each filer’s share would be $1,259/year. Still hate Exxon? The Tax Foundation - Number of Americans Paying Zero Federal Income Tax Grows to 43.4 Million


Friend Q, I hope you are at an early point in your journey through life, because you have so much to learn....

I want to start by addressing how you didn't address at all any of my points about the massive difference between leftism and what the Democratic party does. No response to Hedges' critique of how the Democrats have abandoned leftism for comfort, money, and power and no response to my own long list of the actions of this Democratic president and Democratic Congress that are absolutely anathema to leftism. If you're going to respond, please address them, otherwise I don't see the point in this discussion. If you want to label the Democrats as leftist and assert they're the same thing, how do you account for the fact that all of their policies aren't just not leftist but against leftism?

Your apparent definition of leftism isn't remotely accurate. To go for as uncontroversial and official a defintion as possible, we turn to the dictionary where a leftist is described as: "someone who seeks radical social and economic change in the direction of greater equality. "

Leftist | Define Leftist at Dictionary.com

I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest.

That's the opposite of totalitarian as totalitarianism is "absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution." while the many ideologies under the umbrella of libertarian socialism call for NO STATE AT ALL and thus NO CONTROL or CENTRALIZATION at all. So it differs in the most significant and consequential way imaginable.

I don't think you know what leftism is except for a catch-all term for things you oppose. The idea that fascism and Nazism for instance, extremely far right ideologies, are leftist is absurd.

Classical liberalism is different than the liberalism I'm talking about, I assumed you knew that and didn't know we had to define our terms. You asked in the OP "So, How Come You're Still A Leftie?" Classical liberals aren't leftists, so I'm not sure why you brought that up. In terms of history, yes I was referring to since the French Revolution, particularly in America between 1870-1945.

Then you do a lot of examples of how other people who either called themselves liberals or were at one point liberals abandoned liberal principles throughout history in Europe, which I think plays more into my point than yours. Again, it's an ideology and who believes in and practices it can be judged by their actions. So from the European totalitarians onto Stalin, Mao, or anyone else of that ilk you want to mention were totalitarians who believed in supreme human authority over their populations, they weren't leftists. Communism is leftist, but has never been practiced as such, since it never gets past the vanguard stage and that vanguard then makes themselves into an oligarchy. Just as self-proclaimed conservatives have not brought on or fought for limited government the past few decades because they're not really conservative in the political sense. Again, it doesn't matter what people call themselves when we judge them, it matters what they do. Trusting a politician on where they fall on a political spectrum based on their statements rather than their actions, especially when those two are so contradictory, is foolish.

There are forms of totalitarianism that also share some aspects (mostly economic) of socialism that line up with your aspects list, but that's it. No leftist believes "There is no aspect of the life of the citizen which is beyond the purview of the state." and it's ludicrous to say so. Again, it seems you've defined leftism not as what it is but as a term to describe whatever it is you oppose. Totalitarian regimes, by their very nature, are not leftist. The economic and social conditions of an ideal leftist society give everyone equal power and do not require a state, much less state control, so an all-powerful state is common to fascism and other tyrannical forms of governance that are actually on the right-wing. There may be elements of totalitarianism in Communism when practiced, but the extent to which they are totalitarian is the extent to which they veer from leftism. Put rather simply, leftist ideology simply seeks to craft a culture of equality for all (some with an extremely open, democratic state run clearly by, of, and for the people, some with no state at all). There are valid criticism of that, but they're not found in equating it with ideologies where that is decidedly not the case such as totalitarianism with its incredible disparity in power among the populace.

If you don't think corporations wield and exercise undue and destructive influence, then I understand why we're on such opposite ends of the political spectrum, but this really isn't a discussion of the virtues of leftism vs. rightism so that's kinda moot.

I'm just pointing out that what you're describing as leftism plainly isn't, it's your bastardized personal definition divorced from what the word means and what the ideology supports and since the gap between leftist values and policy and Democratic Party values and policy is bigger than the Grand Canyon, your posed question doesn't make sense and misses the point. The Democratic Party is fundamentally corporatist (like the Republican Party), leftism is diametrically opposed to its very essence to corporatism, so you can't equate the two.

As for the condescending final line, however kindly you phrased it, I'd just say right back at you.

There are lots of things about right-wing politics I oppose, but that doesn't mean I'll start ascribing every imaginable negative to them, ignore what the ideology actually is, and just assume if I don't like it, it's "rightist" and everyone who doesn't believe as I do is a "rightist" regardless of how much substantial difference there is between and among them. I don't agree with anarchocapitalism, neo-conservativism, or theocracy, but that doesn't mean they're all even remotely the same and to pretend otherwise would be ignorant or dishonest.

While I admit that I kinda' like reading it, your post is largely nonsense.
"I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest."

That's the end then, isn't it...

You define yourself into one hair-splitting almost impossible to find box, unique in the universe.

OK.

But just because the Democrats pretend, as you do, that they do not wish the command-and-control economy, the statist overarching authority over every aspect of citizen's lives, doesn't mean that, given a more realistic binomial system of political debate, you and they would not be members of the same totalitarian camp that includes all the categories that I named.

The other camp is the one that includes conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians,...but not you.

But, a few corrections..."I don't think you know what leftism is except for a catch-all term for things you oppose."

The left has as it's major principles the four items that I listed.


Just one more correction...

"Totalitarian regimes, by their very nature, are not leftist. The economic and social conditions of an ideal leftist society give everyone equal power and do not require a state, much less state control, so an all-powerful state is common to fascism and other tyrannical forms of governance that are actually on the right-wing."

Fascism, communism, nazism, modern liberalism, are all permutations of what began as progressivism. Prior to WWII, fascism was viewed as a progressive social movement, and was championed by many in both Europe and the United States. Musselini, FDR, Sorel, Lenin, Hitler,...all totalists, who saw the government as superior to the individual, and corporatism as a tool toward the utopia that was just down the road...

1. "Before WW II, where the term fascism was smeared by the actions of Nazi fascism, many progressive leaders proudly proclaimed thralldom with it, and with its major proponents, such as Mussolini. After, they had to not only distance themselves from it, but now proclaim that fascism was ‘right-wing.’" http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Classical_Liberalism_vs_Modern_Liberal_Conservatism.pdf

Toward that end, the individual was expendable, another tool was eugenics...

Your Democrats have up-dated same with an eye toward rationed healthcare, 'death panels.'

2. During the 1930s H.G. Wells's theory of revolutionary praxis centred around a concept of ‘liberal fascism’ whereby the Wellsian ‘liberal’ utopia would be achieved by an authoritarian élite. Taking inspiration from the militarized political movements of the 1930s, this marked a development in the Wellsian theory of revolution from the ‘open conspiracy’ of the 1920s. Although both communist and fascist movements evinced some of the desired qualities of a Wellsian vanguard, it was fascism rather than communism which came closest to Wells's ideal. However, in practice, despite the failure of approaches to parties of the left and centre as possible agents of revolution, Wells rejected the British Union of Fascists. The disparity between Wells's theory and his actions when faced by the reality of fascism echoes the unresolved tension between ends and means at the heart of the concept of ‘liberal fascism’.
H.G. Wells's ?Liberal Fascism? ? Journal of Contemporary History


This, from a discussion of Goldbergs' "Libeal Fascism,"

The side of fascism he attributes to American liberalism is not that associated with the works of George Orwell or the racism and genocide of the Holocaust. It is much less brutal, “smiley-face fascism,” as he puts it. He asserts that liberals hold political principles which are similar to those found in many fascist regimes. They have a desire to form a powerful state which coordinates a society where everybody belongs and everyone is taken care of; where there is faith in the perfectibility of people and the authority of experts; and where everything is political, including health and well-being. Apparently, the Nazis were strong promoters of organic foods and animal rights, fought against large department stores, and promoted antismoking and public health drives.
Liberal Fascism Explained

3. . Fascism is a religion of the state. It is totalitarian in that it assumes everything is 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 defined as the enemy. American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism. Jonah Goldberg, 'Liberal Fascism', p. 23

 

[Bfgrn]

1. "And I consider myself a leftist..."
Let's begin with the necessity for definition of terms...Leftist: socialist, syndicalist, progressive, liberal, fascist, nazi, commuist, statist, collectivist...pick your poison...now tell how you differ from the other eight. I see all as being totalist philosophies.

"How ironic that the way [H. G.] Wells refers to the fascists and Communists could apply to today’s liberals: “they embody the rule of a minority conceited enough to believe that they have a clue to the tangled incoherencies of human life, and need only sufficiently terrorize criticism and opposition to achieve a general happiness,…” And even more prescient, when we consider the current administration against the backdrop of Wells’ criticism of Soviet Communism as central-planning with “police-state thuggery.”
“The Godfather of American Liberalism”
The Godfather of American Liberalism by Fred Siegel, City Journal Spring 2009

2. "... Bush's term wasn't particularly conservative .."
No argument here.

3. "Liberalism, progressivism, leftism, like conservatism or libertarianism, is an ideology that can be defined and demonstrated throughout history."
Let's begin our argument here.
First, the classical liberalism
a. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw government as a necessary evil, of simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the liberalism of which you speak was of the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn’t want to behave, let alone ‘evolve.’

b. “The American intellectual class from the mid 19th century onward has disliked liberalism (which originally referred to individualism, private property, and limits on power) precisely because the [classical] liberal society has no overarching goal.” War Is the Health of the State

c. After the resounding rejection of Wilson's progressivism, the progressives changed their title to 'liberal.'
“Finally, Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m.../ai_n45566374/

4. Now, that "...throughout history..."part: this is only true if history begins with the French Revolution.
The Enlightenment gave impetus to the French Revolution, which was an attempt to cast off both the oppression of the monarchy, and of the Church.

a. In France, there was the development of an apparatus of ideological enforcement for ‘reason.’ But rather than necessitate liberty, Edmund Burke was prescient enough to predict that ‘enlightened despotism’ would be embodied in the general will, a formula for oppression as in ‘tyranny of popular opinion’ or even ‘a dictatorship of the proletariat.’

b. Although attributed to Rousseau, it was Diderot who gave the model for totalitarianism of reason: “We must reason about all things,” and anyone who ‘refuses to seek out the truth’ thereby renounces his human nature and “should be treated by the rest of his species as a wild beast.” So, once ‘truth’ is determined, anyone who doesn’t accept it was “either insane or wicked and morally evil.” It is not the individual who has the “ right to decide about the nature of right and wrong,” but only “the human race,” expressed as the general will. Himmelfarb, “The Roads to Modernity,” p. 167-68

c. Robespierre used Rousseau’s call for a “reign of virtue,’ proclaiming the Republic of Virtue, his euphemism for The Terror. In ‘The Social Contract’ Rousseau advocated death for anyone who did not uphold the common values of the community: the totalitarian view of reshaping of humanity, echoed in communism, Nazism, progressivism. Robespierre: “the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration and, if I may express myself so, of creating a new people.” Himmefarb, Ibid.

d. In this particular idea of the Enlightenment, the need to change human nature, and to eliminate customs and traditions, to remake established institutions, to do away with all inequalities in order to bring man closer to the state, which was the expression of the general will. Talmon, “Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,” p. 3-7


There are, according to Talmon, in "Totalitarian Democracy," three stages in the development of “totalitarian democracy” in the French Revolution. First, there was the Rousseauist intellectual background, which rejected all existing institutions as relics of despotism and clerical obscurantism, and which demanded a complete renovation of society so that it would be an expression of the General Will—this last being no mere consensus but an objective standard of virtue and reason that imperfect humanity must be coerced into obeying in order to enjoy a bonheur de médiocrité for which it was as yet ill-prepared.

Second, there was the Reign of Terror, when an “enlightened” vanguard of Jacobins undertook to impose the General Will—when Robespierre acted out his role as “the bloody hand of Rousseau,” as Heine called him.

Third, there was the post-Thermidorean conspiracy of Babeuf and his associates, which added to political messianism the doctrine of economic communism, thereby pointing the way to Marx. The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy, by J. L. Talmon

5. "The ideology behind leftism is not the same ideology as the Democratic party and the agenda of liberals is significantly different than the agenda of the Democratic party, in fact they're directly opposed."

Here are some of the more important aspects of all of those:
a. The Constitution is outdated and must be repolaced with a 'living Constituition.'

b. The collective, or the state is superior to the individual. There is no private property beyond the needs and wishes of the state.

c. The result of the correct governmental polices, laws, leaders will be a utopia on earth.

d. There is no aspect of the life of the citizen which is beyond the purview of the state.

6. "...disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced."
Absolute left-wing nonsense.
a. no one is barred from choices that will improve or destroy their lives.
b. corporations are public, and owned, almost entirely by ordinary folks:

“Exxon Mobil, in fact, is owned mostly by ordinary Americans. Mutual funds, index funds and pension funds (including union pension funds) own about 52 percent of Exxon Mobil’s shares. Individual shareholders, about two million or so, own almost all the rest. The pooh-bahs who run Exxon own less than 1 percent of the company.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/business/02every.html

The rich folk pay almost all of the taxes, and those evil corporations?

In 2006, the oil industry paid $81 billion in income tax, and while Exxon’s earnings increased 89% from 2003 to 2007, their income taxes increased 170%. Exxon: Profit Pirate or Tax Victim?

. Exxon's tax bill breaks down like this: income taxes, $36.5 billion; sales-based taxes, $34.5 billion; "all other" taxes, $45.2 billion.” Exxon, Big Oil Profits Evil Only Until You Weigh Their Tax Bills - US News and World Report
If Exxon’s 2008 tax bill of $116.2 billion were split equally among all tax filers who pay income tax, each filer’s share would be $1,259/year. Still hate Exxon? The Tax Foundation - Number of Americans Paying Zero Federal Income Tax Grows to 43.4 Million


Friend Q, I hope you are at an early point in your journey through life, because you have so much to learn....

I want to start by addressing how you didn't address at all any of my points about the massive difference between leftism and what the Democratic party does. No response to Hedges' critique of how the Democrats have abandoned leftism for comfort, money, and power and no response to my own long list of the actions of this Democratic president and Democratic Congress that are absolutely anathema to leftism. If you're going to respond, please address them, otherwise I don't see the point in this discussion. If you want to label the Democrats as leftist and assert they're the same thing, how do you account for the fact that all of their policies aren't just not leftist but against leftism?

Your apparent definition of leftism isn't remotely accurate. To go for as uncontroversial and official a defintion as possible, we turn to the dictionary where a leftist is described as: "someone who seeks radical social and economic change in the direction of greater equality. "

Leftist | Define Leftist at Dictionary.com

I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest.

That's the opposite of totalitarian as totalitarianism is "absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution." while the many ideologies under the umbrella of libertarian socialism call for NO STATE AT ALL and thus NO CONTROL or CENTRALIZATION at all. So it differs in the most significant and consequential way imaginable.

I don't think you know what leftism is except for a catch-all term for things you oppose. The idea that fascism and Nazism for instance, extremely far right ideologies, are leftist is absurd.

Classical liberalism is different than the liberalism I'm talking about, I assumed you knew that and didn't know we had to define our terms. You asked in the OP "So, How Come You're Still A Leftie?" Classical liberals aren't leftists, so I'm not sure why you brought that up. In terms of history, yes I was referring to since the French Revolution, particularly in America between 1870-1945.

Then you do a lot of examples of how other people who either called themselves liberals or were at one point liberals abandoned liberal principles throughout history in Europe, which I think plays more into my point than yours. Again, it's an ideology and who believes in and practices it can be judged by their actions. So from the European totalitarians onto Stalin, Mao, or anyone else of that ilk you want to mention were totalitarians who believed in supreme human authority over their populations, they weren't leftists. Communism is leftist, but has never been practiced as such, since it never gets past the vanguard stage and that vanguard then makes themselves into an oligarchy. Just as self-proclaimed conservatives have not brought on or fought for limited government the past few decades because they're not really conservative in the political sense. Again, it doesn't matter what people call themselves when we judge them, it matters what they do. Trusting a politician on where they fall on a political spectrum based on their statements rather than their actions, especially when those two are so contradictory, is foolish.

There are forms of totalitarianism that also share some aspects (mostly economic) of socialism that line up with your aspects list, but that's it. No leftist believes "There is no aspect of the life of the citizen which is beyond the purview of the state." and it's ludicrous to say so. Again, it seems you've defined leftism not as what it is but as a term to describe whatever it is you oppose. Totalitarian regimes, by their very nature, are not leftist. The economic and social conditions of an ideal leftist society give everyone equal power and do not require a state, much less state control, so an all-powerful state is common to fascism and other tyrannical forms of governance that are actually on the right-wing. There may be elements of totalitarianism in Communism when practiced, but the extent to which they are totalitarian is the extent to which they veer from leftism. Put rather simply, leftist ideology simply seeks to craft a culture of equality for all (some with an extremely open, democratic state run clearly by, of, and for the people, some with no state at all). There are valid criticism of that, but they're not found in equating it with ideologies where that is decidedly not the case such as totalitarianism with its incredible disparity in power among the populace.

If you don't think corporations wield and exercise undue and destructive influence, then I understand why we're on such opposite ends of the political spectrum, but this really isn't a discussion of the virtues of leftism vs. rightism so that's kinda moot.

I'm just pointing out that what you're describing as leftism plainly isn't, it's your bastardized personal definition divorced from what the word means and what the ideology supports and since the gap between leftist values and policy and Democratic Party values and policy is bigger than the Grand Canyon, your posed question doesn't make sense and misses the point. The Democratic Party is fundamentally corporatist (like the Republican Party), leftism is diametrically opposed to its very essence to corporatism, so you can't equate the two.

As for the condescending final line, however kindly you phrased it, I'd just say right back at you.

There are lots of things about right-wing politics I oppose, but that doesn't mean I'll start ascribing every imaginable negative to them, ignore what the ideology actually is, and just assume if I don't like it, it's "rightist" and everyone who doesn't believe as I do is a "rightist" regardless of how much substantial difference there is between and among them. I don't agree with anarchocapitalism, neo-conservativism, or theocracy, but that doesn't mean they're all even remotely the same and to pretend otherwise would be ignorant or dishonest.

While I admit that I kinda' like reading it, your post is largely nonsense.
"I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest."

That's the end then, isn't it...

You define yourself into one hair-splitting almost impossible to find box, unique in the universe.

OK.

But just because the Democrats pretend, as you do, that they do not wish the command-and-control economy, the statist overarching authority over every aspect of citizen's lives, doesn't mean that, given a more realistic binomial system of political debate, you and they would not be members of the same totalitarian camp that includes all the categories that I named.

The other camp is the one that includes conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians,...but not you.

But, a few corrections..."I don't think you know what leftism is except for a catch-all term for things you oppose."

The left has as it's major principles the four items that I listed.


Just one more correction...

"Totalitarian regimes, by their very nature, are not leftist. The economic and social conditions of an ideal leftist society give everyone equal power and do not require a state, much less state control, so an all-powerful state is common to fascism and other tyrannical forms of governance that are actually on the right-wing."

Fascism, communism, nazism, modern liberalism, are all permutations of what began as progressivism. Prior to WWII, fascism was viewed as a progressive social movement, and was championed by many in both Europe and the United States. Musselini, FDR, Sorel, Lenin, Hitler,...all totalists, who saw the government as superior to the individual, and corporatism as a tool toward the utopia that was just down the road...

1. "Before WW II, where the term fascism was smeared by the actions of Nazi fascism, many progressive leaders proudly proclaimed thralldom with it, and with its major proponents, such as Mussolini. After, they had to not only distance themselves from it, but now proclaim that fascism was ‘right-wing.’" http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Classical_Liberalism_vs_Modern_Liberal_Conservatism.pdf

Toward that end, the individual was expendable, another tool was eugenics...

Your Democrats have up-dated same with an eye toward rationed healthcare, 'death panels.'

2. During the 1930s H.G. Wells's theory of revolutionary praxis centred around a concept of ‘liberal fascism’ whereby the Wellsian ‘liberal’ utopia would be achieved by an authoritarian élite. Taking inspiration from the militarized political movements of the 1930s, this marked a development in the Wellsian theory of revolution from the ‘open conspiracy’ of the 1920s. Although both communist and fascist movements evinced some of the desired qualities of a Wellsian vanguard, it was fascism rather than communism which came closest to Wells's ideal. However, in practice, despite the failure of approaches to parties of the left and centre as possible agents of revolution, Wells rejected the British Union of Fascists. The disparity between Wells's theory and his actions when faced by the reality of fascism echoes the unresolved tension between ends and means at the heart of the concept of ‘liberal fascism’.
H.G. Wells's ?Liberal Fascism? ? Journal of Contemporary History


This, from a discussion of Goldbergs' "Libeal Fascism,"

The side of fascism he attributes to American liberalism is not that associated with the works of George Orwell or the racism and genocide of the Holocaust. It is much less brutal, “smiley-face fascism,” as he puts it. He asserts that liberals hold political principles which are similar to those found in many fascist regimes. They have a desire to form a powerful state which coordinates a society where everybody belongs and everyone is taken care of; where there is faith in the perfectibility of people and the authority of experts; and where everything is political, including health and well-being. Apparently, the Nazis were strong promoters of organic foods and animal rights, fought against large department stores, and promoted antismoking and public health drives.
Liberal Fascism Explained

3. . Fascism is a religion of the state. It is totalitarian in that it assumes everything is 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 defined as the enemy. American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism. Jonah Goldberg, 'Liberal Fascism', p. 23

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

Then they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

Goldberg, who has no credentials beyond the right-wing nepotism that has enabled his career as a pundit, has drawn a kind of history in absurdly broad and comically wrongheaded strokes. It is not just history done badly, or mere revisionism. It’s a caricature of reality, like something from a comic-book alternative universe: Bizarro history.

The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: Of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance. Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.

Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author of 1984 once dismissed the misuse of "fascism" as meaning "something not desirable." Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the word's meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it -- he refers to Orwell's critique as his "definition of fascism."

And then Goldberg proceeds to define everything that he himself considers undesirable as "fascist." This is just about everything even remotely and vaguely thought of as "liberal": vegetarianism, Social Security, multiculturalism, the "war on poverty," "the politics of meaning." The figures he labels as fascist range from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg's primary achievement is to rob the word of all meaning -- Newspeak incarnate.

The term "fascism" certainly is overused and abused. The public understanding of it is fuzzy at best, and academics struggle to agree on a definition, as Goldberg observes -- and he makes use of that confusion to ramble on for pages about the disagreements without ever providing readers with a clear definition of fascism beyond Orwell's quip.

Along the way, he grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain ineluctable traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin calls its "palingenesis" -- that is, its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously -- no, viciously -- anti-liberal.

So when Goldberg proclaims early on: "This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists," more thorough observers of history might instead just shake their heads. After all, the facts of Mussolini's utopian/socialist origins and the Nazis' similar appeals to socialism by incorporating the name are already quite well known to the same historians who consistently describe fascism as a right-wing enterprise.

What these historians record -- but Goldberg variously ignores or minimizes -- is that the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in fact purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered "socialist" support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and that the larger Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of Mein Kampf are devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war against "the Left," and not merely the Marxism that Goldberg acknowledges was a major focus of Hitler's animus.

This became manifest in the Italian fascist and German Nazi transformations from a faction of street thugs into an actual political power that seized the reins of government, when fascists gradually shed all pretensions or appeals to socialism and became violently anti-socialist and anti-communist. But it was present all along; "the Left" were the people who were beaten and murdered in the 1920s by the squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans sent off to Nazi concentration camps like Dachau were not Jews but socialists, communists, and other left-wing political prisoners, including "liberal" priests and clerics.

The same incoherence underlies what Goldberg imagines is his provocative thesis: the notion that "modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots," and therefore that "fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The core of this claim is his insistent description of populism as a form of left-wing politics -- which, in many of its manifestations, it certainly was.

Yet Goldberg incorrectly claims that "populism had never been known as a conservative or right phenomenon before" Mussolini. In fact, populism has historically been a broad-ranging phenomenon that expressed itself in both right- and left-wing politics, as Chip Berlet has described in some detail in his 2000 book, Right-Wing Populism in America, which details its history from Bacon's Rebellion to the Ku Klux Klan to the modern-day Posse Comitatus and militia/Patriot movements. What distinguishes these populists from their left-wing counterparts, as Berlet explains, is that "they combine attacks on socially oppressed groups with grassroots mass mobilization and distorted forms of antielitism based on scapegoating." Yet, building on a false characterization of the history of populism, Goldberg goes on to characterize such historical figures as Father Charles Coughlin, the rabid anti-Semitic radio talker of the 1930s, and Sen. Joe McCarthy as left-wing figures simply because of their populist foundations.

More to the point, perhaps, is that discussing fascism's "intellectual foundations" is a nonsensical enterprise in the face of the consensus of historical understanding that anti-intellectualism is an essential trait of fascism, a fact that Goldberg briefly acknowledges without assessing its impact on his thesis. As Umberto Eco put it, the fascist insistence on action for its own sake means that "it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation." In this worldview, the instincts of the fascist leader are always superior to the logic and reason of puling intellectuals.

Probably the essential fascist statement is one that Goldberg in fact cites unreflectingly -- Mussolini's famous reply to those who wanted policy specifics from him: "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better." This remark's noteworthy anti-liberalism also seems to elude Goldberg. And the notion that liberal humanism -- with its long history of rationalism and reliance on logic and science -- has anything whatsoever to do with the fascist approach is, once again, an almost comical upending of reality.

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.

What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for the better part of the past century. Robert O. Paxton, in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first genuine fascist organization, a suggestion that Goldberg airily dismisses with the dumb explanation that the Klan of the 1920s disliked Mussolini and his adherents because they were Italian (somewhat true for a time but irrelevant in terms of their ideological affinities, which were substantial enough that by the 1930s, historians have noted, there were frequent operative associations between Klan leaders and European fascists).

Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg's book is any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance -- all of them openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the nation's most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National Alliance's William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton "American fascists," but he makes no mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke -- all of them bona fide fascists: the real thing.

This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing Goldberg's alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it's a handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.

Liberal Fascism may come complete with copious but meaningless footnotes, but it is in the end just a gussied-up version of a favorite talking point of right-wing radio talkers that the real fascists are those nasty liberals, those feminazis and eco-fascists. It may be all dressed up with a pseudo-academic veneer, but the quality of logic contained therein is roughly the same. If only it would vanish into the ether as quickly.

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

 

[JakeStarkey]

Political Chic, I wish you truly understood what 'statist' and 'statism' means. Until you do and apply the definitions, your writings will continue to be meaningless.

 

[JBeukema]

PC lives in a tiny echo chamber where all there is, is Ann Coulter coming through a single speaker on the wall behind her and a flag on the wall before her.

 

[JakeStarkey]

How happy she would be a '1984' world of her echo.

 

[ScreamingEagle]

I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest.

libertarian socialism....?

wouldn't that be a tad bit of an oxymoron....emphasis on moron....?

 

[Dr.Traveler]

I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest.

libertarian socialism....?

wouldn't that be a tad bit of an oxymoron....emphasis on moron....?

Just spitballing here, but I'd imagine Libertarian Socialism means you're in favor of personal privacy and freedom, i.e. do what you want as long as you don't harm others, while maintaining that essential services should be run by the government.

That isn't that crazy of an idea all in all. Sounds pretty close to my philosophy.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I want to start by addressing how you didn't address at all any of my points about the massive difference between leftism and what the Democratic party does. No response to Hedges' critique of how the Democrats have abandoned leftism for comfort, money, and power and no response to my own long list of the actions of this Democratic president and Democratic Congress that are absolutely anathema to leftism. If you're going to respond, please address them, otherwise I don't see the point in this discussion. If you want to label the Democrats as leftist and assert they're the same thing, how do you account for the fact that all of their policies aren't just not leftist but against leftism?

Your apparent definition of leftism isn't remotely accurate. To go for as uncontroversial and official a defintion as possible, we turn to the dictionary where a leftist is described as: "someone who seeks radical social and economic change in the direction of greater equality. "

Leftist | Define Leftist at Dictionary.com

I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest.

That's the opposite of totalitarian as totalitarianism is "absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution." while the many ideologies under the umbrella of libertarian socialism call for NO STATE AT ALL and thus NO CONTROL or CENTRALIZATION at all. So it differs in the most significant and consequential way imaginable.

I don't think you know what leftism is except for a catch-all term for things you oppose. The idea that fascism and Nazism for instance, extremely far right ideologies, are leftist is absurd.

Classical liberalism is different than the liberalism I'm talking about, I assumed you knew that and didn't know we had to define our terms. You asked in the OP "So, How Come You're Still A Leftie?" Classical liberals aren't leftists, so I'm not sure why you brought that up. In terms of history, yes I was referring to since the French Revolution, particularly in America between 1870-1945.

Then you do a lot of examples of how other people who either called themselves liberals or were at one point liberals abandoned liberal principles throughout history in Europe, which I think plays more into my point than yours. Again, it's an ideology and who believes in and practices it can be judged by their actions. So from the European totalitarians onto Stalin, Mao, or anyone else of that ilk you want to mention were totalitarians who believed in supreme human authority over their populations, they weren't leftists. Communism is leftist, but has never been practiced as such, since it never gets past the vanguard stage and that vanguard then makes themselves into an oligarchy. Just as self-proclaimed conservatives have not brought on or fought for limited government the past few decades because they're not really conservative in the political sense. Again, it doesn't matter what people call themselves when we judge them, it matters what they do. Trusting a politician on where they fall on a political spectrum based on their statements rather than their actions, especially when those two are so contradictory, is foolish.

There are forms of totalitarianism that also share some aspects (mostly economic) of socialism that line up with your aspects list, but that's it. No leftist believes "There is no aspect of the life of the citizen which is beyond the purview of the state." and it's ludicrous to say so. Again, it seems you've defined leftism not as what it is but as a term to describe whatever it is you oppose. Totalitarian regimes, by their very nature, are not leftist. The economic and social conditions of an ideal leftist society give everyone equal power and do not require a state, much less state control, so an all-powerful state is common to fascism and other tyrannical forms of governance that are actually on the right-wing. There may be elements of totalitarianism in Communism when practiced, but the extent to which they are totalitarian is the extent to which they veer from leftism. Put rather simply, leftist ideology simply seeks to craft a culture of equality for all (some with an extremely open, democratic state run clearly by, of, and for the people, some with no state at all). There are valid criticism of that, but they're not found in equating it with ideologies where that is decidedly not the case such as totalitarianism with its incredible disparity in power among the populace.

If you don't think corporations wield and exercise undue and destructive influence, then I understand why we're on such opposite ends of the political spectrum, but this really isn't a discussion of the virtues of leftism vs. rightism so that's kinda moot.

I'm just pointing out that what you're describing as leftism plainly isn't, it's your bastardized personal definition divorced from what the word means and what the ideology supports and since the gap between leftist values and policy and Democratic Party values and policy is bigger than the Grand Canyon, your posed question doesn't make sense and misses the point. The Democratic Party is fundamentally corporatist (like the Republican Party), leftism is diametrically opposed to its very essence to corporatism, so you can't equate the two.

As for the condescending final line, however kindly you phrased it, I'd just say right back at you.

There are lots of things about right-wing politics I oppose, but that doesn't mean I'll start ascribing every imaginable negative to them, ignore what the ideology actually is, and just assume if I don't like it, it's "rightist" and everyone who doesn't believe as I do is a "rightist" regardless of how much substantial difference there is between and among them. I don't agree with anarchocapitalism, neo-conservativism, or theocracy, but that doesn't mean they're all even remotely the same and to pretend otherwise would be ignorant or dishonest.

While I admit that I kinda' like reading it, your post is largely nonsense.
"I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest."

That's the end then, isn't it...

You define yourself into one hair-splitting almost impossible to find box, unique in the universe.

OK.

But just because the Democrats pretend, as you do, that they do not wish the command-and-control economy, the statist overarching authority over every aspect of citizen's lives, doesn't mean that, given a more realistic binomial system of political debate, you and they would not be members of the same totalitarian camp that includes all the categories that I named.

The other camp is the one that includes conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians,...but not you.

But, a few corrections..."I don't think you know what leftism is except for a catch-all term for things you oppose."

The left has as it's major principles the four items that I listed.


Just one more correction...

"Totalitarian regimes, by their very nature, are not leftist. The economic and social conditions of an ideal leftist society give everyone equal power and do not require a state, much less state control, so an all-powerful state is common to fascism and other tyrannical forms of governance that are actually on the right-wing."

Fascism, communism, nazism, modern liberalism, are all permutations of what began as progressivism. Prior to WWII, fascism was viewed as a progressive social movement, and was championed by many in both Europe and the United States. Musselini, FDR, Sorel, Lenin, Hitler,...all totalists, who saw the government as superior to the individual, and corporatism as a tool toward the utopia that was just down the road...

1. "Before WW II, where the term fascism was smeared by the actions of Nazi fascism, many progressive leaders proudly proclaimed thralldom with it, and with its major proponents, such as Mussolini. After, they had to not only distance themselves from it, but now proclaim that fascism was ‘right-wing.’" http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Classical_Liberalism_vs_Modern_Liberal_Conservatism.pdf

Toward that end, the individual was expendable, another tool was eugenics...

Your Democrats have up-dated same with an eye toward rationed healthcare, 'death panels.'

2. During the 1930s H.G. Wells's theory of revolutionary praxis centred around a concept of ‘liberal fascism’ whereby the Wellsian ‘liberal’ utopia would be achieved by an authoritarian élite. Taking inspiration from the militarized political movements of the 1930s, this marked a development in the Wellsian theory of revolution from the ‘open conspiracy’ of the 1920s. Although both communist and fascist movements evinced some of the desired qualities of a Wellsian vanguard, it was fascism rather than communism which came closest to Wells's ideal. However, in practice, despite the failure of approaches to parties of the left and centre as possible agents of revolution, Wells rejected the British Union of Fascists. The disparity between Wells's theory and his actions when faced by the reality of fascism echoes the unresolved tension between ends and means at the heart of the concept of ‘liberal fascism’.
H.G. Wells's ?Liberal Fascism? ? Journal of Contemporary History


This, from a discussion of Goldbergs' "Libeal Fascism,"

The side of fascism he attributes to American liberalism is not that associated with the works of George Orwell or the racism and genocide of the Holocaust. It is much less brutal, “smiley-face fascism,” as he puts it. He asserts that liberals hold political principles which are similar to those found in many fascist regimes. They have a desire to form a powerful state which coordinates a society where everybody belongs and everyone is taken care of; where there is faith in the perfectibility of people and the authority of experts; and where everything is political, including health and well-being. Apparently, the Nazis were strong promoters of organic foods and animal rights, fought against large department stores, and promoted antismoking and public health drives.
Liberal Fascism Explained

3. . Fascism is a religion of the state. It is totalitarian in that it assumes everything is 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 defined as the enemy. American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism. Jonah Goldberg, 'Liberal Fascism', p. 23

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

Then they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

Goldberg, who has no credentials beyond the right-wing nepotism that has enabled his career as a pundit, has drawn a kind of history in absurdly broad and comically wrongheaded strokes. It is not just history done badly, or mere revisionism. It’s a caricature of reality, like something from a comic-book alternative universe: Bizarro history.

The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: Of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance. Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.

Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author of 1984 once dismissed the misuse of "fascism" as meaning "something not desirable." Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the word's meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it -- he refers to Orwell's critique as his "definition of fascism."

And then Goldberg proceeds to define everything that he himself considers undesirable as "fascist." This is just about everything even remotely and vaguely thought of as "liberal": vegetarianism, Social Security, multiculturalism, the "war on poverty," "the politics of meaning." The figures he labels as fascist range from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg's primary achievement is to rob the word of all meaning -- Newspeak incarnate.

The term "fascism" certainly is overused and abused. The public understanding of it is fuzzy at best, and academics struggle to agree on a definition, as Goldberg observes -- and he makes use of that confusion to ramble on for pages about the disagreements without ever providing readers with a clear definition of fascism beyond Orwell's quip.

Along the way, he grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain ineluctable traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin calls its "palingenesis" -- that is, its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously -- no, viciously -- anti-liberal.

So when Goldberg proclaims early on: "This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists," more thorough observers of history might instead just shake their heads. After all, the facts of Mussolini's utopian/socialist origins and the Nazis' similar appeals to socialism by incorporating the name are already quite well known to the same historians who consistently describe fascism as a right-wing enterprise.

What these historians record -- but Goldberg variously ignores or minimizes -- is that the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in fact purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered "socialist" support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and that the larger Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of Mein Kampf are devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war against "the Left," and not merely the Marxism that Goldberg acknowledges was a major focus of Hitler's animus.

This became manifest in the Italian fascist and German Nazi transformations from a faction of street thugs into an actual political power that seized the reins of government, when fascists gradually shed all pretensions or appeals to socialism and became violently anti-socialist and anti-communist. But it was present all along; "the Left" were the people who were beaten and murdered in the 1920s by the squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans sent off to Nazi concentration camps like Dachau were not Jews but socialists, communists, and other left-wing political prisoners, including "liberal" priests and clerics.

The same incoherence underlies what Goldberg imagines is his provocative thesis: the notion that "modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots," and therefore that "fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The core of this claim is his insistent description of populism as a form of left-wing politics -- which, in many of its manifestations, it certainly was.

Yet Goldberg incorrectly claims that "populism had never been known as a conservative or right phenomenon before" Mussolini. In fact, populism has historically been a broad-ranging phenomenon that expressed itself in both right- and left-wing politics, as Chip Berlet has described in some detail in his 2000 book, Right-Wing Populism in America, which details its history from Bacon's Rebellion to the Ku Klux Klan to the modern-day Posse Comitatus and militia/Patriot movements. What distinguishes these populists from their left-wing counterparts, as Berlet explains, is that "they combine attacks on socially oppressed groups with grassroots mass mobilization and distorted forms of antielitism based on scapegoating." Yet, building on a false characterization of the history of populism, Goldberg goes on to characterize such historical figures as Father Charles Coughlin, the rabid anti-Semitic radio talker of the 1930s, and Sen. Joe McCarthy as left-wing figures simply because of their populist foundations.

More to the point, perhaps, is that discussing fascism's "intellectual foundations" is a nonsensical enterprise in the face of the consensus of historical understanding that anti-intellectualism is an essential trait of fascism, a fact that Goldberg briefly acknowledges without assessing its impact on his thesis. As Umberto Eco put it, the fascist insistence on action for its own sake means that "it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation." In this worldview, the instincts of the fascist leader are always superior to the logic and reason of puling intellectuals.

Probably the essential fascist statement is one that Goldberg in fact cites unreflectingly -- Mussolini's famous reply to those who wanted policy specifics from him: "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better." This remark's noteworthy anti-liberalism also seems to elude Goldberg. And the notion that liberal humanism -- with its long history of rationalism and reliance on logic and science -- has anything whatsoever to do with the fascist approach is, once again, an almost comical upending of reality.

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.

What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for the better part of the past century. Robert O. Paxton, in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first genuine fascist organization, a suggestion that Goldberg airily dismisses with the dumb explanation that the Klan of the 1920s disliked Mussolini and his adherents because they were Italian (somewhat true for a time but irrelevant in terms of their ideological affinities, which were substantial enough that by the 1930s, historians have noted, there were frequent operative associations between Klan leaders and European fascists).

Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg's book is any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance -- all of them openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the nation's most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National Alliance's William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton "American fascists," but he makes no mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke -- all of them bona fide fascists: the real thing.

This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing Goldberg's alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it's a handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.

Liberal Fascism may come complete with copious but meaningless footnotes, but it is in the end just a gussied-up version of a favorite talking point of right-wing radio talkers that the real fascists are those nasty liberals, those feminazis and eco-fascists. It may be all dressed up with a pseudo-academic veneer, but the quality of logic contained therein is roughly the same. If only it would vanish into the ether as quickly.

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

Did you read the book?

Oh, what a surprise.

 

[ScreamingEagle]

I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest.

libertarian socialism....?

wouldn't that be a tad bit of an oxymoron....emphasis on moron....?

Just spitballing here, but I'd imagine Libertarian Socialism means you're in favor of personal privacy and freedom, i.e. do what you want as long as you don't harm others, while maintaining that essential services should be run by the government.

That isn't that crazy of an idea all in all. Sounds pretty close to my philosophy.

So what happens to your great libertarian "personal freedom" when you say, start your own business, but at some point they (the state powers that be) decide to take it from you and make it part of the socialist collective....?

 

[JakeStarkey]

A socialist collective is sneaking up behind you, eagle! Boo!

 

[Bfgrn]

While I admit that I kinda' like reading it, your post is largely nonsense.
"I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest."

That's the end then, isn't it...

You define yourself into one hair-splitting almost impossible to find box, unique in the universe.

OK.

But just because the Democrats pretend, as you do, that they do not wish the command-and-control economy, the statist overarching authority over every aspect of citizen's lives, doesn't mean that, given a more realistic binomial system of political debate, you and they would not be members of the same totalitarian camp that includes all the categories that I named.

The other camp is the one that includes conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians,...but not you.

But, a few corrections..."I don't think you know what leftism is except for a catch-all term for things you oppose."

The left has as it's major principles the four items that I listed.


Just one more correction...

"Totalitarian regimes, by their very nature, are not leftist. The economic and social conditions of an ideal leftist society give everyone equal power and do not require a state, much less state control, so an all-powerful state is common to fascism and other tyrannical forms of governance that are actually on the right-wing."

Fascism, communism, nazism, modern liberalism, are all permutations of what began as progressivism. Prior to WWII, fascism was viewed as a progressive social movement, and was championed by many in both Europe and the United States. Musselini, FDR, Sorel, Lenin, Hitler,...all totalists, who saw the government as superior to the individual, and corporatism as a tool toward the utopia that was just down the road...

1. "Before WW II, where the term fascism was smeared by the actions of Nazi fascism, many progressive leaders proudly proclaimed thralldom with it, and with its major proponents, such as Mussolini. After, they had to not only distance themselves from it, but now proclaim that fascism was ‘right-wing.’" http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Classical_Liberalism_vs_Modern_Liberal_Conservatism.pdf

Toward that end, the individual was expendable, another tool was eugenics...

Your Democrats have up-dated same with an eye toward rationed healthcare, 'death panels.'

2. During the 1930s H.G. Wells's theory of revolutionary praxis centred around a concept of ‘liberal fascism’ whereby the Wellsian ‘liberal’ utopia would be achieved by an authoritarian élite. Taking inspiration from the militarized political movements of the 1930s, this marked a development in the Wellsian theory of revolution from the ‘open conspiracy’ of the 1920s. Although both communist and fascist movements evinced some of the desired qualities of a Wellsian vanguard, it was fascism rather than communism which came closest to Wells's ideal. However, in practice, despite the failure of approaches to parties of the left and centre as possible agents of revolution, Wells rejected the British Union of Fascists. The disparity between Wells's theory and his actions when faced by the reality of fascism echoes the unresolved tension between ends and means at the heart of the concept of ‘liberal fascism’.
H.G. Wells's ?Liberal Fascism? ? Journal of Contemporary History


This, from a discussion of Goldbergs' "Libeal Fascism,"

The side of fascism he attributes to American liberalism is not that associated with the works of George Orwell or the racism and genocide of the Holocaust. It is much less brutal, “smiley-face fascism,” as he puts it. He asserts that liberals hold political principles which are similar to those found in many fascist regimes. They have a desire to form a powerful state which coordinates a society where everybody belongs and everyone is taken care of; where there is faith in the perfectibility of people and the authority of experts; and where everything is political, including health and well-being. Apparently, the Nazis were strong promoters of organic foods and animal rights, fought against large department stores, and promoted antismoking and public health drives.
Liberal Fascism Explained

3. . Fascism is a religion of the state. It is totalitarian in that it assumes everything is 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 defined as the enemy. American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism. Jonah Goldberg, 'Liberal Fascism', p. 23

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

Then they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

Goldberg, who has no credentials beyond the right-wing nepotism that has enabled his career as a pundit, has drawn a kind of history in absurdly broad and comically wrongheaded strokes. It is not just history done badly, or mere revisionism. It’s a caricature of reality, like something from a comic-book alternative universe: Bizarro history.

The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: Of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance. Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.

Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author of 1984 once dismissed the misuse of "fascism" as meaning "something not desirable." Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the word's meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it -- he refers to Orwell's critique as his "definition of fascism."

And then Goldberg proceeds to define everything that he himself considers undesirable as "fascist." This is just about everything even remotely and vaguely thought of as "liberal": vegetarianism, Social Security, multiculturalism, the "war on poverty," "the politics of meaning." The figures he labels as fascist range from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg's primary achievement is to rob the word of all meaning -- Newspeak incarnate.

The term "fascism" certainly is overused and abused. The public understanding of it is fuzzy at best, and academics struggle to agree on a definition, as Goldberg observes -- and he makes use of that confusion to ramble on for pages about the disagreements without ever providing readers with a clear definition of fascism beyond Orwell's quip.

Along the way, he grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain ineluctable traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin calls its "palingenesis" -- that is, its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously -- no, viciously -- anti-liberal.

So when Goldberg proclaims early on: "This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists," more thorough observers of history might instead just shake their heads. After all, the facts of Mussolini's utopian/socialist origins and the Nazis' similar appeals to socialism by incorporating the name are already quite well known to the same historians who consistently describe fascism as a right-wing enterprise.

What these historians record -- but Goldberg variously ignores or minimizes -- is that the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in fact purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered "socialist" support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and that the larger Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of Mein Kampf are devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war against "the Left," and not merely the Marxism that Goldberg acknowledges was a major focus of Hitler's animus.

This became manifest in the Italian fascist and German Nazi transformations from a faction of street thugs into an actual political power that seized the reins of government, when fascists gradually shed all pretensions or appeals to socialism and became violently anti-socialist and anti-communist. But it was present all along; "the Left" were the people who were beaten and murdered in the 1920s by the squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans sent off to Nazi concentration camps like Dachau were not Jews but socialists, communists, and other left-wing political prisoners, including "liberal" priests and clerics.

The same incoherence underlies what Goldberg imagines is his provocative thesis: the notion that "modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots," and therefore that "fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The core of this claim is his insistent description of populism as a form of left-wing politics -- which, in many of its manifestations, it certainly was.

Yet Goldberg incorrectly claims that "populism had never been known as a conservative or right phenomenon before" Mussolini. In fact, populism has historically been a broad-ranging phenomenon that expressed itself in both right- and left-wing politics, as Chip Berlet has described in some detail in his 2000 book, Right-Wing Populism in America, which details its history from Bacon's Rebellion to the Ku Klux Klan to the modern-day Posse Comitatus and militia/Patriot movements. What distinguishes these populists from their left-wing counterparts, as Berlet explains, is that "they combine attacks on socially oppressed groups with grassroots mass mobilization and distorted forms of antielitism based on scapegoating." Yet, building on a false characterization of the history of populism, Goldberg goes on to characterize such historical figures as Father Charles Coughlin, the rabid anti-Semitic radio talker of the 1930s, and Sen. Joe McCarthy as left-wing figures simply because of their populist foundations.

More to the point, perhaps, is that discussing fascism's "intellectual foundations" is a nonsensical enterprise in the face of the consensus of historical understanding that anti-intellectualism is an essential trait of fascism, a fact that Goldberg briefly acknowledges without assessing its impact on his thesis. As Umberto Eco put it, the fascist insistence on action for its own sake means that "it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation." In this worldview, the instincts of the fascist leader are always superior to the logic and reason of puling intellectuals.

Probably the essential fascist statement is one that Goldberg in fact cites unreflectingly -- Mussolini's famous reply to those who wanted policy specifics from him: "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better." This remark's noteworthy anti-liberalism also seems to elude Goldberg. And the notion that liberal humanism -- with its long history of rationalism and reliance on logic and science -- has anything whatsoever to do with the fascist approach is, once again, an almost comical upending of reality.

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.

What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for the better part of the past century. Robert O. Paxton, in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first genuine fascist organization, a suggestion that Goldberg airily dismisses with the dumb explanation that the Klan of the 1920s disliked Mussolini and his adherents because they were Italian (somewhat true for a time but irrelevant in terms of their ideological affinities, which were substantial enough that by the 1930s, historians have noted, there were frequent operative associations between Klan leaders and European fascists).

Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg's book is any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance -- all of them openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the nation's most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National Alliance's William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton "American fascists," but he makes no mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke -- all of them bona fide fascists: the real thing.

This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing Goldberg's alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it's a handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.

Liberal Fascism may come complete with copious but meaningless footnotes, but it is in the end just a gussied-up version of a favorite talking point of right-wing radio talkers that the real fascists are those nasty liberals, those feminazis and eco-fascists. It may be all dressed up with a pseudo-academic veneer, but the quality of logic contained therein is roughly the same. If only it would vanish into the ether as quickly.

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

Did you read the book?

Oh, what a surprise.

Why don't you start with Mein Kampf and work from there...

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Volume Two - The National Socialist Movement
Chapter IV: Personality and the Conception of the Folkish State

It would be absurd to appraise a man's worth by the race to which he belongs and at the same time to make war against the Marxist principle, that all men are equal, without being determined to pursue our own principle to its ultimate consequences. If we admit the significance of blood, that is to say, if we recognize the race as the fundamental element on which all life is based, we shall have to apply to the individual the logical consequences of this principle. In general I must estimate the worth of nations differently, on the basis of the different races from which they spring, and I must also differentiate in estimating the worth of the individual within his own race. The principle, that one people is not the same as another, applies also to the individual members of a national community. No one brain, for instance, is equal to another; because the constituent elements belonging to the same blood vary in a thousand subtle details, though they are fundamentally of the same quality.

The first consequence of this fact is comparatively simple. It demands that those elements within the folk-community which show the best racial qualities ought to be encouraged more than the others and especially they should be encouraged to increase and multiply.

---

The folkish philosophy is fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason of the fact that the former recognizes the significance of race and therefore also personal worth and has made these the pillars of its structure. These are the most important factors of its view of life.

If the National Socialist Movement should fail to understand the fundamental importance of this essential principle, if it should merely varnish the external appearance of the present State and adopt the majority principle, it would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground. For that reason it would not have the right to call itself a philosophy of life. If the social programme of the movement consisted in eliminating personality and putting the multitude in its place, then National Socialism would be corrupted with the poison of Marxism, just as our national-bourgeois parties are.

The People's State must assure the welfare of its citizens by recognizing the importance of personal values under all circumstances and by preparing the way for the maximum of productive efficiency in all the various branches of economic life, thus securing to the individual the highest possible share in the general output.

Hence the People's State must mercilessly expurgate from all the leading circles in the government of the country the parliamentarian principle, according to which decisive power through the majority vote is invested in the multitude. Personal responsibility must be substituted in its stead.

 

[PoliticalChic]

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

Then they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

Goldberg, who has no credentials beyond the right-wing nepotism that has enabled his career as a pundit, has drawn a kind of history in absurdly broad and comically wrongheaded strokes. It is not just history done badly, or mere revisionism. It’s a caricature of reality, like something from a comic-book alternative universe: Bizarro history.

The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: Of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance. Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.

Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author of 1984 once dismissed the misuse of "fascism" as meaning "something not desirable." Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the word's meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it -- he refers to Orwell's critique as his "definition of fascism."

And then Goldberg proceeds to define everything that he himself considers undesirable as "fascist." This is just about everything even remotely and vaguely thought of as "liberal": vegetarianism, Social Security, multiculturalism, the "war on poverty," "the politics of meaning." The figures he labels as fascist range from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg's primary achievement is to rob the word of all meaning -- Newspeak incarnate.

The term "fascism" certainly is overused and abused. The public understanding of it is fuzzy at best, and academics struggle to agree on a definition, as Goldberg observes -- and he makes use of that confusion to ramble on for pages about the disagreements without ever providing readers with a clear definition of fascism beyond Orwell's quip.

Along the way, he grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain ineluctable traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin calls its "palingenesis" -- that is, its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously -- no, viciously -- anti-liberal.

So when Goldberg proclaims early on: "This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists," more thorough observers of history might instead just shake their heads. After all, the facts of Mussolini's utopian/socialist origins and the Nazis' similar appeals to socialism by incorporating the name are already quite well known to the same historians who consistently describe fascism as a right-wing enterprise.

What these historians record -- but Goldberg variously ignores or minimizes -- is that the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in fact purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered "socialist" support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and that the larger Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of Mein Kampf are devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war against "the Left," and not merely the Marxism that Goldberg acknowledges was a major focus of Hitler's animus.

This became manifest in the Italian fascist and German Nazi transformations from a faction of street thugs into an actual political power that seized the reins of government, when fascists gradually shed all pretensions or appeals to socialism and became violently anti-socialist and anti-communist. But it was present all along; "the Left" were the people who were beaten and murdered in the 1920s by the squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans sent off to Nazi concentration camps like Dachau were not Jews but socialists, communists, and other left-wing political prisoners, including "liberal" priests and clerics.

The same incoherence underlies what Goldberg imagines is his provocative thesis: the notion that "modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots," and therefore that "fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The core of this claim is his insistent description of populism as a form of left-wing politics -- which, in many of its manifestations, it certainly was.

Yet Goldberg incorrectly claims that "populism had never been known as a conservative or right phenomenon before" Mussolini. In fact, populism has historically been a broad-ranging phenomenon that expressed itself in both right- and left-wing politics, as Chip Berlet has described in some detail in his 2000 book, Right-Wing Populism in America, which details its history from Bacon's Rebellion to the Ku Klux Klan to the modern-day Posse Comitatus and militia/Patriot movements. What distinguishes these populists from their left-wing counterparts, as Berlet explains, is that "they combine attacks on socially oppressed groups with grassroots mass mobilization and distorted forms of antielitism based on scapegoating." Yet, building on a false characterization of the history of populism, Goldberg goes on to characterize such historical figures as Father Charles Coughlin, the rabid anti-Semitic radio talker of the 1930s, and Sen. Joe McCarthy as left-wing figures simply because of their populist foundations.

More to the point, perhaps, is that discussing fascism's "intellectual foundations" is a nonsensical enterprise in the face of the consensus of historical understanding that anti-intellectualism is an essential trait of fascism, a fact that Goldberg briefly acknowledges without assessing its impact on his thesis. As Umberto Eco put it, the fascist insistence on action for its own sake means that "it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation." In this worldview, the instincts of the fascist leader are always superior to the logic and reason of puling intellectuals.

Probably the essential fascist statement is one that Goldberg in fact cites unreflectingly -- Mussolini's famous reply to those who wanted policy specifics from him: "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better." This remark's noteworthy anti-liberalism also seems to elude Goldberg. And the notion that liberal humanism -- with its long history of rationalism and reliance on logic and science -- has anything whatsoever to do with the fascist approach is, once again, an almost comical upending of reality.

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.

What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for the better part of the past century. Robert O. Paxton, in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first genuine fascist organization, a suggestion that Goldberg airily dismisses with the dumb explanation that the Klan of the 1920s disliked Mussolini and his adherents because they were Italian (somewhat true for a time but irrelevant in terms of their ideological affinities, which were substantial enough that by the 1930s, historians have noted, there were frequent operative associations between Klan leaders and European fascists).

Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg's book is any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance -- all of them openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the nation's most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National Alliance's William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton "American fascists," but he makes no mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke -- all of them bona fide fascists: the real thing.

This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing Goldberg's alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it's a handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.

Liberal Fascism may come complete with copious but meaningless footnotes, but it is in the end just a gussied-up version of a favorite talking point of right-wing radio talkers that the real fascists are those nasty liberals, those feminazis and eco-fascists. It may be all dressed up with a pseudo-academic veneer, but the quality of logic contained therein is roughly the same. If only it would vanish into the ether as quickly.

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

Did you read the book?

Oh, what a surprise.

Why don't you start with Mein Kampf and work from there...

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Volume Two - The National Socialist Movement
Chapter IV: Personality and the Conception of the Folkish State

It would be absurd to appraise a man's worth by the race to which he belongs and at the same time to make war against the Marxist principle, that all men are equal, without being determined to pursue our own principle to its ultimate consequences. If we admit the significance of blood, that is to say, if we recognize the race as the fundamental element on which all life is based, we shall have to apply to the individual the logical consequences of this principle. In general I must estimate the worth of nations differently, on the basis of the different races from which they spring, and I must also differentiate in estimating the worth of the individual within his own race. The principle, that one people is not the same as another, applies also to the individual members of a national community. No one brain, for instance, is equal to another; because the constituent elements belonging to the same blood vary in a thousand subtle details, though they are fundamentally of the same quality.

The first consequence of this fact is comparatively simple. It demands that those elements within the folk-community which show the best racial qualities ought to be encouraged more than the others and especially they should be encouraged to increase and multiply.

---

The folkish philosophy is fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason of the fact that the former recognizes the significance of race and therefore also personal worth and has made these the pillars of its structure. These are the most important factors of its view of life.

If the National Socialist Movement should fail to understand the fundamental importance of this essential principle, if it should merely varnish the external appearance of the present State and adopt the majority principle, it would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground. For that reason it would not have the right to call itself a philosophy of life. If the social programme of the movement consisted in eliminating personality and putting the multitude in its place, then National Socialism would be corrupted with the poison of Marxism, just as our national-bourgeois parties are.

The People's State must assure the welfare of its citizens by recognizing the importance of personal values under all circumstances and by preparing the way for the maximum of productive efficiency in all the various branches of economic life, thus securing to the individual the highest possible share in the general output.

Hence the People's State must mercilessly expurgate from all the leading circles in the government of the country the parliamentarian principle, according to which decisive power through the majority vote is invested in the multitude. Personal responsibility must be substituted in its stead.

So, the answer really is 'no'?

 

[beowolfe]

How can any thoughtful citizen continue to support the liberal-progressive agenda?
What aspects of a failed philosophy do you not understand?

Ever hear of a little thing called 'The American Century'? If so, please not that the vast majority of that century was under the progressive agenda. Failed???? Hardly. The greatest days of America have been under the progressive banner. And to be honest, if not for Reagan and those trying to follow in his footsteps, the progressive agenda would have still been going strong and successful. Conservatives are the one with the failed ideology. Voodoo economics, pre-emtive wars.........and candidates who don't know much about the constitution and nothing about governing. For instance, most conservatives seem to think that the first amendment protects you from retalliation from your employer if you say something in public that compromises the employer's business.....

 

[Bfgrn]

Did you read the book?

Oh, what a surprise.

Why don't you start with Mein Kampf and work from there...

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Volume Two - The National Socialist Movement
Chapter IV: Personality and the Conception of the Folkish State

It would be absurd to appraise a man's worth by the race to which he belongs and at the same time to make war against the Marxist principle, that all men are equal, without being determined to pursue our own principle to its ultimate consequences. If we admit the significance of blood, that is to say, if we recognize the race as the fundamental element on which all life is based, we shall have to apply to the individual the logical consequences of this principle. In general I must estimate the worth of nations differently, on the basis of the different races from which they spring, and I must also differentiate in estimating the worth of the individual within his own race. The principle, that one people is not the same as another, applies also to the individual members of a national community. No one brain, for instance, is equal to another; because the constituent elements belonging to the same blood vary in a thousand subtle details, though they are fundamentally of the same quality.

The first consequence of this fact is comparatively simple. It demands that those elements within the folk-community which show the best racial qualities ought to be encouraged more than the others and especially they should be encouraged to increase and multiply.

---

The folkish philosophy is fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason of the fact that the former recognizes the significance of race and therefore also personal worth and has made these the pillars of its structure. These are the most important factors of its view of life.

If the National Socialist Movement should fail to understand the fundamental importance of this essential principle, if it should merely varnish the external appearance of the present State and adopt the majority principle, it would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground. For that reason it would not have the right to call itself a philosophy of life. If the social programme of the movement consisted in eliminating personality and putting the multitude in its place, then National Socialism would be corrupted with the poison of Marxism, just as our national-bourgeois parties are.

The People's State must assure the welfare of its citizens by recognizing the importance of personal values under all circumstances and by preparing the way for the maximum of productive efficiency in all the various branches of economic life, thus securing to the individual the highest possible share in the general output.

Hence the People's State must mercilessly expurgate from all the leading circles in the government of the country the parliamentarian principle, according to which decisive power through the majority vote is invested in the multitude. Personal responsibility must be substituted in its stead.

So, the answer really is 'no'?

Have you read Mein Kampf? And if you answer yes, then you would know that Goldberg's book is false.

"O con noi o contro di noi"--You're either with us or against us.
Benito Mussolini

"It is with absolute frankness that we speak of this struggle of the proletariat; each man must choose between joining our side or the other side. Any attempt to avoid taking sides in this issue must end in fiasco."
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
George W. Bush


"While not all conservatives are authoritarians; all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives."
Robert Altmeyer - The Authoritarians

 

[ScreamingEagle]

A socialist collective is sneaking up behind you, eagle! Boo!

Yer darn right it is.....just read about Kelo v. New London....and Justice Scalia's question "You can take from A and give to B if B pays more taxes?"

...pretty sneaky...and scary too....unless yer a mindless member of the borg...

 

[JBeukema]

I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest.

libertarian socialism....?

wouldn't that be a tad bit of an oxymoron....emphasis on moron....?

Not if you know what words mean.

Libertarian socialism would be in contrast to authoritarian collectivism.

Compare twin oaks or a hippie camp to the USSR

 

[JBeukema]

I missed something. Why is bfgrn quoting Mein Kampf in response to PC's wall of text?

 

[ScreamingEagle]

I don't really subscribe to a particularly ideology, I've yet to find one that totally matches up with my beliefs, but libertarian socialism comes closest.

libertarian socialism....?

wouldn't that be a tad bit of an oxymoron....emphasis on moron....?

Not if you know what words mean.

Libertarian socialism would be in contrast to authoritarian collectivism.

Compare twin oaks or a hippie camp to the USSR

izatso?

just how do you define libertarian and socialism...?

 

[JBeukema]

Libertarianism, in the strict sense, is the moral view that agents initially fully own themselves and have certain moral powers to acquire property rights in external things. In a looser sense, libertarianism is any view that approximates the strict view.

...

Libertarianism is often thought of as “right-wing” doctrine. This, however, is mistaken for at least two reasons. First, on social—rather than economic—issues, libertarianism tends to be “left-wing”. It opposes laws that restrict consensual and private sexual relationships between adults (e.g., gay sex, extra-marital sex, and deviant sex), laws that restrict drug use, laws that impose religious views or practices on individuals, and compulsory military service. Second, in addition to the better-known version of libertarianism—right-libertarianism—there is also a version known as “left-libertarianism”. Both endorse full self-ownership, but they differ with respect to the powers agents have to appropriate unowned natural resources (land, air, water, minerals, etc.). Right-libertarianism holds that typically such resources may be appropriated by the first person who discovers them, mixes her labor with them, or merely claims them—without the consent of others, and with little or no payment to them. Left-libertarianism, by contrast, holds that unappropriated natural resources belong to everyone in some egalitarian manner. It can, for example, require those who claim rights over natural resources to make a payment to others for the value of those rights. This can provide the basis for a kind of egalitarian redistribution.
The best known early statement of (something close to) libertarianism is Locke (1690)

Libertarianism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)


Socialism: A stage of socio-economic development withing a society characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist and egalitarian principles.