Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #383254 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

Synopsis
Draws parallels between the fascism of the 1930s and the liberalism of the present, arguing that liberal politicians from Woodrow Wilson to Hillary Clinton have espoused policies and principles similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism.

Customer Reviews

Reclaiming Liberalism
This remarkable book has been a huge hit in the USA, less so in the UK as most of the potent examples Jonah Goldberg deploys in pointing up the explicitly authoritarian roots in much modern Leftism are primarily American.

The book's sheer density of grisly examples of 'progressive' oppressiveness is maybe a problem - after a while there is Just Too Much to cope with comfortably. But what gruesome and spectacular examples many of them are.

For me the best part of the book (apart from the gushing praise for the likes of Mussolini from so many seemingly clever people at the time) is the demolition job done on 60s radicalism in the USA. Goldberg nails down in convincing detail how these people managed to veil their openly vicious revolutionary drivel behind all the blathering about 'peace', and (worryingly) how a strain of their totalitarian thinking is still with us, mutating into ever more ingenious ways of extending state control over all aspects of our lives.

This for me is the main danger in the UK's current binge of Big Statism as inflated by unrelenting EU requirements.

Not just a sly erosion of responsibility and our freedoms. Much worse, erosion of the very idea of responsibility, of freedom as something worth having - and worth fighting for.

Arrangements of an astonishingly subtle sort which have helped define some of the highest standards for public life and process ever seen in human history might casually come to be dismissed as boring, old-fashioned - not part of the `contemporary narrative'.

Is there a point at which Liberal Fascism via Big Government wins?

Has an unrecognised tipping-point been reached - and (worse) been passed? When state-sponsored passive cynicism and attendant public spending are so enormous a part of our lives that instead of our owning the state, the bland state owns us?

How would we tell? Would we care? Read the book, think, and decide for yourself.

A Non American perspective.
Liberal in the American political sphere means left, Socialism was and is a dirty word in America thus the American left adopted the word "liberal" thus you have to be aware of the American meaning of "Liberal" as you read this book.

To a large degree this book is nothing new, Both Karl Popper and his friend and noble prize winner, Friedrich Hayek both pointed out the roots of Nazism, popper in his "open society" and Hayek in "the road to surfdom", both were Austrians and saw at close quarters the birth of Nazism.

The difference between the two most evil ideologies of the 20th centruy is written in their respective names, "international Socialism" and "national socialism" both although manifesting themselves in different guises they both come from the same well of philosophical thought, as popper pointed out Hagel

As a "classical Liberal" myself I can recommend this book, it is sure to upset the right and left kind of people, its a good introduction to the issue of "statism" but to truly understand the sources of the killing fields of the 20th century, Belsen to Cambodia, Gulags of Siberia to the cultural revolution you will have to go much further than frothy American politics, but in essence Goldberg is right, Fascism is off the Left, thats not to say people on the left are authoritarian or anti-libertarian but they can be and they have been.

Alternate Title: How to De-Program a Liberal Arts Graduate...
I suspect that the ivory tower elites will despise this book. University acadamia and the media always equate conservative governments such as the USA under Dubya and Canada under Prime Minister Harper as being the equivalent to Nazis Germany under Hitler. Jonah Goldberg deftly exposes the fact the the Liberal Left have more in common with the National Socialists than just the term "socialist".
It all boils down to individual rights ie the true conservative view that each person is of infinite value vs the socialist view that the worth of the individual must be sacrificed for the "good" of the State. Which is a paradox unto itself, considering that Liberalism/Socialism does not recognize the concepts of good and evil, only moral equivalence.