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

Author:Jonah Goldberg [Goldberg, Jonah]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, USA, Fascism & Nazism, Political Ideologies & Parties, Political Ideologies - Conservatism & Liberalism, World politics, Political Ideologies - Fascism & Totalitarianism, Political Ideologies, Conservatism & right-of-centre democratic ideologies, Fascism & Totalitarianism, Fascism, World politics - 20th century, Current Events, International Relations, History & Theory - General, Conservatism, POLITICAL SCIENCE, Conservatism & Liberalism, 20th century, History & Theory, Political structure & processes, Politics, U.S. - Contemporary Politics, Liberalism
ISBN: 9780385511841
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2007-05-14T23:00:00+00:00

7

Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine

THERE IS NO issue on which modern liberals consider themselves more thoroughly enlightened than that of race. And there is no contentious topic where they are quicker to insist that dissent from liberal orthodoxy is a sign of creeping fascism. In virtually every major racially charged debate over the last forty years, at least some self-righteous liberals have invoked the record of the Holocaust to warn, darkly, that if opponents of racial preferences of one kind or another get their way, we just may find ourselves on the slippery slope to Nazi Germany.

White liberals learned this trick from black liberals. Black civil rights figures love playing the Nazi card. When Newt Gingrich tried to reach out to liberal Democrats by inviting them to social functions, New York representative Major Owens was outraged. "These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they're worse than Hitler," Owen said. "Gingrich smiles...[and] says they're going to be our friend. We're going to have cocktail-party genocide." The NAACP chairman Julian Bond is supposed to be a moderate in racial politics, but he, too, has a weakness for Nazi analogies. "Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side," he recently declared. Harry Belafonte smeared conservative blacks--Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and others--in the Bush administration by snorting that Hitler also "had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich" (this is untrue, by the way). Jesse Jackson has never met a reductio ad Hitlerum he didn't like. Over the course of his career he has compared Republicans to genocidal Nazis countless times, from decrying the Hitlerian roots of the religious right to denouncing George W. Bush's "Nazi tactics."1

The American right is constantly required to own the darkest chapters in the country's history: the accommodation of segregationists, McCarthyite excesses, isolationism prior to World War II, and so on. Rarely mentioned is the liberal side of these stories, in which the Democratic Party was the home to Jim Crow for a century; in which American liberalism was at least as isolationist as American conservatism; in which the progressive Red Scare made McCarthyism look like an Oxford Union debate; in which successive Democratic presidents ordered such things as the detention of Japanese-Americans, sweeping domestic surveillance of political enemies, and the (justified) use of horrific weapons on Japan; and in which Moscow-loyal communists "named names" of heretical Trotskyites.2

Perhaps most damning of all is the liberal infatuation with eugenics, which has simply been whitewashed out of existence. Like the editors of the old Soviet encyclopedias who would send out updates to instruct which pages should be torn out, American liberalism has repeatedly censored and rewritten its own history so that the "bad guys" were always conservatives and the good guys always liberals. This revisionism plays a role in our bioethical debates today: liberals still have a soft spot for certain types of eugenics, but they are as blind to their current attraction as they are to their historical one.

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