Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Page 58
58. Clinton, It Takes a Village, pp. 314, 315. Emphasis mine.
59. Ian Williams, "Big Food's Real Appetites," Nation, May 6, 2002; Tim Russert, CNBC, June 10, 2000.
60. Nomination of Janet Reno, White House, Feb. 11, 1993, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=47044&st=&st1 (accessed Feb. 6, 2007); Janet Reno, Remarks to Justice Department Employees, Washington, D.C., April 6, 1993.
61. Clinton, It Takes a Village, pp. 82, 113.
62. Lasch, "Hillary Clinton, Child Saver."
63. Clinton, It Takes a Village, pp. 45, 63, 88-89.
64. Ibid., p. 83.
65. Ibid., pp. 233, 132.
66. Kate O'Beirne, "The Kids Aren't Alright," National Review, Sept. 1, 2003; Kate O'Beirne, Women Who Make the World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 36-38.
67. Gretchen Ritter, director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Texas, likewise writes that mothers who stay home to take care of their children are the equivalent of slackers who refuse "to contribute as professionals and community activists." Gretchen Ritter, "The Messages We Send When Moms Stay Home," Austin American-Statesman, July 6, 2004, p. A9.
68. O'Beirne, Women Who Make the World Worse, p. 40.
69. Clinton, It Takes a Village, p. 189.
70. Ibid., pp. 239, 169.
71. William Jennings Bryan, Omaha World-Herald, Sept. 23, 1892, quoted in Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan: Volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 75; H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969), p. 496.
72. Ian Kershaw, The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 73.
73. Elizabeth Kolbert, "Running on Empathy," New Yorker, Feb. 7, 2000, p. 36.
74. Bovard, Freedom in Chains, p. 19.
75. "The Real Hillary Just Stood Up," New York Post, June 30, 2004, p. 30; Amy Fagan, Inside Politics, Washington Times, June 30, 2004, p. A07.
10. THE NEW AGE: WE'RE ALL FASCISTS NOW
1. "Reality-based community" became a slogan for left and liberal bloggers starting in 2004. The phrase is generally used as a form of derision for President George W. Bush and his policies. It comes from an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality"..."That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Hitler's speech is quoted in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 257.
2. John J. Miller, "Banning Legos," National Review Online, March 27, 2007.
3. It's interesting to note that during the height of the Kulturkampf, America's president, Ulysses S. Grant, lobbied for a constitutional amendment banning the teaching of "sectarian tenets" in any school receiving any amount of public assistance--and mandating that "all church property" be subject to taxation. See Jeremy Rabkin, "The Supreme Court in the Culture Wars," Public Interest (Fall 1996), pp. 3-26.
It's important to understand how Protestantism in Germany became corrupted by both nationalist and socialist agendas, in much the same way it had been in America by the progressives. Surveys in 1898 and 1912 revealed that a majority of German workers did not believe in God, but nearly all of them believed that Jesus was a "true workers' friend." If Jesus were alive today, surmised one worker, "he would certainly be a social Democrat, maybe even a leader and a Reichstag deputy." (Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War [New York: HarperCollins, 2005], p. 268.) For non-Marxists, the emphasis was less on class and more on the nation as the subject of religious ardor. Adolf Stoecker, the court preacher to Wilhelm II, helped lead the charge and was a direct influence on Hitler and National Socialism. Stoecker denounced capitalism--in part because of its alleged inherent "Jewishness." He advocated workers' communes and a lavish welfare state. He also demanded racial quotas for universities and other professions and went on to found one of the first anti-Semitic parties in Germany, the Christian Socialist Workers' Party. The process of turning Germanism into a religion became symbolically complete when another party came along and changed the word "Christian" to "National"--the Nazis.
4. Hitler's Table Talk, p. 59.
5. Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: Putnam, 1940), p. 50.
6. Other official holy days included Heroes' Memorial Day, Reich Party Day, the Fuhrer's Birthday (of course), and the National Festival of the German People. Winter solstice, brimming with volkisch tributes to Germanic superiority, replaced Christmas. Commemoration of the movement's fallen replaced the old Remembrance Day and was drenched with pagan rituals.
7. William E. Drake, "God-State Idea in Modern Education," History of Education Quarterly 3, no. 2 (June 1963), p. 90.
8. J. S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-45 (New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 76-77; Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's, 1987), p. 230.
9. The song continues:
Singing we follow Hitler's banners;
Only then are we worthy of our ancestors.
I am no Christian and no Catholic.
I go with the SA through thick and thin.
The Church can be stolen from me for all I care.
The swastika makes me happy here on earth.
Him will I follow in marching step;
Baldur von Schirach take me along.
(Gene Edward Veith Jr., Modern Fascism: The Threat to the Judeo-Christian Worldview [St. Louis: Concordia, 1993], p. 67)
10. Ibid., pp. 94, 102.
11. Ibid., p. 138.
12. Joyce Howard Price, "Harvard Professor Argues for 'Abolishing' White Race," Washington Times, Sept. 4, 2002, p. A05.
13. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. See http://web.archive.org/web/20020603084225/www.ety.com/HRP/books online/mythos/mythosb1chap03.htm (accessed July 10, 2007). Timothy W. Ryback, "Hitler's Forgotten Library," Atlantic Monthly, May 2003; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 454.
14. Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 133; see also David Rieff, "Designer Gods," Transition, no. 59 (1993), pp. 20-31.
15. Adam LeBor and Roger Boyes, Seduced by Hitler (Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2001), p. 119.
16. E. F. Kaelin, Heidegger's "Being and Time": A Reading for Readers (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1988), p. 58; Veith, Modern Fascism, pp. 119, 124.
17. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 28.
18. Quoted in Richard Harrington, "The Good, the Bad, and the Bee-Bop," Washington Post, Oct. 17, 1988, p. B1.
19. Hitler's Table Talk, p. 353.
20. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 348; Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (Keizer, Ore.: Founders, 1995), p. vii.
21. Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up (New York: Picador, 2000), p. 140.
22. Albert Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 336, 220-21.
23. See Michael Crichton's Commonwealth Club speech in 2003: www.crichton-offi
cial.com/speeches/speeches_quote05.html. Also see Steven Landsburg's Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1993); Eric Goldscheider, "Witches, Druids, and Other Pagans Make Merry Again," New York Times, May 28, 2005, p. B7; Robert H. Nelson, "Tom Hayden, Meet Adam Smith and Thomas Aquinas," Forbes, Oct. 29, 1990; Dana Milbank, "Some Heated Words for Mr. Global Warming," Washington Post, March 22, 2007, p. A02.
24. William Rees-Mogg, "And Yet the Band Plays On," Times (London), May 26, 1994.
25. Matt Lauer, Countdown to Doomsday, Sci-Fi Channel, June 14, 2006.
26. See Peter Staudenmaier, "Fascist Ecology: The 'Green Wing' of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents," www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html (accessed May 8, 2007).
27. Ibid.
28. Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 139.
29. Prominent raw foodists (or members of the living food movement) include Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Edward Norton, and Angela Bassett; Hitler's Table Talk, p. 443.
30. See, for example, www.peta.org/about/whyanimalrights.asp and Charles Oliver, "Don't Put Animal Rights Above Humans," USA Today, June 11, 1990, p. 10A.
31. See Jacob Sullum, "What the Doctor Orders," Reason, Jan. 1996; Jacob Sullum, "An Epidemic of Meddling," Reason, May 2007.
32. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, p. 120; Jacob Sullum, "To Your Health!" National Review, Sept. 13, 1999.
33. Jon Gertner, "The Virtue in $6 Heirloom Tomatoes," New York Times Magazine, June 6, 2004; Jonah Goldberg, "Gaiam Somebody!" National Review, March 19, 2001.
AFTERWORD: THE TEMPTING OF CONSERVATISM
1. The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz writes:
At heart, Buchanan is a man of the old Catholic right--echoing the anti-New Deal catechism popularized by the "radio priest," Father Charles Coughlin, and the muscular, pietistic, corporatist anti-communism that found a hero in Generalissimo Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War...He detests the welfare state, which he sees as an intrusive secularist force. He regards the world beyond our shores as a tempest of savage tribalism, and he would like, on that account, both to halt immigration and to pull the United States out of the United Nations. He has a penchant for conspiratorial thinking, illustrated by his remarks about the devilish "foreign policy elites" and the pro-Israel "amen corner" that supposedly control our policies abroad and corrupt our politics at home. ("Third Out," New Republic, Nov. 22, 1999)
There's much truth here, but what Wilentz gets flatly wrong is that Buchanan does not, in fact, "detest" the welfare state and never has. This is not an insignificant distortion.
2. Molly Ivins, "Notes from Another Country," Nation, Sept. 14, 1992.
3. These and other quotations are from Ramesh Ponnuru's "A Conservative No More," National Review, Oct. 11, 1999. I'm indebted to Ponnuru in general and to this article in particular for many insights into Buchanan.
4. For Buchanan on Zhirinovsky, see The Death of the West (New York: St. Martin's, 2002), p. 18. On Euro-Americans, see "The Disposition of Christian Americans," Nov. 27, 1998, www.buchanan.org/pa-98-1127.html; and "Un-American Ivy League," New York Post, Jan. 2, 1999.
5. See Ponnuru, "A Conservative No More."
6. See David Brooks, "Politics and Patriotism: From Teddy Roosevelt to John McCain," Weekly Standard, April 26, 1999; Richard Lowry, "TR and His Fan," National Review, Feb. 7, 2000; David Brooks, "A Return to National Greatness: A Manifesto for a Lost Creed," Weekly Standard, March 3, 1997; John B. Judis, "Are We All Progressives Now?" American Prospect, May 8, 2000.
7. Ramesh Ponnuru, "Swallowed by Leviathan: Conservatism Versus an Oxymoron: 'Big-Government Conservatism,'" National Review, Sept. 29, 2003.
8. Fred Barnes, Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006); see also interview with Tim Russert, CNBC, Jan. 28, 2006.
9. See Samuel Huntington, "Conservatism as an Ideology," American Political Science Review 51 (June 1957); and Friedrich Hayek, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
10. See: Jonah Goldberg, "A Lib-Lib Romance," National Review, Dec. 31, 2006.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldberg, Jonah.
Liberal fascism : the secret history of the American left from Mussolini to the politics of meaning / Jonah Goldberg.--1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Fascism. 2. Liberalism. 3. World politics--20th century. I. Title.
JC481.G55 2007
320.53'3--dc22
2007010668
eISBN: 978-0-385-51769-0
v1.0