Another selection from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Previous quotes here.

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It was around this time [the 1920s] that through a dexterous sleight of hand, Progressivism came to be renamed “liberalism.” In the past, liberalism had referred to political and economic liberty as understood by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. For them, the ultimate desideratum was maximum individual freedom under the benign protection of a minimalist state. The progressives, led by [John] Dewey, subtly changed the meaning of this term, importing the Prussian vision of liberalism as the alleviation of material and educational poverty, and liberation from old dogmas and old faiths. For progressives liberty no longer meant freedom from tyranny, but freedom from want, freedom to be a “constructive” citizen, the Rousseauian and Hegelian “freedom” of living in accord with the state and the general will. Classical liberals were now routinely called conservatives, while devotees of social control were dubbed liberals. Thus in 1935 John Dewey would write in Liberalism and Social Action that activists government in the name of the economically disadvantaged and social reconstruction had “virtually come to define the meaning of liberal faith.” Given this worldview, it shouldn’t be surprising that so many liberals believed the Soviet Union was the freest place on earth. (p. 221-222)

Another selection from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Very fascinating.

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Under doctrines of black liberation, “revolutionary” violence was always justifed so long as you insisted that the bloodied corpse had somehow been an accomplish to oppression. Whites became the new Jews. “[To] shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time,” observed Jean-Paul Sartre[…] All of this blood chic was retained in Norman Mailer’s White Negro, which fetishized black crime as hip, cool, and revolutionary. The New LEft not only bought this line; they sold it. A poll found 20 percent of American students identified with Che Guevara—beating out Nixon, Humphry and Wallace.

Madness, cruelty, and totalitarianism were “in.” Thugs and criminals were heroes, while champions of the rule of law were suddenly “fascists.” Almost from the outset, this logic poisoned the civil rights movement’s early triumphs. At Cornell most of the black students were admitted on what we’d today call affirmative action, with lower-than-average SAT scores. Particularly revealing is the fact that many of the gun-toting revolutionaries were recruited to the school precisely because they fit Mailer’s stereotype of the noble “ghetto youth,” the authentic Negro, and as such were given preference over other blacks with higher scores and better qualifications—because more qualified blacks were too “white.”

By the end of the decade, the civil rights movement had for all intents and purposes become a Black Power movement. And Black Power, with its clenched fists, Afro-pagan mythology, celebration of violence, emphasis on racial pride, and disdain for liberalism, was arguably America’s most authentic indigenous fascism. Stokely Carmichael—at one time the “prime minister” of the Black Panther Party—himself defined Black Power (a term he originated) as “a movement that will smash everything Western Civilization has created.” Carmichael shared Hitler’s dream of building a folkish racial state upon the ashes of the old order.

Indeed, when one reads the racial indoctrination taught to children of Nazi Germany, it’s difficult to see the difference between Carmichael’s black pride and Hitler’s German pride. “What is the first Commandment of every National Socialist?” asked a Nazi catechism. “Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrade as your self!” The connections between Black Nationalism and Nazism, Fascism, and other supposedly right-wing racist groups aren’t merely theoretical—or recent. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Back to Africa movement, admitted in 1922 that his ideology was perfectly simpatico with Mussolini’s. “We were the first fascists,” he declared. Indeed his rhetoric was often eerily consonant with German fascism: “Up You Might Race, Accomplish What You Will,” “Africa for the Africans… at Home and Abroad!” and so forth. In the 1960s Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, formed a cordial relationship with George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was even intited to speak at the Nation of Islam National Convention back in 1962, at which he praised Elijah Muhammad as the black Adolf Hitler. On January 28, 1961, Muhammad sent Malcolm X to Atlanta to negotiate an agreement with the Ku Klux Klan whereby the Klan would support a separate black state. (p. 195-196)

A selection from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. It’s quite long, but well worth the read. I’m 160 pages into it, and it’s very informative.
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It’s ironic that in the 1930s it was far from out-of-bounds to call the New Deal or FDR fascist. Yet for the two generations after World War II it was simply unacceptable to associate the New Deal with fascism in any way. This cultural and political taboo has skewed American politics in profound ways. In order to assert that the New Deal was the opposite of fascism—rather than a kindred phenomenon—liberal intellectuals had to create an enormous straw man out of the modern conservative movement. This was surprisingly easy. Since “right-wing” was already defined as anti-Roosevelt, it did not take much effort to conflate the American right with Nazism and fascism….

The myth of right-wing fascism only began to unravel decades later thanks to an unlikely figure: Ronald Wilson Reagan, a former Roosevelt Democrat. In both 1976 and 1980 Regan refused to retract his opinion that the early New Dealers looked favorably on the policies of Fascist Italy. […] Reagan’s refusal to back off his claim was a watershed moment, though the taboo remains largely intact. But why was the taboo there in the first place? One answer is both obvious and entirely understandable: the Holocaust. As one of the signature evils of human history, the extermination of European Jewry colors everything it touches. But this is terribly inaccurate, in that various other fascist regimes don’t deserve to be blamed for the Holocaust, including Fascist Italy. Nowhere here do I suggest that New Dealism was akin to Hitlerism if we are to define Hitlerism solely in terms of the Holocaust. But fascism was already fascism before the Holocaust. The Holocaust chronologically and to a certain extent philosophically was the death rattle of fascism in Germany. To use the last chapter of German fascism to explain away the earlier fascisms of Italy, America, and elsewhere is akin to reading the wrong book backward. And to say that the New Deal had nothing in common with fascism because the later New Dealers stood opposed to the Holocaust is to say that there is nothing distinct or significant to fascism save the Holocaust—a position that no serious person holds.

Indeed, it seems almost impossible to deny that the New Deal was objectively fascistic. Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress’ war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they’d deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). In 1942 he flatly told Congress that if it didn’t do what he wanted, he’d do it anyway. He questioned the patriotism of anybody who opposed his economic programs, never mind the war itself. He created the military-industrial complex so many on the left decry as fascist today.

In 1936 Roosevelt told Congress, “We have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.” As Al Smith noted, the upshot of this statement is that Roosevelt didn’t mind an authoritarian government, so long as representatives of “the people”—that is, liberals—ran the government. But if anybody “we” dislike gets control of the government, it would constitute tyranny.

This kind of skewed rationale gets to the heart of liberal fascism. Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism. The anti-dogmatism that progressives and fascists alike inherited from Pragmatism made the motives of the activist the only criteria for judging the legitimacy of action. “I want to assure you,” FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”