There's a passage from a 2005 essay by Umberto Eco that I've frequently quoted, as it neatly defines several elements of the mindset of our age in just a few carefully thought out sentences:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

With the Progressive Era and New Deal, our vision of what we asked of the federal government changed forever. Add in World War II, the Cold War, Great Society, and the War on Terror and it's clear that we're never going to return to a limited federal government or presidency. Liberals and libertarians will complain about the executive authority that George W. Bush has used in fighting against terrorism, but think of all that the Obama campaign is promising for their candidate. Some people have less concern for a presidential usurpation of power in order to defend us against terrorists and some people prefer to look to the president to use that power to fix our broken souls as Michelle Obama has promised that her husband, if elected president, could do for all of us.

"We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another -- that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

Whether we're looking for a president to keep us safe or fix our souls, we're certainly conceiving of a very different president than James Madison or even Alexander Hamilton ever envisioned. And we look to the federal government to have power encompass all of this. We're never going to be able to turn back the clock to an 18th or 19th century understanding of the presidency or the federal government. And perhaps there are few who would want to. When disaster strikes, whether it's a terrorist attack or a powerful hurricane, Americans will expect a president who can act with power and dispatch. If you think that George W. Bush is unique in his expansion of presidential powers, then you just haven't studied enough of our country's history. And there is not going to be some great return to an earlier understanding of what a president can or should be able to do whether we elect McCain or Obama.

Today’s “presidentialists of all parties”—a phrase that describes the overwhelming majority of American voters—suffer from a similar delusion. Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging. Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making.

"1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us":

Ace explains "Why Bill Ayers Matters":

As Allah snarked earlier, How come Bush's TANG records weren't similarly "tangential' as the left now claims of every character issue involving Barack Obama?

This may be obvious but it has to be said, and perhaps said repeatedly, until the left acknowledges it.

Either terrorism is a grave moral sin and unforgivable legal crime or it is not, guys. You cannot continue differentiating between "good terrorism" and "bad terrorism."

Related: Dick Morris explores "Hillary's Terrorist Ties".

Rich Lowry writes, "Just Imagine":

Regarding that Time global warming cover, just imagine if the mainstream media were as exercised about the war on terror and as devoted to crusading to win it. How different would the political environment look?

HuffPo: "Gingrich: Left Wing Of The Democratic Party 'Admires' American Terrorists".

Leonard Bernstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could not be reached for comment. If we want to expand the list to Democrats who admire foreign terrorists, we can add Ramsey Clark, Jimmy Carter, Patty Murray, Ward Churchill, Michael Moore, "Pinch" Sulzberger, Chrissie Hynde, Oliver Stone, Margaret Cho and John Kerry to the list as well.

John Stephenson has more.

Related: "What Will Karl Do?"

More: "A Timeline Of Crime For Obama’s Buddy William Ayers".

As Jonah Goldberg has noted in several places in Liberal Fascism, and reiterated to Salon magazine:

What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization ... That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They're not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they're still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it's all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that's what I'm getting at.

(Note that Time probably doesn't call for this particular scheme, which would no doubt save quite a bit of power and resources.)

Update: "Imagine the designs that were rejected"!

Michael Goldfarb writes:

Last night's episode of Bill Maher's Real Time featured evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins (the very poor man's version of Christopher Hitchens), explaining why scientists can't be certain of much of anything:

I think any scientist would be unwise to commit himself to saying there definitely is not anything. I mean, I can’t definitely commit myself to saying there are no fairies. I’m pretty sure there are no fairies. [laughter] But, I think it would be unscientific to do what the extreme religious people do and say, “I know there is a god.”

It's an interesting contrast to comments by NASA scientist James Hansen earlier this week complaining about a high school textbook that didn't portray global warming as a fact rather than a theory:

Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain."

So Hansen is certain that global warming is real and the greenhouse gases are the cause. As are Bill Maher, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and every other luminary of the left. Immediately following his interview with Dawkins last night, Maher proceeded to mock Christians for their skepticism of global warming (or indifference, as he would have it), explaining it as a result of their belief in the Rapture. But hasn't the left embraced global warming as their own version of the Rapture? They do not harbor any doubt, but believe with the fervor of religious conviction that the end of civilization will come as a result of consumerism. And they seem completely unaware that in believing this, they have shed the very skepticism that is supposed to define the secular left.

From The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff (though also quoted here, not surprisingly):

The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."

People wonder why I quit university teaching. Imagine an office - all your colleagues and all your supervisors and anyone with a say in your tenure prospects, your research funding and your publications - where everyone organizes their careers in such a way that a "human rights" commission would have no reason to object. Their teaching practices, their research, their political views; everything they think and do including and especially their "private" lives from the television they (do not) watch to the fast food they (do not) eat to the sex lives they (do not) allow themselves to have. Even the concept of a "private" life dismissed as reactionary and/or illusory and in any event subject to the scrutiny of any undergraduate with internet access and a grudge. That is the life I escaped.

(H/T: SDA)

David Bowie's mid-1970s song "Heroes" was about two people personally fighting back against a monumental communist evil. The Berlin wall namechecked in the song is happily gone now (I have a tiny piece of it on a shelf in my study), but the freedom-crushing spirit behind it lives on, in smaller but still sadly pervasive forms, from people who should know better. And so does the spirit of rebellion, because, after all, dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

As Tim Blair writes, "Remember these examples when next confronted by epic stupidity in your own world. We can be heroes, too."

Silencing Canadian bloggers into submission, one lawsuit at a time.

Much more from Kathy Shaidle, who's one of the bloggers being sued:

Richard "The Boy Named Sue" Warman has finally filed his statement of claim.

Canada's busiest litigant, serial "human rights" complainant and -- the guy Mark Steyn has called "Canada’s most sensitive man" -- Richard Warman is now suing his most vocal critics -- including me.

The suit names:

• Ezra Levant (famous for his stirring YouTube video of his confrontation with the Canadian Human Rights tribunal after he published the “Mohammed Cartoons”)
• FreeDominion.ca (Canada’s answer to FreeRepublic.com)
• Kate McMillan of SmallDeadAnimals.com
• Jonathan Kay of the National Post daily newspaper and its in-house blog
• and me, Kathy Shaidle of FiveFeetOfFury.com

Richard Warman used to work for the notorious Human Rights Commission, which runs the "kangaroo courts" who’ve charged Mark Steyn with "flagrant Islamophobia."

Richard Warman has brought almost half these cases single-handledly, getting websites he doesn’t like shut down, and making tens of thousands of tax free dollars in "compensation" out of web site owners who can’t afford to fight back or don’t even realize they can.

The province of British Columbia had to pass a special law to stop Richard Warman from suing libraries because they carried books he didn't approve of.

Richard Warman also wants to ban international websites he doesn’t like from being seen by Canadians.

The folks named in his new law suit are the very bloggers who have been most outspoken in their criticism of Warman’s methods.

Jonah Goldberg goes F-Spotting:

I don't know why I didn't think of this before. Behold a new sport for readers. Send me your examples of people just using "fascist" to describe things they don't like. For example, Kevin Costner in Bull Durham: “Quit trying to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring and besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. They’re more democratic.”

Whatever its claims, Queen isn't here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, "We Will Rock You," is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band.

Incidentally, in 1992, Rolling Stone magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary with a lavish party at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, a restaurant whose interior was designed by Philip Johnson.

Jacob Sullum writes that "There are two kinds of people in the world":

The kind who think it's perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

In another chapter from the lost history of the 1930s, the American Spectator's Daniel J. Flynn looks at the strange legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:

Who says San Francisco doesn't honor veterans?

Last weekend, the city, which voted in 2005 to ban military recruiters from public high schools and colleges, unveiled a memorial to fighting men and women in uniform. The uniforms they donned, however, were not those familiar to American soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines.

The city honored American Communists and their fellow travelers who fought in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. The $400,000 monument, donated from private funds but hosted on public land, extends 40-feet long and eight feet high.

Media accounts of the tribute uniformly noted that members of what has become known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought against Francisco Franco. But those reports were conspicuously silent about the man they fought for: Joseph Stalin. Similarly absent was the word "Communist," a party with which roughly eighty percent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were officially affiliated.

The few surviving veterans are quick to point out that they fought fascists, but "fascist" in the Communist lexicon of the 1930s was applied to everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to Leon Trotsky to Francisco Franco. Stalin saw enemies everywhere, so many American members of the International Brigades in Spain partook in, and others fell victim to, purges of suspected deviationists among the "republican" armies.

(Via Eyeblast.tv)

Writing at Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle directs her Five Feet Of Fury towards the Canadian Human Rights Commission:

Next time someone threatens to “move to Canada” over real or imagined Patriot Act overreach, present him with this scenario:

Having settled into his new Ottawa digs, your expatriate pal is reading his morning paper when a familiar name leaps off the newsprint: his own.

Turns out Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) investigators were trolling your friend’s neighborhood for unprotected wireless internet connections, and leeched onto his.

Why? So they could post racist comments under assumed names on “neo-Nazi hate sites,” then charge the site’s owners with … publishing hate speech.

That’s how your innocent friend’s name and address got read aloud — then hastily broadcast by Blackberrying bloggers and journalists — in open court, as evidence in one of the CHRC’s most widely publicized cases.

So now your left-wing expatriate friend is widely suspected of being either a neo-Nazi racist or part of a secret government entrapment scheme.

His phone starts ringing. It won’t stop for quite some time.

Kind of a buzzkill after all those (highly exaggerated) reports about “gay marriage” and “legalized pot” up here in the Great White North, eh?

Like I said in my first Silicon Graffiti video this year, think of it as totalitarianism with a smiley face.

Last week, when I began assembling the B-roll footage and still photos for Wednesday's Philip Johnson video, I had a pretty good handle on what was readily available on the 'Net (and had ready access to any still photos I'd need from my own collection of books on modern architecture, if they weren't already online). Last July, I linked to a video containing shots of the Glass House, and I knew that clips of Charlie Rose interviewing Johnson were online. But stumbling across this YouTube clip was quite a moment of serendipity:

Sontag's arch Beat Poet-style patter, overdubbed as she's filmed driving through Manhattan, is a scream. But what a fox she was in the early 1960s, in her New Frontier Jackie Kennedy togs and hairstyle. She was right around 30 at the time; her much harsher looking appearance a decade or so later is a reminder of this John Derbyshire truism regarding how women of the far left often age.

Sontag's 1975 essay, "Fascinating Fascism", was a necessary attack on Leni Riefenstahl's attempt to rehabilitate her image 30 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. But did Sontag know, when she was standing next to Johnson on top of the world in his Seagram Building offices, that she was standing next to someone who would have been thrilled to be another Albert Speer?

By the time of his death in 2005 at the venerable age of 98, Philip Johnson was arguably America's best known architect, having designed his famed "Glass House" in 1949, and worked with Mies van der Rohe on Mies's Seagram Building a few years later. The former was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1997; the latter dubbed "Building of the Millennium" by the New York Times.

But Johnson's puckish demeanor in his later years, which earned him decades of good cheer from fellow Manhattan elites, hid a dark journey through the liberal fascist politics of the 1930s, which culminated in his cheering on the Nazis as they marched through Poland in 1939. “We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle”, he would write to a friend at the time.

At the start of the 1930s, Johnson was an admirer of the socialist-leaning architects of Germany's Bauhaus, as he founded the newly born Museum of Modern Art's architectural department, and helped put modern architecture on the map in the US. Apparently after witnessing a Hitler rally in Potsdam in 1933, Johnson was immediately attracted to the Nazis. That moment sent Johnson on a seemingly strange journey: shortly thereafter, he would leave MoMA to seek employment with first Huey Long and then Father Coughlin, before ultimately winding up cheering the Nazis on at the start of WWII.

During that same period though, while Johnson openly admired the Nazis, he befriended the last director of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, even as the Nazis were shuttering the design school's doors. Returning to MoMA in the 1950s and establishing himself, via his famed Glass House, as a known architect in his own right, as Hilton Kramer noted in the mid-1990s, and Anne Applebaum shortly after Johnson's death, Johnson did a near-thorough job of tossing his radical past down the memory hole. At the least, most of his fellow Manhattan elites didn't lose too much sleep over it.

And yet, comparing Johnson's past with the lost history of the 1930s described in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, in retrospect Johnson comes across as a sort of dark version of Woody Allen's Zelig character, appearing alongside several of the fascist left's most important figures in both the US and Europe during the Depression.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

All you need to know about the state of Google these days is summed up by comparing two concurrent weekends of splash pages: the transnational search engine couldn't be bothered to create a customized page last week for the traditional Christian holiday of Easter, but could create one for the gnostic "Earth Hour" festival to pay homage to Gaia. (In a blackout design which ironically uses more power than their usual white page!) And speaking of "Earth Hour", Tim Blair writes:

The University of Sydney isn't taking any chances. "Campus Infrastructure Services will be switching off as many non-essential lights as possible, while ensuring that safety and security on our campuses is maintained," said an administration email sent last week. "There will be some street and path closures to allow as many lights as possible to be switched off."

So they're closing streets to protect students from dangerous unlit areas. Sounds like the university needs to work on its definition of "non-essential."

That's one thing about light; it makes dangerous places safe. Light is emblematic of civilisation. Nobody would visit Paris if it were known as the City of Dark. Likewise, we rarely invoke the Dark Ages to describe a pleasant situation. Bruce Springsteen possibly wasn't in the happiest frame of mind when he wrote "Darkness On The Edge of Town."

Supporters of Earth Hour like to talk about the important symbolism of the event in terms of climate change and suchlike. The deeper symbolism is of a rejection of progress - of the centuries of research and innovation that culminates in us being able to bring light by flicking a few grams of plastic.

(Incidentally, I wonder how they'd react if a hospital told them a loved one suffering a heart attack couldn't have electrical defibrillation because the juice in the emergency room was off for Earth Hour?)

Update: Found via Mark Steyn, Darrell Epp suggests, "Forget ‘Global Warming’ and Start Worrying About ‘Demographic Winter’."

Linking to an item found by The Deacon's Bench blog, the Anchoress writes, "This actually sounds like a church Obama could love: WE ARE THE GOD-LINGS WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR!":

That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, "Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah," this morning will rock the walls of Toronto's West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.

But at West Hill on the faith's holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”

Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity's central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.

Generally speaking, no divine anybody makes an appearance in West Hill's Sunday service liturgy.

There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.

Ms. Vosper has written a book, published this week – With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe – in which she argues that the Christian church, in the form in which it exists today, has outlived its viability and either it sheds its no-longer credible myths, doctrines and dogmas, or it's toast.

James Lileks stumbles over the 1943 movie version of Titanic:

Did I get the British version? No, that’s “A Night to Remember.” I checked the TiVo info: this was “Titanic” from 1943. What? Robert Osbourne ambled up to the camera and explained:

This was the Nazi version of the tale.

I’d never heard of it. (Of course, there are ten reviews on imdb.com.) It was a fairly big-budget item for the German cinema, what with the war and all, and had two directors. The first was killed by the Gestapo midway through production. Must have been hell to arrange a competition bond in those days. Goebbels nixed its release in the end, since so many people dying was apparently a depressing thing to show war-weary audiences. They wanted music, romance, comedy. They got it, but from the clips I’ve seen they were fascinatingly soulless things – everyone seems to be smiling through sheer terror. Imagine a Busby Berkeley sequence in which every dancer has her own sniper in the wings waiting to shoot her if she fails, and you’ll get the idea.

The Nazi “Titanic” is useful evidence against those who think the National Socialists chose the second part of their name for no particular reason – it’s anti-capitalist propaganda. The movie begins not on the dock, or on board, or in a boisterous café by the quay; no, it starts off in the White Star boardroom, where the eeeevil investors are figuring out the best way to manipulate the stock. Yes, that’s correct: insider trading sunk the Titanic. The head of White Star – a tall, dashing, cynical, cunning, selfish Bruce Ismay (snort) pushes the captain to reach New York in record speed to boost the stock, which had gyrated up and down prior to departure, and had been subject to large block purchases by other characters on the ship – oh, don’t ask. The interiors looks nothing like the Titanic, but the special effects aren’t bad, and it’s impressively shot. It’s just all wrong. Every frame is just saturated with a strong dose of Wrong.

Forgot the best part: the hero is a German. He’s a fictional officer who tries to warn everyone about the ice. He’s cool, composed, devoted to duty, and scornful of the capitalists. At least the Soviets had that Russian-soulfulness thing going, so their movies would be soaked with sloppy emotion and Slavic hymns; the Nazis were tin-eared thick-thumbed boors when it came to art. God help us if they’d won; I cannot imagine their sitcoms.

Here's my review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, from the March issue of the New Individualist magazine. The text of that issue is not yet online, so I'm reprinting this review online with the permission of editor-in-chief Robert Bidinotto, who, separate and apart from his long-form work "on dead tree", is also a fine blogger.

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 496 pages, $27.95.

With America committed to war overseas, an American president (who many consider to be racist) suspends vast swatches of American liberties. Opponents of the war are demonized, their patriotism routinely questioned. Even popular foods bearing the names of now-unpopular, formerly allied nations are spontaneously renamed, in banal demonstrations of mass support for the war effort.

Is this an account in 2004 by a blogger on the leftwing Daily Kos website, railing feverishly against President Bush and the Global War on Terror? No, it’s a description of the state of our nation in 1917, under President Wilson during World War I. As Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online, writes in his new book Liberal Fascism:

The liberty cabbage, the state-sanctioned brutality, the stifling of dissent, the loyalty oaths and the enemies list--all of these things not only happened in America but happened at the hands of liberals. Self-described progressives--as well as the majority of American socialists--were at the forefront of the push for a truly totalitarian state. They applauded every crackdown and questioned the patriotism, the intelligence, and decency of every pacifist and classically liberal dissenter.

That so little of this history is remembered, Goldberg argues, is the result of two things. First, since the left has a remarkably firm grip on academia, they tend to write history--and write it in a way that’s favorable to their side of history. Second, the left tends to have a remarkably short collective memory. While most conservatives and libertarians can name those movements’ founders (such as Hayek, Buckley, and Rand), the typical modern leftist tends not to remember his intellectual forefathers nearly as well. Or as liberal journalist and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote in his 2004 book Stand Up, Fight Back, “Liberals and Democrats tend not to view themselves as the inheritors of a grand tradition. Almost on principle, they are suspicious of such traditions, of too much theorizing, of linking themselves too much to the past.”

The result is that the intertwining of Marxism, Progressivism, and Fascism in the first decades of the twentieth century--the theme of Liberal Fascism--has been virtually forgotten among the modern left. Which is why it is now routine for conservatives (including whichever Republican happens to hold the highest national office at the time, whether it’s Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, or George W. Bush) to be demonized by the left as a Nazi, and for the Nazis--and fascism in general--to be widely described by the left, and much of the culture at large, as rightwing movements.

The Mustache on the Left

Of course, it was the Soviets of the 1920s who first began to describe fascism as being on the right. As a more populist strain of totalitarianism, it was, arguably, to the right of communism, which ultimately killed tens of millions more people during the twentieth century. But the collectivist nature of fascism is far, far to the left of American conservatism and especially American libertarianism. To paraphrase a remark by Charles Krauthammer shortly after the 2006 midterm elections: Americans play politics within the middle of the football field; since 1789, Europeans have confined themselves mostly to the forty yards on the left side of the field. This helps to explain why, when the wall dividing Berlin fell in 1989, the same region embraced a corporatist, nanny-state European Union only a few years later.

Goldberg does yeoman’s work researching and documenting material that the American left had consigned to the memory hole since 1945. By the 1970s, this pre-World War II past was considered hermetically sealed by liberals. As Goldberg writes, Ronald Reagan, a former FDR backer, was attacked in the Washington Post as late as 1981 for correctly pointing out the favorable lip service that he remembered being paid by FDR’s brain trust to Mussolini.

But lots of intellectuals and artists of the era before WWII had good things to say about Il Duce. Herbert Croly, a founder of the New Republic, offered, in Goldberg’s words, “qualified support for Mussolini” in the pages of his magazine. Cole Porter (or possibly P.G. Wodehouse, when he revised Porter’s lyrics for the British stage) name-checked Mussolini in an early version of “You’re the Tops.” In fact, the title of Goldberg’s book comes from a 1932 speech by H.G. Wells at Oxford University to Britain’s Young Liberals organization, in which he said, “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.” Goldberg quotes George Orwell, discussing Wells nine years later: “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.” Of Germany’s Italian counterpart, in 1933’s The Shape of Things to Come Wells wrote, “Fascism indeed was not an altogether bad thing; it was a bad good thing; and Mussolini has left his mark on history.”

Populist Totalitarianism

In fact, Mussolini’s fascist Italy features rather prominently in Goldberg’s book, for numerous reasons. It predates Hitler’s vision of a National Socialist Germany. As David Ramsay Steele wrote in a 2003 essay titled “The Mystery of Fascism,” the ideology’s most influential thinkers--including Mussolini himself--evolved their positions in an attempt to create a more populist form of socialist government than Marxism, especially the Soviet revolutionary model. And as Goldberg writes, fascism, by its very nature, will embody the nationalist traditions of whatever nation it infects--which is why fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany were each very different regimes. Anti-Semitism, now often viewed as part and parcel of fascism, was a key historical component of Germany in particular. In contrast, Goldberg writes:

For most of his career, Mussolini considered anti-Semitism a silly distraction and, later, a necessary sop to his overbearing German patron. Jews could be good socialists or fascists if they thought and behaved like good socialists or fascists. Because Hitler thought explicitly in terms of what we would today call identity politics, Jews were irredeemably Jews, no matter how well they spoke German. His allegiance, like that of all practitioners of identity politics, was to the iron cage of immutable identity.

The word “fascism” is Italian for bundling together, derived from the Latin word fasces, and Mussolini adopted the original Roman symbol of power--a bundle of birch rods tied together with a red ribbon--for fascist Italy.

As Goldberg mentioned to me in a recent interview, Mussolini similarly invented the word “totalitarianism” as a way to describe a cradle-to-grave socialism that would bind all aspects of his nation together. “Mussolini meant it to be appealing to people,” Goldberg said. “It was a sales pitch for his kind of government. He meant it as we would use words like ‘holistic’ today, as sort of covering every aspect of life; everyone’s going to be included, everyone’s going to be part of the community. No child is going to be left behind. That was the meaning of totalitarianism in its original conception.”

These sorts of reminders are part of Liberal Facism’s strength. Goldberg does not just look back with ninety years of hindsight and editorial bias. He presents the concepts and the words used in the way they were envisioned at the time.

It’s only after WWII that totalitarianism understandably became associated with militaristic, jackbooted thugs. But militarism wasn’t exclusive to European fascists. The collectivists of the first half of the twentieth century--from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to the Soviets--chose military forms and imagery because they were thought of as the most efficient ways to mobilize their nations. The New Dealers were inspired by Wilson’s handling of World War I--both in the trenches in Europe and almost as aggressively while fighting the administration’s enemies domestically. And much of the New Deal was an attempt to place the Depression–addled U.S. economy under the equivalent of a wartime footing. As Goldberg notes, the imagery promoting the National Recovery Act was virtually indistinguishable from much of the concurrent propaganda of 1930s–era Germany.

Brave New Village

That the wartime pitch of the 1910s, 1930s, and 1940s was global is one of the reasons why Orwell’s 1984 predicted that socialist England could come to resemble a mélange of fascism and Stalinism only a few decades after its 1949 publication date. And ever since, 1984 has been seen as the model of a totalitarian future. But modern, post–1960s collectivism--whether it’s the EU and its “soft” but all-encompassing policies; Hillary Clinton with her “It Takes a Village” imagery; or President Bush with his “compassionate conservatism” catchphrase--has generally moved away from militaristic imagery and instead uses muted, much more seductive language, symbols, and programs to expand government. Which is why Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Goldberg writes, is the more apt model for modern socialism and its cradle-to-grave nanny state.

This also explains the “have a nice day” smiley face with the Hitler mustache on the dust jacket of Liberal Fascism. It’s one of the few signs of humor in this otherwise scholarly book, from a writer known for drafting very funny columns during the early days of National Review Online.

Since I’m writing this over a month before the book’s publication date, I’ll be quite interested to see how liberal elites respond to it. We already know what the rank-and-file left thinks: Months before publication, its Amazon.com page was full of the most vile ad hominems and slander, when it wasn’t being hacked; and since no one attacking the book on Amazon had yet read it, it’s safe to assume that their attacks were based almost solely on the book’s cover art and title. Which illustrates one of Goldberg’s central theses remarkably well: How many of the book’s detractors know that they’re attacking it for language written by H.G. Wells from 1932?

One debatable point I noticed was in the chapter on New Age mysticism, where Goldberg writes:

Tom Wolfe, in his essay, “The Great Relearning,” details how the counterculture, inspired by the German Bauhaus, wanted to start over, to declare a New Year Zero (much as the Jacobins and Nazis did), to go back to the fork in the road where Western civilization allegedly took the wrong path.

I think Goldberg misses Wolfe’s point and inadvertently draws the inaccurate conclusion that the ’60s U.S. counterculture took some inspiration from Bauhaus theories. The history of the left during the twentieth century is one of an endlessly repeating theme, “start from zero”; that theme connects the artists of the Bauhaus with the hippies of the sixties. But otherwise, modernism was anathema to the countercultural denizens of Haight-Ashbury. If they had even heard of the Bauhaus, hippies rather forcefully rejected its modernist aesthetics, which were then at their cultural peak in the form of every major corporation’s skyscraper.

Also, I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the concluding paragraphs of Goldberg’s book:

In 1968, in a televised debate on ABC News during the Chicago Democratic National Convention, Gore Vidal continually goaded William F. Buckley, eventually calling him a “crypto-Nazi.” Vidal himself is an open homosexual, a pagan, a statist, and a conspiracy theorist. Buckley, a patriotic, free-market, antitotalitarian gentleman of impeccably good manners, could take it no more and responded: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

It is one of the few times in Buckley’s long public life that he abandoned civility, and he instantly regretted it. Nonetheless, having been on the receiving end of many similar insults and diatribes, I have deep sympathy for Buckley’s frustration. For at some point it is necessary to throw down the gauntlet, to draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary, to cry at long last, “Enough is enough.” To stand athwart “progress” and yell, “Stop!” My hope is that this book has served much the same purpose as Buckley’s intemperate outburst while striving for his more typical civility.

This ending seemed to cheapen, just a hair, what is overall quite a remarkable book. For a moment, I was left thinking that Liberal Fascism is little more than a “Nyah!”--a thumbing of the nose back at liberals for decades of calling conservatives Nazis. But it’s so much more than that. And I’m worried that these two paragraphs will be reported as the whole theme of the book (er, as I just did).

But Goldberg’s real point is inescapable: The modern American left totes a lot of historical baggage, much of which it’s unaware. And that baggage continues to inspire it, even as the left mutates into softer, kinder, gentler, squishier forms unthinkable by its ancestors when they “started from zero” ninety-some years ago.

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Title by Jonah, review of Horton Hears a Who by The Conservative Mindcleaner:

It looks like I got Jonah Goldberg's attention with this one. I don't know what to make of his "Uh oh" though. Let's just say I'm not the only one who's going to make these connections. I might be the only one stupid enough, however, to say it out loud.

Assuming that those who attacked the Times Square military recruitment office turn out to be the usual suspects, (and it ultimately may not, of course), it's further proof that the radical left is trapped in the time machine, with the dial permanently set at 1968. Ed Morrissey writes:

Given the escalating protests over military recruitment, it seems inevitable that people would bomb those who seek to protect the nation and fight our enemies. This morning, unknown attackers bombed a Times Square military recruitment office. Thankfully, the office and the building that housed it was closed at the time of attack:

An explosive device damaged a military recruiting station in Times Square early Thursday, and police blocked off the area to investigate.

The explosive device caused minor damage, and no one was injured, police said. The explosion shattered a glass entryway. …

Witnesses staying at a hotel in the area said they heard a “big bang” and could feel the building shake. A large plume of smoke was also visible after the explosion, they said.

Melanie Morgan just wrote about the escalating attacks on military recruiters a week ago. She lists several cities where recruitment centers have been attacked in varying degrees, usually limited to vandalism and threats of violence. These operations have not hurt military recruiting at all. Michelle wrote about this two years ago (and many times since), and quite obviously the attackers have grown frustrated that they haven’t frightened off enough people to slow down the flow of recruits.

Now the movement has decided to morph into domestic terrorism. Of course, the people responsible will claim that they bombed the office during the night to keep anyone from being hurt. That’s exactly the same kind of rationalization that people like the Weather Underground and the SLA used at first, anyway — that terrorism was justified by their politics. In fact, a few like William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn still claim that.

I wrote a little while ago about the plan of some protest groups to 'Recreate 68' at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this year. If there's a close delegate count and the convention is contested -- which is still unlikely, but possible -- that stands to raise the tension level for Democrats. If the anti-war base is dissatisfied with Congress' failure to bring the troops home -- a virtual certainty -- that could raise it as well. The pressure is on the DNC to ensure that despite the potential trouble, the nominating party goes smoothly.

Since writing previously, I've learned that the folks trying to screw up the liberalpalooza have their own website: Recreate 68.org. The site is set up to facilitate communications between protesters, and help them with planning. It includes a primer on 'Direct Action.' The first part is devoted to an argument over semantics -- trying to explain how Direct Action is different from terrorism. Then they assert that while it's not terrorism, 'it is violent:'

To say that it is violent to destroy the machinery of a slaughterhouse or to break windows belonging to a party that promotes war is to prioritize property over human and animal life. This objection subtly validates violence against living creatures by focusing all attention on property rights and away from more fundamental issues.

The organizer of Recreate 68 (a Ward Churchill buddy) is already sparring with the City of Denver over the permitting process for protests. It seems like there's real potential for this to get ugly.

But instead of trying to "Recreate '68", isn't it time to move beyond a year that's forty years in the past? Trying to relive the 1960s today is as pathetic as trying to recreate the era of Benny Goodman and Bing Crosby in the 1970s.

Or as Daniel Henninger wrote in November:

What fell out of 1968 was a profound division over what I would call civic vision.

One side, which took to the streets in Chicago or occupied Columbia University, concluded from Vietnam and the race riots that America, in its relations with the world and its own citizens, was flawed and required big changes. Their defining document was the March 1968 Kerner Commission report, announcing "two societies," separate and unequal. The press, incidentally, emerged from Vietnam and the riots joined to this new, permanent template. That, too, has never stopped.

The other side was, well, insulted. It thought America was fundamentally good, though always able to improve. The Voting Rights Act passed in 1964 on a bipartisan vote, opposed mainly by southern Democrats. This side's standard-bearer called the U.S. "a shining city upon a hill." But after 1968, no Democratic presidential candidate would ever speak those words. Nor will Mr. Obama ever repeat Mr. Sarkozy's explicit repudiation of that era.

If it's Hillary versus Rudy, McCain or even the placid Mitt Romney, we will be in those streets again. Besides, her candidacy comes with Jumpin' Jack Flash himself, Bill Clinton. Would it be a good thing if the country's politics said bye-bye baby to the children of 1968? Probably. But it won't happen this time.

Update: "First the Times Square bombing, now this. How does Rove do it?"

Fluoridation, no doubt.

Todd Seavey writes:

Why, then, the eco-maniacal insistence on maintaining the ban, even in the face of massive human suffering caused by the elimination of DDT?

Around the time of the DDT ban, Dr. Charles Wurster, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, may have revealed how some environmentalists really feel about human beings when he was asked if people might die as a result of the DDT ban: "Probably...so what? People are the causes of all the problems; we have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any."

If you missed Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday because you were listening to Pajamas' PJM Political on XM satellite radio, you can tune-in here and catch two hours of Jonah Goldberg discussing Liberal Fascism.

If you missed PJM Political yesterday because you were listening to Hugh Hewitt, you can catch it here.

And for a sneak preview of next week's PJM Political, take a listen to Austin Bay's interview with Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics.

This past September, I pondered if Michelle Obama was the next Teresa Heinz, whose soundbites would cause much damage control for her husband's presidential campaign. To her credit though, Teresa never said, "we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

As Ed Morrissey writes:

But it's the notion that only Barack Obama can save our souls that is the most offensive part of the speech, by far. Government doesn't exist to save souls; it exists to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. If I feel my soul needs saving, the very last place I'd look (in the US) for a savior would be Washington DC or Capitol Hill. I'll trust God and Jesus Christ with my soul, and I'm not going to mistake Barack Obama for either one.

This, though, is the religion of statism distilled to its essence. Only a government can rescue people from the consequences of their own decisions. Only government programs can provide for your every need, and only government can use your money wisely enough to ensure that your needs get covered. Individuals cannot possibly manage to help their neighbors through their churches or community organizations, let alone encourage people to do for themselves.

And all you need to enter the statist Utopia is to sell your soul. So that it can be fixed.

Update: Mark Steyn looks at an even creepier side-pocket element of Obama worship.

More: As Orrin Judd writes, "When You Start To Scare Even Mother Jones", you know you may have problems.

Jonathan Stein writes on the Mother Jones blog:

This is our moment to do what? To march? To organize? No. To vote for Obama. As if simply by voting for one man, we make a mark upon this country as indelibly as those who fought the Nazis or sat at lunch counters.

But the easiness of Obama's movement isn't what bothers me most. I am profoundly troubled that any candidate would chart the course of American history as follows (and I'm rearranging Obama's history here to make it more chronological):

American Revolutionaries -> Manifest Destiny -> Slaves/Abolitionists -> Suffragettes -> the Labor Movement -> the Greatest Generation -> the Civil Rights Movement -> Himself.

Chapomatic writes, "I Despair For My Country (Although My Waistline Might Well Improve)":

Jonah Goldberg just helped me get thrown out of an ice cream shop.

Over in Pacific Grove, California, a pretty little town between Monterey and the Pebble Beach golf community, where no hovel goes for less than about $800K, is a Lappert’s ice cream shop. Lappert’s is a brand from Hawaii and makes a darn good vanilla.

This vanilla today had some auwe in it. As I get to the head of the line I note that prominently displayed on the counter is a bunch of Truther literature. You know the kind: pictures of the WTC7 collapse, links to loathsome websites, the works.

“You don’t believe all this stuff, do you?”, says I, not realizing the storm to come.

“It’s all in there”, says the aging boomer running the place, pointing to a copy of the 9/11 Commission report in a Ziploc bag beneath the Troofer stuff.

“But you believe that the U.S. did it to ourselves? Then you’re a fool.”

He didn’t start calling me a Nazi and racist, though, until he noticed the book in my hand. Saturdays are the only time off I have from this job, so I try to get a little reading in sometimes. In this case, it was Liberal Fascism, and I’m up to the part where Goldberg gets into Wilson versus Teddy Roosevelt in progressive ideals. Apparently the red cover is a red flag. Then I got called a racist for being white–how do you know what I am, quite frankly?–and it got a little loud in the shop.

I received a Nazi salute as I walked out, and the aging boomer eating his ice cream with his date near the door fluffed up and started telling me how he wasn’t going to talk to me as I was going out the door. I guess he didn’t like it when I stopped and asked him why he was talking to me if he didn’t want to talk to me…the gears didn’t move too quick on the guy.

Troofers. Boomers. Rich comfortable people in fake alt-lifestyle decorated businesses. Argh.

I can’t even buy ice cream without Troofer crap served up liberal fascism style.

From Fora.TV, here's Jonah Goldberg, Michael Ledeen, Fred Siegel, and Ronald Radosh, discussing Liberal Fascism at the Hudson Institute:

For more inconvenient truths salvaged from the memory hole, don't miss John H. McWhorter on the "Party of Chains" at City Journal.

Baptist Press quotes the Goracle on his namesake issue, Goreball Worming:

"This is not a political issue," Gore told a crowd of approximately 2,500 paying attendees. "It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue."

I guess I'm strictly an old school kind of guy: unlike Al, I can't say I'm too comfortable with most post-Christian religions. They often end rather badly for all concerned.

Update: And as Jonah Goldberg notes in Liberal Fascism, they often end-up attempting to eliminate or modify into incoherence the holidays named by their predecessor faith.

Andrea Billups of the Washington Times writes about advertising and father figures:

Todd Wasserman knew he had touched a nerve when he saw the enormous number of responses from readers.

As editor of Brandweek, a New York-based magazine that covers the nation's marketing industry, Mr. Wasserman penned a column in November bemoaning the treatment of fathers in advertising.

The dad-as-buffoon and the anti-father imagery seemingly permeated advertising and marketing campaigns, which continually use stereotypes about men to get cheap laughs, he observed. And they are increasingly the norm.

The letters poured in.

"I don't think we ever got so much reaction," said Mr. Wasserman, the father of a 5-month-old. "That fathers are often the butt of ads and accepted as idiots, that was just commonly accepted. But for me, it just seems like a stale target, a safe target for someone trying to get an easy laugh in an ad. The more people I talked to, the more it seemed a lot of people felt that way."

He is not alone in his assessment.