Liberal Fascism using a progressive name was and still is Fascism

This is a great book review of what looks to be a great book on Liberalism which Goldberg claims is Fascism. Think not? Read the article. Then get the book.

“Liberal Fascism”, by David Forsmark FrontPage Magazine book review of “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Goldberg

Goldberg’s focus is is perfectly timed. After generations of misappropriating the word “liberal” and thoroughly discrediting a word that classically applies better to George Washington than to George McGovern, the American Left has reclaimed its roots by attempting to resurrect the euphemism of “progressive” to describe itself.This would seem a good public relations move. Everyone is for “progress,” and all anyone remembers about the Progressives from high school history class is that they were for food safety standards, banning child labor, breaking up predatory monopolies and reforming slumlords.

But as Goldberg points out, America’s turn-of-the-century progressives were the direct intellectual forebears of 1930s fascism, and many of those who lived that long actively supported both the Italian and German “experiments.”

The Progressives and fascists both admired Bismarck’s welfare state, though the collapse of Christianity in Europe was replaced by a religion of the state, while the Social Gospel — the means for perfecting the masses — became dominant in America.

The Progressives’ variety, Goldberg writes, was “nice and for your own good … a sort of Christian fascism. … But liberals often forget that the Progressives were also imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many would call ’state capitalism.’”

As Goldberg points out, both fascists like Italy’s Benito Mussolini and progressives like Woodrow Wilson claimed the same intellectual forebears, and it is utterly specious to posit that modern conservatives and fascists have any intellectual roots in common. Conservatives simply draw no inspiration from Hegel, Nietzsche or Rousseau; fascists and progressives do — and Wilson and Mussolini expressly did.