The Shape of Code

Based purely on its title, Liberal Fascism: The secret history of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg, published in 2007, is not a book that I would usually consider buying.

The book traces the promotion and application of fascistic ideas by activists and politicians, from their creation by Mussolini in the 1920s to the start of this century. After these ideas first gained political prominence in the 1920s/30s as Fascism, they and the term Fascism became political opposites, i.e., one was adopted by the left and the other labelled as right-wing by the left.

The book starts by showing the extreme divergence of opinions on the definition of Fascism. The author’s solution to deciding whether policies/proposals are Fascist to compare their primary objectives and methods against those present (during the 1920s and early 1930s) in the policies originally espoused by Benito Mussolini (president of Italy from 1922 to 1943), Woodrow Wilson (the 28th US president between 1913-1921), and Adolf Hitler (Chancellor of Germany 1933-1945).

Whatever their personal opinions and later differences, in the early years of Fascism Mussolini, Wilson and Hitler made glowing public statements about each other’s views, policies and achievements. I had previously read about this love-in, and the book discusses the background along with some citations to the original sources.

Like many, I had bought into the Mussolini was a buffoon narrative. In fact, he was extremely well-read, translated French and German socialist and philosophical literature, and was considered to be the smartest of the three (but an inept wartime leader). He was acknowledged as the father of Fascism. The Italian fascists did not claim that Nazism was an offshoot of Italian fascism, and went to great lengths to distance themselves from Nazi anti-Semitism.

At the start of 1920 Hitler joined the National Socialist party, membership number 555. There is a great description of Hitler: “… this antisocial, autodidactic misanthrope and the consummate party man. He has all the gifts a cultist revolutionary party needed: oratory, propaganda, an eye for intrigue, and an unerring instinct for populist demagoguery.”

Woodrow Wilson believed that the country would be better off with the state (i.e., the government) dictating how things should be, and was willing for the government to silence dissent. The author describes the 1917 Espionage Act and the Sedition Act as worse than McCarthyism. As a casual reader, I’m not going to check the cited sources to decide whether the author is correct and that the Wikipedia articles are whitewashing history (he does not claim this), or that the author is overselling his case.

Readers might have wondered why a political party whose name contained the word ‘socialist’ came to be labelled as right-wing. The National Socialist party that Hitler joined was a left-wing party, i.e., it had the usual set of left-wing policies and appealed to the left’s social base.

The big difference, as perceived by those involved, between National Socialism and Communism, as I understand it, is that communists seek international socialism and define all nationalist movements, socialist or not, as right-wing. Stalin ordered that the term ‘socialism’ should not be used when describing any non-communist party.

Woodrow Wilson died in 1924, and Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) became the 32nd US president, between 1933 and 1945. The great depression happens and there is a second world war, and the government becomes even more involved in the lives of its citizens, i.e., Mussolini Fascist policies are enacted, known as the New Deal.

History repeats itself in the 1960s, i.e., Mussolini Fascist policies implemented, but called something else. Then we arrive in the 1990s and, yes, yet again Mussolini Fascist policies being promoted (and sometimes implemented) under another name.

I found the book readable and enjoyed the historical sketches. It was an interesting delve into the extent to which history is rewritten to remove inconvenient truths associated with ideas promoted by political movements.