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Book: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Quotes of Book: Liberal Fascism: The Secret
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  1. Jonah Goldberg _ Liberal Fascism: The Secret

    Given the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult to understand why anyone doubts the fascist nature of the French Revolution. Few dispute that it was totalitarian, terrorist, nationalist, conspiratorial, and populist. It produced the first modern dictators, Robespierre and Napoleon, and worked on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the "general will." The paranoid Jacobin mentality made the revolutionaries more savage and cruel than the king they replaced. Some fifty thousand people ultimately died in the Terror, many in political show trials that Simon Schama describes as the "founding charter of totalitarian justice." Robespierre summed up the totalitarian logic of the Revolution: "There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man…{W}e must exterminate all our enemies.
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  2. Jonah Goldberg _ Liberal Fascism: The Secret

    Fascism's success almost always depends on the cooperation of the "losers" during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes-the people who have just enough to fear losing it-are the electoral shock troops of fascism {Richard Hofstadter identified this "status anxiety" as the source of Progressivism's quasi-fascist nature}. Populist appeals to resentment against "fat cats," "international bankers," "economic royalists," and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues.
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