“The word “neoconservative” was coined by Michael Harrington and the editors of Dissent to describe their old friends who’d moved to the right. It was an insult, along the lines of “running dog” or “fellow traveler.” Or perhaps the “neo” was intended to conjure “neo-Nazi,” the only other political label to sport the prefix. As Seymour Martin Lipset, one of the most-respected social scientists of the 20th century and an original neocon wrote, the term “was invented as an invidious label to undermine political opponents, most of whom have been unhappy with being so described.”

-~Jonah Goldberg

Jonah Goldberg on The Glenn Beck Show Feb 11/09

Jonah Goldberg on “Liberal Fascism”

 

Jonah Goldberg on Glenn Beck Explaining the Socialist Agenda Behind the Stimulus Bill

Glenn Beck A Closer Look At The Progressive Movement

Liberal Fascism part 1 Speech to YAF.wmv

Author Jonah Goldberg on Glenn Beck 2/18 – Liberal Fascism

Author Jonah Goldberg on Glenn Beck 2/19 – Liberal Fascism

Author Jonah Goldberg on Glenn Beck 2/20 – Liberal Fascism

Author Jonah Goldberg on Glenn Beck 2/21 – Liberal Fascism

Liberal Fascism (1) — Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

 

Liberal Fascism (2) — Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

 

Liberal Fascism (3) — Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

 

Liberal Fascism (4) — Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

 

Liberal Fascism (5) — Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

 

Liberal Fascism Q-A (1)

 

Liberal Fascism Q-A (2)

 

Liberal Fascism Q-A (3)

 

Background Articles and Videos

Jonah Jacob Goldberg

“ Jonah Jacob Goldberg (born March 21, 1969) is an American syndicated columnist and author. Goldberg is known for his contributions on politics and culture to National Review Online, where he is the editor-at-large. He is the author of Liberal Fascism, a #1 bestseller.^[1]

Goldberg also frequently appears on television, on such shows as Good Morning America, Nightline, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Real Time with Bill Maher, Larry King Live, Your World with Neil Cavuto and most recently the Glenn Beck Program and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He is also a frequent participant on bloggingheads.tv. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Goldberg 

 

We’re all fascists now”

An interview with conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg, who argues that fascism is left-wing, not right-wing, and that contemporary liberals are fascism’s intellectual offspring.

By Alex Koppelman

“…What’s the book about?

It’s a revisionist history. It’s an attempt to reconfigure, or I would say correct, the standard understanding of the political and ideological context that frames most of the ideological debates that we have had since, basically, World War II. There’s this idea that the further right you go the closer you get to Nazism and fascism, and the further left you go the closer you get to decency and all good things, or at least having the right intentions in your heart.

For 60 years most historians have been putting fascism on the right, or conservative, side of the political spectrum. What are you able to see that they weren’t?

There are a lot of historians who get fascism basically right. There are a lot of historians who don’t. I think the Marxists have been part and parcel of a basic propaganda campaign for a very long time, but there are plenty of historians who understand what fascism was and are actually quite honest about it.

To sort of start the story, the reason why we see fascism as a thing of the right is because fascism was originally a form of right-wing socialism. Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist, he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I.

Originally being a fascist meant you were a right-wing socialist, and the problem is that we’ve incorporated these European understandings of things and then just dropped the socialist. In the American context fascists get called right-wingers even though there is almost no prominent fascist leader — starting with Mussolini and Hitler — who if you actually went about and looked at their economic programs, or to a certain extent their social program, where you wouldn’t locate most if not all of those ideas on the ideological left in the American context. …”

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/11/goldberg/

Dispelling The Herbert Hoover Myth

Jonah Goldberg

“…The Herbert Hoover of popular imagination was a laissez-faire lickspittle of Adam Smith. But this idea began as Rooseveltian propaganda and endures as the creation myth of modern liberalism.

William Leuchtenburg, possibly the greatest authority on the FDR era, wrote some time ago, “Almost every historian now recognizes that the image of Hoover as a ‘do-nothing’ president is inaccurate.”

After the stock market crash of 1929, Hoover browbeat business leaders to keep wages and prices high. He invested heavily in public works projects. He pushed for an international moratorium on debts. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which later became a home for many of FDR’s Brain Trusters. Hoover increased farm subsidies enormously.

Some of Hoover’s interventions were good but ineffectual. A few were very, very bad and very effective.

In 1932, Hoover in effect repealed Calvin Coolidge’s tax cuts, increasing the rates for the poorest taxpayers by more than 100 percent and hiking the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. Worse, contrary to his own better instincts, Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley trade bill that raised protectionist walls at precisely the moment the world needed trade the most.

Then there’s this idea that FDR rode to the rescue, saving the day by untying the American people from the railroad tracks of runaway capitalism. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, now a surrogate for Barack Obama, recently said on NPR: “It’s very tempting to always think that the government should just stand back and let the private sector sort these problems out. That’s the kind of thinking that made the Depression ‘Great.’”

Summers should know better (in fact, I’m sure he does). The Great Depression was not made “Great” by government inaction. Indeed, FDR’s New Deal may have been wonderful in some mytho-poetic sense, and maybe some of its reforms can be defended in some broader context, but as an effort to end the Great Depression, the New Deal was a failure. As my colleague Mark Steyn writes, “Lots of other places – from Britain to Australia – took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That’s why in other countries they refer to it as “the Depression,” but only in the U.S. is it ‘Great.’”

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/03/opinion/main4499465.shtml

 

The Shrine of FDR

“…Both these defenses are representative of the general approach of New Deal apologists: Whenever challenged, they simply change the terms of the argument. While it’s certainly true that there is no consensus that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression, there is a sweeping consensus that the New Deal didn’t end it. The vast majority of historians and economists—including Paul Krugman—will concede that the Great Depression didn’t end until either World War II or the post-war economic boom (that’s a whole other argument). In other words, only after FDR himself admitted he was no longer going to play the role of “Dr. New Deal” and instead became “Dr. Win-the-War” was there any real chance of ending the Great Depression. If a golfer can’t hit the ball to save his life with a five-iron, but smacks the dickens out of it with a seven-iron, it’s hard to see how his improved score demonstrates the effectiveness of five-irons.

Ultimately, the question of whether the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression depends almost entirely on what you mean by “the New Deal.” When Social Security was in Republican crosshairs, liberals insisted that it was at the heart of the New Deal. Well, whatever Social Security’s merits, it had nothing to do with ending the Great Depression. When partisan divisions prove inconvenient to liberals, they lament the absence of the unity and common purpose we allegedly enjoyed during the New Deal (though the 1930s were actually a chaotic and deeply divided time). When certain favored industries suffer from international competition, the New Dealers’ supposed genius at economic planning is invoked; the problem there is that much of their effort on this front was a disaster. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration and National Recovery Administration, for example, were economic and moral disgraces. One would think—or at least hope—that today’s progressives don’t believe small businessmen should be prosecuted or jailed for trying to under-price their big-name competitors, or schoolchildren should be forced to conduct militaristic pageants in support of the government’s agenda.

In fairness, people who say, categorically, that the New Deal didn’t prolong the Great Depression make the same mistake as those who say it did: They assume that it’s possible to determine the “natural” lifespan of the Great Depression. It isn’t. Still, we can draw inferences from useful comparisons. In the U.S., the Great Depression was deeper, and the recovery from it slower, than in most industrial nations. Why did employment recover more quickly in Canada and the United Kingdom? Indeed, why was the American effort to end the Depression among the least successful of the industrialized nations? Some progressives might argue that it was because the government wasn’t interventionist enough. Fine, let them argue that. But it is a very different argument from the one we usually hear about the purported success of the New Deal. …”

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTc0ZDM0MDg1NDIyNWQ5ZDFhMTcyNzhlYTI1YmE4Y2M=&w=MQ==

 

Into the Belly of the Beast
If you’re a socialist on the way down, you were never really a capitalist on the way up. By Jonah Goldberg

 

“…One of the great things about capitalism is that, unlike socialism or, say, Bobby Knight, it can deal with failure. In fact, capitalism needs failure. Joseph Schumpeter called this “creative destruction.” Your grandmother called it “making lemonade out of lemons.” The beauty of free markets is that firms learn from their mistakes or they lose money, shrink, and then go out of business. Governments, meanwhile, grow from their mistakes and learn to make money from them.

Under normal circumstances, the financial inferno would cause a lot of pain, but it would also burn away a lot of deadwood. The strongest firms would survive, and newer, healthier businesses would sprout from the ashes. Plummeting housing prices would make homes affordable for first-time buyers again, particularly those with good credit who live within their means.

Sure, we would still have a stimulus bill, with tax cuts and infrastructure spending and, yes, silly pork projects. And that would be fine. We would even have some kind of bailout of the banking industry, which became a mess in part because people like Christopher Dodd and Maxine Waters tried to play the banker in their own personal game of Monopoly.

But that’s not what we got. Instead, the old adage “Everyone’s a capitalist on the way up and a socialist on the way down” is kicking in. The thing is, if you’re a socialist on the way down, you were never really a capitalist on the way up. Capitalism requires putting your own capital at risk.

What we do have is a grand adhocracy where “government,” a.k.a. Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, and a dozen others, will figure everything out as they go. Businesses will rise or fall based on their skill at kissing up to the government.

And as sure as shinola, when government fails again, we’ll be told that only government can save us. …”

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTA3ZWIyNjFiZmY2OWI4Y2IxZTJhYjgzNGQzYTcyMmI=

 

Day 15 of Obama’s honeymoon

One doesn’t have to break a sweat searching for examples of the news media’s ongoing love affair with our president. In this, he is like FDR.

By Jonah Goldberg

 

“…One of the great tests of news media bias is when the storyline has become unfalsifiable. With George W. Bush, no matter what he did, the facts always seemed to prove he was to blame. With Obama, no matter what he does, he’s always the hero. For instance, during a trip to China in 2005, then-President Bush tried to open a locked door while leaving a news conference, and the press tittered at his buffoonery. Yet last week, when President Obama walked into an Oval Office window that he thought was a door, much of the news media looked the other way — perhaps recognizing his genius at spotting where a door should have been.

Bush’s love of exercise was analyzed as a troubling obsession of an out-of-touch president. Obama’s fixation with physical fitness gives numerous reporters hope that he will alleviate America’s obesity epidemic. In a front-page exclusive, The Washington Post revealed that on Obama’s recent vacation, the Hawaiian “sun glinted off (his) chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.”

A more serious example can be found in some of the news coverage of the stimulus bill. Obama made it his top priority to get bipartisan support for his unprecedented spending bill. The president exerted enormous personal effort to sway House Republicans to his cause but failed to win a single GOP vote, and he even lost 11 Democrats. And yet the Post reported in another front-page article that the Democratic House’s passage of the bill — which was always assured — “marked a big victory for his presidency a little more than a week into his term.” Indeed, it’s hard to see how anything short of a crushing defeat would be described as anything other than a “big victory.”  …”

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/02/day-15-of-obama.html

 

 Jonah Goldberg

National Review Online

NRO

12 Month Archive of Article

http://author.nationalreview.com/?q=MjE5NQ==

 

Jonah Goldberg:
Columns, Opinion, Views, Issues

“…One of the most prominent young conservative journalists on the scene today, Jonah Goldberg is Generation X’s answer to P.J. O’Rourke. His columns and articles, laced with keen wit and pithy insights, have rapidly generated a large readership. Whether he’s issuing a sharply-worded cultural critique or laying out a lucid analysis of a hot political issue, Goldberg is guaranteed to make you laugh, and learn. His work is proof that reading and thinking about political, media, and cultural issues can be enlightening and entertaining at the same time–even if you don’t agree with his particular point of view.

A nationally syndicated columnist and the editor of National Review Online, he also is a contributing editor to the print version of National Review. In addition, he writes the popular “Goldberg File” column for National Review Online. He is also the media columnist for The American Enterprise Magazine, and a media critic for Brill’s Content.

He has also written on politics and culture for the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Public Interest, The Wilson Quarterly, The Weekly Standard, The New York Post, National Review, The Women’s Quarterly, and Slate.  …”

http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/archive.shtml

 

Jonah Goldberg and the Libertarian Axiom on Non-Aggression

by Walter Block

“…The foundation of libertarianism is the non-aggression axiom. This states that it is illicit to initiate or threaten invasive violence against a man or his legitimately owned property. Murray Rothbard characterized this as “plumb line” libertarianism: follow this one principle, and you will be able to infer the libertarian position on all issues, without exception.

Before considering the latest Jonah Goldberg criticism of this philosophy (saving a friend from suicide by force), consider, perhaps, an even more difficult case.

You are standing in the path on an onrushing boulder, completely unaware of your fate. In a second, this massive rock will hit you, and you will die. (Let us stipulate the truth of this supposition). Instead, however, I push you out of its path, and into safety. The only trouble is, as a result of it, although I have saved your life, I also broke your arm.

Now, if you are a reasonable sort of person, you will be grateful to me. Instead, you insist upon sticking to the literal letter of libertarian law, and sue me for damages for the injury you have sustained. After all, I did initiate a violent act upon your person, which resulted in an injury. If this is not assault and battery, you argue, then nothing is. How shall the libertarian judge rule? …” 

 http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/block1.html

  

Goldberg’s Trivial Pursuit      

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, Jonah Goldberg, Doubleday, 496 pages

By Austin W. Bramwell

“…Goldberg does at times display a blush of shame. He qualifies his conclusions to the point of taking them all back, insisting that he does not actually mean to say that liberals are dangerous totalitarians. He grants that some of his points are trivial and others may appear outrageous, so that nothing he says should be taken as both true and interesting at the same time. He claims that movement conservatives also suffer from the totalitarian temptation, so that we are “all” fascists now. Why then link liberalism in particular with fascism? Here Goldberg is surprisingly candid: because, he argues, liberals do it to conservatives all the time.

 

He’s right, of course. Many liberals do impute nefarious designs to conservatives. With just a modicum of restraint, Goldberg could have written a very good book. “Look,” he could have said, “‘Fascism’ has no meaning today, but, in any case, not only does conservatism owe nothing to fascism, but, historically, conservatives in America generally opposed fascism while liberals and leftists often were sympathetic.” Instead, lacking even the excuse of ignorance, he chose to sling the term “fascism” around as casually as the most vulgar leftist. It does not speak well of Goldberg that, by his own admission, he wrote his first book not to enlighten but to exact revenge.

Liberal Fascism completes Goldberg’s transformation from chipper humorist into humorless ideologue. Perhaps it was hubris that made him do it. The last important book by a conservative was Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987, whose ideas had been in circulation for many years before. Goldberg may have convinced himself that by penning yet another disquisition into the “true nature of liberalism,” he could become the first movement conservative in a generation to write something lasting. In the end, he succeeded only in recycling 60 years worth of conservative movement bromides.”

http://amconmag.com/article/2008/jan/28/00028/

 

Jonah Goldberg on Obamanation

 

Jonah on Tucker

 

Jonah Goldberg tells UMass to “Give War a Chance”

 

Peter Beinart and Jonah Goldberg Political Debate

http://fora.tv/2008/10/02/Peter_Beinart_and_Jonah_Goldberg_in_Political_Debate#chapter_01

 

Michael Savage on New World Order, Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama Dictatorship on Jan. 27, 2009

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