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The Fascism You Didn't Know: Uncovering History's Greatest Misunderstanding
When you hear the word "fascism," what comes to mind? Jackbooted thugs? Swastikas? Right-wing extremism? This reflexive association is precisely what Jonah Goldberg challenges in his provocative bestseller "Liberal Fascism." Since its 2008 publication, the book has sparked fierce debate across the political spectrum, with conservative commentators like Glenn Beck praising its historical insights while liberal critics dismiss it as partisan revisionism. Yet its central thesis remains stubbornly relevant: fascism, properly understood, originated not from the right but from the progressive left.
Goldberg's work has become required reading in many political science programs, not because everyone agrees with it, but because it forces readers to question fundamental assumptions about political ideologies. The book's controversial premise-that modern liberalism shares intellectual DNA with fascist movements-continues to challenge conventional wisdom about the political spectrum itself. Whether you find yourself nodding in agreement or seething with disagreement, Goldberg's historical detective work demands serious engagement from anyone interested in understanding the true nature of political movements that shaped the 20th century and continue to influence our world today.
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The Great Misunderstanding: Redefining Fascism
Fascism is perhaps the most misunderstood political term in modern discourse. While angry left-wingers routinely label corporations and right-wing politicians as fascists, even scholarly investigations acknowledge the term's elusive definition. Leading academics offer complex definitions: Roger Griffin calls it "a genus of political ideology whose mythic core is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism," while others emphasize national regeneration and anti-liberalism.
Despite this academic uncertainty, many liberals act as if they know exactly what fascism is, wielding the term as a cudgel against opponents. "Fascist" has become a modern word for "heretic," branding individuals worthy of excommunication from political discourse. Hollywood writers use "fascist," "Brownshirt," and "Nazi" to describe anything liberals dislike. In the political realm, Representative Charlie Rangel claimed the GOP's Contract with America was more extreme than Nazism, Bill Clinton called the Texas GOP platform a "fascist tract," and mainstream publications eagerly promote academics who suggest the GOP is fascist.
This reflexive labeling reveals more about political tribalism than historical understanding. The left's understanding of fascism contains striking contradictions. Their logic seems to be that anything liberals approve of can't be fascist by definition, while conservative policies are inherently fascistic regardless of their actual content. Fidel Castro might objectively fit fascist criteria, but because the left approves of his resistance to U.S. "imperialism," calling him fascist is considered absurd.
The uncomfortable truth is that fascism is actually a phenomenon of the left, not the right. The common belief that fascism and communism are opposites is a propaganda triumph that masks their minimal theoretical and practical differences. Both were utopian visions that attracted international followings. American Progressivism-from which modern liberals proudly claim descent-shares the same intellectual wellsprings as European fascism. Indeed, many fascist ideas were first applied in America before being exported to Europe where Mussolini and Hitler implemented them.
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Mussolini: The Original Fascist Revolutionary
Contrary to popular perception, Mussolini's Fascism preceded Hitler's Nazism by many years, with sixteen years elapsing between the March on Rome and Italy's reluctant adoption of anti-Semitic race laws in 1938. Before Hitler, fascism had no connection to anti-Semitism-in fact, Jews were overrepresented in the Italian Fascist movement from its 1919 founding until their expulsion in 1938, and Mussolini enjoyed support from Rome's chief rabbi and much of the Jewish community.
Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Mussolini enjoyed tremendous popularity in America. Journalist Isaac Marcosson called him "a Latin Teddy Roosevelt" in the New York Times. The American Legion saw itself as America's equivalent to the Fascisti. Will Rogers declared dictatorships "the greatest form of government" after interviewing Il Duce. A 1927 Literary Digest survey named Mussolini as the world's greatest living man. Even Winston Churchill called him the world's greatest lawgiver, while Sigmund Freud dedicated a book to him as "the Hero of Culture."
America's progressive muckrakers were particularly enamored with Mussolini. Ida Tarbell praised the "despot with a dimple" for his progressive labor attitudes. Lincoln Steffens proclaimed God had "formed Mussolini out of the rib of Italy." Samuel McClure hailed Fascism as "the first new ideal in government since the founding of the American Republic."
Born Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, he was named after three revolutionary heroes. His blacksmith father Alessandro was an ardent socialist and anarchist who belonged to the First International with Marx and Engels. Young Benito inherited his father's hatred of religion, particularly Catholicism, and became notorious for ridiculing Jesus and challenging God to strike him dead. As a rising socialist journalist, he wrote anti-Church works and demanded that socialists purge Christians from their ranks.
In 1902, Mussolini fled to Switzerland, carrying only two lire and a medallion of Karl Marx. There he joined radical socialists and anarchists, including Lenin's colleague Angelica Balabanoff. Though their meeting is disputed, Lenin and Mussolini admired each other, with Lenin later lamenting Mussolini was "lost to us" and calling him "a strong man, who would have led our party to victory."
After returning to Italy, Mussolini became editor of "La lotta di classe" (Class War), opposing the government's war with Turkey and calling for general strikes. Imprisoned for sedition, he emerged a socialist star, being called "Il Duce" of revolutionary socialists years before becoming the Duce of Fascism. Had Mussolini died in 1914, Marxist theorists would likely remember him as a heroic martyr to the proletarian struggle, as he was then one of Europe's leading radical socialists.
When World War I broke out, Mussolini initially followed the socialist party line opposing intervention, but soon moved to the interventionist camp, arguing that parties must adapt to "iron necessity" rather than dogma. From this moment, Italian Socialists smeared Mussolini as "right-wing" to punish his apostasy, though his inspiration remained firmly on the socialist left: "Socialism is in my blood."
In 1919, Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento, a popular front of pro-war leftists including socialist veterans, Futurists, anarchists, and syndicalists. Their program was unmistakably leftist: universal suffrage, abolishing the Senate, ending the draft, repealing nobility titles, establishing eight-hour workdays and minimum wages, reforming pensions, expropriating uncultivated lands for veterans, building secular schools, implementing progressive taxation amounting to "partial expropriation of all riches," nationalizing arms industries, and confiscating religious property.
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Hitler: The Socialist Revolutionary
Was Hitler's Germany fascist? Leading scholars like Eugen Weber, A. James Gregor, and George Mosse have argued that Nazism and Italian Fascism were fundamentally different phenomena. While Nazism wasn't Fascist with a capital F, it was fascist with a lowercase f-though this scholarly distinction reveals how misunderstood both movements are in popular understanding.
"Fascist" and "fascism" barely appear in Mein Kampf-just two paragraphs in over 700 pages. Hitler acknowledged fascism as Mussolini's invention but saw it primarily as a successful "idea" that enabled "complete renovation" of a nation, similar to the French and Russian revolutions.
Mussolini personally disliked Hitler, describing him as "a gramophone with just seven tunes." Italian Fascist ideologues distanced themselves from Nazi racism and anti-Semitism, with even extremist ultra-Fascists like Roberto Farinacci writing that Nazism's exclusivist racism "was offensive to the conscience of mankind."
What Hitler took from fascism was the importance of having an idea to arouse the masses, not any particular content. For Hitler, ideas weren't valuable for their intrinsic truth but for enabling desired action-destroying enemies, attaining glory, and ensuring racial triumph.
The conventional story portrays Hitler exploiting resentment over Germany's WWI defeat ("stab in the back" by communists, Jews, weak politicians) and the Versailles Treaty. Colluding with capitalists eager to defeat communism, Nazis staged a reactionary coup by mobilizing "conservative" elements in German society, then established "state capitalism" to reward industrialists who profited from Jewish persecution.
While containing truth, this account isn't complete. The left has cherry-picked facts to portray Nazism as communism's polar opposite, exaggerating industrialists' and conservatives' roles while minimizing Nazism's substantial leftist and socialist aspects. The Nazis didn't merely destroy the Left-they replaced it, incorporating many members in the process. In reality, Nazism drew significant support from working and lower classes-supposedly the natural constituency of the left. German aristocrats and business elites initially rejected Hitler, only backing him opportunistically after his rise seemed inevitable.
Hitler was no conservative or reactionary in any meaningful sense. He saw himself in an existential battle with "reactionaries" who wanted to restore the old order. "We had no wish to resurrect the dead from the old Reich," Hitler wrote, but rather "to build a new State." He admired Stalin and communists but derided those wanting to "turn back the clock." Even the Nazi anthem, the "Horst Wessel Song," referred to comrades shot by the "Red Front and reactionaries."
The Nazi Party deliberately exploited socialist imagery and rhetoric to attract communists. Hitler explained in Mein Kampf how they strategically used red in their propaganda to draw leftists to Nazi meetings, with their flag combining red for "the social idea," white for nationalism, and the swastika representing "the struggle for Aryan man." Party members were called "comrades," and Hitler successfully appealed to "class-conscious proletarians" to fight against "reactionary agitation with the fists of the proletariat."
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Woodrow Wilson's Fascist America
The period of "liberty cabbage," wartime censorship, state-sanctioned brutality, stifling of dissent, and loyalty oaths under Woodrow Wilson's administration was, in Goldberg's view, a fascistic dictatorship implemented by self-described progressives who pushed for a totalitarian state.
Wilson was born in 1856 to a family that quickly acclimated to southern ways after moving from Ohio. Despite severe dyslexia that delayed his reading until age ten, Wilson's extraordinary patience and ambition propelled him through academia to become the first Ph.D. president. His appeal stemmed from being a professional academic during the rise of social science, when expertise was seen as key to human progress.
From his undergraduate days, Wilson was infatuated with political power. He admired men like Bismarck and Lincoln not for their ends but for their means-their ability to impose will and centralize power. Wilson believed power was God's instrument on earth and therefore always to be revered, later arguing as president that he was God's right hand and opposition to him thwarted divine will.
Wilson viewed the state as a natural, organic expression of the people themselves, dismissing constitutional democracy as merely a phase in governmental evolution. He attacked the very concept of natural rights, taking "dead aim at the Declaration of Independence" by dismissing "inalienable rights" as "nonsense" and "mere vague sentiment." For Wilson, government should do "whatever experience permits or the times demand," unfettered by constitutional constraints.
Wilson's vision blended with the broader progressive chorus who rejected individualism entirely. Jane Addams demanded individuals "lose the sense of personal achievement," while theologian Walter Rauschenbusch declared "individualism means tyranny." This fusion of Darwinian organicism and Christian messianism created a totalitarian worldview where society was one organic whole, leaving no room for dissent.
Wilson's America became a full-fledged police state during World War I. Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, any criticism of the government could earn prison sentences. A state official received two and a half years for criticizing a Red Cross fund-raising drive. A Hollywood producer got ten years for making a film depicting British atrocities during the American Revolution. One man was tried simply for explaining in his home why he didn't want to buy Liberty Bonds.
The Department of Justice arrested tens of thousands without cause, issuing warnings that German enemies must "obey the law; keep your mouth shut." The government created its own quasi-fascist force, the American Protective League (APL), whose members were given badges reading "Secret Service" and tasked with spying on neighbors. They read mail, tapped phones, and helped extract confessions with government approval. In New York City alone, the APL rounded up fifty thousand men in "slacker raids," two-thirds later found innocent. By 1918, the APL had over a quarter million members across 600 cities.
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FDR's New Deal: American Fascism's Crowning Achievement
Hitler and Roosevelt both came to power in 1933, understanding many of the same things about politics in the mass age. Both were elected amid perceived exhaustion of traditional liberal politics and expertly exploited new political technologies. Roosevelt mastered radio while Hitler used planes for dramatic effect. The propaganda art of New Deal America, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia featured remarkably similar imagery of bulging-biceps laborers.
Where FDR and Hitler most overlapped was in their appeals to "the forgotten man." Fascism's success typically depends on the cooperation of the lower-middle classes-people with just enough to fear losing it. Populist appeals against "fat cats," "international bankers," and "economic royalists" were stock-in-trade for both leaders, though Hitler and Mussolini were more demagogic than FDR.
Both Hitler and Roosevelt genuinely cared about the "little guy," with mounting scholarship showing that "Hitler's New Deal" was more generous and successful than FDR's by basic indicators. Germany prospered under Hitler with increased birthrates, marriages, and an 80 percent drop in suicide rates from 1932 to 1939. Hitler focused intensely on ending unemployment, achieving this faster than FDR did in America.
Mussolini and Hitler celebrated the New Deal as a kindred effort. The Nazi Party's newspaper praised Roosevelt as having "irreproachable character" and "immovable will," noting he had eliminated "the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation" by adopting "National Socialist strains of thought." Hitler personally congratulated FDR's "heroic efforts" and told the American ambassador that Roosevelt's moral demands were "the quintessence of the German state philosophy." Mussolini was even more direct, reviewing FDR's book "Looking Forward" by saying "This guy's one of us" and declaring that America was "on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century."
The New Deal exhibited objectively fascistic characteristics: governmental force imposing domestic policies, industry captains writing their own rules, secret surveillance of dissidents, FDR taping conversations and using the postal service against enemies, lying to maneuver America into war, and undermining Congress's war powers. Roosevelt told Congress in 1936 that the "new instruments of public power" were wholesome in "a people's government" but would provide "shackles for liberties" in others' hands-revealing he didn't mind authoritarianism if liberals controlled it.
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The 1960s: Fascism Takes to the Streets
The third fascist moment in the United States began in the 1960s, differing dramatically from previous fascist periods by coming after the hard collectivist era in Western civilization. While the cultural left has long seen fascism in the conformity of the 1950s, the 1960s actually represented an international movement of radical uprisings around the world.
At Cornell University in spring 1969, self-styled leftist revolutionaries engaged in fascist tactics to force concessions from the administration. Students and professors labeled as "race traitors" received death threats, enemies were savagely beaten by roaming thugs, and armed students in military uniforms intimidated the campus. The administration, out of cowardice and sympathy, refused to punish the revolutionaries even when the president was manhandled.
Though these radicals considered themselves leftists-the opposite of fascists-they enthusiastically responded when a professor read them Mussolini's speeches. Events culminated when Black Nationalists under the Afro-American Society seized the student union with rifles and shotguns, demanding an ethnically pure educational institution. The crisis began with a cross burning outside a black dorm-later revealed as a hoax orchestrated by the radicals themselves to provide a pretext for violence, similar to a Reichstag fire tactic.
Fascism is inherently a youth movement, exalting passion over reason and action over deliberation. The glorification of young people's opinions precisely because they lack experience is fundamentally fascist, reflecting the Nazi celebration of "idealism of the deed" over "old dogmas." Youth politics resembles populism-essentially politics of the tantrum.
Pre-Nazi Germany experienced a youth revolution remarkably similar to America's 1960s. German youth culture of the 1920s-30s was filled with rebelliousness, environmental mysticism, and paganism. These middle-class youth rejected bourgeois liberalism, considering family life repressive, sexuality hypocritical, and parental religion a sham. They sought to establish a youth culture fighting "the bourgeois trinity of school, home and church."
The New Left's fascist tendencies are evident in their elevation of unity as the highest social value-a core tenet of fascism. The chant "The people united will never be defeated!" perfectly encapsulates this fascist refrain. While unity may seem virtuous, it's often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Liberalism values individuality over unity, while fascists find meaning in collective enterprises of class, nation, or race.
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Liberal Fascist Economics: The Corporate-Government Partnership
Liberals have successfully defined conventional wisdom about economics, positioning corporations as inherently right-wing entities whose unchecked power threatens to bring us perilously close to fascism. From mainstream publications to left-wing commentators like Bill Maher and Arianna Huffington, the narrative remains consistent: big business represents a sinister force that must be contained to prevent fascism.
Since the 1930s, the left has portrayed industrialists and financial elites as the wizards behind fascist movements. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims "Mussolini complained that 'fascism should really be called corporatism,'" while others like Norman Mailer describe America as a "pre-fascist" society controlled by corporations and Republicans.
But this diagnosis misreads both symptoms and disease. In their vigilance against fascism, liberals have unwittingly created it with a friendly face. The reality is that the more a business supports the rule of law and free markets (truly "right-wing" in the American sense), the less fascistic it becomes.
The myth that fascism was a tool of big business has been endlessly parroted by Hollywood, journalists, and academics despite lacking historical support. This interpretation originated with Marxist-Leninists who defined fascism as "the most reactionary form of the dictatorship of finance capital." When fascism succeeded in Italy, communists simply declared this confirmed their prophecy that capitalists would fight back against socialism.
The evidence shows this narrative is false. Far from being uniformly supportive of fascism, big business was bitterly divided before Mussolini seized power. Fascist intellectuals openly despised capitalism and laissez-faire economics. Similarly, the Nazi Party was a grassroots populist movement whose leaders routinely attacked "dividend-hungry businessmen" and "cold-blooded money-grubbers." Hitler's writings are filled with contempt for capitalists, and Nazi Labor Unions even threatened to put business leaders in concentration camps if they didn't increase workers' wages.
The true fascist bargain operates quite differently from the liberal narrative. The state says to industrialists: "You may stay in business and own your factories. We'll guarantee profits and limit competition. In exchange, you implement our political agenda."
Many industrialists wanted to maintain the War Industries Board after World War I. The war had demonstrated that national planning worked. Stuart Chase, who coined "New Deal," explicitly cited Soviet Gosplan and WWI war socialism as models. The New Deal, despite its anti-wealth rhetoric, simply recreated wartime corporatism, inviting industries to write their own regulatory codes.
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Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine
Modern liberalism's eugenic heritage runs deep through its intellectual foundations. British socialist icons like George Bernard Shaw weren't merely flirting with eugenics-they saw it as essential to the socialist project. Shaw declared "The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man." He advocated abolishing traditional marriage for eugenically-guided polygamy under a State Department of Evolution, lamenting how people "select their wives and husbands less carefully than they select their cashiers and cooks." Shaw believed women would prefer a 10 percent share in genetically superior men over full possession of inferior specimens. His vision included a "human stud farm" to "eliminate the Yahoo whose vote will wreck the commonwealth." Most chillingly, Shaw proposed that undesirables should be eliminated "with many apologies and expressions of sympathy" by placing them in "the lethal chamber."
American progressives matched their British counterparts in eugenic fervor, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes leading the charge. His notorious Buck v. Bell opinion allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, declaring "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
The Catholic Church stood as the foremost global institution combating eugenics, which explains why Italian Fascism was less obsessed with eugenics than either American progressives or Nazis. G.K. Chesterton, author of Eugenics and Other Evils, faced relentless ridicule for opposing what nearly all "thinking people" considered the sophisticated position.
Even black intellectuals weren't immune to eugenic thinking. W.E.B. DuBois's "Talented Tenth" concept was eugenically weighted, as he complained that "the negro has not been breeding for an object" and supported Margaret Sanger's "Negro Project" to curtail reproduction among "inferior" blacks.
Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League, advanced eugenic views under the banner of "reproductive freedom." She scorned "positive" eugenicists' approach as mere "cradle competition," bluntly writing in 1922 that "More children from the fit, less from the unfit-that is the chief issue of birth control." Her colleague H.G. Wells proclaimed in the introduction to her book that "We want fewer and better children" and condemned the world being "swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny."
Sanger's publications regularly featured hard racism comparable to Nazi propaganda. The Birth Control Review even published articles by Ernst Rudin, Hitler's sterilization director. She spoke at a KKK rally in 1926 and appointed white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard to her organization's board. Her 1934 "Code to Stop Overproduction of Children" decreed that "no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit."
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The Brave New Village: Modern Liberal Fascism
Hillary Clinton represents a looking glass through which we can observe liberal continuity with the past and glimpse its possible future. If American fascism was predicted to be distinct from European versions through its gentility and respectability, Clinton fulfills this prophecy as a representative figure who embodies fascism's maternal side.
Hillary Clinton's political vision stems directly from the Social Gospel movement rather than conventional liberalism. Born to a Methodist family, she maintained strong religious connections throughout her life, particularly through her youth minister and mentor, Reverend Donald Jones. Even today, observers note her rhetoric sounds like "Methodist Sunday-school lessons."
Clinton saw radical politics as inseparable from her religious mission. Her groundbreaking 1969 Wellesley commencement address, which landed her in Life magazine as a generational leader, expressed familiar fascistic sentiments-rejecting "acquisitive and competitive corporate life" while seeking "a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living." She declared her generation wasn't interested in "social reconstruction" but "human reconstruction," revealing a longing for unity, authenticity, and transformation that would make "hollow men" whole.
Goldberg analyzes Hillary Clinton's bestseller "It Takes a Village" as a quintessential liberal fascist text. He argues its very title invokes a mythical communal past as authority for reorganizing modern society-functioning like the fasces symbol but for a maternal rather than martial age. The village metaphor transforms from "everything in the State, nothing outside the State" to "everything in the village, nothing outside the village."
Clinton's conception of civil society, Goldberg contends, is fundamentally distorted. Rather than independent associations pursuing their own interests free from state interference, her village offers no public square for free citizens. Instead, she envisions a "spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose" managed by the state-what Goldberg calls "the Volksgemeinschaft reborn as a Social Gospel day-care center." Her repeated emphasis on togetherness, partnership and unity mirrors fascism's bundling imagery, exemplified by her use of snowflakes sticking together as a metaphor for collective strength.
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Conclusion: We're All Fascists Now
Goldberg opens his conclusion by arguing that freedom disappears "not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for"-the danger of modern statism. He summarizes his book's central thesis: modern liberalism descends from progressivism, which shares intellectual roots with European fascism. While fascism expressed itself through nationalism, racism and militarism in Europe, in America it took the softer form of progressivism-what he calls "liberal fascism."
After the Holocaust and Kennedy assassination, this progressivism inverted into what James Piereson calls "punitive liberalism," where America's promise became its curse. The progressive desire to improve America transformed into a religious crusade to cleanse it of sins through self-flagellation. Liberalism succumbed to the "totalitarian temptation"-believing expert priesthoods could redesign society and brook no opposition.
Goldberg clarifies that modern liberals aren't "cartoonish Nazi villains" but campus administrators, diversity managers, and antismoking crusaders. The danger isn't Orwellian but that Americans might surrender freedom for a false promise of security-not military security but the "figurative, quasi-religious security promised by the Third Way." Many progressives, he argues, envision America as "a vast college campus where food, shelter, and recreation are all provided" and the only crime is offending minorities.
While acknowledging that life in a "medicalized, psychologized society" might be pleasant for some, he warns that such a society requires conditioning people to find joy in it. The greater danger is that an America that stops believing in itself might "believe in anything," potentially letting in something far worse than European-style statism.
While focusing primarily on leftist totalitarianism throughout the book, Goldberg acknowledges that the right harbors its own fascist tendencies. The human longing for community and tribalism exists across the political spectrum, manifesting in different ways.
What many conservatives fail to grasp is that American conservatism isn't identity politics for Christians or right-wing Progressivism, but opposition to political religion itself. It defends classical liberal institutions: private property, free markets, individual liberty, and community self-determination. Progress comes from working out inconsistencies within this tradition, not abandoning it.
The gravest threat is losing sight of where politics begins and ends. When government is expected to do everything "good," political cults emerge. The left's unique threat is claiming to be free from dogma while making "compassion" the watchword of politics-controlling arguments through intentions rather than facts, and brilliantly labeling opponents as fascists.
