Fascism is a religion of the state... It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life... Any rival identity is part of the 'problem'... American Progressivism, from which today's liberalism is descended, was a kind of Christian fascism... It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian-- or "holistic," if you prefer-- in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say.

The introduction is a vast brush-fire designed to clear away the automatic association of fascism with the right and establish some basic points: fascism was a progressive, futuristic movement, a secular (sometimes stridently anti-clerical) religion which like any religion claimed total dominion over life within its borders, and to the extent that right and left have any fixed meaning at all, that kind of revolutionary overhaul has a lot more to do with Trotsky and Bakunin than Burke and Disraeli. Frankly I would have liked to see Goldberg wrestle here with what "right" and "left" mean-- which to my mind, is very little. I mean, if conservatives are conservative, then Margaret Thatcher was, properly speaking, a free market radical, not a hidebound old Tory (or an Eisenhower Republican). So moving fascism from one column to the other doesn't mean that much to me because I think the columns obscure more than they reveal in the first place.

What's more valuable here is reaffirming, first, that there's a lot of socialism in fascism, and a lot of fascism in socialism. An overarching statism, a monolithic paternalism mixed with cold-blooded utilitarianism (we'll take care of you, including deciding whether you get to breed or even live), usually anti-clericalism, the appropriation of media for state ends, a high tendency toward anti-semitism (though Goldberg points out that Italy's record on resisting the Holocaust was better than any country besides Denmark's and, ironically enough, Franco's in Spain)-- these are the fundamental characteristics of all the progressive movements which sought to establish total control of a state for progressive ends, whether the name at the top was Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin-- or Wilson, whom he argues was in many ways the models for these others. The opposite of this was not the Left but the "classical liberalism" associated with England which was so hated by more radical types-- and widely agreed to have outlasted its historical moment by the time WWI ended. In other words, to be too conservative.

This was the beginning of the cult of the expert, a point he must make later on (since he works at a magazine cofounded by James Burnham, who wrote about that in bestselling books before and after WWII-- he was for it before and against it after). It was the belief that smart technocrats could run everything given modern communications, that democracy would only get in their way and impede progress (for which there was only one definition), and it ought to have come crashing down with the failure of the Soviet planned economy and the equally devastating failure of the likes of Robert McNamara in American foreign policy. Yet we're hearing it again right now in the election, that government needs to offer a stimulus package (of your money) to get the economy going again, with the underlying assumption that we have a freakin' clue how to do that and what the effects will be. A properly aligned political system would be not right and left, arbitrary as those are, but would have statism at one end and libertarianism at the other-- and then it would be obvious why "it takes a village to raise a child" is on the same end of the spectrum, however less noxious it may be, as "science must ask itself, does it serve National Socialism?"