Liberal Fascism

The number one book at Amazon.com is Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. Here is an interview with Goldberg. Here are some excerpts that I thought were meaningful.

I often like to ask college kids, except for the murder, bigotry, and genocide, what is it exactly about Nazism that you don't like? And they can't name anything. But, conservatives can come up with all sorts of stuff. They were socialists. They wanted free health care. They hated Christianity. They hated tradition. They were statists at the end of the day. All of those things are inherent to fascism and what was anathema to fascism was the idea that you can have, what the scholars of totalitarian theory call "islands of separateness" -- that churches can go their own way, that corporations can operate without coordinating with the state, that individuals can have free consciences, that there can be free debate, free and open discussion.

What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a world view we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics.

Today on the Left, we have people, like Richard Delgado at the University of Colorado, who says that blacks and Hispanics should flee the enlightenment as fast as they can because there is no way that the regime of white privilege could ever assimilate people who are born black or Hispanic, because you can never transcend your identity or your gender. It's where the whole logic of quotas come from, it's where the whole logic of Affirmative Action comes from. It's the idea that black people think like black people and white people think like white people and therefore, the only kind of diversity you can have is diversity by skin color, gender, and sexual orientation.