"For Good Reasons"

(more thoughts and inspriations from reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism)

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were abandoned by their fathers. I have often wondered about the impact of that fact on their personalities. When FDR was only eight, his father suffered the first of several heart attacks. "Franklin responded by resolving to conceal his sorrow and anxiety from his father," writes Goldberg. This is apparently where FDR first began the practice of masking his real feelings behind a permanently cheery demeanor," writes Goldberg. I have written that Obama, too, seems to very difficult to pin down. Like Obama in Chicago, FDR had a "determination to fit in," when he went to school at Groton, after being homeschooled by Swiss tutors.

FDR married his distant cousin, Eleanor, who was given away in marriage by FDR's cousin, Teddy Roosevelt. Franklin was "smooth and insubstantial," while Eleanor was a person of "conviction, earnestness, steadfastness - and extremely valuable connections."

FDR was picked by Wilson to be assistant secretary of the navy. He proved to be a "very capable and political secretary." After the war he pushed successfully for a peacetime draft. He ran unsuccessfully for president in 1920. He contracted polio in 1921. Like Bill Clinton, "he was a sponge, possessing a certain genius for gauging the political temper of the times." Like Obama, he spoke in "generalities that everyone found agreeable at first and meaningless upon reflection." He was like a "chamelion on plaid," groused Herbert Hoover. Unfortunately, writes Goldberg, "the currents tended to push him in only one direction: statism, for that was the intellectual tide of the times."

A common principle: the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for "good reasons." This is the common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism," writes Goldberg. "It represents the triumph of Pragmatism in politics in that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of governmental power. They all invoke with divine reverence "science." I believe this also applies to our current administration.

The only coherent policy Roosevelt subscribed to was "bold, persistent experimentation." "For the liberals and progressives, Goldberg writes, everything was expendable, from tradition to individualism to "outdated" conceptions of freedom."