Liberal Fascism Watch: Tom Friedman's Love Affair with Dictatorship

Well, sometimes they do come right out and say what they are thinking. In an op ed piece in the Daily Worker, oops make that The New York Times, Tom Friedman gushes over the "enlightened people" who run China today and how much better it is to have a dictatorship that can impose change on the unenlightened mob of citizens who, clearly, do not know what is best for them. He says:

"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a
reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have
great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but
critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st
century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in
electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind
power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and
rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy
efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that
industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline
prices, from the top down."

One party autocracy (trans. dictatorship) has "drawbacks"? Is that an adequate discription of the murder of tens of millions of people by a revolutionary movement dedicated to totalitarianism? "From the top down" - does he really mean for us to understand that he thinks that planned economies actually work? Does he really mean that?

He calls Obama a "centrist" not a socialist. But Tom, haven't you read your Lenin? He has to pretend to be a centrist until he has consolidated power. Oh, I get it, you are pretending to criticize him so people will think he isn't on your side, since you are so overt about your socialism. Wink, wink. I get it now.

Here is Jonah Goldberg's response:

"So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and
antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and,
most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman's intellect
illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and
necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these
planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are "drawbacks"
to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of
reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and
broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these "drawbacks"
pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America.

I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was
made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that
was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it's the argument that
idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today).
It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearned for a strong
progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn't picky
in this regard). This is the argument for an "economic dictatorship" pushed by
Stuart Chase and the New Dealers. It's the dream of Herbert Croly and a great
many of the Progressives."

Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism, is a terrific analysis of the fascist tendencies of contemporary American liberalism (which, of course, has long since ceased to be "liberalism" in the classical 19th century sense of the term). The only debate is whether it inclines more specifically toward socialism or fascism. The value of Goldberg's book is that he shows how both are true at once. He reminds us of something that only massive Communist propaganda could cause us to forget: that Hitlerism was a form of socialism - the National Socialist kind.