دانلود کتاب فاشیسم‌های لیبرال

In 2009, when political correctness still reigned supreme, Jonah Goldberg published Liberal Fascism, a book which claimed the true heirs to fascism were actually progressive liberals. Goldberg argued that the most insidious attempts to control our lives (such as smoking bans and pervasive surveillance from security cameras) originated from the Left. To support his thesis that it was modern progressivism, not conservatism, which shared the same intellectual roots as Fascism, Goldberg cited examples including the Clinton personality cult, the military chic of 1960s student radicals, and what he called Hollywood’s totalitarian aesthetics (today, he would certainly adduce cancel culture, wokeism, DEI policies and growing acceptance and rights for LGBT+ people, as well). My thesis throughout this text is almost exactly the opposite of Goldberg’s: to paraphrase Max Horkheimer, who wrote in 1939 that ‘Whoever is not willing to talk about Capitalism should also keep quiet about Fascism’, I would argue that ‘whoever is not willing to talk (critically) about liberalism should also keep quiet about fascism’. And, perhaps, also about Donald Trump. These writings are not about Trump. However, the myriad issues interrogated in these essays are all in dialogue with the historical event that is the second term of Trump’s presidency – an event in the catastrophic sense of an occurrence which makes us aware that our world, as we knew it, has ended. The shortest formal definition of such an event is one that doesn’t only change the specific circumstances of a situation, but changes the very co-ordinates of the situation itself. I can illustrate this best with an updated version of an old joke from the GDR (German Democratic Republic) that I have told many times: Putin, Xi and Trump meet God and each is allowed to ask him a question. Putin begins: ‘Tell me, what will happen to Russia in the next few decades?’ God answers: ‘Russia will gradually become a colony of China.’ Putin turns away, appalled, and starts to cry. Xi asks his question: ‘And what will happen to China in the next few decades?’ God answers: ‘The Chinese economic miracle will be over, and China will have to return to a hardline dictatorship to survive while asking Taiwan for help.’ Xi, too, turns away in horror and begins to weep. Finally, Trump asks: ‘And what will be the fate of the US after I take over again?’ In response, God himself turns away and starts to cry … This is the true change, when God – who stands here for the big Other, the neutral frame that encompasses the situation – breaks down. Trump’s second term constitutes, of course, just such a total rupture, a catastrophic event: the basic co-ordinates with which we map and measure the quality of public life no longer steady or orient us. ‘Normal’ standards are suspended and all categories and expectations will have to be thoroughly remade.