Jonah Goldberg: Liberal Fascism

Matthew Yglesias: The Goldberg Standard: Might as well quote this short post in toto:

To some, the modern American right-wing looks intellectually moribund. Steve Hayward thinks there's some truth to that, but also powerful minds working on serious issues; people like . . . Jonah Goldberg. The idea that Goldberg's Liberal Fascism represents one of the peaks of right-of-center political thinking is, I think, a more damning indictment than anything any liberal could possibly come up with.

Goldberg is so inscrutable I've never even managed to parse the title. In English we normally put the adjective in front of the noun, which should make the book about a subset of Fascism, specifically the Liberal subset. In other words, it reads like an oxymoron, but whereas you can find relatively jumbo shrimp, which fascists were relatively liberal? Franco? Juan Peron? Neither seems to be a subject of interest to Goldberg. Nor is it clear that he means Fascist Liberalism, although that seems to get closer to his intent. But rather than focusing on a subset of liberalism, he wants to taint the whole by finding a phylogenetic linkage from fascism to liberalism -- something remarkable (in the sense of ridiculous) not only logically but historically. Or maybe not: could he be complaining that fascism is debilitated by its ontological linkage to liberalism?

Given the confusion in the title -- not helped by the subtitle, The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, implying (among other things) that Il Duce was an American and that "the politics of meaning" actually means something -- it seems unlikely that reading the book would clarify anything. Still, the book was a huge bestseller, paving the way for subsequent nonsense by Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Dick Morris, and Michelle Malkin. Still, the main effect seems to have been to free the word "fascist" of all meaning for use as an all-purpose epithet. Maybe it was wrong to characterize George Bush (just to pick a not-quite-arbitrary example) as a fascist, but at least one could make a logical argument, citing points both for and against. But after Goldberg, the right is free to attack Obama as fascist or nazi or socialist or liberal or any other nasty itch they wish to scratch.

PS: From the publisher's notes:

Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term "National socialism"). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities -- where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist. [ . . . ]

We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

No need to refute these arguments point-by-point. Like antimatter, few even survive as arguable assertions as far as the period. To take an example, one reason no one (but Goldberg) remembers Du Bois as having been "inspired by Hitler's Germany" was that the people we do remember so inspired where conservative racists and antisemites, not civil rights leaders. Another reason is that Du Bois is more often remembered as a communist, forgetting that before WWII hardly any white people but communists really supported civil rights. FDR certainly didn't want to talk about it -- Ira Katznelson wrote a book about the New/Fair Deals called When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Injustice in Twentieth-Century America. (Goldberg's own magazine, National Review, was still defending segregation in the 1960s.)

posted 2009-10-06