Liberal Fascism 2: Introduction

So let's dive in. The introduction of Liberal Fascism is "Everything You Know About Fascism Is Wrong," which strikes me as a very characteristic title that illuminates the central strategy of this book. Goldberg begins with a fact, or a piece of conventional wisdom that both liberals and conservatives can agree upon. In this case, it is the understanding that the word "Fascism" is difficult to define, and yet is often used as a rhetorical cudgel, moreso by the left than the right. That is, I believe, difficult to dispute. Then he goes beyond that point to a second, that Fascism as a political movement came out of European Socialism. Also true. He then goes on to try and create a bridge between Italian Fascism (and to a smaller and less successful extent, Nazism) and liberalism as it is understood today. He makes a lot of reasonable points about Democrats in the early part of the century who engaged in authoritarian behavior, militarism, and violence. But as he keeps reiterating, this doesn't mean that he is accusing liberals of being Fascists or Nazis. So what is he really saying?

And so it is with the title of the Introduction. I imagine if I were to tell him that the title was a huge overstatement of what he's trying to argue (as a matter of fact, I am currently 1/3rd of the way through the book, and I don't thing I've learned anything about fascism that I didn't know before, and I certainly don't believe that everything I know about it is wrong), he'd concede the point, and tell me to lighten up. This, is the rhetorical strategy of the book in a nutshell: attack liberals by making an ambiguous connection to fascism, then back away from saying that liberals are, in fact fascist. It's a good strategy for attack, but a bad strategy for understanding history.

His attempt to define fascism is a good example of this attack/retreat strategy. He begins with the understandable point regarding the difficulty of defining the term, and how it has become a catchall term for goverments' repressive, violent, or just plain unpopular acts. He offers some short definitions from academia and proceeds to ignore the one word that is in all of them, "nationalism". Fascism relies on ginning up an extreme sense of nationalist identity, and if such a thing has been part of the liberal strategy (at least since WWII, and though Goldberg may argue with liberal tactics, he isn't willing to attack the fact that we entered the First or the Second World War), it's certainly news to me.

Goldberg's definition is similar, but distinct. Goldberg calls fascism a "religion of the state" Which is not nationalism, but statism. And any act of state can thus be tarred with the fascist label. Which he almost but not quite does:

This book will present an alternative history of American liberalism that not only reveals its roots in, and commonalities with, classical fascism, but also shows how the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand. In fact, conservatives are the more authentic classical liberals, while many so-called liberals are "friendly" fascists.

Now, I am not saying that liberals are fascist. Nor am I saying that to believe in socialized medicine or smoking bans is evidence that you are a crypto-Nazi. What I am mainly trying to do is to dismantle the granitelike assumption in our political culture that American conservatism is an offshoot of Fascism.

In fact, at least as far as I have read (about a third of the book), Goldberg makes few arguments about conservatism, most of which are filled with a level of nuance that is entirely lacking in his bromides against evil liberals. I guess that should be no surprise. But it makes for a reading experience chock full of cognitive dissonance.