Liberal Fascism 3: Chapters 1 & 2

Mussolini and Hitler. OK, OK, calm down. Nothing can drive a conversation into a tree like the introduction of fascism, Nazis, Hitler, the Holocaust, et al. Goldberg has said that part of the reason he wrote this polemic is because he wanted to refute the accusation by liberals that conservatives are fascist, racist, etc. And really, that can be a fair cop, occasionally. But it's also a fair cop about conservatives. The recent changeover in the White House has brought out many conservatives who have called Obama and his policies fascist. That is the real point of Goldberg's polemic (after all, it isn't called Conservatives Aren't Fascists), and so here comes the big hurdle, how are liberals like Mussolini and Hitler?

As I said, Goldberg imagines fascism in every form of the state intervening in any activity of government other than the military. At one point he claims that libertarianism would be the perfect system if not for the military (and presumably, he thinks things like roads and general infrastructure are OK, or does he think that privatising the highways might be a good idea. Jonah?) So the fact that Hitler believed in state policies for health and for some form of social welfare becomes evidence of how he was, in fact, a liberal. But the reality is that very few politicians on either side of the aisle would achieve Goldberg's ideal of conservatism. Which is borne out by the ideological circular firing squad that contemporary conservatism has become of late.

Huge swaths of Mussolini's life must be elided to make his point. Most notably, the violence that Mussolini and the Fascists wrought upon the socialists and communists that he once supported must be ignored, which Goldberg is mostly able to do. One keeps coming back to the core reason that Goldberg was interested in doing this book in the first place. At the end of the book, he recounts the famous incident where he called Gore Vidal a faggot after Vidal called him a fascist. "My hope is that this book has served much the same purpose as Buckley's intemperate outburst while striving for his more typical civility." In other words, I want to tell liberals to fuck off, but civilly.

The chapter about Hitler starts with typically razor-sharp logic. "Was Hitler's Germany Fascist? Many leading scholars... say more or less no." Then he turns around and says more or less yes. And the kicker, "But the fact that such an argument exists among high-level scholars should suggest how abysmally misunderstood both phenomena are in the popular mind, and why reflexive rejection of the concept of liberal fascism may be misguided." Which is to say, the Chewbacca Defense.

And so it goes. All he succeeds in arguing is that Hitler is not a contemporary conservative, and that he may have shared some ideological points with liberals. Of course, Nazis shared the deference to leadership, glorification of the family, and mythologization of the people that are hallmarks of contemporary conservatism. But that is no reason to call them Nazis, and Goldberg mentions none of this. He is right about one thing. Never has this argument been made with such care. The problem is, the argument is "I know you are but what am I?"