Liberal Fascism 5: Chapter 3

It's certainly brave of Jonah Goldberg to begin a chapter called "Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism" with the section in Sinclair Lewis' novel It Can't Happen Here that speaks of "our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty Cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'?" as an example of Liberal Fascism. And we remember how three conservative congressmen declared that the cafeteria in congress would serve Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast in lieu of their French counterparts, thanks to France's reluctance to get involved in the war in Iraq. Of course, one distinction between the two expressions of jingoism was that one was an act of populist sentiment, and the other was an act of Congress.

Still, here is the chapter where the most negative aspects of the Democratic Party are most vividly illuminated. But Goldberg does himself no favors by stating, baldly, that "Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century's first fascist dictator." One wonders why Wilson stepped down and let Warren G. Harding (a Republican, no less) become President.

Woodrow Wilson was certainly a problematic figure, and no modern liberal would support his jingoism, racism, war mongering, or unconstitutional behavior. His invasions in Latin America and the Phillipines would have few defenders among the antiwar left. He was an ardent segregationist, to the point of jettisoning many African Americans from federal jobs. He condoned censorship, and prosecuted antiwar sentiment. All of these, most modern liberals would concede, were bad things.

But to hear Goldberg say it, these were the ideas that became modern liberalism. One wonders then, how liberals metamorphosed from war-mongering jingoists to peacenik America-hating soy-latte-sippers. The contradictions between modern liberalism and early 20th Century Progressivism are not explored. Nor, for that matter, are the similarities that Progressives shared with modern Conservatives. Such nuances would not merely add shades and complexities to Goldberg's theories, they would expose cracks in the foundations of his (admittedly) vague thesis.

Goldberg focuses on ideas that have been repudiated by most modern liberals (eugenics, the worship of the state, and the embrace of communism, etc.) and ignores the aspects of Progressivism that might still have merit, and that are broadly popular. Goldberg's fundamental argument gives the impression that he believes state intervention in most any aspect of society is fundamentally suspect. Which becomes a major problem in the following section, when he jumps past the presidencies of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge (thus ignoring such things as the Teapot Dome scandal, and the laissez faire government of Calvin Coolidge, which is often blamed for precipitating the Great Depression. But talking about such things would entail talking about the scandals of Republican governance, but again, such rebuttals to his argument must be ignored if the Liberal Fascist meme is to flourish.

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?"

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.

Liberal Fascism 1: Front Matter

Let's first get this out of the way: I would consider myself a liberal, and I think most people who know me and would question me would not disagree. And on the liberal spectrum (for in this day and age, among certain members of the conservasphere, John McCain would be considered a liberal), I'd be somewhere among the left. Not quite Ward Churchill, but not Evan Bayh, either. So the fact that someone decided to write a book with the provocative title Liberal Fascism is, to my mind, somewhat of an insult.

I should also say that I am not a student of Fascism, fascist history, or fascist movements, either. But in my defense, neither is Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg is a columnist for the National Review and blogger at The Corner, a contributing editor to USA Today, and a pundit, which is is the contemporary equivalent of what used to be called a public intellectual.

So what is this book about? Well, one way to begin is to tell of the history of its subtitle, which has changed many times. Now its certainly unfair to judge a book by its subtitle, and many a non-fiction writer has balked at the very need for such a thing. But in Mr. Goldberg's case, the changes that it has gone through are somewhat illuminating. It began as The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods which probably ran afoul of his publisher's legal department. Those Hegelians can be real difficult. And so it changed to The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton, which just sounds silly. So it became, at first, The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning which is just vague enough to pass muster, and yet specific enough to aggravate. It has since changed again, in the paperback edition which sits right next to my laptop (no Jonah, thank you) in order to celebrate the presidency of liberal fascist acolyte Barack Obama, to The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change. Bam!

All of those give you a general idea of what might be in store when you open the book, as does the cover, the iconic smiley face with an equally iconic Hitler moustache drawn on it. Bam Bam!

And so we open the book and scan the reviews, by such eminences as Newt Gingrich, Tom Wolfe, and other conservative writers such as Daniel Pipes, Thomas Sowell, Christopher Buckley, and William Bennett. And so we see the central argument of the book as refracted through 1 paragraph blurbs. Gingrich traces the history of Liberal Fascism to "a strain of elitist moral certainty that allows one group of people to believe they have the right to determine the lives of others." Which is more ambiguous than Tom Wolfe's argument, that the Soviet Communists were kin to the Italian fascists and the Nazis. As to what this means about the left, he is unclear, but to be fair, it's only a paragraph.