Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism
Penguin; $28; 487pp
In fact, in many respects fascism not only is here [in the US] but has been here for nearly a century. For what we call liberalism – the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism – is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism.
Thus does National Review’s Jonah Goldberg summarise the thesis of Liberal Fascism, invoking, not once but twice, the f-word. No, not that one – and no, not that one – but the innocuous-looking noun ‘fact’.
In fact, there are a great many facts in this 487-page book, though whether these facts add up to the ‘fact’ cited in the above quotation has caused a good deal of debate in the US, where Liberal Fascism has had the effect of so deepening the trenches in the culture war that a friendly kickabout in No Man’s Land is now a physical impossibility. And little wonder, when you consider the contents. They are, to say the least, explosive.
Essentially, Goldberg’s thesis is this. Fascism is not, as is often assumed, a phenomenon of the right but of the left, which has managed to successfully shift the blame by following the precedent set down by Stalin and describing all opposition as ‘fascist’. Moreover, the ‘Western fascist moment’ also spawned American Progressivism (as represented by the ‘fascist’ presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt), which morphed, in turn, into modern liberalism (as represented by Hillary Clinton). What fascism and liberalism have in common is a belief in social regeneration, a liking for the state and a distrust of big business. Oh, and vegetarianism.
No doubt Goldberg is right to deplore the invocation of ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ as terms of abuse in political discourse, and right to identify liberals and left-wingers as by far the worst culprits in this regard. I also think he’s right to stress the left’s denial in respect of its past. But to say that fascism is a phenomenon of the left and not of the right is simply not true. All sorts of currents run in to fascism, some from the left and some from the right. All Goldberg has done is to stress those aspects of left-wing history that fit his thesis, ignoring, for example, Mussolini’s support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, while emphasising certain of his social policies, or banging on about Liberty Cabbage in Wilson’s wartime administration (shades of Orwell’s Victory Gin?) and completely ignoring Freedom Fries. It is scholarship of a deeply dishonest sort.
In essence, however, this is not a work of scholarship but a dressing down dressed up as scholarship. On every page, Goldberg’s inner blowhard rattles the cage of objectivity. His favourite tactic is the dummy caveat – a deny-and-imply in which he initially pleads that of course he isn’t saying that liberals are morally equivalent to Nazis etc., before going on to insinuate just that. Note how, in the following sentence, the most egregious moral equivalence is couched in terms that ostensibly eschew it:
We do live in an ‘unconscious civilisation’ of fascism, albeit of a friendly sort infinitely more benign than that of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, or FDR’s America.
It’s a good job Liberal Fascism was written before the economic crash. Obama’s talk of a new New Deal might have sent Goldberg over the edge.
It used to be that moral equivalence was something of a left-wing speciality. After all, it wasn’t conservative commentators who described the 9/11 attacks as a blow for freedom from within the imperium. Goldberg’s silly and tendentious book is a sign that the madness is beginning to spread. Some reviewers have referred to its title as oxymoronic, which it certainly is. But the book itself is simply moronic.
