Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg. New York: Doubleday, 2007. 482 p., $27.95.
Where to start? This book was recommended to me over the summer, and I promised if I would read it. Mostly, I was curious if the rhetoric was as inflamed and hyperbolic as the title suggests.
It is.
Goldberg argues (argue is an appropriate verb here) that the word fascism has been erroneously tied to the right of the political spectrum in an effort to debase the conservative movement. The author supports his claim with what can generously be described as a loose and selective use of 20th century history. For him, fascism has reared its ugly head continuously, starting with Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Hitler, FDR, JFK, and extending down to Hillary Clinton. Although the book decries the use of the word fascist as a catch-all used by liberals in describing the right, the author in turn hurls the emotionally-charged word with remarkable carelessness. Though he constantly writes he is not actually comparing liberals to Hitler or other authoritarian dictators of the not-distant past, that is exactly what he does.
From what I can tell, Goldberg decries government action in any facet of life. Indeed, he states that libertarianism would be the ideal political philosophy if it could only "account for children and foreign policy" (p. 344). His anger at government regulation, social change, and innovation in public policy is pronounced, and I got a distinct feeling while reading that he is not very fond of youth ("Historically, fascism is of necessity and by design a form of youth movement, and all youth movements have more than a whiff of fascism about them." (Page 165)) and children.
The book is thus along the lines of Krugman's book that I read previously: there is a coherent argument in there somewhere but it is drowned by the ridiculous adolescent name-calling and overdrawn comparisons and ad hominem attacks. The left/right divide has always been somewhat arbitrary and focused largely on economic cleavages in society; a book that looks at how this political division has changed over time would have been interesting and shed new light on modern conservatism. By using deliberately provocative words (including the title), name calling, and guilt by association, Goldberg has certainly moved books, but failed to provide any coherent or worthwhile contribution.
The author's purpose in writing this book, he writes in the conclusion, is to emulate William Buckley's famous outburst on television where he screamed at the liberal Gore Vidal, "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered," though with a little more civility. I credit Goldberg for honestly explaining his purpose, though I fear he falls short on the civility part.
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ReplyDeleteAndrew, you always make one significant error in your evaluations of policy. You argue that the left/right divide is fluid and not static, thereby shifting the argument toward "what is center" and away from "what is correct."
ReplyDeleteJonah Goldberg's book tries to use the left/right paradigm to explain the deviation from correct principles of individual rights, divisions of power, and limited government that the fascist regimes built by socialist movements sought to usurp. Perhaps framing the argument in a worn-out, hijacked paradigm was his greatest error. But he did so to reflect the difference between strict constructionist constitutional framing of government and historical fascist regimes (which intellectuals incessantly label as right of center - thus falsely correlating fascist methodology to conservative ideology) to his readers.
Among his greatest examples is the Nazi movement. A socialist movement that harnesses a country's nationalism to deny individual rights, concentrate power, and expand the role of a government is no less to the left than the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. Just because the communist party in Germany positioned itself to the left of the Nazi's does not make the Nazi party's platform to the right of some preconceived static center. They both deviate from correct principles of good governance, as does the neo-Liberal (aka Progressive) movement... hence the title "Liberal Fascism".
You would be wise do shed the old world paradigm of a left/right divide about a fluid center. As Aristotle would say, A=A. Rand, Existence exists. There is right and there is wrong. The principles espoused in the American Constitution represent the greatest firm point about which to build a government. There is no left of that point, there is no right of that point. There is only deviation from correct principles of government.