« Does McCain Have a Ceiling? (II) | Main | Rudy Can Fail » Liberal Fascism And Its Critics13 Jan 2008 09:00 am Here is some free advice for liberals who don't care much for Jonah Goldberg or his (bestselling) new volume: Either confine yourself to dismissive snark, of the sort perfected by my colleague Matt, or buckle down and actually read the damn thing. The "definitive critiques" by people who admit that they haven't yet cracked the covers are not helpful to your cause. And yes, I'll have something to say about the book myself, I promise - but only once I've finished reading it. Comments (243)
My thesis=Conservatives are Stalinists. Gonna disagree with that? Make fun of me? Even before my book/paper is finished?
"Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right ', a Fascist century." "In rejecting democracy Fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism, the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress." --Benito Mussolini, the foremost fascist philosopher and coiner of the term fascism (thanks to Alex Koppelman for the quotes)
Ross, The author admits to not reading Mussolini's defining text on Fascism. How exactly can I take him seriously?
Freddie et al, Don't forget this precious quote from Goldberg: "the only reason [Mussolini] got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I."
Correction, I should have said not reading Mussolini's defining text in the last three years. The last 3 years, which is when he was writing his oh so serious book.
I think RickM has it right. Has Ross read the latest Chomsky? The latest Michael Moore? Is he up on the current lit from the white supremacy movement? Has he read the latest anti-semitic tracts out there? Does he need to? This is the kind of standard that seems awfully cutting when you use it to attack other people, but is much harder to apply to yourself. You can engage a work you haven't read by a)having read the past work of the author and hazarding guesses at the quality based on what he or she has previously written, and b)engaging the basic argument as has been explained by the author in the course of promoting and commenting on the work (and Goldberg has not been shy.) Anyway, we know the basic argument of Goldberg's book-- that liberalism is the intellectual progeny of fascism. And you know what? That argument can not be made in a serious or meaningful way. It can't because it is refuted by about 85 years or so of serious scholarship. It is refuted by every credible scholar and historian working in the field. And, most damningly, as I just gave you a taste of, it is refuted by the writings and scholarship of every major fascist intellectual and leader. I don't understand why people are acting like the fascist movements in Europe occurred eons ago and we can only hazard guesses as to what their motivations truly are. This movement is less than a hundred years old. There is reams of materials to read, primary source materials, from the architects of fascism. It just takes a little research to find it. And all of it, by every fascist thinker and leader, undermines Goldberg's thesis. Every one I've read has defined fascism in opposition to socialism and communism. Goldberg has specifically said that communism and fascism are the same. Why do I have to extend a veneer of respect to an argument that is transparently incoherent?
Goldberg does his impressive work, which I got yesterday and just started digging into, a disservice both with the title and the book cover. It's a serious look at the historical roots of fascism and, with that, the danger that progressives or liberals must understand when using the coercive power of the state in favor of the group or nation or many. The "one and the many". The Madisonian dilemma. Tocqueville's "bland despostism". It comes in many forms; all of which one should recognize as potentially dangerous to individual liberty. Those liberals or progressives who ignore the main theme - if not the book itself - are only harming their cause. So be it.
David Neiwert, of the Orcinus blog, has been writing about real fascism for years, in a true, scholarly fasion that is light years beyond Goldberg's reactionary propaganda. The American Prospect ran his review of Goldberg's book 5 days ago, here. And yes, Neiwert read it first. For some insight from someone who actually knows what they're talking about, you might try his article. Sorry that he's a liberal. Maybe Jonah's buddies will be able to send him to the re-education camps some day.
SteveMG- If it is a serious book then why does Jonah say so many unserious things like "the only reason [Mussolini] got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I." And "The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism." How is it even possible for one non-scholar to overturn the entire historiography of fascism without consulting primary sources?
I finished reading it. It's pretty stupid. Anything interesting or correct that Jonah tries to say was said more succinctly and sharply by Hayek 60 years ago. Jonah's "Tempting of Conservatism" chapter, where he tries to show that he's an equal opportunity analyst, by identifying incipient fascist tendencies on the right, is almost shockingly incomplete. Only Bush's compassionate conservatism and Pat Buchanan are fascist; he doesn't even mention the President's expansion of war powers or the Iraq War. In another section he also critiques Brooks and Kristol's National Greatness Conservatism (which he has to, since they were inspired by Teddy Roosevelt, and his theory revolves around the idea that Progressivism was a fascist movement.) However, the critique of National Greatness Conservatism is only based around its "shared sacrifice" domestic agenda, despite the fact that an expansionist foreign policy was a key to the appeal of both Roosevelt and Brooks/Kristol. For a guy who constantly harangues liberals over Williams James' "Moral Equivalent of War" essay, it seems absurd to overlook the actual support for war by people on his side. From the original National Greatness Wall Street Journal essay "It embraces a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness abroad." Can I make fun of it now?
As has been indicated above, Goldberg has a fairly lengthy record in the commenting-about-liberals business. I'll be interested to see if you think he's broken any new ground.
that liberalism is the intellectual progeny of fascism. Nope. He's arguing (it's an argument; one can reject it or embrace it; but it helps to first understand it) that on the left/right polarity, that fascism belongs on the left sphere and not the right. It's been placed on the far right end of the spectrum when it belongs on the far left. Fascism, liberalism, socialism, are brothers, offshoots of modern statism. They all believe in using the power of the state in imposing the right way of living on its citizens. He admits, indeed, there are elements of fascism on the right. There are (so far, I'm about 1/3 through it) a number of problems with his argument. He doesn't adequately address, for my tastes, the ultranationalism inherent in fascism. The left largely rejects extreme nationalism. Read the book. It won't hurt.
The term "liberal fascism" is by any definition, a malicious oxymoron written by a right wing rhetorical grenade chucker. Just a few of the characteristics defining 20th century Fascism. Hyper=nationalism
SteveMG- This is where your and Goldberg's concepts are so muddled: "Fascism, liberalism, socialism, are brothers, offshoots of modern statism." What does that mean? Offshoots of modern statism? Was statism a movement that valued an expansionist state for the very sake of expanding the state? Or is it simply, and I might add correctly, simply the belief that the state can and should enact activist policies that are intended to benefit the lives of the citizenry? Who isn't a statist to varying degrees? Certainly over the past 25 years, George W. Bush is more statist than any other President. I guess Jonah and you would call him a fascist, no?
Actually, the term "liberal fascism" was invented not by Goldberg, but by H.G. Wells; and he meant it as a good thing.
Sorry, are you saying that liberals and progressives aren't statists? They don't want to use the powers of the state on behalf of the common good? Or in the cause of social justice? The old immanentize the eschaton? Sure seems like it to me.
SteveMG- That is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that statism is not on the same intellectual plane as liberalism, conservatism, fascism or communism. Meaning, statism is not a system of organizing and viewing the world--it is merely the belief that the state could and should actively improve the lives of its citizenry. You, and presumably Goldberg, are committing a category error if group statism and liberalism together. Statism was not a movement or ideology prior to liberalism, fascism and communism. Statism is a tendency within those ideologies (and conservatism, too), but statism is not an offshot or intellectual offspring from any specific ideology. It is a characteristic of those ideologies. If indeed you are accurately representing Goldberg's argument that liberal, fascism, and communism are all descendants from the intellectual archetype of statism, then I have even more disincentive to read his book.
This is where your and Goldberg's concepts are so muddled: "Fascism, liberalism, socialism, are brothers, offshoots of modern statism." First, those are my words summarizing what he says. Or what I read as what he is saying. So, don't make the mistake of putting my words into his mouth. Second, he goes into extensive details on the roots of fascism. And the differences among liberalism, socialism, fascism. It would take a rather lengthy (and boring as hell) summary here. And, again, I've only gotten through about 1/3. Perhaps it's better to hammer this out when Ross addresses it. He's much better at this game than I am.
Blackadder is correct, it was originally used by Wells. Re: the debate between Rickm and SteveMG. It seems like Jonah's basic point is that Rousseau's belief in the will of the people as sometimes superceding the actual desires of individual persons was nascent fascism. Then, the French Revolution and the modern progressive/liberal movement, as well as actual fascism, are descended from common ancestry. That's why he calls liberalism the niece of fascism.
Sam wrote: "It seems like Jonah's basic point is that Rousseau's belief in the will of the people as sometimes superceding the actual desires of individual persons was nascent fascism." If that is the case, then Rousseau's idea was also nascent authoritarianism, compassionate conservatism, excepting the executive from the rule of law, Stalinism, Maoism, Nasserism, Titoism, syndicalism, corporatism, Bushism, etc.
Rickm, I'm pretty sure Jonah would put everyone of those in that category, and those that he didn't would be for purely political reasons.
Rickm, I'm pretty sure Jonah would put everyone of those in that category, and those that he didn't would be excepted for purely political reasons.
What I am saying is that statism is not on the same intellectual plane as liberalism, conservatism, fascism or communism. Modern statism as manifested, for example, by the Wilson Administration. Just read his section on the Wilson presidency. Statism took on an entirely different color, if you will, at the beginning of the 20th century. It changed from being an administrative state to a state dedicated to, for example, social justice or the collective will or in service to the nation, et cetera. I'm doing a fairly poor - well, really poor - job of explaining some pretty complicated arguments. Ross will make me look pretty foolish in a couple of days.
Reading these comments reinforces the original posting at the top; read the book so you know what you are talking about. These comments also show that the culture wars have hollowed out our collective knowledge base; we fling around terms like fascist and commie but we don't even know what they mean anymore. I haven't read the book, but if it makes us relearn (or rethink) our political theory 101 then it is a good thing.
That argument can not be made in a serious or meaningful way. It can't because it is refuted by about 85 years or so of serious scholarship. It is refuted by every credible scholar and historian working in the field. Of course, this specious spurious victim of academicide is apodictic in defining who is "serious" and "credible," the leftist loons whom he has read, of course. Actually reading a book before condemning it isn't necessary for the committed loon.
From Goldberg himself: "Originally being a fascist meant you were a right-wing socialist, and the problem is that we've incorporated these European understandings of things and then just dropped the socialist." That is utterly, utterly untrue. Every fascist leader and intellectual defined fascism in opposition to communism. Anyone who has made such a basic mistake in his evaluation of what fascism is can't be making a valid argument. Nope. He's arguing (it's an argument; one can reject it or embrace it; but it helps to first understand it) that on the left/right polarity, that fascism belongs on the left sphere and not the right. It's been placed on the far right end of the spectrum when it belongs on the far left. From Goldberg: "[Liberalism] is definitely totalitarian....Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it's all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that's what I'm getting at."
He's arguing...that on the left/right polarity, that fascism belongs on the left sphere and not the right. It's been placed on the far right end of the spectrum when it belongs on the far left. That is indeed the extent of his argument. I've read the book, and it is perhaps the most well-researched "I know you are, but what am I?" in the history of the world. If the subject is the "bland despotism" of progressives, look at what Ezra Levant is going through in Canada. If the subject is the "police state" of conservatives, look at the Drug War and its very literal confiscations of property and freedom. To hell with Mom and Dad both, whichever side of the aisle they find themselves on.
Of course, as daveinboca shows us, the far right can only support their alternate histories, of course, by attempting to discredit those whose jobs it is to do the actual primary source research, of course, that we like to, of course, call scholarship.
Of course, this specious spurious victim of academicide is apodictic in defining who is "serious" and "credible," the leftist loons whom he has read, of course. Actually reading a book before condemning it isn't necessary for the committed loon. This made me laugh out loud. Here's the thing, sport: Have you read the books by the leftist loons you're criticizing? No. Of course not. Anyway, you don't have to believe leftist loons, because the fascists themselves defined themselves in opposition to communism. Fascism was an explicitly anti-communist movement! They said so themselves, over and over again! Why is that so hard to grasp? Oh wait, that's right-- your side is ideologically opposed to actual research. My bad.
. Every fascist leader and intellectual defined fascism in opposition to communism. Goldberg said socialism, not communism. Fascism and socialism were brothers; they were not, originally, ideological antipodes. Think of it as liberal anti-communism and conservative anti-communism. As the poster above noted, one of the main problems here is our differing views on what "statism" or "socialism" mean. We can't even agree on basic terms. How the heck can be move on from there. Especially given the limited nature of posting. E.g., I was using the term "statism" much differently (I think) than my fellow poster Rick used it. This is too much of me, frankly. Perhaps another reader of the book can give a better explanation.
"I haven't read the book, but if it makes us relearn (or rethink) our political theory 101 then it is a good thing." I am all for rethinking or re-evaluating our political theory from serious and relatively non-partisan authors. It's just that Jonah Goldberg is not in that category. He's in the category with Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity. And I haven't read any of their books either, because I think they're intellectually dishonest - with an agenda to further conservative causes. I read most every thing Jonah writes on the web and nothing tells me I should spend a nickel or a minute of my time with his book of the absurd title.
Haven't read the book, but it seems like Goldberg sets up conservatism and the "right" as the opposite of statism such that all statist ideologies (including fascism) are automatically liberal and of the "left." That's a distortion of the actual history and practice of conservatism. Although a professed desire for "smaller government" (the DoD excluded, of course) and tax cuts are one component of modern movement conservatism, conservatism is not and never has been classical liberalism.
Nightjar, Secondly, it is a book, not a column and not a post on the National Review website. Many authors, when given the space a book allows, write more thoroughly-researched and thoughtful treatises. Lastly, the title comes from the prominent leftist H.G. Wells which was meant to reinforce the thesis in the book.
Mr. Douthat, Mortimer Adler offered an advisory that not every book is worthy of a careful line-by-line reading, and appended to that a systematic scheme for inspecting a book antecedent to a rapid quick-and-dirty reading antecedent to a reading with care, with the prudent reader terminating his efforts at a point where the data indicate they are no longer worthwhile. The purpose of taxonomy is to clarify, and it does so by selecting the most salient features and then constructing sub-classifications by selecting the most salient feature given a certain superordinate feature. From the title of the book, blurbs, and brief reviews, it appears Mr. Goldberg has set himself the task of demonstrating that certain aspects of political economy are the ultimate features a proper political taxonomy. I would wager that a guided and selective reading would tell you whether he achieved that task or attempted to achieve it. (One might suspect that the title Liberal Fascism was selected because a title like Commonalities between Fascism and the Therapeutic State might be more indicative of contents but bad for sales). There are other reasons you might want to read the book in toto. Mr. Goldberg (along with Michael Kinsley and Maureen Dowd) is something of a humor writer manque and is usually at least mildly amusing. It might have some entertainment value (and the cover art is pretty funny).
Honestly, Goldberg's book is nothing but an embarassment for conservatives everywhere. It's the sort of silly name calling and semi-literate historical comparisons you used to see in mimeographed newsletters in the 1960s. There's nothing original about it either - it is hardly news that Mussolini and Hitler were fans of economic policies that were redistributive and would certainly not be 'conservative' from a Hayekian point of view. But Gotz Aly and other real scholars have covered that ground. And Aly did make some interesting links from Hitler to the modern German welfare state that make leftists squirm. But Goldberg is not Aly - he tries to draw straight lines between historically unrelated phenomena simply to try to stir the pot.
Keith You may be right, but the several comments and reviews I've read, suggest an absurdity of content matched by the absurd title, no matter who first coined the phrase. I agree, it is a book that should be read liberals, if for no other reason than to debunk it. If you or others who bother to contribute the 20 bucks or so to buy and read it conclude it has merit, then I'll be wrong. That is merit other than creating new wingnut definitions for themselves and liberals toward promoting their conservative ideology over liberalism. Jonah Goldberg an academic author. Who'd a thunk it.
Meaning, statism is not a system of organizing and viewing the world--it is merely the belief that the state could and should actively improve the lives of its citizenry. Outside the ambit of contemporary anarchism, the utility of the state is generally conceded. My thesis=Conservatives are Stalinists. Gonna disagree with that? Make fun of me? Even before my book/paper is finished? The Stalin regime was a practical expression of a social order sketched out in a distinct text whose paternity is acknowledged by all Communist regimes. You could also look at the Stalin regime as a latter-day expression of an antique type of political economy, but the type in question is one that has scant precedent in the Medieval or Modern Occident. The equation of 'conservatism' with 'Stalinism' is more obtrusively absurd than what Mr. Goldberg appears to be attempting.
The book is a boon for two groups--the know-nothings, who can repeat phrases like 'serious' and 'academic' for the first time in their lives, and the know-betters, like Ross, who understand the book sucks, but can use it as some sort of meta-critique of liberalism. The sad truth is that there is a good book about fascism and the modern democratic state out there. For instance, I'm reading the irritatingly dense Homo Sacer right now, which is about as far from Goldberg territory as words can take you, and it follows (as far as I can tell) the course of .control over humans in the modern state, whether fascist or democratic. What I don't understand is why actual conservatives with brains aren't furious about this book being published. Besides all of the nepotism and the glaring lack of talent, there is the this: you want to talk about liberals, Hayekian freedom, and the space in-between, fine, go for it. But something stupid like Liberal Fascism will not only make it into a talking point intended to win a three-second conversation on cable television, it's going to forever set the standard at low and moronic.
In this case, I choose to judge the book by its cover. Goldberg may be likable in person, but the fact that he chose to associate Liberals with Hitler speaks volumes about his judgement. And if you wish to make the argument that his publisher chose the cover design, then I would counter that he had the right to reject it and chose not to. That speaks volumes about his character as well. Why on earth should I reward such behavior by buying the book?
Doug- Also, Jonah uses the cover his blog hosted at National Review. He definitely endorses the cover.
I have a challenge for Ross, and Jonah, though I know both the latter rarely reads or responds to comments, preferring only to selectively sample them to highlight how they are all dismissable crazy ranting. Jonah's book is inherently a work of Intellectual History. And, as it turns out, this is an academic field with a lot of great thinkers who know a heck of a lot about these sorts of subjects. If Jonah's central thesis is serious, and he at least claims it is, and if it is controversial and new research, which it certainly seems to be, why doesn't Jonah submit it to a journal of Intellectual History for review? Or perhaps it's neither that serious, nor that rigorous? It seems to me that someone whining about not judging a book by it's title is on pretty thin ice when they've picked a title that is, for lack of a better word, a form of trolling, sure to pump up sales amongst the thriving Coulter market. And while I've not read the book yet, I think we live in a day and age when the central arguments of any work can be summed up and related fairly well, including describing them on the book's own promo material. If the critics of Jonah's work are all wrong and misinformed, then it would be nice if he'd seriously try to show how, instead of just insisting that they need to help pump up his sales before being able to judge. It seems to me pretty clear that the whole exercise of the book is to use the word facism over and over and, even while disclaiming that he's not directly accusing all modern liberals of being genocidal maniacs, to simple use the bad connotation of how MOST people understand the term to smear any and everyone who falls under his much much broader definition. If I'm wrong, or misinformed about this, then please: don't complain about how I haven't read it yet. If I'm so misinformed, it should be trivially easy to show that I am. So why all the coyness?
I may flip through this book if I see it laying around somewhere, but I certainly wouldn't pay one cent for it. I don't have to visit Goldberg's bathroom to know that his shit stinks.
Freddie is awfully impressed that the original "fascists" opposed the original "communists." That would be really convincing, except that -- as Goldberg has already pointed out -- it doesn't undermine their similar roots and objectives. Freddie's argument here is as if one tried to claim that Protestants and Catholics don't share any common heritage, because after all they used to oppose and even kill each other (and therefore a book about "Christian Catholicism" is an oxymoron).
Ross - Good luck w/ the reading; I guess someone has to do it. btw: I hope you have mental health insurance.
As a sort of sidebar to this discussion, it's interesting for me (real interest, not faux) how some on the political left uncritically accept the view that the proper role of the state is to promote justice and fairness and equality. Feed us, house us, take care of us. That's simply what it's supposed to do. They see no danger in expanding the state to accomplish these goals. This, I think, is one of the major points Goldberg is making. By documenting the historical roots between liberalism and fascism, he points out the potential danger when using the modern state for a larger eschatological purpose. The fact that many are outraged about anyone exposing these comparisons underscores, for me, how careless they are about using the state so expansively. If it's a good goal, why not let government do it? Liberals aren't, of course, fascists. Their goals are noble; but using ignoble means to achieve noble goals can corrupt that goal. Conservatives run the same risk (war on terror anyone?). People tend to lose their concerns about power when they exercise it. Dismiss Goldberg as a neocon crank, if you wish. Not much I can say to persuade you otherwise. But you're doing your cause no good by dismissing some of his ideas.
In this case, I choose to judge the book by its cover. Goldberg may be likable in person, but the fact that he chose to associate Liberals with Hitler speaks volumes about his judgement. I do not think a smiley-face icon has much ideological content, 'liberal' or otherwise. I recall a man I saw in a Halloween costume around about 1975. His was a Ku Klux Klan outfit on the back of which was stenciled the smiley-face icon adjacent to a speech balloon which read "Have a Nice Day!". Similar joke.
No, JD, it's more like saying Evangelical Christianity and Scientology are linked because they both relied on buildings, books, recruitment, and the need for divine meaning (with whatever it is Scientologists believe in substituted for 'divine'). Because it's true--socialism and fascism post-WWI do have certain similarities. The foremost is that they were both oriented towards politics. Amazing, right? They involved humans, for example, and relied on political interaction, which required that you respond to certain realities in people's lives. What's crazy about Goldberg's argument is that he seems to be saying true conservatives are so out there that any sort of political interaction involving the economic or social life is kin to totalitarianism Which is fine, if you're a pure anarchist, I guess, but there's no real evidence that Goldberg is. He's just wrote a book that slams liberals now by charting what socialists did in the 20s and how that compared to the rising fascist movement. He also seems completely uninterested as to why the New Deal America compared to Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's USSR ended up in a rather different political quadrant. Real books by real writers, even those with severe ideological slants, are obvious because they actually care about their subjects.
SteveMG wrote: Whoa whoa whoa hold up!!! Did you just equate using the state to "promote justice and fairness and equality" with a "larger eschatological purpose"????
I do not think a smiley-face icon has much ideological content, 'liberal' or otherwise. No, but the word "Liberal" does. You may not have noticed, but it's the first word of the book's two-word title. And the smiley-face Klan outfit is a joke from Blazing Saddles.
As a sort of sidebar to this discussion, it's interesting for me (real interest, not faux) how some on the political left uncritically accept the view that the proper role of the state is to promote justice and fairness and equality. Feed us, house us, take care of us. That's simply what it's supposed to do. At the risk of sounding picayune, I think it would be generally (if not universally) agreed that a function of the state is to promote justice and fairness; what would be in dispute would be the precise content of 'justice' and 'fairness'. Likewise, bar for Jos. Sobran and people of like mind, the state is there to provide goods and services (order-maintainence, rationing of the commons, &c), just not the sorts of goods and services that can be produced more efficiently by the private sector.
If Goldberg's point is that: P1 liberalism == big government P2 conservatism == small government C fascism is a branch of liberalism then he's saying nothing that the National Review hasn't been saying since its inception, even as it defended and applauded Franco. He's also tacitly admitting that Ron Paul is the only actual conservative running for president this year (and I don't say that as a fan of Paul.)
Doug recalls: "And the smiley-face Klan outfit is a joke from Blazing Saddles." Yeah. Like his hero, Saint Reagan, Art Deco conflates movies with reality.
No, but the word "Liberal" does. You may not have noticed, but it's the first word of the book's two-word title. I did notice. The principal referent to Hitler is the mustache on the smiley-face icon. "Fascism", whether used rigorously or not, refers to an array of governments and movements, not merely Hitler's Germany. Some were (or inclined to be) genocidally violent (the German Nazis and the Croatian Ustase) and some were not (the Italian Fascists).
Art- Don't forget that Goldberg writes that "the white male is the Jew of liberal fascism."
Did you just equate using the state to "promote justice and fairness and equality" with a "larger eschatological purpose"???? Yes! Of course. "We will not rest", says Hillary or Barack or Ted Kennedy and so on, "Until every child has healthcare. Until no child ever goes to bed hungry. Until all racism is erased from America. Until every person has an adequate education. Until we achieve justice for all and equality for all and a fair society for all".. et cetera et cetera... Until America is perfect, government must continue and expand its activities. More programs, more spending, more legislation. We hear this all...the...time. Every problem in America for the left (I am, of course, painting with large strokes) must be addressed with a government administered program. Government must not rest, the state must not be put aside, until this end goal is met. Immanentizing the eschatology indeed.
SteveMG writes: "This, I think, is one of the major points Goldberg is making. By documenting the historical roots between liberalism and fascism, he points out the potential danger when using the modern state for a larger eschatological purpose." Are you trying to convince yourself that Goldberg has some sort of noble purpose here, Steve? The prick SUPPORTS TORTURE. He doesn't give a rat's ass about the potential dangers of the modern state - he embraces them, as long as they're untilized by his side.
RickM: In this usage, the state's end purpose. What is the goal of government? Not as in the end of the world. No, I'm not saying that liberals want to use the state to end the world. This format shows, once again, that it's a poor one to express ideas. Especially if someone (me?) is using it so poorly.
Commentators have missed the real point of Goldberg's writing - which is soft, strong, and thoroughly absorbent. I just hope the publishers will make the second edition easier to use. Put some of those neat little dots down the side of each page - it helps to be able to tear them out cleanly before you wipe.
I don't want to sound like a presumptuous European, but really most of you guys seem clueless about some of the major themes of European history after the Franch revolution. In one word, for several generations the great engine of cultural history was the myth of the revolution, the idea that a new world order of freedom and equality was about to come along (this ended up with Auschwitz and the Gulag, of course). I have not read Goldberg, but I have read Ernst Nolte, Renzo De Felice and Eric Voegelin and I can tell you the following: fascism (and Nazism) conceived of themselves as REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS just as much as communism. The difference was that they identified the coming immanent escathon with the nation and the race, not with the proletariat. But inasmuch they were revolutionary, they were not conservative! So you liberal friends have to decide exactly what you want to call a "right winger". Is it an anti-revolutionary (like Edmund Burke or Hayek or Del Noce) or is it a fascist? These are two exactly opposite philosophies of history. Just don't tell me that a "fascist" is some king of authoritarian thug, because intolerance is a common feature of all ideological revolutionary movements (including the current American version, political correctness). On the other hand, if "liberalism" (in the contemporary American sense, which is NOT the traditional European sense) is a successor of the European socialist tradition, then indeed it shares the same philosopical ancestors (e.g. Rousseau, Hegel etc.) as fascism. I am afraid in US schools nobody reads any longer that great classic of American political history, Prof. Jacob Talmon's "Origin of Totalitarian Democracy."
SteveMG: "I'm using the word "eschatology" as meaning the ultimate destiny or end purpose. In this usage, the state's end purpose. What is the goal of government? Not as in the end of the world. No, I'm not saying that liberals want to use the state to end the world. This format shows, once again, that it's a poor one to express ideas. Especially if someone (me?) is using it so poorly." Hint: If you mean "goal," say goal.
Yeah. Like his hero, Saint Reagan, Art Deco conflates movies with reality. I actually have never seen Blazing Saddles, bar bits and fragments which were on the televison last summer when I was visiting a family member in a nursing home. Don't remember that scene. The fellow in question I met at the home of a friend, in 1975. I have no particular investment in Mr. Reagan, and never voted for him.
jacksonbollock writes: "I just hope the publishers will make the second edition easier to use. Put some of those neat little dots down the side of each page - it helps to be able to tear them out cleanly before you wipe." Jonah's hoping the second edition is bound in Iranian skin.
Thanks, Carlo. Excellent contribution. You're one post is ten times better than my incoherent five or so. I should just let you respond for me.
So Art Deco, I'm confused. You took issue with my claim that the book's cover associates Liberalism with Hitler. I support my point by pointing out that the word Liberal and the imagery of Hitler are both on the front, prominently displayed and right next to each other. You counter by saying that smiley faces and fascism can sometimes refer to other things as well, so no attempt to associate Liberalism with Hitler exists. Is that a fair assessment of your argument?
A few points: Re: If that is the case, then Rousseau's idea was also nascent authoritarianism, compassionate conservatism, excepting the executive from the rule of law, Stalinism, Maoism, Nasserism, Titoism, syndicalism, corporatism, Bushism, etc. Indeed. I would add that outside the Anglo-American world, the basic idea that the State should promote the common good and should take (in most things) precedence over individual preferences, is probably shared by most people. "Statism" of some sort or another is probably the default worldview of most people in the world, and of most complex societies throughout history; the ideas of individualism and liberalism are the innovation and largely peculiar to Anglo-American socities in the modern era. To pile together such things as different as Titoism, Falangism, Stalinism and Christian Socialism all together and call them 'fascism' reminds me of those Muslims who would lump together all non-Muslim countries as 'The World of War'. What Mr. Goldberg calls 'statism', I would call simple common sense. The state does, in fact, exist to promote the common good, the general will, the pursuit of virtue, etc. Statism is not a modern idea either. The precolumbian Inca Empire was an impressively centralized state that has been seen by many on the left as a sort of precursor to modern socialism and as a utopian Golden Age. Plato, too...was Plato a 'fascist'? Give me a break? One could argue on similar grounds that the modern libertarian conservatives are like the Taliban. After all, the Taliban had their origins in the Afghan Mujahideen, who were libertarian anti-Statists (at least relative to the communist regime in Kabul), who wanted to preserve their property, religion, family structures and weapons against the intrusions of a modernizing state. (Some Americans at the time, I believe, saw in the Mujahideen and Nicaraguan Contras the equivalent of our Founding Fathers.) Therefore, because Jonah Goldberg and the Taliban share anti-statist and anti-socialist intellectual origins, Jonah Golberg is 'Liberal Taliban'. No?
Art Deco replies: "I actually have never seen Blazing Saddles, bar bits and fragments which were on the televison last summer when I was visiting a family member in a nursing home. Don't remember that scene. The fellow in question I met at the home of a friend, in 1975." It must be nice to have total recall like that. Then again, I guess you've been too busy watching "Birth of a Nation" over and over again.
Don't forget that Goldberg writes that "the white male is the Jew of liberal fascism."... I think he means that both are designated scapegoats, but I cannot speak for him. In one sense, I think you are right. Political anti-semitism is not a signature feature of fascism - a large array of non-fascist movements adopted anti-semitic platforms during the inter-war period. (And I have had the impression from my reading that the anti-semitic legislation issued by the Mussolini government was but a practical accommodation to Hitler, not something truly derivative of the fascist ideology in Italy).
Hector: Because everything you attributed Goldberg as claiming is incorrect. Among other things, when he uses the word "statism", he's talking about the modern state and not the state qua state. I'm sure you know that, for example in America, for the first 200 years or so we had a small central government (except for times during wars). It was largely an administrative state and did not have as its goal justice or equality or fairness. It's only in the past century or so that we've seen this incredible expansion of government in our lives. And by the way, sorry, the Taliban are not libertarians.
Hector: there is a HUGE difference between asserting that the state should promote the common good (a formula that goes at least as far back as Thomas Aquinas) and the modern Hegelian/communist/fascist notion of the "ethical state." The latter has a quasi-religious status, and claims to enbody "the people's will" (Rousseau) or "the movement of history" (Hegel, Marx) or "the nation" (fascism) or "science" (today) in determining what is good for its subjects in every aspect of their individual lives. In other words, it is not one aspect within the life of society, but it claims to BE society in its collective expression.
Perhaps not. The Democrats aren't fascists either. Nevertheless, the Mujahideen were certainly anti-statist, at least as compared to their enemies. Conservatives in the US were in favor of the Mujahideen during the 1980s, so I'm not sure why you are disclaiming them now. My point is that the attempt to distinguish the modern state from the premodern state is incorrect. 'Statist' governments in the 20th and 21st century, whether on the right or the left, often drew inspiration from pre-modern models of the state. E.g. the Argentine Colonels drawing inspiration from the European Middle Ages, Evo Morales and General Velasco drawing inspiration from the Inca Empire, etc. Rousseau, after all, wanted to recreate the lost golden age before private property. Limited government is a feature of traditional Anglo-American culture, as you point out, but has never had much popularity in much of the rest of the world.
SteveMG writes: "I'm sure you know that, for example in America, for the first 200 years or so we had a small central government (except for times during wars). It was largely an administrative state and did not have as its goal justice or equality or fairness. It's only in the past century or so that we've seen this incredible expansion of government in our lives." It's also true that for most of that past century the US has either been at war or on a war footing. (By "war footing" I'm referring to the Cold War, for instance.)
It's only in the past century or so that we've seen this incredible expansion of government in our lives. Hector, you seem to be making an inadvertent argument in favor of government. Unless of course you think the 19th century was preferable to the 20th-21st. Not that government can claim most of the advances made, but it did help provide the stability which made many advances possible. For example, without big bloated government, we wouldn't be able to discuss this issue via computer today.
Is that a fair assessment of your argument? I suppose you are right. He associates Hitler (directly) with the smiley-face icon. He associates 'liberal' with 'fascist' so you are correct that he associates 'liberal' with 'nazi' (as that is a subset of 'fascist'), albeit the association is indirect and attenuated. Fascism is not necessarily genocidal (and non-fascist goverments in Roumania and Vichy France were implicated in the Final Solution by deporting Jews for reasons-of-state) but the sense of association is going to be there so long as fascism is correllated with genocidal tendencies (though is not strictly identified with them). Since it appears Mr. Goldberg is trying to appropriate the rhetorical force of the term 'fascism' for a dubious polemical end, he cannot complain that people take it the way you did.
E.g. the Argentine Colonels drawing inspiration from the European Middle Ages Generals Videla, Viola, Galtieri, & c. were aiming to establish a network of guilds, communes, manorial estates, enfoeffed knights and nobles, &c. after they were done with the Montoneros, the Trotskyists, and Jacobo Timmerman?
That’s it - I’m buying myself a copy ASAP!!!! Many of what are (rightfully) called right wing “hatchet books” can be very useful nonetheless. If this is the case with Goldberg’s book, it will prove to be useful as almost a reference work. If the footnotes and resources are well documented, such books can act as a useful resource for hunting down greater detail and historical fact that supports the general thesis.
Limited government is a feature of traditional Anglo-American culture, as you point out, but has never had much popularity in much of the rest of the world. Never? Constitutional government has been the default in continental Europe for a century-and-a-half, in a selection of Latin American countries from various points in time between 1830 and 1890, and in Japan and India throughout the post-War period.
I think if many of the liberal critics of Goldberg's thesis had read Niebuhr, much of their criticism about the book would change. Those that don't think Goldberg's a neocon pig, mind you. A good healthy dose of Niebuhr would be good for the left today in any event.
Having read Goldberg's book, the main problem with it is that there is literally no political movement outside of of modern American conservatism (and, more specifically, modern American Reaganite Christian movement conservatism) which is a.) not fascist in nature and b.) bad. He manages a discussion of fascism in 1930s America while mentioning exactly once either Charles Lindbergh or Henry Ford as anything even resembling fascist. The relationship of capitalism to fascism remains entirely untouched, the right's concept of "Islamofascism" goes entirely unexplored. The entire point of the book is to redefine the entire history and nature of modern American liberalism as a two-step history from the French Revolution to Woodrow Wilson, ending up with Hillary Clinton. It's not so much the (awful, ignorant) quality of Goldberg's arguments as it is the utter mendacity with which he makes his twin arguments. The first argument is that, quite directly, all "bad" ideologies from the 19th century to present are the result of political liberalism, without failure. One wonders from his writings if a conservative or right-wing movement would ever be capable of any excess or evil, so total is the reverence in which he holds his own beliefs. The second, and perhaps more insidious, argument is that one can draw direct comparisons between between doctrines and ideologies based not on the motivating factors or ultimate direction of the ideologies, but instead on their intermediate goals. It's the "Nazis liked puppies, too" argument writ large. Goldberg's argument is stunningly myopic, blazingly ignorant and almost totally bereft of any actual intellectual rigor or curiosity. You can tell from his writing that he spent most of his four years of research skimming books until he found a liberal or liberal idea somehow reflected in fascist actions and deciding, without further review or thought, that it was yet another gotcha in his growing, persuasive pile of evidence detailing liberal fascism. If you want to save yourself the money, find your state Democratic Party's platform, open it to any page, jab your finger at a sentence and say "fascist". Repeat for a few hours, and you've got the same effect.
Fitz says: "Many of what are (rightfully) called right wing “hatchet books” can be very useful nonetheless. If this is the case with Goldberg’s book, it will prove to be useful as almost a reference work. If the footnotes and resources are well documented, such books can act as a useful resource for hunting down greater detail and historical fact that supports the general thesis." Does this mean Fitz thinks the book might be useful?
1. Since Goldberg is engaging in what amounts to Holocaust denial -- downgrading the term "fascism" so it becomes meaningless, a classic Holocaust-denial technique -- there is no reason to wait to get mad at him; since he is spitting on the graves of fascism's victims in order to score debating points against liberals, he deserves no more serious thought than David Irving. 2. To repeat the obvious points: Goldberg is wrong when he says that fascists were against a different kind of "liberalism" than American liberalism; Mussolini, Hitler and so on specifically denounced the tolerance, pluralism, multiculturalism and cultural freedoms that American liberals believe in. That he ignores this and focuses instead on meaningless parallels -- Hitler believed that the state could do good, so do liberals -- is reprehensible. And of course Goldberg hasn't responded to Niewert's obvious point: there are people in America who actually identify themselves as Fascists, and they are right-wingers. (No, all right-wingers are not fascists. But all actual self-declared fascist movements in America are right-wing.) 3. And since it is conservatives who want to use the all-powerful instruments of the state to make everything wonderful, e.g. banning abortion to enforce their idea of morality, or torturing people to make us "safe" and "protected" -- the idea that liberals are more statist than conservatives is not borne out. The only instances where conservatives support freedom is the freedom of elites at the expense of others; so conservatives support a health-care system that increases the freedom of the rich by decreasing the freedom of everyone else. Goldberg's assumption that liberals are anti-freedom is hilariously out of date; he's in denial about the fact that he's part of a movement, American conservatism, whose entire purpose is to use the state to limit freedom.
I have friends who, with great seriousness, will routinely chastise the New York Times for being too conservative. You know the type -- your given tenured professor who has been lecturing stridently for years now, in class, about the criminal Bushilter junta, etc. I welcome efforts like Goldberg's to counter such rhetoric, and perhaps engender some self-reflection. Unquestionably, the likes of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini would be more at home on the Left of today than on the Right. They both despised capitalism, free markets, or anything close to laissez-faire. They viewed democracy as contemptibly weak and impotent. They were big government people, seeking to order their societies around a powerful central government that subordinated individual freedoms in order to win their struggle for . How you fill that blank in is really the core difference between national socialism, communism, or any flavor of socialism. Hitler and Mussolini filled in that blank with a romantic nostalgia -- either the long denied birthright of the Aryan race, or restoring the lost glory that was Rome. In that sense alone, which I'd argue is arbitrary and insignificant, can their regimes be termed reactionary or even slightly conservative by today's standards. Fill that blank in with something else, or something more modern, and you have got the same socialist dynamic at the core, just with a shift in emphasis. Is the struggle against the Jews, against the bourgeois, or against social injustice more broadly, or even against global warming? Hitler was intoning against the Bolsheviks with great stridency -- but understand that in Munich beer halls before the disaffected German workers, the Bolsheviks were his competitors for the same space on the ascendant Left. Unplug class struggle from the Bolsheviks and plug in racial struggle, and you get National Socialism. It's clear that fascism is a socialist system with a strong sense of collectivism ordered around a powerful central state that does not value individual rights. Hitler is and always was far closer to Stalin than to Thomas Jefferson. Every idea he ever had was far to the left and inscrutably foreign to every aspect of Classical Liberalism.
I'm sure you know that, for example in America, for the first 200 years or so we had a small central government (except for times during wars). It was largely an administrative state and did not have as its goal justice or equality or fairness. It's only in the past century or so that we've seen this incredible expansion of government in our lives. In the interests of precision, there was no central goverment on the continent from 1607 to 1774. There was an expansion in the permissible scope of the federal government's activity in the post-bellum period but the ratio of federal expenditure to domestic product stood at 3% as late as 1929 (of which I think about half was devoted to the military and the postal service). The qualitative and quantitative change in govermental function commenced around 1933 in this country. An analagous process occured just about everywhere in the occidental world, though over somewhat different time periods. The Preamble to the Constitution reads thus: We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, Someone had 'justice' as a goal.
Art Deco writes: "He associates Hitler (directly) with the smiley-face icon. He associates 'liberal' with 'fascist' so you are correct that he associates 'liberal' with 'nazi' (as that is a subset of 'fascist'), albeit the association is indirect and attenuated. Fascism is not necessarily genocidal (and non-fascist goverments in Roumania and Vichy France were implicated in the Final Solution by deporting Jews for reasons-of-state) but the sense of association is going to be there so long as fascism is correllated with genocidal tendencies (though is not strictly identified with them). Since it appears Mr. Goldberg is trying to appropriate the rhetorical force of the term 'fascism' for a dubious polemical end, he cannot complain that people take it the way you did. " Here we have it, folks - perhaps the only person on the planet dumb enough to think that Jonah Goldberg isn't deliberately connecting liberals with Hitler with this choice of cover.
Every idea he ever had was far to the left and inscrutably foreign to every aspect of Classical Liberalism. This, of course, makes sense if you classify small government as the definitional expression of right-wing politics. Again, the self-idolizing restriction of right-wing politics as only Jeffersonian democracy is neither particularly accurate nor fair - but it does allow conservatives to take any negative political act since 1776 and place it totally on the shoulders of the left.
ken wrote- Yeah its not like the NY Times employs the far-right Bill Kristol or that Bush suspended habeas corpus and instituted torture. Your friends must really be crazy!!!! But then the rest of your post is so incoherent and stupid that I don't believe any educated person--let alone a tenured professor--would be friends with you.
Reading the book is perhaps a prerequisite for criticizing the book itself. It is not a prerequisite for criticizing Jonah Goldberg. Whatever arguments he makes in the book, he's made arguments for his thesis in a number of other forums. Those arguments are fair game for critique, ridicule, etc., even by those who haven't read his 500 page book.
Since Goldberg is engaging in what amounts to Holocaust denial -- Take a pill. And of course Goldberg hasn't responded to Niewert's obvious point: there are people in America who actually identify themselves as Fascists, and they are right-wingers. (No, all right-wingers are not fascists. But all actual self-declared fascist movements in America are right-wing.) Whether they are properly classified as 'left' or 'right' is either a matter of terminological convention (and thus substantively unimportant) or else an indication of their affinities (in which case a discussion of the affinities rather than the taxonomy would be more to the point).
I do not think you are going to find a provision of the Penal Code of any state that does not reflect someone's idea of an ethical or moral norm. That aside, that it be the function of the state to protect life and to define and punish crimes is an old one and one consensually held. That it be the function of the state to redistribute income or teach adolescents how to use an intrauterine device has rather less of a pedigree (and is the subject of rather more contention).
???
Carlo's post really does need repeating for its ability to clear the air & due justice to the overall theme that Goldberg (and conservatism generally) understands "fascism" to be (rightfully) a part of. “I don't want to sound like a presumptuous European, but really most of you guys seem clueless about some of the major themes of European history after the Franch revolution. In one word, for several generations the great engine of cultural history was the myth of the revolution, the idea that a new world order of freedom and equality was about to come along (this ended up with Auschwitz and the Gulag, of course). I have not read Goldberg, but I have read Ernst Nolte, Renzo De Felice and Eric Voegelin and I can tell you the following: fascism (and Nazism) conceived of themselves as REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS just as much as communism. The difference was that they identified the coming immanent escathon with the nation and the race, not with the proletariat. But inasmuch they were revolutionary, they were not conservative! So you liberal friends have to decide exactly what you want to call a "right winger". Is it an anti-revolutionary (like Edmund Burke or Hayek or Del Noce) or is it a fascist? These are two exactly opposite philosophies of history. Just don't tell me that a "fascist" is some king of authoritarian thug, because intolerance is a common feature of all ideological revolutionary movements (including the current American version, political correctness).” “On the other hand, if "liberalism" (in the contemporary American sense, which is NOT the traditional European sense) is a successor of the European socialist tradition, then indeed it shares the same philosopical ancestors (e.g. Rousseau, Hegel etc.) as fascism. I am afraid in US schools nobody reads any longer that great classic of American political history, Prof. Jacob Talmon's "Origin of Totalitarian Democracy."
My post above at Posted by Fitz | January 13, 2008 4:17 PM Is written after having read the entire thread. Out of all the comments I found that one to be the most germaine & enlightening to the debate.
Some of the clearest distinctions between current liberals and fascists is the lack of nationalism and militarism. But what many posters are forgetting is that you don't have to go back very far to find liberals/progressives that were in fact nationalist and militaristic not to mention racist to boot. Are Wilson, FDR, JFK, and LBJ, etc. no longer considered liberal? Is anyone going to argue that those presidents weren't nationalistic or willing to use force to implement policy? If Jonah's concept is so far out of field then why was the very title of his floated by an influential liberal? What about the New Left? They were not nationalist but they were sure into violence and terror as an instrument of leftist politics. Most of those commenting on the book simply refuse to believe that their might be some connection between fascism and progressive thought in this country. But does anyone doubt the connection between Marxism and liberalism? Does that mean all liberals are the heirs of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? That they are genocidal maniacs? No. But you would be a fool to dismiss the connection between Marxism and communism and American liberalism.
You know the type -- your given tenured professor who has been lecturing stridently for years now, in class, about the criminal Bushilter junta, etc. So Ken, "Bushitler" is patently ridiculous, but saying that "Hitler would be more at home on the Left," is your idea of reasoned discourse? Oh those horrible mindless Hitler-equating partisans! I'm glad I'm not one of them! By the way, you're Hitler.
Art Deco writes: "That aside, that it be the function of the state to protect life and to define and punish crimes is an old one and one consensually held. That it be the function of the state to redistribute income or teach adolescents how to use an intrauterine device has rather less of a pedigree (and is the subject of rather more contention)." This is, of course, demonstrably stupid, unless Art Deco would have us believe that the state in classical or medieval times did not redistribute income (mostly upwards) on a routine basis.
Again, Carlo's argument is just another Goldbergian absurdity - having decided that something can be classified as bad (revolution), conservatism is inherently incapable of it. Can we just cut out the middleman and get straight to the point? Ronald Reagan good. Everything else bad. Token classical European liberal reference mandated. The end.
No, I'm Hitler. And I'm voting for Bush in '08.
Yeah its not like the NY Times employs the far-right Bill Kristol or that Bush suspended habeas corpus and instituted torture. Your friends must really be crazy!!!! Leaving aside the accuracy of your characterization of his views, Dr. Kristol writes a commentary or two a week for the editorial page. He has no role in reporting the news or editing it. It would be rather lame to have an Op-Ed page without contrasting opinions on it and rather lame to neither develop nor recruit talented people to write topical commentary, which is why (one assumes) the Washington Post editorial page has for decades refrained from Monovox uttered by mediocre writers. The New York Times will have to speak for itself.
Fitz writes: "My post above at Posted by Fitz | January 13, 2008 4:17 PM Is written after having read the entire thread. Out of all the comments I found that one to be the most germaine & enlightening to the debate." What does Germaine Greer have to do with this?
Some of the clearest distinctions between current liberals and fascists is the lack of nationalism and militarism. But what many posters are forgetting is that you don't have to go back very far to find liberals/progressives that were in fact nationalist and militaristic not to mention racist to boot. And one of the clearest links between current conservatives and fascists is the distinct presence of nationalism and militarism. It becomes irrelevant, however, because Hitler was a vegetarian and Bill Clinton had a picture with JFK.
Art Deco writes: "Leaving aside the accuracy of your characterization of his views, Dr. Kristol writes a commentary or two a week for the editorial page. He has no role in reporting the news or editing it." So Kristol has a PhD, which leads Art Deco to call the bloodthirsty prick "Dr. Kristol." Why do I suspect he wouldn't extend the same absurd "courtesy" to a liberal pundit?
This is, of course, demonstrably stupid, unless Art Deco would have us believe that the state in classical or medieval times did not redistribute income (mostly upwards) on a routine basis. Public policies do have implications with regard to income distribution. That does not render redistribution the purpose or predominant effect of that public policy. (As it is with social insurance schemes). I think it is anachronistic to speak of medieval social relations (and such things as the compulsory labor services and dues given by peasants to seigneurs) as 'redistribution' by the 'state'. I do not think authority was fully articulated in the sorts effected in 'public' and 'private' realms.
Re: It seems like Jonah's basic point is that Rousseau's belief in the will of the people as sometimes superceding the actual desires of individual persons was nascent fascism Bertrand Russell made that case a long time ago (and also linked Rousseau's view to the political views of Plato in antiquity). Russell however was very even-handed about it, pointing out that Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin and Stalin all owed a debt to Rousseau. He did not just carp at his own political opponents. Re: we fling around terms like fascist and commie but we don't even know what they mean anymore. That's been true for quite a while. Difference is the Left had a monopoly on calling people Fascists while the Right used Communist (or Socialist) as their generic slur word. What's different here is Goldberg trying to co-opt the word Fascism for use of the Right-- an admission perhaps that "Socialism" no longer seems to work as a scare name for the Left. Re: Fascism and socialism were brothers; they were not, originally, ideological antipodes. This ignores history. Fascistic government (Mussolini, Hitler, Franco etc.) almost always persecuted, or at least severely curtailed, Socialist parties. And ideologically I do not see where there's so much as a drop of Marxism in Fascism. To be sure, if you go back to Hegel you do find a common ancestor, but Fascism owes nothing to Marx, the direct progenitor of Socialism, except in opposition to it. Re: So you liberal friends have to decide exactly what you want to call a "right winger". Is it an anti-revolutionary (like Edmund Burke or Hayek or Del Noce) or is it a fascist? These are two exactly opposite philosophies of history. True. But the American Right hosts both strains, contradictory though they be. And in recent years the fascistic strain has gotten the upper hand. I've made this point in other places: our American conservatives are not conservative at all: they have become radicals pushing intellectual-driven radical solutions. A true conservative would look like Dwight Eisenhower not George W Bush. Re: On the other hand, if "liberalism" (in the contemporary American sense, which is NOT the traditional European sense) is a successor of the European socialist tradition This is very hard to say. There are strains of that certainly, especially on the Far Left where Marx was once sainted and revered. (The American Far Left however has been marginalized for generations). But I would say that the true mainstream of American liberalism owes little to Marx or Hegel and instead harks back further to the "New Jerusalem" social perfectionism of the early New England Puritans, quite suitably secularized of course. It's no mistake that the most liberal region of our country is New England after all.
Why do I suspect he wouldn't extend the same absurd "courtesy" to a liberal pundit? Richard Cohen, R.M. Kaus, Michael Kinsley, and Maureen Dowd are properly addressed as "Mr., Mr., Mr., and Miss", respectively. I cannot be bothered with reading the remainder.
Art Deco-
Richard Cohen, R.M. Kaus, Michael Kinsley, and Maureen Dowd are properly addressed as "Mr., Mr., Mr., and Miss", respectively. I cannot be bothered with reading the remainder. How utterly sad that this is considered a lineup of liberal pundits.
As a self-described liberal with semi-centrist views, I'd like to keep Kinsley on my team, thank you very much. Anyone else can claim Dowd that wants her.
The first argument is that, quite directly, all "bad" ideologies from the 19th century to present are the result of political liberalism, without failure. One wonders from his writings if a conservative or right-wing movement would ever be capable of any excess or evil, so total is the reverence in which he holds his own beliefs. If I am not mistaken, Mr. Goldberg is an admirer of Friedrich von Hayek and not an exponent of any sort of pre-Lockean political theory, so it would be peculiar to attribute to him the idea that 'liberalism' is the root of all political excesses. I think such a view might be attributable to John Rao or Thomas Droleskey, but they are academicians who bear little resemblance to Mr. Goldberg in their affiliations and do not write for the same publications.
I think, with that latest post, Art Deco just parodied himself.
If I am not mistaken, Mr. Goldberg is an admirer of Friedrich von Hayek and not an exponent of any sort of pre-Lockean political theory, so it would be peculiar to attribute to him the idea that 'liberalism' is the root of all political excesses. I think that bloobedy blabbedy so flim flammer the moopie padda. What? WHAT?
Rickm writes: "I think, with that latest post, Art Deco just parodied himself." He's always close to that edge, anyway. I'd like to see a reality TV show with Artie and Fitz living in the ghetto.
Fritz has a point when he characterizes both fascists and communists as revolutionary. However, I would argue that this only part of the truth. Both want to use violent means to change the status quo of liberal bourgeois regimes founded on individual rights. But while the communist revolution was meant to realize the rights of man and promise of 1789, the fascist revolution entailed their negation via each individual's being subsumed into the nation or, in Hitler's case, the race. Fascism was, for this reason, counter-revolutionary and in this sense right wing. As for Goldberg, the left's use of fascism as a categorical grab bag to demonize their enemies is an old story and one with a horrible pedigree going back to Stalin. In fact, all Goldberg does is rehash Stalin's old denunciation of his one-time communist allies and fellow left wingers as Hitlerian Trotskyists. What was tragic in that instance is now replayed as farce and intellectual slapstick.
This ignores history. Fascistic government (Mussolini, Hitler, Franco etc.) almost always persecuted, or at least severely curtailed, Socialist parties. And ideologically I do not see where there's so much as a drop of Marxism in Fascism. To be sure, if you go back to Hegel you do find a common ancestor, but Fascism owes nothing to Marx, the direct progenitor of Socialism, except in opposition to it. This ignores history. Mussolini, Hitler and Franco did not curtail socialist parties -- they led them. Looking at just the Nazis, as soon as they came into power they started confiscating businesses, and instituting price controls broadly across the entire economy. 4-Year Plans (which the Soviets would model later with their 5-Year Plans) were enacted, and central government began assessing industrial output and setting up quotas and production schedules across the whole swath of German industry. At the rural level, the Nazi confiscated large estates and set up collectives on them. The National Labor Front required all businesses employing more than 20 people to report directly to planning bureaus and directed by them. What is not socialist about all this?
And one of the clearest links between current conservatives and fascists is the distinct presence of nationalism and militarism. It becomes irrelevant, however, because Hitler was a vegetarian and Bill Clinton had a picture with JFK. I think you would have a hard time locating a period of American history (bar in wartime) where martial virtues were peculiarly esteemed or where the military was anything but firmly subordinate to civilian authority. America is not Wilhelmine Germany and the use of the term 'militarism' to describe a feature of the political culture is non sequitur. I would point out that the counter-point to 'nationalism' in the American political context was throughout the period running from 1793 through about 1900 to be found in Southern political thought, a pedigree few seem to wish to claim bar the folks at the Rockford Institute. Other counter-points might be early twentieth century socialism (Debs, &c) and the libertarian-isolationist-parochialist strain of thinking in the Republican Party typified by Robert Taft. The Roosevelts and Wilson manifested the more 'nationalist' strain of American political thought in the early twentieth century. During the 1950s a strain of social-liberal politics that was as critical as celebratory of American culture achieved a certain eminence ( Adlai Stevenson, &c.) and the isolationist wing of the Republican Party was liquidated by electoral defeat and changes of view. I do not believe that the preferred ancestors of contemporary social-liberals were less nationalist than their 'conservative' counterparts prior to that time.
In all the comments here, not one has mentioned the pink Elephant in the virtual living room. Some comparison of European politics, I suppose, is in order for describing how we got where we are in American politics. For those of you who've read the book, how does Jonah deal with the powerful influence of our slavery past-- particularly in the context of southern ideology. As well as the past 30 years of melding southern conservatism into the Republican party, where it has become the dominant force it is today. Isn't an entire society[the south] and it's institutions based on slave labor and racial violence a rather pure form of fascism? Modern liberalism has been the stalwart foe of this kind of thinking in American history whether it was first aligned with the democratic party, and now the republican party. And no, racism in America is not dead, it's just better disguised.
Ok. Ken cannot tell the difference between Socialist and socialist, and I think Art Deco isn't a parody, but the output of one of those auto-generating complaint scripts.
This ignores history. Fascistic government (Mussolini, Hitler, Franco etc.) almost always persecuted, or at least severely curtailed, Socialist parties. I would like to point out that the Communist governments in Russia (1917-21) and in Eastern Europe (1944-49) dissolved or suborned the extant social-democratic and agrarian parties without fail.
Even using Mr. Goldberg's glossary, this cannot pass. The ruling party in Spain was formed in 1937 from a forced merger of Carlists and Falangists to which the Alfonsine monarchists later signed on. The Falangists were the element with the greatest affinity for continental Fascist parties, the others embodying much older strains of Spanish political thought. Even so, the leader of the Falangists wassomewhat dubious about foreign Fascist parties; the Falangist were also the weakest electorally (prior to the Civil War) of the four components of the Nationalist coalition behind Franco.
Isn't an entire society[the south] and it's institutions based on slave labor and racial violence a rather pure form of fascism? The purpose of conventional terminology and taxonomy is clarity. The retrospective application of a term developed to describe Italian institutions and practices during the 1920s (where you had a partially industrial economy and a free labor system) to early modern plantation economies or pre-modern economic systems which featured hereditary subjection is likely to confuse more than it illuminates.
Starscream / Rickm: The 'liberalism' I was referring to was 'classical liberalism', aspects of which American political thinkers from Milton Friedman to Irving Howe might be pleased to lay claim; I was not referring to the social-democratic variant Goldberg is critiquing.
Would you extend that courtesy to Kristol's fellow op-ed writer at the NY Times? Of course. He has his achievements.
True. But the American Right hosts both strains, contradictory though they be. And in recent years the fascistic strain has gotten the upper hand. Rubbish.
which featured hereditary subjection is likely to confuse more than it illuminates." Ok! parsing words can be fun. So because, the forced labor and branding of inferiority , and murder, of the Nazi's victims were mostly white, diseased, old, or Jew's, then you can't use the term fascism because er.. the American subjected were a different color? Free labor systems in Axis controlled lands? I'd say calling 20 years of brutal slave holding and another 100 years of violent segregation a form of fascism is highly illuminating. And also accurate. But then I'm a scientist, what do I know.
that be roughly "200 years of brutal slave holding"
By 1939 Franco had pretty much assumed, and did claim, the legacy of Jose Rivera who by then had achieved cult status. Rivera championed central planning via government working with the proletariat in the trade unions, and via national syndicalism. That's a socialist recipe, and one Franco followed, even through the "Spanish Miracle", which, as Franco proudly boasted, was enabled by the central planning of the state's technocrats. I withhold judgement on Franco's experiment to a degree far larger than I do with Hitler & Mussolini (whom I both harshly condemn). To his credit he was far less ruinous than his fascist colleagues. Spaniards fared far better than their German or Italian counterparts, but they were still victims in the social experiments of a commanding state. Luckily for them, Franco's grand designs were far less ambitious than Hitler's or Mussolini's (mitigating the fallout I'd suppose).
My thesis=Conservatives are Stalinists. Gonna disagree with that? Make fun of me? Even before my book/paper is finished?
Art Deco,I agree with you that applying the label "fascist" to the antebellum slaveocracy is anachronistic, but I don't see how you can claim that "fascist" only really applies to Mussolini's Italy and then defend Goldberg, who splatters the term on everything. How can you string words together with that much cognitive dissonance in your head? For some definitions of fascism from real historians, go here: What needs to be noted here is that the "similarities" Goldberg finds between Liberalism (as opposed to liberalism) and Fascism are nearly all innocuous. If all the Nazis did was run a Keynesian economy and promote organic agriculture we'd remember them fondly. He ignores the aggressive warmongering, racism, content for liberal political institutions, systematized violence, and anti-intellectualism that made fascism so odious (traits which are better represented on the political right).
JonF: thanks for you constructive comments. I would add, as somebody who grew up during the last great wave of Marxist folly in Europe (Italy in the 70's) but who has lived in the US since 1990, that the most striking change I have observed in the US during my time is the "Europeanization" of the left. By this I mean that during the early part of the XX century the political divide in the US was, by and large, less based on ideology than in Europe and more on socio-economic interests. The big trade unions were never Marxist, for instance, and the Democratic party was in no way shaped by any revolutionary utopia (not even social democracy). This has changed deeply in recent times. If you see fascism on the right (really? In the sense of Mussolini?) I see much more dangerous utopian/totalitarian strains on the left (multi-culturalism, political correctness). Unlike Marxism, contemporary American utopianism is not about the collective, but more about the individual (liberation from oppressive sexual mores, from patriarchy, from the family, from religion, from gender, from "the truth" etc.). It is an ideology notheless, insamuch it starts from some element of truth, then turns it into an all-encompassing abstract theory that becomes a tool of social hegemony. In fact, not having read the book, I think Goldberg chose to use the word "fascism" just for shock-power (pour epater le bourgeois). If he had written "Liberal ideology" nobody would have cared.
The 'liberalism' I was referring to was 'classical liberalism', aspects of which American political thinkers from Milton Friedman to Irving Howe might be pleased to lay claim; I was not referring to the social-democratic variant Goldberg is critiquing. Uh...what? What possible reason, other than abject obfuscation, would you have for completely changing the commonly understood point of reference for a term with no warning whatsoever?
but I don't see how you can claim that "fascist" only really applies to Mussolini's Italy I would be inclined to apply it to Germany (1933-45), Italy (1922-45), Croatia (1940-44), Hungary (1943-44, not earlier), Egypt (1952-70), Syria (1963- ), and Iraq (1958-63, 1968-2003).
I think Mr. Goldberg is a fairly affable and irenic character but I do not recall defending his argument.
I ran out of Thioridizine.
I didn't read the whole thread, just due to it's length, nor have I read the book, but I think what Led posted above is spot on. If you define "Left" and "Right" as collectivism vs. individualism, then yes, I would agree that fascism and modern liberalism both belong on the Left hand side of the ideological spectrum. The problem is that you'd have a hard time convincing me that conservatism necessarily belongs on the right as a form of individualism, particularly the type of neoconservatism embodied in the previous writings of Mr. Goldberg and his ideological brethren. American conservatism has had a long history of favoring individualism (at least until the G.W. Bush administration came along) and opposing statism or collectivism, yes, but it isn't the case that conservatism as a general philosophy has any equivalency to individualism. Whether a particular brand of conservatism is Left or Right, it would seem to me, is heavily dependent upon what, exactly, it is seeking to conserve. It is because of this that Mike Huckabee can run for president as a social conservative, and yet the word "individualist" could hardly be applied to any policy position the man holds. Goldberg seems to realize this, I think, and I guess that is why he said recently he became "much more libertarian as a result of writing this book." As a libertarian, this tends to make me wince. On the one hand, I guess it's a good thing that a neoconservative war-agitator is actually taking some time to ponder the merits of individualism. On the other hand, I'd rather someone like Jonah Goldberg not self-identify as a libertarian. The man is, to be blunt, a pig, and conservatives can keep him.
Haven't you heard Starscream? It's just wingers making new realities while liberals are figuring out the old reality. Kinda like, I suspect, our Jonah Goldberg.
What possible reason, other than abject obfuscation, would you have for completely changing the commonly understood point of reference for a term with no warning whatsoever? Jes' bein' cute.
Ok Art Deco, here is a challenged for you. Please tell me how, exactly, a post-Farouk, pre-Sadat Egypt was fascist. Please. Because, unless you know something I don't about Egypt under that period, I'd guess you have no idea what you are talking about.
Re: Generals Videla, Viola, Galtieri, & c. were aiming to establish a network of guilds, communes, manorial estates, enfoeffed knights and nobles, &c. after they were done with the Montoneros, the Trotskyists, and Jacobo Timmerman? Art Deco, Surprisingly, yes, more or less. Perhaps not them as much as the right-wing intellectuals who provided the ideas behind the Argentine regime (ideas which had been floating around since at least 1930s). There's an interesting book 'Intellectual Origins of the Argentine Right" which you would find useful. Generals Videla, Massera and others actually led a movement with substantially deeper ideological underpinnings than, say, Pinochet. Intellectuals on the Argentine right frequently praised the guild system, deplored the line of secular philosophers going back to Descartes and Kant, claimed that their goal was to recreate society along Thomistic lines, and called for a corporatistic economy that was supposed to embody the spirit of the Middle Ages. There were even a few monarchists within the movement and people who felt that Argentina should revert to a colony of Spain. The Montoneros, actually, have an interesting pedigree. If Mr. Goldberg was a bit smarter he might have used the Montoneros as an example of his thesis. During the 1930s, they were a right wing Falangist movement but by the late 1960s, under the influence of liberation theology, they had evolved into a socialist, far-left wing faction. They maintained, throughout, an allegiance to Catholicism, nationalism, some form of socialism, and a deep hostility to both America and Russia. That kind of evolution is actually far from uncommon in Latin America. For example the party of Evo Morales, currently the socialist leader of Bolivia, originated in the 1930s as a Falangist party. Nevertheless, the fact that fascist and socialist parties often shared a common antipathy towards liberalism and sometimes changed from one into the other, should not disguise the fact that fascism and socialism are very different things.
Ken, The New York Times is certainly, _on foreign policy_ too conservative for _me_. (On other issues they're too liberal, like abortion, say.) They certainly make choices about what to report, or not to report, and those choices reflect an agenda which is broadly supportive of the capitalist system and of U.S. hegemony. I'm not sure that this is that controversial. I don't think you will see the New York Times printing this New Year's Day story anytime soon. I have to say, parenthetically, that for all my (general) respect for the Church it is not acquitting itself too well when it calls for amnesty to be extended to Nixon Moreno who raped a policewoman.
Goldberg was inspired to write this book from weariness of constant criticism of leftists who routinely brand conservatives positions as some sort of fascism. Any even moderate conservatives experience this often among the pious secularists. The usual procedure of the left going back to Rousseau is that successful individuals, whether aristocrats or bourgeois are somehow regarded as inherently anti-social and evil, who need to be reigned in by some sort of central governmental power, whether from a a faux populist democracy or hard-edged national or world socialism. Anyone who has closely read Tocqueville or Tallman's 1960 book Totalitarian Democracy is well aware of this. Goldberg, however breathless,, has done well to remind contemporary people that in the face of life's difficulties totalitarian solutions, however tempting, from the left or right are futile and dangerous.
By 1939 Franco had pretty much assumed, and did claim, the legacy of Jose Rivera who by then had achieved cult status. Rivera championed central planning via government working with the proletariat in the trade unions, and via national syndicalism. That's a socialist recipe, and one Franco followed, even through the "Spanish Miracle", which, as Franco proudly boasted, was enabled by the central planning of the state's technocrats....I withhold judgement on Franco's experiment to a degree far larger than I do with Hitler & Mussolini Fascism did not have any central text nor was it promoted by a motherland power (prior to the erection of collaborationist governments in 1940) so drawing a definitive line between the species fascist and other species in the genus non-Marxist authoritarian is a task one can readily flub. In any case, I would refer you to Stanley Payne's book Fascism: Comparison and Definition. He is fairly dubious about the use of the term for the Spanish regime, in large measure because the Falange was not, after 1943, used as a means of social mobilization. He aslo says that Spanish 'syndicatos' were near-beer compared to corporatist systems erected elsewhere in Europe. He does not point out that the Franco, Salazar, and Dollfuss/Schuschnigg regimes lacked a revanchist and imperialist aspect with regard to the world at large; and the restrictions on national minorities legislated in Spain and Austria were a world away from the sort of death-happening implemented upon the fancied internal enemy in Germany and Croatia. IMO, that is the most important factor (for what my opinions are worth).
Re: Rivera championed central planning via government working with the proletariat in the trade unions, and via national syndicalism. That's a socialist recipe, and one Franco followed, even through the "Spanish Miracle", which, as Franco proudly boasted, was enabled by the central planning of the state's technocrats. That's not (necessarily) socialism, it's _corporatism_. That is to say, the economic model that was promoted as an alternative to capitalism and communism, in papal encyclicals, and was put into practice (in a sense) in countries like Greece, Brazil, etc. If you want to argue that modern Sweden and Falangist Spain are both corporatist, be my guest. Nazi Germany spent a lot on highways too, so I guess a national highway system is fascistic too. The corporatist economy, and even the authoritarian nature of the State, weren't what made Nazi Germany evil. What made it evil was 1) genocide and death camps Of those, I would say that genocide has characterized a few left-wing and a few right-wing governments (although defining 'genocides' based on class seems more than a little dubious). Totalitarianism has characterized come left wing governments but not most- not even by some of the more liberal communist states, like Yugoslavia or Cuba. Race theory, which defined the Nazi regime more than anything else, is almost by definition a feature of some right wing regimes and intellectuals (although not, by any means, of all). South Africa (1948-1990) drew inspiration from Nazi race theory, and was obviously on the right. I would call myself in varying senses of the world, a believer in Christian socialism and in some degree of both corporatism and 'national syndicalism'. If you would like to call me a fascist, go ahead. Slurs that have obviously no basis in reality don't really have much of an impact on the intended victim.
Art Deco, The 'fascist' regimes in Portugal and Greece did not even have the death penalty, as far as I know, which is something to think about. It's also worth remembering that the 'fascist' regimes in Greece and Austria were actively anti-Nazi; Dollfuss was actually assassinated by Austrian Nazis, and Metaxas
So because, the forced labor and branding of inferiority , and murder, of the Nazi's victims were mostly white, diseased, old, or Jew's, then you can't use the term fascism because er.. the American subjected were a different color? Free labor systems in Axis controlled lands? I'd say calling 20 years of brutal slave holding and another 100 years of violent segregation a form of fascism is highly illuminating. And also accurate. But then I'm a scientist, what do I know. Political terminology acquires its meanings through discussion and correspondence. 'Fascism' is a term that conjures up one set of images and ideas and not another, and functions as an aid to understanding how one sort of political society and economy differs from another. If you wish to make the case that antebellum South Carolina and Italy in the 1920s are truly equivalents, go ahead. It will likely be a while before the phrase "John C. Calhoun was an ideologist of fascism" looks and sounds like something other than a pamphleteer's scam or one man's idiosyncracy.
I would call myself in varying senses of the world, a believer in Christian socialism and in some degree of both corporatism and 'national syndicalism'. Are you familiar with the writings of Daniel Bell? He calls himself a "liberal socialist conservative". I.e., liberal politics, conservative cultural, socialist economically. Related to the main topic, one of his arguments is that we enter into a post-industrial society, that the role of ideology is increasingly irrelevant in politics. E.g., what is liberalism? What is conservative? What really, today, is fascism? Those ideologies no longer neatly fit into today's world.
's also worth remembering that the 'fascist' regimes in Greece and Austria were actively anti-Nazi It's also worth noting that the only regime that did stand up to Hitler's aggression before Poland was Italy (and Hitler did stand down after Mussolini mobilized troops along the northern border). I fully recognize that while the Nazis were fascists it does not follow that all fascists were Nazis. Of course these days when somebody calls you a fascist they do mean to attribute the negative overtones of Nazism. H.G. Wells, the man who coined the phrase "Liberal Fascism" did so before WWII and meant it as a positive thing. Goldberg in his book does point out elements of fascism that have occurred in American conservatism, so he makes no claim to begin with that all things fascist and all things liberal are monolithically the same. Rather, imagine the spectrum of political thought, with libertarianism and classical liberalism on the right and communism on the left. Fascism properly belongs on the left side, where the liberals are too these days. Does that put all leftists in bed with Hitler? That would come as a surprise (and in fact did) to Joseph Stalin. Does it mean that Hillary Clinton is about to strike up concentration camps for her enemies? Of course not. But fascism, a strange brew of romantic collective utopianism, is yet another variety of socialism at its core.
Please tell me how, exactly, a post-Farouk, pre-Sadat Egypt was fascist. Please. Because, unless you know something I don't about Egypt under that period, I'd guess you have no idea what you are talking about. Stanley Payne thought it did not qualify, because, as far as I can remember, the regime rapidly liberalized during the period running from 1970-78; the true brittleness of the political order in Eastern Europe was not yet revealed and this may have influenced his willingness to use a term commonly associated with 'totalitarian' regimes. The Nasser regime was revanchist and imperialist in its aims, actively seeking the liquidation of a neighboring state and the expulsion and murder of its population, and actively seeking to amalgamate any Arab territory he could into a Pan-Arab superstate under his leadership through negotiated mergers, putches, and promoting Pan-Arab political movements to destabilize territorial governments which stood in his way. The regime was constitutively authoritarian, destroying a parliamentary regime of three decades standing and then constructing a one-party state with no independent public life. Much of the commercial bourgeoisie and the landed gentry were dispossessed and then committees of the state party insinuated into the life of these confiscated enterprises. A cult of personality was established in Egypt and abroad through Nasser's rhetorical skills in the promotion of his dreams of conquest and power. I would say it meets a fascist minimum a good deal better than Antonio Salazar's quiescent autocracy.
Art Deco wrote: The Nasser regime was revanchist and imperialist in its aims, actively seeking the liquidation of a neighboring state and the expulsion and murder of its population" Wrong. Nasser did not actively seek the liquidation of Israel, any more than Israel actively sought the liquidation of Egypt. In fact, Nasser was probably the best Arab leader to settle the Israeli/Palestinian conflict--the failed Alpha plan of the early 1950s was largely the result of Israeli intrasigence on the refugee issure. The Gaza raid of February 1955 by Israeli ensured that the Egyptian-Israeli relationship would prove violent. "and actively seeking to amalgamate any Arab territory he could into a Pan-Arab superstate under his leadership through negotiated mergers, putches, and promoting Pan-Arab political movements to destabilize territorial governments which stood in his way." So he was expanionist--for a couple of years. Big whoop. He did not actively seek to amalgamate any Arab territory that he could. The creation of the UAR was not imposed by Nasser--merely initiated. Nasser clearly had apprehensions, but whas pressured by the business classes of Syria. In the end, the UAR was more a nominal union than an actual one. Nasser did not involve himself in putshces either--he merely aided the revolutionaries in Yemen, much as Saudi Arabia aided the royalists. Yemen was a front of what M. Kerr calls the Arab Cold War. "The regime was constitutively authoritarian, destroying a parliamentary regime of three decades standing and then constructing a one-party state with no independent public life. " The parliamentary regime was purely a sham and a relic of the colonial period.
Again, Nasser's land reform program--often applauded by the contemporaneous press coverage in America--was a response to the widespread rural poverty in Egypt and the maldistribution of land that was a relic of the colonial era.
Wow. Just wow. With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, You might be a liberal fascist if you react like a liberal fascist to a book titled Liberal Fascism. By your own words here, Goldberg nailed you.
Egypt certainly needed land reform and an economy run in the interest of its people. Badly. As in many third world countries the commercial bourgeoisie was basically a parasitic oligarchy and let's not even get into the 'landed gentry'. Whatever arguments one might make about the virtues of the American capitalist system are off the table when it comes to a system of oligarchic landlords and usurers. Egypt needed revolution, and a one party state was the only way they could do it- it's good that they could have a revolution that wasn't led by a dogmatic Marxist party. If Nasser was a fascist then does that make General Velasco in Peru also a fascist?
Peter Leavitt types: "Goldberg was inspired to write this book from weariness of constant criticism of leftists who routinely brand conservatives positions as some sort of fascism. Any even moderate conservatives experience this often among the pious secularists." I'm not sure what language Peter Leavitt writes his posts in, but I'm quite sure that the program he uses to translate them into English is the crappiest one in existence.
Look, Nasser wasn't a fascist. Calling him a fascist is a disgusting slur meant to tar him with anti-semitism. It has long been a tactic of the pro-Israel far right, going back to the early days of Commentary magazine.
'Fascism' is a term that conjures up one set of images and ideas and not another, Although fascism, as you note, originated in specific places during a specific time. Since then academics like yourself have distilled some fundamental characteristics of the 20th century phenomena labeled "Fascism". My comparison of events that happened prior to Mussolini et al..is an argument of practical application of these traits, not of historical precision. In that vein, I think such comparisons are valid and necessary to debate the political evolution of American political ideology. Although Mussolini coined the phrase Fascism, he certainly wasn't the first leader to champion one or more of the tenants of fascist ideology experienced in 20th century Europe. I.E hyper-nationalism, racial or religious superiority/inferiority, etc..
Max babbles: "Wow. Just wow. With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, You might be a liberal fascist if you react like a liberal fascist to a book titled Liberal Fascism. By your own words here, Goldberg nailed you." Max failed to mention who he was addressing, but Jonah Goldberg couldn't nail a passed-out crack whore unless he downed a bucket of Viagra and his mom spanked him first.
"E.g., what is liberalism? What is conservative? What really, today, is fascism? Those ideologies no longer neatly fit into today's world." You guys are kooks! I've been checking in - and you've been going at this for hours! Like a dog and a milkbone. THIS is where you Big Brains have ended up! Sheesh! I'm glad I didn't get involved. This book exercises the net like few others. DSouza's deliberate attempt at bombthrowing didn't strike gold like this one is doing. You all must admit that you're dancing to Goldberg's tune. Have at it!
Ken: what the fascists did was nationalize industry in order to turn it into a WAR MACHINE because of an almost fanatical devotion to nationalism and patriotism. It wasn't out of any commitment to worker rights or an even distribution of wealth, or any of the things that socialists at the time wanted.
Bad: I wanted to revive industries in my country for any reason, the last thing I'd do is nationalize them. Then again, I'm not a socialist, unlike the Nazis.
Ken- Thats cool. Too bad noone was talking about reviving industries. The Nazis nationalist industries IN ORDER TO CONTROL THEM. Not in an attempt to make the more efficient, or introduce child labor laws, or save the environment, or help out the workers.
This book exercises the net like few others. DSouza's deliberate attempt at bombthrowing didn't strike gold like this one is doing. You all must admit that you're dancing to Goldberg's tune. If you had actually read the posts, you would see that many of them - most recently - have nothing to do with Goldberg's thesis in his book. I know, reading and thinking is just hard work. Especially that durned thinking' part. Anyway, it's just a book; don't be scared.
Ken, Bad, all you other cretins, The Nazis did not nationalize industry, and never planned to. Yes, they regulated and licensed industries do a degree that a Hayekian conservative would certainly find unacceptable, but a crucial difference between National Socialism and the left wing kind, is that the Nazis generally respected private property, respected contract law, and felt that private property was a more efficient form of organization than state property. Of course only people of the correct nationality were entitled to own private property, but that is not the same as nationalization.
steveMG: I didn't mean it to be snide, you rascal! I meant it in a friendly way! You character! Look at the number of comments on this single post vs the rest of Douthat's: it's like 160 to 14 or so, on avg. You guys have been energized, supercharged, by Liberal Fascism. Don't be so crabby. Scared? Impossible! Your sarcasm falls flat! C'mon, enjoy the good cheer I offer you. And if not, then fine. Seriously, MG, I realize that snide know it all arrogance is the norm on the net, and you read that into my post, and responded in kind, but I really was just in a good mood and amazed that you all have been online for hours. But if you are hell bent on remaing superior, so be it! to the rest of you, have at it!
Rickm: The Nazi Party Platform of 1920 most certainly addressed child labor, improvement in worker conditions, profit-sharing, collectivization of farms, rent control, abolition of all income not directly earned through personal labor, and even generous pension increases. Of course, it also had a healthy dose of Jew hating, and scapegoating the November criminals, nursing Treaty of Versailles resentments and so forth. But the official motto was, "Common Good Before Individual Good", not "Get the Jews" and it did contain many "Progressive" elements mixed in strangely with all the insane racial hatreds. The Nazis were not successful during this period. After the Great Depression hit Germany in 1930, Hitler accelerated his calls to revitalize the German economy, and these concerns became central to his campaigns. Economic concerns were foremost, and he positioned himself as the savior of the German worker. His rise to power came during that period. It's true Hitler had bad motives, but it's also true he ran a socialist economy. He never would have instituted socialist economic schemes if he didn't believe in them. That's the catch. Hitler was a socialist -- a stark raving mad genocidal maniac, and a socialist too.
vanya_6724: The Nazis did nationalize much of their industry, starting in 1933-34, thru diktat. Here is a quote from Time Magazine, in the article that proclaimed Hitler "Man Of The Year": The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism. The National Labor Law passed shortly after Hitler became Furher required most business to submit themselves to direct control of the Nazi regime -- they issued the work orders and maintained strict accountability. In other words, they instituted a planned economy.
Over a hundred posts here so maybe this is pointless. I do think "Liberal Fascist" is, in normal cases, something of an oxymoron. H. G. Wells's vision of it is the closest I can think of to be it not being so, but I'm not sure how influential it was. His idea was that for a time the state would be essentially totalitarian in order to re-educate everyone toward liberalism. (Social liberalism, economically he was quasi-socialist) Children would be trained, in a Skinnerian way if necessary, to only value reason and enlightenment values. Ideally everyone would be remade into rationalistic and sexually liberated irreligious nontheists. (To a degree everyone would be remade as H. G. Wells, although in fairness I think he imagined these future people lacking some of his personal failings) However in most normal cases liberalism is anti-authoritarian. I might cut him a bit of slack as the cover makes me think it's kind of a joke. Still calling things you dislike "Fascist", even as a joke, is a tired and hackneyed device. It belittles what people actually suffered and renders the term meaningless. That said I think it might be possible to have a "Progressive Fascism" or "Leftist Fascism." The Strasser Brothers of Germany led a more Leftist strain of Nazism. The core elements of Fascism like glorification of violence, the state, and totalitarianism could be done on a Left-wing basis. The militant nationalism of Fascism is a little harder to imagine on the Left, but some forms of Left-wing populism could incorporate it. On "Progressive Fascism" many of the technocrats and Italian Futurists were sympathetic to Fascism. In theory it's not too hard to imagine a Fascism bent on destroying traditions and upholding the Progress as everything. Fascism in Italy had an element of anti-clericalism before realizing this was alienating many potential supporters. In reality though there's really no significant movement in the US Right or Left that can be legitimately called "Fascist."
Ken, Hitler eradicated the Left-wing elements in the "Night of Long Knives." There are statements by him saying that he supported socialist elements as a ploy to get more votes from poor workers. (The Nazis were largely a party of the middle-class and the college educated) Goebbels was more truly socialist from what I recall, but he buried that a bit for power's sake.
All of this crap being put forward by fascist-leaning cons about the Nazis being "socialist" ignores the fact that the Nazis were bankrolled by German industrialists who went on to become partners in the Reich, not nationalized pawns of the state. Just take a look at the roles and fortunes of IG Farben or Krupp under the Nazis. If some small fish were nationalized, why would the huge German industries of the time give a damn? And it sure didn't change the nature of the Nazi takeover of Germany - it was a right-wing movement.
I don't know that I would refer to Time magazine to assess the socialist quality of another country- this is after all the magazine that was strongly anti-socialist and a supporter of Chiang in China. Look, certainly if you use one particular dimension of political analysis, then fascist and state-socialist regimes might appear to be on the same side. But not everyone treats the 'state vs. individual' distinction as importantly as you do (I'm guessing you are a libertarian conservative of some type). The Nazi regime was constitutively defined by its belief in a race theory and a hierarchy of races, which is very definitely _not_ an idea that one finds on the left, at all. A regime is defined not just by what it does but by the ends it seeks to pursue. The kind of ideal society that socialists try to pursue is very different from the Nazi ideal. (One of the problems of course is that 'socialist' is about as broad and meaningless a term as 'fascist', although socialists are usually self defined instead of it being a term of abuse. I wouldn't consider the social-democratic parties of most of continental Europe as being socialist, either, any more than I would the Nazis.)
Thomas R: You raise a good point. Hitler despised Marxism and the offshoots of it he competed with, such as the Bolsheviks or the Social Democrats. There's an interesting passage in Mein Kampf where he contemplates what the Social Democrats were trying to do in Vienna, and he begins to examine the value of the labor unions they were attempting to cultivate. He is torn between their intent, and the fact that their leaders (and their intellectual heir, Karl Marx) all seemed to be Jewish. This is Hitler, he is not rational, and his hatred for Jews wins out. I've always thought that what Hitler was up to during the Night of the Long Knives was, essentially, to "clean house". Cleanse it of any racial impurities. Is that insane? Yes, but I bet you it's what Hitler was up to. He wanted to make sure that everybody had their eye on the proper scapegoats.
Ken writes: "I've always thought that what Hitler was up to during the Night of the Long Knives was, essentially, to "clean house". Cleanse it of any racial impurities. Is that insane? Yes, but I bet you it's what Hitler was up to. He wanted to make sure that everybody had their eye on the proper scapegoats." That wasn't it. Purging the SA was Hitler's way of assuring the German military and the conservatives that he was on their side, and that the mob-like goons in the SA weren't important to him. Beating up communists in the streets was one thing, but by Long Knives Hitler was on to bigger and nastier things, and his friends were richer more pragmatic.
Uh, make that "richer and more pragmatic." I hate when that happens.
Well, Rohm followed the ideas of Marx (a Jew), was a homosexual, picked a fight with the German Army that Hitler admired, was a loose cannon prone to criticizing the Fuhrer, and led a wing of the party that state power rendered redundant. Pick a theory for Night of the Long Knives -- they all work. At any rate, this has been an enjoyable discussion with you folks. I think it's past time I moved on. I think there is value in these topics, tho. Liberals have been increasingly quick to call everything thing fascist -- the president, the GOP, the troops, any given conservative joe blow they encounter in class or on the web, the list seems ever expanding. One guy comes along with a book and levies counter-charges, and now we have the ever contracting definition of fascism from the libs. So, what we have is a war of definitions unavoidably. However, having looked at the fascism in practice and the fruits that it bore, and comparing it to other cataclysms of the last century, it is hard not to conclude that there isn't much difference between Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the others. They are grandiose totalitarian schemes promising various redemptions through social engineering, then all come crashing down at horrific cost. The myths and scapegoats are changeable, but the methods and the inhumanity on a mass scale are not.
Ken roves: "Liberals have been increasingly quick to call everything thing fascist -- the president, the GOP, the troops, any given conservative joe blow they encounter in class or on the web, the list seems ever expanding. One guy comes along with a book and levies counter-charges, and now we have the ever contracting definition of fascism from the libs. So, what we have is a war of definitions unavoidably. However, having looked at the fascism in practice and the fruits that it bore, and comparing it to other cataclysms of the last century, it is hard not to conclude that there isn't much difference between Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the others. They are grandiose totalitarian schemes promising various redemptions through social engineering, then all come crashing down at horrific cost. The myths and scapegoats are changeable, but the methods and the inhumanity on a mass scale are not." Finally Ken reveals his true colors - he's another torture-loving movement conservative! I'm shocked! So of course he has to place the Nazis on the left, because they have a bad reputation in history, just as his own movement will.
Wrong. Nasser did not actively seek the liquidation of Israel, any more than Israel actively sought the liquidation of Egypt. In fact, Nasser was probably the best Arab leader to settle the Israeli/Palestinian conflict--the failed Alpha plan of the early 1950s was largely the result of Israeli intrasigence on the refugee issure. The Gaza raid of February 1955 by Israeli ensured that the Egyptian-Israeli relationship would prove violent.
So he was expanionist--for a couple of years. Big whoop. He did not actively seek to amalgamate any Arab territory that he could. The creation of the UAR was not imposed by Nasser--merely initiated. Nasser clearly had apprehensions, but whas pressured by the business classes of Syria. In the end, the UAR was more a nominal union than an actual one. Nasser did not involve himself in putshces either--he merely aided the revolutionaries in Yemen, much as Saudi Arabia aided the royalists. Yemen was a front of what M. Kerr calls the Arab Cold War. I am familiar with Mr. Kerr's slim and conceptually unsophisticated volume. The union with Syria was not merely nominal and Nasser insisted on a reconstruction of Syrian political institutions and economic practices in accordance with Egyptian models. The revolt in Syria in 1961 was triggered by the dissolution of the Syrian cabinet in favor of a single cabinet in Cairo. Distrust of Nasser and anxiety over the goals and activities of Nasserist political parties was a feature of Lebanese, Iraqi, and Jordanian political life quite apart from his capers in Syria and the Yemen. King Hussein's distrust of Nasser's intentions vis-a-vis the Jordanian monarchy were vivid as late as 1969.
Patron-client politics, bribery, and electoral alchemy are often (in the first instance) and invariably (in the second and third) blots on governance in congruence with popular consent. They tend to be less so than military dictatorship (which has the added demerit of abuse of dissenters). That aside, I would refer you to Cecil Hourani's essay on the loss of confidence in parliamentary government after 1948 on the part of the social stratum in the Arab world from which politically-engaged people hailed. His view was that this came to be because such institutions were conceived of as inefficient for purposes of the amassing of national power. (Which Nasser, among others, promised). "Much of the commercial bourgeoisie and the landed gentry were dispossessed and then committees of the state party insinuated into the life of these confiscated enterprises." Again, Nasser's land reform program--often applauded by the contemporaneous press coverage in America--was a response to the widespread rural poverty in Egypt and the maldistribution of land that was a relic of the colonial era. Egypt was a dependency of the British Empire de jure from 1914 to 1922 and de facto from 1882 to 1914. The British subjects present in Egypt at that time were a rotating population of soldiers, civil servants, Suez Canal employees, and miscellaneous expats. The colonial settler population in North Africa was in Algeria, not Egypt. As late as 1980, Egypt had a per capita income about 5% that of the United States. I cannot say what the numbers were for Egypt in 1950, but as a rule these days, income distributions for Arab states without a hypertrophied oil sector (e.g. Morocco) are unremarkable. Latin America is the locus of highly unbalanced distributions of income and assets, not North Africa. Characteristics of the land-tenure system - insecurity and informality of tenure and fragmentation of land parcels may badly impede economic development. Disrespect for property rights also impedes economic developement.
Finally Ken reveals his true colors - he's another torture-loving movement conservative! I'm shocked! Oh yeah, and such demeaning,snarky comments and invalid assumption so characteristically from the libs, that wasn't a piece of that "enjoyable" part I mentioned.
Latin America certainly has traditionally the highest levels of inequality, but Egypt in 1952 was a neofeudal monarchy and also very highly unequal. And the landlords and merchants have no 'right' to their property to begin with, and certainly do nothing for economic development. In a neocolonial society like pre-1952 Egypt, they probably also inhibit economic development by promoting dependency on the neocolonial power. What the peasants of Egypt needed in 1952 was less some neubulous 'economic development' than the very concrete steps of land reform and a socially controlled economy. That was what Nasser gave them, and if he had to run a one party state to do it, I think it was well worth it.
Torture-loving movement conservative Ken quotes and writes: "Finally Ken reveals his true colors - he's another torture-loving movement conservative! I'm shocked! Oh yeah, and such demeaning,snarky comments and invalid assumption so characteristically from the libs, that wasn't a piece of that "enjoyable" part I mentioned." Need I mention Ken's characteristically piss-poor command of the English language? Why is it that the typical wingnut poster writes as though he'd been homeschooled by homeless people?
And that's enough for many of you to push them far apart, and claim they couldn't possibly be the same thing? Also, some of you really tip your hand when you make the claim that the Nazis had these horrible aims, but the Communists/Socialists/socialists/communalists/communitarians/collectivists/what other silly term for "a group of people taking orders from someone else who knows better how they should organize and live their lives" were good and just and dedicated toward equality. Really? We get regimes like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc. out of a system dedicated toward equality? I say to thee once more, really? No one has yet mentioned Oakeshott yet. He seems to have been the most recent political philosopher to clearly delineate between "governments dedicated to a goal above and beyond respecting the rights of the individual" and "governments dedicated just to respecting the rights of the individual." That's the key point of Jonah's book--Democrats and Social Democrats and Greens and what not might have noble aims, but at the end of the day they're still subverting the individual to the state, and that paves the way for disaster or, at best, dehumanization and infantilization. Nazis were racists, Fascists were ultra-nationalists, Soviets were collectivists to the bone, and bin Laden's crew want global sharia law. At the end of the day, none of them give a damn about my ability to order my own life, or to arrive at superior arrangements through voluntary bargaining...just like anyone who thinks the goal of the state should be to eliminate poverty, provide healthcare, defend the environment with religious-like zeal, etc. And hey, here's a fun thought experiment: Most of the people here who want a huge bureaucratic state are those who think Bush is the worst thing ever. Okay, fair enough. Now imagine you have your huge state that has its hand in your healthcare, your income, your housing, etc. Now put Bush at the head of that state, so you're now dependent on him for all those things. Still want that huge state, or would you rather go it your own, with just the government protecting you from the coercive force of others, along with enforcing contracts and property rights?
Fascism, liberalism, socialism, are brothers, offshoots of modern statism. They all believe in using the power of the state in imposing the right way of living on its citizens. He admits, indeed, there are elements of fascism on the right. There are (so far, I'm about 1/3 through it) a number of problems with his argument. He doesn't adequately address, for my tastes, the ultranationalism inherent in fascism. The left largely rejects extreme nationalism. Read the book. It won't hurt.
Oooooh!! You were so close!! Go ahead. Say it. Jonah's opus is full of shit. And yes, I've read it.
"So the only difference between Fascism and Communism, according to many on this board (Hector being the last I read), is rhetoric?" Thankfully I'm not referred to here because I would say no. I indicated it is possible to create a Leftist Fascism, but this doesn't mean it's the normal course of things. Historically speaking Fascism intentionally positioned itself as "neither Left nor Right", which is to some degree accurate if not very pleasing to partisan politics. Fascism explicity rejects those who see "in history nothing but the class struggle" and generally rejected the elimination of private property so can not be seen as Communist. However it went further than that. Most socialism tended toward internationalism, but "Fascism will have nothing to do with universal embraces." It did not claim to end or radically reducing inequality. In fact it "asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men" and adds that "Fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism." A rejection, even in theory, of anything like equality and fraternity makes it pretty much unlike any socialism that has ever existed. However the "Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others." It certainly did not value free-enterprise as normally understood. And although it valued "the great value of tradition in records" and states "Outside history man is a nonentity" it was not conservative in any normal sense. It considered itself a "new departure in history" and termed itself revolutionary at least in some sense. All quotes from "The Doctrine of Fascism." http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:gpjpOck9c9gJ:faculty.smu.edu/bkcarter/THE%2520DOCTRINE%2520OF%2520FASCISM.doc+%22doctrine+of+fascism%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us
So anyway no they are not virtually the same. However if you are meaning both Communism and Fascism are bad because they share totalitarianism I'd agree. However the idea that simply doing the exact opposite is a total good strikes me as an unwarranted assumption. In Fascism the State was everything, so Libertarians imply the state should be essentially almost nothing. In Communism the collective is everything in Libertarianism or Randianism it's virtually nothing. It might be emotionally comforting to be opposite to totalitarianism in all detail, but it's not evidence that doing so is plausible or desirable. Nor is it proof that moderate increases in state power inevitably lead to anything like totalitarianism. If it were most of Western Europe would be totalitarian now and I don't think you can successfully argue that that actually happened.
"Fascism, liberalism, socialism, are brothers, offshoots of modern statism. They all believe in using the power of the state in imposing the right way of living on its citizens." As others have pointed out, this is ahistorical and cheap. There's no such thing as "modern statism." It's like you're a Luddite seeking to score points by arguing that Hitler, Saddam, and Vanilla Ica are all products of "modern technologism." Therefore technology is poopy. The weakness in that argument is that there is no such thing as "technologism" as an ideology.
Jefe, No, I don't think fascism and communism are at all the same thing. More like polar opposites. Any highly ideological regime is bound to be authoritarian (not totalitarian). But at the end of the day, they pursue entirely different objectives. Communist states were, in fact, pursuing equality. That's not a bad thing. The fact that most of them , under the malign (and even posthumous) influence of Stalin and some mistaken elements in Marxist theory, made serious errors and in some cases fell victim to tyranny doesn't detract from that. In fact, not all communist states were that bad places to live. I don't like everything about the way Cuba has done things, but I would still defend her record against her critics- count me as a _qualified_ defender of the Cuban revolution. And there other states like Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, or modern-day Venezuela or Bolivia that I would defend with very little qualification at all. Capitalism, though, I have no time for. None. Perhaps my ideal of the 'social state' is the regime of General Velasco (1968-1975) I don't particularly believe you necessarily have the right to 'organize your life as you see fit' or 'collective bargaining' or any such, so your pleading about those things means little to me. The goal of a state is to coerce people like you who apparently feel no duty to your fellow man.
While I haven't read Goldberg's book, its main ideas, as represented in the reviews, seem plausible. A better criticism might be that it doesn’t sound all that original. Scholarly works like Zeev Sternhell's "The Birth of Fascist Ideology" long ago laid out the virulently anti-capitalist character of at least some of the major strains that went into the complicated makeup of fascism. This was a movement that in part arose as a reaction against the failure of reformist Second International Marxism to pursue a sufficiently revolutionary anti-capitalist path, something that was clear by around the 1890s. The innovative fascist insight was that violent nationalism might provide a stronger foundation for anti-capitalism than the hollow internationalism of the Marxists. (Later on revolutionary Marxists in power quickly grasped and exploited this insight, from Stalinist Russia to Maoist China to the almost purely race supremacist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.) There's also a good deal of work documenting the over-representation of students, intellectuals and the highly educated among the early supporters of fascism. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Early fascism seems to have been precisely the sort of exciting, big-picture, meaning-of-life-enhancing, anti-bourgeois, anti-liberal democratic ideology that a certain class of intellectual appears to find fascinating at all times. Whether Goldberg is able to demonstrate that liberals (in the modern American definition) are more subject to the totalitarian temptation than others, I cannot say (not having read the book). But there’s no harm in reminding liberals that this is a temptation they are not less subject to than anyone else.
MB, I doubt that Goldberg is going to convince anyone that their favorite ideology is bad because it has links to fascism. The only thing you are likely to convince them of is that fascism isn't so bad either. Most people can agree that, say, Hitler and Stalin were ultimate evil. But if you argue to, say, a supporter of Castro (of which there are many, even in the United States), that Franco and Castro had some superficial similarities, you're not likely to convince him to stop liking Castro; all that you will convince him of is that Franco perhaps wasn't that bad either. Re: Early fascism seems to have been precisely the sort of exciting, big-picture, meaning-of-life-enhancing, anti-bourgeois, anti-liberal democratic ideology that a certain class of intellectual appears to find fascinating at all times. Well, as an intellectual, _I_ certainly am attracted to that sort of ideology. Not to fascism, nor much (anymore) to Marxism, but to some form of moderately authoritarian Christian Socialism...along the Velasco lines, perhaps. 'Republic of the Saints'. Since I have a visceral antipathy to most of what the bourgeoisie, and the ideologists of 'liberal democracy' have brought to the world over the last few centuries, none of those terms of abuse you are using have much of an effect on me. I would happily accept the titles of anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal. And the more I see of the defenders of liberal bourgeois ideology like some of the commenters on this thread, the more i feel myself to be anti-liberal.
The label of the book and the jacket-cover do it for me. It is like the movie "Dude, where is my car". You don't have to see the movie to know its stupid.
Carlo & All… Once again Carl comes much closer to what I understand Goldberg to be saying and what I see as the inherent connection between American “liberalism” (leftism) &Fascism/Nazi’s/Communism Posted (above) by Carlo 6:22 PM “I see much more dangerous utopian/totalitarian strains on the left (multi-culturalism, political correctness). Unlike Marxism, contemporary American utopianism is not about the collective, but more about the individual (liberation from oppressive sexual mores, from patriarchy, from the family, from religion, from gender, from "the truth" etc.)”
IN THE LAND OF THE ROCOCO MARXISTS “Here we come upon one of the choicest chapters in the human comedy. Today, at any leading American university, a Kant, with all his dithering about God, freedom, and immortality, or even a Hume, wouldn't survive a year in graduate school, much less get hired as an instructor. The philosophy departments, history departments, English and comparative literature departments, and, at many universities, anthropology, sociology, and even psychology departments are now divided, in John L'Heureux's delicious terminology (The Handmaid of Desire), into the Young Turks and the Fools. Most Fools are old, mid-fifties, early sixties, but a Fool can be any age, twenty-eight as easily as fifty-eight, if he is one of that minority on the faculty who still believe in the old nineteenth century Germanic modes of so-called objective scholarship. Today the humanities faculties are hives of abstruse doctrines such as structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, reader-response theory, commodification theory [...] The names vary, but the subtext is always the same: Marxism may be dead, and the proletariat has proved to be hopeless. They're all at sea with their third wives. But we can find new proletariats whose ideological benefactors we can be -- women, non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals, transsexuals, the polymorphously perverse, pornographers, prostitutes (sex workers), hardwood trees which we can use to express our indignation toward the powers that be and our aloofness to their bourgeois stooges, to keep the flame of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt burning. This will not be Vulgar Marxism; it will be ... Rococo Marxism, elegant as a Fragonard, sly as a Watteau”
I have not read Goldberg's book, but based on my previous impressions of his writing, I'm bound to be underwhelmed. The basic thrust of the book, that fascism is a left-wing phenomenon has been well-documented elsewhere, particularly in Erik von Kuhnelt-Liddihn's Leftism Revisited. I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised when I actually read the book, but I'm not counting on it.
I haven't read the book either, but one thing that occurred to me in reaction to what I've heard about it is that the critique of things like public schools, the cult of "health," etc. as authoritarian resembles (much smarter) leftist critiques. See for example Christopher Lasch. I wonder if JG thinks he is making an original argument because he simply hasn't read many books.
Brendan. I give JG more credit than that. I think what he is trying to do is popularize a accurate understanding about the left that (nevertheless) has not made its way into the popular consciousness in a broad way.
When people start asserting that the gay rights movement is implicitly marxist and that political correctness = totalitarianism, then I think it is safe to say this thread needs to die.
Jefe, So let me get this straight. The Bush Administration, which reserves the right to kidnap and torture anyone without due process, which uses signing statements to subvert laws passed by Congress, which claims the right to go to war without Congressional authorization, is a defender of individual rights? This is a tendency among libertarianish right-wingers I've never understood. Universal healthcare, which would make for a healtheir, economically more secures, and FREER population, is totalitarian, while unfettered executive power, toruture, rendition, and aggressive war are okey-dokey. The problem with crafting a political spectrum (and let's face it, the right-left spectrum is a lousy map of political ideology) whihc places Stalinism on one end and Hayek-style libertarian conservatism on the other is that it balances a political program which was actually (bloodily) implemented with a laissez-faire utopian ideology which has never acutally been put in place and which most conservatives don't even embrace wholeheartedly. The only way Jonah can excuse US conservatives from his ridiculously broad definition of fascism is by equating "conservative" with a political system that never exisited, and thus never got blood on its hands or saw its ideas actually tested. His definition of "conservative" is just as much a strawman as his definition of "fascist." Can anyone call Reagan or Bush a Hayekian with a straight face? Come on.
"When people start asserting that the gay rights movement is implicitly marxist and that political correctness = totalitarianism, then I think it is safe to say this thread needs to die." The link is between the worldview of the new left & leftism visa-a-vie its historical lineage (JG argument) and its current day manifestations
Throw a dart at a pig. Hit the pig. The pig squeals. Like a, well, like a stuck pig. Like this entire thread.
Fitz writes: "The link is between the worldview of the new left & leftism visa-a-vie its historical lineage (JG argument) and its current day manifestations" There is ordinary illiteracy, and then there is Fitz. If "visa-a-vie" isn't the funniest thing I'll read today, it will surprise me very much.
I see that Moe, Larry, and Jim Keane, lacking any sort of intellectual distinction, has become a risible and moralistic pedant on spelling and style as a substitute for substance. I should suggest that, as Ross remarked, it would be salutary for him to read Liberal Fascism and, if possible, show some understanding of its thesis before regurgitating such shallow criticism and ad hominem folderol.
Peter- I have this book sitting on my desk that argues that all conservatives are violent pedophiles. Don't you dare critique it if you haven't read it.
Heck, Matt Yglesias hasn't even read his own candidate for President's autobiography yet, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." How can he be expected to read books he criticizes?
Rickm writes: "I have this book sitting on my desk that argues that all conservatives are violent pedophiles. " I'll take exception to that. Some conservatives are cannibalistic necrophiles and have no interest in children.
Peter Leavitt suggests: "I should suggest that, as Ross remarked, it would be salutary for him to read Liberal Fascism and, if possible, show some understanding of its thesis before regurgitating such shallow criticism and ad hominem folderol." Reading 500 pages by Jonah Goldberg sounds almost as pleasant as 10 hours of root canals on the wrong teeth. I'll pass. My suggestion to you, Petey, is that you spray Cheez-Whiz all over your head and then give yourself a swirlie.
Bertrand Russell made that case a long time ago (and also linked Rousseau's view to the political views of Plato in antiquity). Russell however was very even-handed about it, pointing out that Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin and Stalin all owed a debt to Rousseau. JonF, this is a marvelous example of why, to criticize the book, it would help to have read the damn book! You see, this could easily have been a paraphrase of something Jonah himself wrote in, I believe, about chapter three. (Don't have a copy at hand right now.) Similarly, see the other person above who thinks that "compassionate conservatism" has some fascistic tinge --- another point that Jonah makes explicitly in his book.
Egypt needed authoritarian rule in the 1950s and 1960s, When you state a 'need', you have an implicit purpose in mind. What is it?
Excuse me, he 1. Ordered U Thant to remove the extant UNEF force out of the Sinai and moved Egyptian forces forward; 2. Concluded ad hoc military alliances with Syria and Jordan; and 3. Ramped up the bellicose rhetoric. Perhaps it was all performance art.
To the extent that you have a fixed set of practices in mind with the term 'neo-feudal monarchy', I might point out that a succession of East European countries managed, between 1790 and 1906, to reform their cadastres, confer allodial rights to the occupants of rustical lands, and consolidate fragmented peasant holdings without confiscation of demesnes.
You may think so, Hector, but you are going to have to concede that they are less than likely to be in agreement. Their economic and political behavior is going to be conditioned by their conception of what their rights and interests are, not yours.
Hector, technological adaptations and refinements of division of labor tend to be enacted by people who own enterprises. They do not happen like weather. They can be enacted by government apparatchiks, but there is a considerable literature on the comparative disutility of public enterprises. In a neocolonial society like pre-1952 Egypt, Can you define the term 'neo-colonial"?
You have been channeling Andre Gunder Frank. That particular research program petered out twenty-five years ago, perhaps because its most rigorous exponents could only quantitatively substantiate bits and fragments of the sort of contentions made by Baran, Frank, &c.
'Economic development' is not a nebulous idea but one of which salient features have well defined metrics, beginning with GDP per capita.
To what antecedent aspects of the land tenure regime are you referring?
Been tried. Again and again. I am sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. That was what Nasser gave them, and if he had to run a one party state to do it, I think it was well worth it. Fine. I will point out that your evaluation of costs may be skewed because you did not pay them.
Re: This ignores history. Mussolini, Hitler and Franco did not curtail socialist parties -- they led them. This is a howling error. While I admit I do not know much about the fortunes of Italian Marxists under Mussloini, German Marxists of all stripes were sent to the camps or murdered outright. Nazi rhetoric brims over with invective against Marxism. And no, you cannot be a Socialist without also being a disciple of Marx-- that would be as absurd as saying someone is a Muslim but has no regard for Mohammed. Re: I would like to point out that the Communist governments in Russia (1917-21) and in Eastern Europe (1944-49) dissolved or suborned the extant social-democratic and agrarian parties True, but that's a very different thing: the Communists affirmed Marxist ideology, they simply thought they were the only true disciples of it and so persecuted others much as the Catholic Church once persecuted Protestants as heretics. The Nazis rejected Marxism root and branch; their attitude toward Marxists of all stripes was more like that of medieval Catholicism toward Islam: an external enemy to be destroyed, not an internal dissent to be put down. Why do you think rightwingers of all sorts (notably many churchmen) gravitated toward the Fascists and Nazis even when they did not share their beliefs? Hitler and Mussolini were seen as the inveterate foes of Marxism and (whatever their own sins against property) the defenders of the established socioeconomic order. Re: the most striking change I have observed in the US during my time is the "Europeanization" of the left. Really? I see things very differently. American politics (inclduing American liberalism and progressivism) is farther from that of Europe than ever. At best you can find some ties between the American liberal/left and that of Britain and Ireland (and Canada too). That's a cultural connection of course: the Anglo world has its own spin on these things. Now to be sure, in a country of 300 million people you can find just about anything, including probably people who think that Mao was too conservative. But anything remotely mainstream in this country is very distinct from the European (at least the Continental) political scene. Re: If you see fascism on the right (really? In the sense of Mussolini?) Well, no, and I probably should have qualified that one throw away line. I don't think Bush, Cheney et al are literal Fascists, but I do think they have departed from the American conservative tradition in serious and major and not very healthy ways. They are playing in an illiberal and nationalistic garden and they have dragged almost the whole GOP with them. And it's the same garden where once the weeds of Fascism grew. We need to get the hell out of that place and come back to the formal and proper gardens planted by Mr Hamilton and Mr Jefferson and their compatriots. Re: I see much more dangerous utopian/totalitarian strains on the left I see a lot of silliness in places like Kos, but none of it is remotely close to the mainstream, and the likelihood of it gaining power is about the same as my becoming pope (me = non-Catholic and gay). It's nothing more than the old playdoll radical chic from the past, updated and decked out with a snarling vocabulary of four letter words. But unlike the radical right it's harmless because it's weak and isolated and it is only heard so much because of the Internet where anything can bray and howl at full volume. Re: contemporary American utopianism is not about the collective, but more about the individual America has been about the individual (in several different ways) ever since the Jamestowners came over to strike it rich and the Pilgrim fathers followed to practive their own religion instead of that set forth by His Majesty. Re: Similarly, see the other person above who thinks that "compassionate conservatism" has some fascistic tinge But I don't think it has a fascistic tinge at all. I think it was 2/3 empty propaganda and a 1/3 feint toward something like Christian Democracy which is about as fascist as a meeting of the Methodist Ladies Society.
JonF, I really have to take issue with this: Re: And no, you cannot be a Socialist without also being a disciple of Marx-- that would be as absurd as saying someone is a Muslim but has no regard for Mohammed. No, not true. In the _Communist Manifesto_ Marx vituperates a number of existing socialist parties ("feudal" socialist, "clerical" socialist etc.) for not being _truly_ socialist. This would indicate that there were already parties claiming the name 'socialist' well before Marx. You could plausibly claim Rousseau perhaps as the first socialist, but not Marx. Moreover, there were quite a number of movements which were distinctively socialist and on the left and nevertheless (while they might borrow some things from Marx) considered themselves non- or even anti-Marxist. Anarcho-socialism, "Christian socialism", "Arab Socialism", etc.
"other is that it balances a political program which was actually (bloodily) implemented with a laissez-faire utopian ideology which has never acutally been put in place and which most conservatives don't even embrace wholeheartedly" Justin K. I'm not sure I agree with the rest of your post, but I very much agree with this. It's easy to state how a purely theoretical system would not have the same abuses. Communism itself said something similar for much of the nineteenth c. There also were individuals who deemed themselves "pre-Marxian" socialists. People like Saint-Simon and Robert Owen were more of an influence for them. Although at this point in history most existing socialist movements have some history or links to Marxism. (Anarcho-socialists seem to go more in a Kropotkin/Bakunin stream though.)
Rickm says: "My thesis=Conservatives are Stalinists. Gonna disagree with that? Make fun of me? Even before my book/paper is finished?" Sorry, Rickm, but you scored an own goal. You've inadvertently affirmed Jonah's thesis. From Hungary 1956 through the attempted coup against Yeltsin liberals, socialists, assorted communist reformers and the new left routinely referred to Stalinists as "conservatives." If I had $1 for every time the liberal media referred to Stalinists as "conservatives" I'd have more money than Rupert Murdoch. Were the doctrinaire orthodox communists who followed the party line right-wingers? Maybe, but only in the context of the extreme left. Rival left wing groups trying to smear each other in the eyes of their followers are engaging in politics, not political philosophy. Face it: Jonah's right. Get over it.
Re: No, not true. Then you are using socialist in a sloppy, unconventional manner and we will really cannot have this discussion because for you "socialist" can pretty much mean anything. Re: This would indicate that there were already parties claiming the name 'socialist' well before Marx. Yes, and Jefferson's party used the name "republican", but it certainly is not to be confused with Lincoln's GOP, or today's. For that matter are Christian Scientists "scientists" as the word is normally understood? No, I am talking about Socialism with a capital "S", which is inherently Marxist. (Granted modernm daySocilaist parties have wandered quite far from old Karl, but their roots are in his works)
JonF says: only Marxists can properly be called "S"ocialists. JonF, meet Rickm. You're also affirming Jonah's point. Where Rickm is a victim of his own attempt at snarkiness, you're simply ignorant. Marxists claiming a monopoly on the name "Socialist" is politics, not political philosophy. You're playing an old game, trying to score debating points against your socialist rivals on the left, just like what the Marxists did to their fascist (and other socialist) rivals in the 1920s and 1930s. However, Jonah's trying to get to the truth of the matter. Face it: you're way out of your depth. Have a little humility. Read the book and learn. Then rejoin the debate.
They were republican in that they believed in a republic. Republican movements predate either party. Socialism however isn't so old. In any event no Marx did not invent the term and socialism is not inherently Marxist. Kropotkin style anarchist socialism or Christian socialism are some examples of that. This kind of confusion is not unusual though, but you seem to be seeing your confusion as simply being correct which is of course erroneous.
From Tom Segev's 'The Seventh Million' Regarding the press in Jewish Palestine, "Almost everything written in the left-wing press about the rise of the nazis reflected a sense of...fear created by the destruction of Weimar democracy. Thus the Mapai weekly Hapoel Hatsair [a liberal newspaper]...described Nazism as a 'black reaction meant to draw Germany back to the darkest ideas of the Middle Ages.'" "The Revisionist right, by contrast, had long been sympathetic to Benito Mussolini's Fascism and now and then even to Adolf Hitler's Nazism." p22-23 Someone tell Jonah, and his obsequious supporters, that the Zionists in Israel had it backwards. The left should have been supportive of fascism, and the right should have opposed it. But that didn't happen. Why? Because, Jonah is wrong. DUH.
I see that Moe, Larry, and Jim Keane, lacking any sort of intellectual distinction, has become a risible and moralistic pedant on spelling and style as a substitute for substance. Which is pretty hilariously ironic when you consider that earlier in the same thread, he was whining about SteveMG using big words like "eschatological" because he didn't understand it.
Douche quotes and writes: "I see that Moe, Larry, and Jim Keane, lacking any sort of intellectual distinction, has become a risible and moralistic pedant on spelling and style as a substitute for substance. Which is pretty hilariously ironic when you consider that earlier in the same thread, he was whining about SteveMG using big words like "eschatological" because he didn't understand it." I did no such thing, of course. Douche's mom didn't just squeeze out an idiot - she brought up a liar as well.
JonF, Just because socialist movements _share_ certain elements in common with Marx, doesn't mean that they are "inherently Marxist". I mean, I believe that men and women are ontologically equal, but that doesn't make me a feminist, just because I borrow some ideas from feminism. Christian socialism, the Arab socialism of Michel Aflaq, African socialism, the anarcho-socialism of Spain, and the syndicalist socialists in Latin American countries are just some examples of movements which, while they shared some elements in common with Marx, were equally reacting and rebelling against other parts of Marxist doctrine. To take a current example, the socialist government of Bolivia, while it is heavily inspired by Che Guevara, Castro and the Cuban revolution, also draws a lot of inspiration from the Inca empire and has its historical roots on the Falangist far right. It would be silly to call the German social democrats, for historical reasons, a socialist party and the Bolivian MAS not. There are quite a number of socialist movements for whom Marx is but one influence among many. And no, it isn't as though I would make 'socialist' an empty signifier. Socialism means a belief in: 1) some kind of social control of the economy, 2) means of production owned mostly by either the state or workers' cooperatives 3) a declining role for the profit motive and individual self-interest, 4) a general belief in economic equality and a classless society. None of those is _original_ with Marx, and one can believe in all of those things and be a Marxist to less or no degree.
Can't we just agree that while the debate of whether fascism could be classified on the left is interesting but in the end completely pointless and purely academic and Goldberg only writes a whole book about it to piss liberals off, the fundamental mistake he is making is comparing social movements and political theories from wildly different times and cultures to draw comparisons that end in absurd results because u can't compare things that are not comparable. To give an example I am familiar with, part of his argument seems to be that fascists would be liberals in the US because they are "statists". In any case, transferring this to an American context is absurd. The lack of knowledge of different contexts and cultures and the absurd transposition of American-infused prejudices about life and the political process is the same of kind of lazy punditry that brought us ... in Iraq (yes, I went there).
Hector said General Velasco established his ideal social state during his reign in Peru. From Wikipedia on Velasco's reign, and feel free to take issue if you think the entry here is unreliable: "It was also characterised by the increasing use of authoritarian powers, as the administration grew away from tolerating any level of dissent, periodically jailing, deporting and harassing suspected political opponents and repeatedly closing and censoring broadcast and print news media, finally expropriating all of the newspapers in 1974 and sending the publishers into exile." I'm currently reading "The Black Jacobins," a book about the Haitian Revolution written by a professed socialist. Very interesting historical account, and the author leaves no doubt of his ideological orientation so its easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. Anyhow, the author is fond of saying that the people want things, but they're too ignorant to know they want things, and thus some great authoritarian must lead (or coerce) them. Goes right in line with Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, etc. This seems to be Hector's preferred political philosophy. "I have plans for society, and if you don't go along with them I'll jail you and take away your right to dissent." Hector, how are you different from any of the legions of dictatorial thugs and their supporters that have come and gone in the annals of history? Because you're dedicated to some ethereal goal like "equality?" As opposed to the Spaniards who ran police states in the name of Christian virtue & purity, or innumerable other regimes trying to accomplish some end ideal, with the individual serving as but a tool or cog in their machine of state?
Jefe, Please read this article, it's a defence of the newspaper expropriation of 1974. What you fail to mention is that the newspapers were not taken over by the state, but rather they were assigned to specific occupational sectors- the national associations of unions that grouped together fishermen, manufacturers, cooperative farmers, professionals, etc. It was intended to be an embodiment of the principle of corporatism, which had traditionally (though it doesn't need to be) been associated with the right. The article also points out that all the major newspapers in Peru had been owned by a very narrow oligarchy, that they had faithfully served the interest of the cosmopolitan capitalist elite, that 'freedom of the press' in terms of representing a broad spectrum of people, classes and ideologies had _never_ existed in Peru, and that censorship was the traditional norm in that country. General Velasco, of course, for all his friendly relations with the Soviets, certainly saw himself as much a man of the right as a man of the left. He had originally made a name for himself by defeating a Marxist insurgency, and saw his 'Revolution from Above' as the only thing that could prevent a Marxist takeover. The 1968 revolution was intended to combine principles sometimes associated with the right (hierarchy, authority, religion and military supremacy) with principles traditionally associated with the left (cooperativization, a partially nationalized economy, care for the needs of the poor and a general emphasis on economic equality and the common good.) General Velasco made frequent references to the corporatist model of society, based on the Catholic middle ages, and on the Inca Empire as the models for his revolution. A fascinating and inspiring man and not one that can be easily described as left or right. http://www.jstor.org/view/00221937/ap010082/01a00040/0
One might also add that Colonel Humala, who clothes himself in the model of General Velasco and would like to restore his regime (except even more radical this time around), came out of nowhere to win 49% of the vote in Peru's election last year- quite an impressive share for someone with such a radical program, and one which will probably increase to a majority in the next election.
This thread has been a fascinating object lesson in how presumably educated people form opinions on books they haven't read. It's a testament to American liberal arts education, where students learn the use of opinion leaders to discern what to think, rather than honing their skills in learning how to think.
"While Peru's old ruling class was dismantled, land productivity dropped, and the state-run cooperatives' inefficient management hurt the country's exports, eventually creating a huge foreign debt" "Velasco's growing authoritarian rule was seriously undermined by the country's diminishing productivity" "In August, 1975 Velasco was ousted by a more moderate group of officers" Although other sources describe his efforts in more positive terms. Still even if well-intentioned he ultimately failed. (He sounds like a humane version of Mugabe by the sounds of it, which is not a compliment)
Re: Marxists claiming a monopoly on the name "Socialist" is politics, not political philosophy. Huh? Your comments makes no sense. Now sure, anyone can call himself a "socialist". It's not like there are enforceable copywrites on names. The world is full of oxymoronic self-given names from "Holy Roman Empire" to Russia's "Liberal Democratic" party. But I am talking reality here, and the realty is that Socialism (big "S") is Marxist BY DEFINITION. That is, you cannot have an explicitly, avowedly non-Marxist Socialism any more than you can have four-sided triangles. And yes, modern Marxists have evolved rather well beyond orthodox Marxism (but still acknowledge Marx's original critique of capitalism) and yes there are hybrid Socialisms (e.g., your Christian Socialism) where a Marxist critique is mixed in with other elements. Re: However, Jonah's trying to get to the truth of the matter. Jonah Goldberg is trying to plow a whole new field for rightwing propaganda. Thank you, but no. Re: Republican movements predate either party. Yes of course! (Am I arguing with the terminally dense)? But when someone uses the term "Republican" (capital "r") in a modern American context, it is the GOP they are talking about. For a similiar example see the distinction between orthodox Christian and Orthodox Christian. The lattern is presumably the former, but the former is not necessarily the latter. Re: some kind of social control of the economy, Which has always been true of every economy, no matter how primitive. If there's a state at all, it will exercize some control over at least some economic transactions. Now, for a comment of my own. The Nazis and assorted Fascists of the 20th century were Modernists as opposed to Traditionalists (none of that old European Throne and Altar stuff for them). They were not however politicallly liberal, neither by Continental or Anglo-American definitions of that term. Jonah Goldeberg is trying to pull a slight of hand here by identifying them as radically modernist (true) then claiming that since many leftwingers are also radically modernist, the Fascists must be on the Left. I forget the name for this logical error, but it's an old one. One might as well argue that since cats are carnivores and sharks are carvinores, cats are therefore sharks (or vis versa).
Ha Ha!
ok, JonF, I'm not persuaded. Let's look at the Nazis and subtract their hatred for Jews for a brief exercise. I consider the Holocaust to be the greatest evil ever contemplated by Man, and hauntingly so. It might be difficult to look at the Nazis without it (and this might be the whole problem when it comes to the term "fascism") but let's try. To be fair you must, however. Mussolini's Italy was definitively fascist, yet shared none of this demonic obsession for genocide. Stalin fought the fascists, yet liquidated even more innocents than Hitler managed. Okay, racial policies excepted, how can the remainder of Nazi politics be described as anything other than socialist? What was the difference between the guy in the red shirt in Munich, 1927, and the guy in the brown one? How come the same guy often wore one shirt one week and the other the next?
JonF you sound so persuasive it's a shame you aren't actually correct. You aren't though. There are Christian Socialists who are a mix of Marxism and Christianity, but this doesn't say anything about the concept. There are variants of religious socialism that essentially predate Marx and have only some influences by him. Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, and F. D. Maurice founded "The Christian Socialist movement" in 1848. Granting this was the year "The Communist Manifesto" was founded all three of them had written of a Christian socialism before then. There's also the anarcho-socialists. Now if by "capital S" Socialist you only mean those forms of socialism influenced by Marx, than of course "capital S" socialism is going to be Marxian. It's also true that most existing Socialist parties are more influenced by Marx than by Owen or Proudhon or Maurice. Still I'd need some evidence that non-Marxian socialists no longer exist to really accept what you're saying.
"Italy was definitively fascist, yet shared none of this demonic obsession for genocide." I'm curious what the Ethiopians or Jehovah's Witnesses have to say on that.
You're first question is nonsensical. You might as well ask "How can Nazi politics be described as anything other than ultranationalist?" or "How can Nazi politics be described as anything other than authoritarian?" or "How can Nazi politics be described as anything other than militaristic?" The answer is, of course, easily - fascism is essentially about the sacrifice of the individual to the state. The fascists may not have believed in unfettered capitalism, but that's a symptom. Focusing on the economic aspects of fascism is like defining an elephant as an animal that's gray. You're second question is incredibly complicated. But there's several. The most obvious is nationalism v. internationalism (in the 20's, at least). It's a libertarian instinct (that I share) to focus on the economic aspects of fascism, but that's not the story.
"Italy was definitively fascist, yet shared none of this demonic obsession for genocide." I'm curious what the Ethiopians or Jehovah's Witnesses have to say on that. oh bother. engage my point or leave me out of it.
You're first question is nonsensical. You might as well ask "How can Nazi politics be described as anything other than ultranationalist?" That interesting, and you are on to something! What is the difference between socialized medical care and nationalized medical care? Socialized property vs. nationalized property? I don't see much difference in practice. If you do, please say so. "How can Nazi politics be described as anything other than militaristic?" That was your substitution, not mine. And the answer is: Nazi policies are inherently militaristic and could not be otherwise. However, ditto with Marxism -- a philosophy built around the idea of class WARFARE and REVOLUTION. The violent nature of Nazism proves its relation to pure, capital "S" Socialism more than should be comfortable to a Leftist
"oh bother. engage my point or leave me out of it." If the point is that Fascism is socialism than I don't see why I need to engage it any further. They said it wasn't socialist in their doctrine, they did not believe in core socialist ideas, and most historians agree it was not socialism. I agree though that it has influences from socialism and many of its early thinkers were former socialists, but this doesn't make it socialist. For example Reagan's policies were also influenced by many former socialists, but to see Reagan as s socialist would also not be very plausible in most situations. So debating that matter is unnecessary. Well no debate is necessary on the Italian or Spanish variant. Nazism as socialist is somewhat more valid, but the socialist aspect was not as significant in the period Nazism is most discussed. Strasserism, the International Third Position, and that wacko French-Hindu woman who considered Hitler an avatar were all essentially "Leftist Nazis." So "Leftist Nazism" is certainly a possibility. However it never really ruled any nation or place. Now I dealt with whether Italian Fascism is genocidal because that's more interesting in that it is actually a subject of legitimate debate. Italian ventures in Ethiopia were maybe no more racist/genocidal than other European imperialists in Africa, but they're sometimes seen as genocidal as well. It's an area open for discussion. Although Italian Fascism was certainly not racist in the Nazi sense. Jews who accepted Western, specifically Italian, culture were allowed in the Fascist Party. Possibly non-whites were too, but I'm not sure of that. I think they leaned genocidal, at times, on other cultures that remained decidedly non-European in outlook.
Thomas R., You're certainly entitled to make that comparison, but I don't think it's a good one. General Velasco's regime is probably better compared with other social-revolutionary regimes in the region like Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico and Chile. Like Allende's regime, the one in Peru was quite short-lived. It was probably less successful than these other four, but the interesting question is why-- most historians' critiques I have seen are that it didn't go far enough in challenging capitalism. (It's true of course that most historians of Latin America tend to approach these things from an explicitly Marxist perspective). Velasco's regime was quite explicitly anti-Marxist and so they were never quite sure about how far to push the role of the state and land redistribution. The peasant cooperatives, for example, did coexist with a modern, industrial capitalist sector and when the revolution was over, many of them were swallowed up by that sector again. Regardless, I think that the Velasco regime, in its hybridization of left-wing and right-wing ideas, offers a glimpse of what the kind of government that could solve the continent's ills would look like. The first experiments in liberal democracy weren't terribly successful either, remember. It also depend what are the metrics you're using--economic development? social equality? certainly the peasants who got access to land and were freed from the landlord's yoke thought the revolution was a good thing.
JonF, If accepting "the Marxist critique" among "other elements" makes one "Marxist", then I guess you are correct, and I wouldn't much disagree with you. I don't think that necessarily makes one a _Marxist_ though. There are people today who accept the feminist arguments about equality in the workplace and the voting booth, but would not consider themselves _feminists_ because they think that the feminist interpretation of history is fatally flawed. There have definitely people who accepted significant elements of the Marxist critique of capitalism, but also rejected other elements, and some of these people considered themselves quite explicitly anti-Marxist, on the basis of what they were rejecting. General Velasco, or for that matter Nasser, or many anarcho-socialists, or Schumacher for that matter, considered themselves both socialist and anti-Marxist. If you consider the Marcionites or the Arians to be Christian, or the Alawites to be Muslims, then perhaps it makes sense to consider everyone who borrows some elements of Marxism to be "Marxist", but only in a very broad reading of the term.
What do you mean the Nazis disavowed socialism? "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance." -- Adolph Hiter, May 1, 1927 However, I grant you talk is cheap and clinging to mere words from Adolph Hitler was never a smart thing to do. Look at what policies they put into action. The racial ones aside, it's all firmly socialist stock. Hayek's 1944 study on the economics of centrally planned economies used two countries for data, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Nobody, not even Keynes, took that as controversial or surprising, because they were functionally and substantively birds of a like feather.
As I said Nazis as socialist is more plausible, but you are quoting things from 1927. His actual rule from the mid-1930s onward was less socialist. And simply not being Hayekian or laissez-faire does not make one socialist. I'm not sure I used the word "disavowal" so you're likely not even referring to me. In any event I simply meant socialist aspect was not particularly significant after the mid-1930s. Anyway this conversation has gone on too long as is so I'll stop there.
Thomas R., Look at the party platforms for the Fascists (Liberal Fascism, p. 46) and the Nazis (pp. 410-413). Socialists.
Freddie, “Mussolini on occasion acknowledged that fascism was perceived as a movement of the “right,” but he never failed to make it clear that his inspiration and spiritual home was the socialist left.” Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, page 44. Then he backs it up. Check out the Fascist party platform on p. 46. You should read the book, Freddie.
Freddie, “This movement is less than a hundred years old. There is reams of materials to read, primary source materials, from the architects of fascism. It just takes a little research to find it. And all of it, by every fascist thinker and leader, undermines Goldberg's thesis. Every one I've read has defined fascism in opposition to socialism and communism. Goldberg has specifically said that communism and fascism are the same.” Yes Freddie, there "is" reams of materials, the most relevant of which to Jonah’s thesis are to be found in chapters 1 and 2 of the book. And no, he hasn’t “specifically said that communism and fascism are the same.” You just made that up. Anyone who has read the book would know that. And, no, the work of academic historians in this field (I was trained as one) is confused and all over the board, because the paradigm they are working within (fascism is a phenomenon of the right (i.e., “conservative,” “reactionary”) has become a dogma. They live with the congnitive dissonance because they like socialism, and don’t like what would happen if they just admitted that fascism and Nazism were phenomena of the left. I mean, it’s not as if we don’t already know that leftists are capable of some pretty horrendous things. Orwell once said that sometimes the hardest thing to see is the truth that’s right in front of our noses. Jonah’s thesis goes against a lot of entrenched interests, academic and political.
Doug, you wrote: “In this case, I choose to judge the book by its cover. Goldberg may be likable in person, but the fact that he chose to associate Liberals with Hitler speaks volumes about his judgement.” George Carlin stated on Real Time with Bill Maher: “When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts.” Liberal Fascism, p. 1. Didn’t everyone used to talk about how there was something vaguely fascist about that creepy, silly, ubiquitous smiley face, even though you couldn’t put it into words? The cover art is really brilliant when you think of it. Transgressive. You know, “Art”. Shakes people up, just like a crucifix in a jar of urine, except this one isn’t funded by your tax dollars. Don’t cheat yourself. Read the book.
Bad, “If the critics of Jonah's work are all wrong and misinformed, then it would be nice if he'd seriously try to show how, instead of just insisting that they need to help pump up his sales before being able to judge.” Check out his Liberal Fascism website at www.liberal-fascism.com and his Liberal Fascism blog spot at www.nationalreview.com. He responds to (serious) criticisms there. “It seems to me pretty clear that the whole exercise of the book is to use the word facism over and over…” Not if you’ve read the book.
Peter, Amen on J.L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1960). Considered by many in the profession to be a hidden treasure. A modern day classic may be the sociologist Liah Greenfeld’s, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1994), which brings welcome clarity to a related problem that has vexed academic historians for decades. The roots of both Marxism and Nazism are both in that toxic stew that was German romanticism and nationalism. Sometimes academic historians need a little push from the outside.
Dear George Sorwell, He has. He’s putting contemporary American politics into a deeper and broader historical and geographical context. Check it out.
Art Deco (any relation to Streamline Moderne?), you wrote: “The equation of 'conservatism' with 'Stalinism' is more obtrusively absurd than what Mr. Goldberg appears to be attempting.” Not really so absurd. From 1956 on Stalinists were often referred to in the Western press and by historians and analysts of the Soviet Bloc as “conservatives,” because, vis-à-vis various Communist “reformers,” they were. The new left in the 1960s then tried to peddle the trope that they really were conservatives. He doesn't make the point but it does sort of illustrate Jonah's thesis.
Dear Fitz, you wrote: “Many of what are (rightfully) called right wing “hatchet books” can be very useful nonetheless. Jonah writes: “I have tried not to clutter the book with citations but I have included quite a few explanatory—or discursive—notes. Readers curious about other sources and further reading should consult the Website for this book, www.liberal-fascism.com, and may also post comments or queries there.” Good luck. Make up your own mind about whether it's just a "hatchet job"
Starscream says: “You can tell from his writing that he spent most of his four years of research skimming books until he found a liberal or liberal idea somehow reflected in fascist actions and deciding, without further review or thought, that it was yet another gotcha in his growing, persuasive pile of evidence detailing liberal fascism.” Don’t believe him. Check it out for yourself. Anyway, to the perfectly comprehensible (even if you disagree with it): “Goldberg is an admirer of Friedrich von Hayek and not an exponent of any sort of pre-Lockean political theory, so it would be peculiar to attribute to him the idea that ‘liberalism’ is the root of all political excesses,” Starscream posted the following response: “I think that bloobedy blabbedy so flim flamer the moopie padda. What? WHAT?” So it’s possible that Jonah’s book is just over his head.
Rickm, you wrote: “I have this book sitting on my desk that argues that all conservatives are violent pedophiles.” Which one? I was at Borders last night and they had about 30. And that was just in the new releases. And this: “there are numerous heuristics to use to find out if a book is worthwhile, honest, or even original. Goldberg's book fails all those tests.” Try this heuristic: I read it. It’s worthwhile, honest and original. Buy it. Read it. You’ll thank me.
Benjamin, First of all no, we can’t agree. Yes it is very interesting to learn what fascism was and its influence on American politics then and now and, no, it’s not pointless, especially when there has been so much talk about it, especially from the left, especially since Bush became president, and especially since 9/11. (This sudden reticence on the left to talk about fascism in America is itself a noteworthy historical event.) Despite his central concern with the origins and history of American progressive liberalism in relation to European currents, he summarizes the relevant histories of Italian Fascism and Nazism in their own right, discusses the other national variants in what is at heart a pragmatic, as opposed to a doctrinaire, socialist ideology, and carefully delineates and distinguishes European from American contexts. Yes “u can’t compare things that are not comparable,” but that’s a tautology—you haven’t shown whether they are or aren’t comparable. Jonah does. Second, if I was a liberal (and I was) or a leftist (and I was), and was open-minded, intellectual, interested in the history of ideas (especially those I believe to be true and good), in American history, as concerned about the threat of fascism as liberals claim to be, and all other good stuff, I would think this book was very important. I would run, not walk, to the bookstore and buy this book and read it. I would not, as various posters have stated, refuse to read it, tell others to avoid it, and engage in ad hominem attacks against the author and attribute positions and arguments to him that aren’t in the book or accuse him of ignoring arguments that are discussed in the book. If there’s any “lazy punditry” it’s in your post (see, e.g., your discussion of France which, if you had read the book, you’d see wasn’t necessary).
JonF, Give it a rest. It’s a preposterous thesis. Marxism and fascism (including Nazism) were just two kinds (heresies?), among many, of socialism. Socialism was and remains much bigger and older than either of them. The continuing influence of your dogmatic Marxism and its internecine struggle with fascism is part of the ideological mindset that has made it difficult for students of fascism to see the obvious, and that left the field wide open for Jonah to write his book. By the way, where did Marx get his socialist ideas from, including his rabid anti-semitism and his belief in the special mission of the German working class specifically to save "civilization" from the corrupting influence of liberalism and capitalism? Marx was not as original as Marxists think he was.
Rickm, One reason some of you are having such a hard time staying focused is because you’re trying to debate the merits of a book’s thesis without having read the book, where the arguments and the evidence happen to be located. Not to pick on you, since you’re clearly not alone, at least half these posts, yours included, don’t seem to be about Jonah’s book at all and so go off on irrelevant tangents. Lest one think that you actually made some kind of point, Segev’s take on how the German left reacted to the end of the Weimar Republic (incomplete to say the least, considering the Communists actively voted and worked with the Nazis to destroy it), true or false, is not relevant to Jonah’s thesis at all, and the liberal Zionist newspaper in pre-war Palestine that he cites had to be referring to Nazi anti-semitism, since nothing in the Nazi social and economic programs can be remotely compared to any “ideas of the Middle Ages.” This isn’t relevant either, since anti-semitism is not restricted to any part of the political spectrum (as Jonah clearly shows in his book, just in case this is news to you). Sympathy for fascism among the “Revisionist” right (Zionist “Revisionist right”? German Social Democratic “revisionists”?) would tend to support Jonah’s thesis since neither could be considered remotely conservative or reactionary in the European context. We’d need more information that we really don’t need because Jonah’s book is packed with important evidence that is actually relevant to his arguments but, of course, you haven’t read it. Instead you’ve gone off on some snippet from some other book you’ve read that really doesn’t have anything to do with Jonah’s thesis but you think it does because, well, you did happen to read that one, and, again, you haven’t read Jonah’s book but you want to talk about it.
Nightjar, you wrote: “For those of you who've read the book, how does Jonah deal with the powerful influence of our slavery past-- particularly in the context of southern ideology….” Start with chapter 3, on Woodrow Wilson and his presidency. Pretty sickening stuff. Something liberals don't talk about much, or, if they do, they blame it on "America," not on the specific people and the ideology that motivated them.
Justin K, Why don’t you read chapter 3 on Woodrow Wilson’s administration (and why not continue on to Chapter 4 and FDR’s New Deal while you're at it), and then compare with the supposed evidence for the Bush administration's fascism from the tin-foil hat crowd. You will be enlightened.
Oh, before I forget. Neo-con pre-emptive strike (because the threat is not yet imminent): “I know you are, but what am I?”
Look guys (notice there don't seem to be any women posting here? Think the tin-foil hats might be a little off-putting?), This is my first blogapalooza ever and I’m done. I’ve been waiting for someone to write this book for a long time, probably since before Jonah was born. It’s a book that was crying out to be written and any historian could have had it for the taking. You’d just have to be willing to forego tenure, getting invited to conferences and faculty parties, getting published in the prestigious journals or having people sit near you or talk to you in the faculty lounge, or admit that the ideology that allows you to believe that you are superior to certain “others,” i.e., your very identity, is based on a myth. Other than that, no big deal. Yes professional historians are the ones doing the spadework, digging up primary sources and writing the monographs. But evidence doesn’t interpret itself, and this is where the profession has fallen down. Some of the best history writing today is coming from outside academia, just in case you haven’t noticed. It just happened that Jonah’s the one who did it, and guess what: we’re lucky. Pick it up and you cannot put it down. Unlike most academic historians, this guy really writes well. No un-navigable prose, pretentious postmodernist jargon, or intentional obscurity hiding the lack of any real ideas other than the typical vulgar -Marxist twaddle. This story is too big to be buried in inaccessible prose or relegated to the university press houses. There’s no reason to confine it to the professoriate, especially not with the politicization of university history faculties. It has broader significance than your typical scholarly dispute. It needs to be out there now for public discussion. This book is just a beginning. But it cuts the Gordon knot that has vexed academic historians for decades and he has clearly identified the reasons how and why such an untenable paradigm gained such a foothold in academia in the first place. Not because he’s a genius, but because he freed himself from a certain kind of mental straightjacket that academics were peculiarly susceptible to. It’s Kuhn’s point about paradigms in action. The conventional paradigm on fascism obscures and confuses what’s going on in the data. It just needed a little push to send it tumbling. For reasons peculiar to the political pathologies of Western academia in the late 20th and early 21st century, that push had to come from the outside and it had to come from a conservative journalist. Tough. It’s not like this stuff never happens—every other book nowadays by an academic historian claims to “revolutionize” our understanding of this or that. Well, this one actually delivers the goods. I have some problems with the coherence of an argument here or there, or whether some piece of evidence is as strong as he claims (sometimes I think I can think of better ways to argue his point or better evidence to use), but these are really just quibbles. I had been trained as an academic historian (Soviet Union and 20th century Europe), and what I wish there was more of in the book would have made it stronger, but I really appreciated and learned from the chapters on the Wilson administration (chapter 3) and the New Deal (chapter 4). This book is good. It’s packed with direct quotes from the main players, great analysis, but you never lose the thread of the (very robust) main argument despite its complexity. Read this book and you will learn things—true things, disturbing, myth-shattering and “transgressive” things. Don’t liberals and leftists think that’s good anymore?
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Go careful there, Ross! That sort of oldfashioned critical thinking looks mighty liberal these days. What next - examining the Bush administration on the basis of its record?
Posted by nickzi | January 13, 2008 9:47 AM