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Fun With Fascism

By John Tabin on 3.20.08 @ 12:03AM

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
by Jonah Goldberg
(Doubleday, 487 pages, $27.95)

In a certain sense, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is long-overdue. The idea that Goldberg endeavors to debunk, namely that fascism was a right-wing phenomenon, has gone unchallenged for far too long. The Soviet propaganda that labeled any socialist not beholden to Moscow "on the right" has endured longer than the Soviet Union itself.

In another sense, Goldberg's book has hit the shelves, and the bestseller list, at the perfect time. This election season illustrates just how much the ideologies that Goldberg examines have come to inform our politics.

A number of critics have made fools of themselves by sneering at Goldberg's book based on the cover, inferring that it must be a shrill polemic that merely tosses the left's favorite epithet back at them. This misses the point: Goldberg isn't using "fascist" in the usual sense of "evil politics." Goldberg insists that "fascism" has a meaning -- an elusive meaning, but a meaning nonetheless.

Scholars have never quite come to a consensus on how to define fascism. Goldberg's approach is to let the record speak for itself.

He begins by exploring the largely undiscussed history of the relationship between Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and American Progressivism -- a relationship that, he meticulously documents, was marked by mutual admiration and emulation -- and draws out the threads that connect them as he traces the history of what came to be called "liberalism."

Those threads include:

* The marriage of nationalism to socialism. This springs from the insight that, pace Marx, homeland trumps class: The proletariat feels more connected to their fellow countrymen than to the workers of the world.

* Totalitarianism, the idea of a state that encompasses all of society. Mussolini defined "totalitarianism," a word that he coined, as "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State," and he meant this in a good way: The state would take care of everyone. The corollary, of course, is hostility to individualism and classical liberalism.

* Militarization of politics and society. This doesn't mean support for a strong military, but rather exporting the values, images, and organizing principles of the military into society as a whole.

* The need for "great" leaders, and personality cults around them.

* The belief that politics can replace religion, and the view that the state ought to be vehicle of spiritual rebirth.

* Obsession with action, and impatience with the vicissitudes of democracy and constitutionalism.

GOLDBERG ARGUES, controversially, that the first fascist dictator was not Mussolini, but actually Woodrow Wilson, whose style of governance had all of the above elements. Wilson used World War I as a pretext to criminalize disloyalty, mount extra-constitutional attacks on his political enemies, and trample on the freedom of the press.

We generally remember Warren G. Harding's call for a "return to normalcy." What we forget is that returning to normalcy involved releasing political prisoners.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Business, Religion, Books, Constitution, Military, Socialism, Fascism, Conservatism