Crap Detector wrote

Liberal Fascism sounds like an oxymoron

It doesn't sound that way to anti-intellectual ignorant right wing boors.
Palin worshipers like you.

Fascist
noun
1. a person who believes in or sympathizes with fascism.
2. (often initial capital letter) a member of a fascist movement or party.
3. a person who is dictatorial or has extreme right-wing views.

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

In his new book, Goldberg has decided to dream up fascists on the left
rather than acknowledge the fact that the real American fascists have been
lurking in the right's closet for lo these many years.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From
Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday, 496
pages)

* * *

The public understanding of World War II history and its precedents has
suffered in recent years from the depredations of revisionist historians
-- the David Irvings and David Bowmans of the field who have attempted to
recast the meaning of, respectively, the Holocaust and the Japanese
American internment. Their reach, however, has been somewhat limited to
fringe audiences.

It might be tempting to throw Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret
History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
into those same cloacal backwaters, but there is an essential difference
that goes well beyond the likely much broader reach of Goldberg's book,
which was inexplicably published by a mainstream house (Doubleday). Most
revisionists are actually historians with some credentials, and their
theses often hinge on nuances and the interpretation of details.

Goldberg, who has no credentials beyond the right-wing nepotism that has
enabled his career as a pundit, has drawn a kind of history in absurdly
broad and comically wrongheaded strokes. It is not just history done
badly, or mere revisionism. It’s a caricature of reality, like something
from a comic-book alternative universe: Bizarro history.

The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: Of
all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one
of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its
overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic
neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance.
Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire
enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.

Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author of
1984 once dismissed the misuse of "fascism" as meaning "something not
desirable." Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the word's
meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it -- he refers to Orwell's
critique as his "definition of fascism."

And then Goldberg proceeds to define everything that he himself considers
undesirable as "fascist." This is just about everything even remotely and
vaguely thought of as "liberal": vegetarianism, Social Security,
multiculturalism, the "war on poverty," "the politics of meaning." The
figures he labels as fascist range from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D.
Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg's primary
achievement is to rob the word of all meaning -- Newspeak incarnate.

The term "fascism" certainly is overused and abused. The public
understanding of it is fuzzy at best, and academics struggle to agree on a
definition, as Goldberg observes -- and he makes use of that confusion to
ramble on for pages about the disagreements without ever providing readers
with a clear definition of fascism beyond Orwell's quip.

Along the way, he grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia
regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many
regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain ineluctable
traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and
ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture
of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity,
its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger
Griffin calls its "palingenesis" -- that is, its core myth of a
phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent
Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously --
no, viciously -- anti-liberal.

So when Goldberg proclaims early on: "This is the monumental fact of the
Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective
memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists," more thorough observers of
history might instead just shake their heads. After all, the facts of
Mussolini's utopian/socialist origins and the Nazis' similar appeals to
socialism by incorporating the name are already quite well known to the
same historians who consistently describe fascism as a right-wing
enterprise.

What these historians record -- but Goldberg variously ignores or
minimizes -- is that the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in fact
purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered "socialist"
support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and that the larger
Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all
things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of Mein Kampf are
devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war against "the Left," and
not merely the Marxism that Goldberg acknowledges was a major focus of
Hitler's animus.

This became manifest in the Italian fascist and German Nazi
transformations from a faction of street thugs into an actual political
power that seized the reins of government, when fascists gradually shed
all pretensions or appeals to socialism and became violently
anti-socialist and anti-communist. But it was present all along; "the
Left" were the people who were beaten and murdered in the 1920s by the
squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans sent off to Nazi
concentration camps like Dachau were not Jews but socialists, communists,
and other left-wing political prisoners, including "liberal" priests and
clerics.

The same incoherence underlies what Goldberg imagines is his provocative
thesis: the notion that "modern progressivism and classical fascism shared
the same intellectual roots," and therefore that "fascism, properly
understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and
always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The core of this claim is his
insistent description of populism as a form of left-wing politics --
which, in many of its manifestations, it certainly was.

Yet Goldberg incorrectly claims that "populism had never been known as a
conservative or right phenomenon before" Mussolini. In fact, populism has
historically been a broad-ranging phenomenon that expressed itself in both
right- and left-wing politics, as Chip Berlet has described in some detail
in his 2000 book, Right-Wing Populism in America, which details its
history from Bacon's Rebellion to the Ku Klux Klan to the modern-day Posse
Comitatus and militia/Patriot movements. What distinguishes these
populists from their left-wing counterparts, as Berlet explains, is that
"they combine attacks on socially oppressed groups with grassroots mass
mobilization and distorted forms of antielitism based on scapegoating."
Yet, building on a false characterization of the history of populism,
Goldberg goes on to characterize such historical figures as Father Charles
Coughlin, the rabid anti-Semitic radio talker of the 1930s, and Sen. Joe
McCarthy as left-wing figures simply because of their populist
foundations.

More to the point, perhaps, is that discussing fascism's "intellectual
foundations" is a nonsensical enterprise in the face of the consensus of
historical understanding that anti-intellectualism is an essential trait
of fascism, a fact that Goldberg briefly acknowledges without assessing
its impact on his thesis. As Umberto Eco put it, the fascist insistence on
action for its own sake means that "it must be taken before, or without,
reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation." In this worldview, the
instincts of the fascist leader are always superior to the logic and
reason of puling intellectuals.

Probably the essential fascist statement is one that Goldberg in fact
cites unreflectingly -- Mussolini's famous reply to those who wanted
policy specifics from him: "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our
program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the
sooner the better." This remark's noteworthy anti-liberalism also seems to
elude Goldberg. And the notion that liberal humanism -- with its long
history of rationalism and reliance on logic and science -- has anything
whatsoever to do with the fascist approach is, once again, an almost
comical upending of reality.

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical
revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle
Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book
In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate
McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same
historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing
revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative
facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole
mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply
theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.

What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he
describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as
representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact
that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for
the better part of the past century. Robert O. Paxton, in his book The
Anatomy of Fascism, identifies the Ku Klux Klan as the first genuine
fascist organization, a suggestion that Goldberg airily dismisses with the
dumb explanation that the Klan of the 1920s disliked Mussolini and his
adherents because they were Italian (somewhat true for a time but
irrelevant in terms of their ideological affinities, which were
substantial enough that by the 1930s, historians have noted, there were
frequent operative associations between Klan leaders and European
fascists).

Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg's book is
any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse
Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance -- all of them
openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the
nation's most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for
instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National
Alliance's William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like
Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton "American fascists," but he makes no
mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln
Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke -- all of
them bona fide fascists: the real thing.

This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these
groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing
Goldberg's alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the
left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in
the right's closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it's a
handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.

Liberal Fascism may come complete with copious but meaningless footnotes,
but it is in the end just a gussied-up version of a favorite talking point
of right-wing radio talkers that the real fascists are those nasty
liberals, those feminazis and eco-fascists. It may be all dressed up with
a pseudo-academic veneer, but the quality of logic contained therein is
roughly the same. If only it would vanish into the ether as quickly.

David Neiwert is a freelance writer based in Seattle and the editor of the
blog Orcinus. A National Press Club award winner for his reportage on the
radical right, he is also the author of three books, most recently
Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community.