In a Nutshell Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg

Books in brief for the busy reader.

Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg, a National Review Editor and nationally syndicated columnist, has just come out in paperback after an impressive run in hardback as #1 on the New York Times best seller list. The book achieved this despite being largely ignored by most of the main stream liberal press. It also came under bitter attack from the netroots activists for its cover, its title and anything else except its substantive argument, ad hominem being piled on top of libel and smear in an attempt to make still-born the author’s thesis.

Let me make it as plain as I can: the thesis of this book is so transparently obvious as to be unarguable. The disdain of the main-stream left and bitter invective of the radicals only serves to confirm this.

His thesis is that the main stream understanding of the historical phenomenon known as Fascism has erroneously placed Fascism on the Right of the political spectrum, when in fact it is a variety of Leftist Socialism.

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Look at it this way: the popular conception of the political spectrum is that Socialism is on the Left and Capitalism on the Right. Communism then is placed at the most leftward extreme of Socialism, and is balanced by Fascism as the most rightward extreme of Capitalism. This makes a nice clean picture, but Mr. Goldberg's book argues persuasively that it is just so much nonsense. Italian Fascism and German Nazism both grew directly and organically out of the explosions of Leftist Socialist ideology at the beginning of the 20th Century, the same explosions that gave rise to Communism. In Mr. Goldberg's view, when Fascism and Communism turned against each other, it was not because they were political opposites, but because they were essentially similar Leftward ideologies battling for the same constituencies.

As such, Mr. Goldberg seeks in his book to untangle and document the historical threads linking Mussolini and the Italian Fascists (and thereafter, the German National Socialists) with the same revolutionary Socialism that gave rise to Communism in Russia in 1917. Additionally, Mr. Goldberg delineates the repercussions of Fascism and the Fascist impulse that still play out in American politics today.

One aspect he notes of the ongoing Fascism debate is that it is often overlooked that American conservatism is not the same thing as the European variety. In the early 20th Century in Europe, conservatives were aligned with monarchies and other similar manifestations of old class-structures, big business and government power. As such, although they might balk at the Totalitarian governments desired by the Communists and Fascists, the idea of a strong central government per se was by no means something European conservatives were against. America's conservative tradition however was rooted in the classic liberalism of the Founding Fathers, and as a result it was and is quite antithetical to not only aristocracy and other European class-based traditions, but also strong, powerful centralized governments of any kind.

It is European conservatives who oftentimes found common cause with Fascism, primarily in opposing the spread of Communism. And in doing so, European conservatives played no small part in the confusion that placed Fascism on the Right. But this confusion resulted also from a well documented disinformation campaign by Stalin against the Fascists, in what Tom Wolfe in comments on the book jacket of the hardcover edition calls "... the greatest hoax of modern history, [when] Russia's ... Communists, established themselves as the polar opposites of their two socialist clones, the National Socialists ... and Italy's Marxist-inspired Fascisti."

None of this confusion in Europe between Left and Right should have infected American politics. As I said, American conservatives were directly and organically related to the classical liberalism of the American Revolution. Additionally, and surprisingly for me, Mr. Goldberg locates America's own Fascist moment as occurring BEFORE the rise to power of Mussolini in Italy, when Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1912. President Wilson's politics and policies grew out of the burgeoning Progressive movement in the United States, and was in direct opposition to the classical American tradition of Constitutionally limited government.

But even so, Mr. Goldberg documents, the Left took up Stalin's mantra from the 1930's and has continued to insist to this day that American conservatism is an incipient Fascism just waiting to take over America. And, Mr. Goldberg makes plain, Liberals do this even as they promote programs and policies that grew out of the neo-Fascist Progressivism of the early 20th Century.

In sum, this is a very important book making a very important argument for the times we live in. It is a bold attempt to correct the last 100 years of political theater in America, to untangle a debate which has atrophied into a fine set of canards and cliches.