XPost: can.politics, alt.politics, alt.politics.democrats   
   XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   From: yeung@yahoo.ch   
      
   The Scholarly Flaws of "Liberal Fascism"   
      
   Robert Paxton is emeritus professor of history at Columbia University.   
   His latest book is Anatomy of Fascism (Vintage, 2005).  He is well   
   educated and therefor unworthy of being a Republican.   
      
   Jonah Goldberg tells us he wrote this book to get even.  The liberals   
   started it by “insist[ing] that conservatism has connections with   
   fascism” (p.  22).  Conservatives “sit dumbfounded by the nastiness of   
   the slander” (p.  1).   “The left wields the term fascism like a   
   cudgel” (p.  3).   So Jonah Goldberg has decided it is time to turn the   
   tables and show that “the liberal closet has its own skeletons” (p.   
   22).   After years of being “called a fascist and a Nazi by smug,   
   liberal know-nothings” he decides that “responding to this slander is a   
   point of personal privilege” (p.  392).   
      
   Feeling oneself a victim is wonderfully liberating.  Anything goes.  So   
   Jonah Goldberg pulls out all the stops to show that fascism “is not a   
   phenomenon of the right at all.  It is, and always has been, a   
   phenomenon of the left” (p.  7).  The reader perceives at once that   
   Goldberg likes to put things into rigid boxes: right and left,   
   conservative and liberal, fascist and non-fascist.  He doesn’t leave   
   room for such complexities as convergences, middle grounds, or   
   evolution over time.  Thus Father Coughlin was always a man of the   
   left, and so was Mussolini (Giacomo Matteotti or the Rosselli brothers,   
   leaders of the Italian left whom Mussolini had assassinated, would have   
   been scandalized by this view).  The very mention of a “Third Way” puts   
   one instantly into the fascist box.   
      
   That’s too bad, because there really is a subject here.  Fascism – a   
   political latecomer that adapted anti-socialism to a mass electorate,   
   using means that often owed nothing to conservatism – drew on both   
   right and left, and tried to transcend that bitter division in a   
   purified, invigorated, expansionist national community.  A sensitive   
   analysis of what fascism drew from all quarters of the political   
   spectrum would be a valuable project.  It is not Jonah Goldberg’s   
   project.   
      
   The bottom line is that Goldberg wants to attach a defaming epithet to   
   liberals and the left, to “put the brown shirt on [your] opponents,” as   
   he accuses the liberals of doing (p.  392).  He goes about this task   
   with a massive apparatus of scholarly citations and quotations.  But   
   Goldberg’s scholarship is not an even-handed search for understanding,   
   following the best evidence fully and open-mindedly wherever it might   
   lead.  He chooses his scholarly data selectively and sometimes   
   misleadingly in the service of his demonstration.   
      
   Jonah Goldberg knows that making the Progressives, Woodrow Wilson,   
   Theodore Roosevelt and FDR the creators of an American fascism – indeed   
   the only American fascism, for George Lincoln Rockwell and other overt   
   American fascist or Nazi sympathizers are totally absent from this book   
   – is a stretch, so he has created a new box: Liberal Fascism.  The   
   Progressives and their heirs who wanted to use government to rectify   
   social and economic ills, and who, in Goldberg’s view, thereby created   
   an American Fascism, acted with good intentions, rarely used violence,   
   and had nothing to do with Auschwitz.  Even so, they share an   
   intellectual heredity and a set of common goals with the European   
   fascists.  So they go into the “Liberal Fascist” box.   
      
   Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron, of course.  A fascism that means no   
   harm is a contradiction in terms.  Authentic fascists intend to harm   
   those whom they define as the nation’s internal and external enemies.   
   Someone who doesn’t intend to harm his or her enemies, and who doesn’t   
   relish doing it violently, isn’t really fascist.   
      
   But the problems go much deeper.  Pushing Liberalism and Fascism   
   together requires distorting both terms.  It doesn’t help that these   
   are two of the most problematical words in the political lexicon.  To   
   his credit, Goldberg is aware that the term “liberal” has been   
   corrupted in contemporary American usage.  It ought to mean (and still   
   means in the rest of the world) a principled opposition to state   
   interference in the economy, from Adam Smith to Ronald Reagan.   
   Goldberg sometimes refers to “classical liberalism” in this sense, and   
   with approval.  Unfortunately he has capitulated to the sloppy current   
   American usage by which “liberal” means, usually pejoratively nowadays,   
   any and all of the various components of the Left, from anarchists and   
   Marxists to moderate Democrats.   
      
   Goldberg stereotypes liberals to make them abstract, uniform, robotic.   
    The telltale phrase is “liberals say” or “liberals think” (mostly   
   without anyone quoted or footnoted).   For example, “Liberals .  .  .   
   claim” that free-market economics is fascist (p.  22).  Could we please   
   have a few examples of “liberals” who say this? It is a straw man, as   
   is the vast, ghostly “liberal mind” that sounds like a physical   
   reality: “fascism, shorn of the word, endures in the liberal mind” (p.   
   161).  Does this liberal mind have a telephone number, as Henry   
   Kissinger said famously of the European Union?   
      
   This “liberal mind” is a very big tent.  Goldberg believes that   
   moderate reformists are essentially involved in the same project as   
   radical activists.  Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Al Gore, Hilary   
   Clinton are all devoted in one way or another to the allegedly fascist   
   project of taking action to make a better world.   
      
   Goldberg makes sure we understand that force and violence are integral   
   to this “liberal” project of state action to improve society.   
   Robespierre’s terror begins “liberalism” in this sense, and Goldberg   
   attributes  to it a fanciful fifty thousand deaths (the scholarly   
   consensus is 12,000, which is bad enough).  Later he spends a lot of   
   time on the worst excesses of 1960s radicalism, as if the Weathermen   
   and Hilary Clinton belong together as seekers of a new community.   
      
   Fascism is given an equally broad definition:  it is any use of state   
   power to make the world better and to create a community.  This is not   
   only too vague to mean much, it is simply wrong.  Authentic fascists   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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