- Goldberg, Jonah.
Liberal Fascism.
New York: Doubleday, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-385-51184-1.
-
This is a book which has been sorely needed for a long, long time,
and the author has done a masterful job of identifying,
disentangling, and dismantling the mountain of
disinformation and obfuscation which has poisoned so much of
the political discourse of the last half century.
As early as 1946, George Orwell observed in his essay
“Politics
and the English Language” that “The word Fascism
has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something
not desirable’”. This situation has only worsened in
the succeeding decades, and finally we have here a book which thoroughly
documents the origins of fascism as a leftist, collectivist
ideology, grounded in Rousseau's (typically mistaken and pernicious)
notion of the “general will”, and the direct descendant of
the God-state first incarnated in the French Revolution and
manifested in the Terror.
I'd have structured this book somewhat differently, but then when
you've spent the last fifteen years not far from the French border,
you may adopt a more top-down rationalist view of things; call it
“geographical hazard”. There is a great deal of
discussion here about the definitions and boundaries among the
categories “progressive”, “fascist”,
“Nazi”, “socialist”, “communist”,
“liberal”, “conservative”,
“reactionary”, “social Darwinist”, and others,
but it seems to me there's a top-level taxonomic divide which sorts
out much of the confusion: collectivism versus individualism.
Collectivists—socialists, communists, fascists—believe
the individual to be subordinate to the state and subject to
its will and collective goals, while individualists believe the
state, to the limited extent it exists, is legitimate only as it
protects the rights of the sovereign citizens who delegate to it
their common defence and provision of public goods.
The whole question of what constitutes conservatism is ill-defined
until we get to the Afterword where, on p. 403, there is a
beautiful definition which would far better have appeared in the
Introduction: that conservatism consists in conserving
what is, and that consequently conservatives in different societies
may have nothing whatsoever in common among what they wish to conserve.
The fact that conservatives in the United States wish to conserve
“private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom
of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves
how they will live within these guidelines” in no way
identifies them with conservatives in other societies bent on
conserving monarchy, a class system, or a discredited collectivist
regime.
Although this is a popular work, the historical scholarship is
thorough and impressive: there are 54 pages of endnotes and an
excellent index. Readers accustomed to the author's flamboyant
humorous style from his writings on
National Review Online
will find this a much more subdued read, appropriate to the
serious subject matter.
Perhaps the most important message of this book is that, while
collectivists hurl imprecations of “fascist” or
“Nazi” at defenders of individual liberty, it is the
latter who have carefully examined the pedigree of their beliefs and
renounced those tainted by racism, authoritarianism, or other nostrums
accepted uncritically in the past. Meanwhile, the self-described
progressives (well, yes, but progress toward what?) have yet
to subject their own intellectual heritage to a similar scrutiny. If
and when they do so, they'll discover that both Mussolini's Fascist
and Hitler's Nazi parties were considered movements of the left by
almost all of their contemporaries before Stalin deemed them
“right wing”. (But then Stalin called everybody who
opposed him “right wing”, even Trotsky.) Woodrow Wilson's
World War I socialism was, in many ways, the prototype of fascist
governance and a major inspiration of the New Deal and Great Society.
Admiration for Mussolini in the United States was widespread, and H. G.
Wells, the socialist's socialist and one of the most influential
figures in collectivist politics in the first half of the twentieth
century said in a speech at Oxford in 1932, “I am asking for a
Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”
If you're interested in understanding the back-story of the
words and concepts in the contemporary political discourse
which are hurled back and forth without any of their historical
context, this is a book you should read. Fortunately, lots of
people seem to be doing so: it's been in the top ten on
Amazon.com for the last week. My only quibble may actually be
a contributor to its success: there are many references to
current events, in particular the 2008 electoral campaign for the
U.S. presidency; these will cause the book to be dated when
the page is turned on these ephemeral events, and it shouldn't
be—the historical message is essential to anybody who
wishes to decode the language and subtexts of today's politics,
and this book should be read by those who've long forgotten
the runners-up and issues of the moment.
A podcast interview
with the author is available.
January 2008 