The Return of Jonah Goldberg’s Ass-Backwards “Liberal Fascism”

Oh you are just a delight, Mr. Goldberg

My dad’s earliest political memory is of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Then seven years old, what he remembers is not Joseph Welch telling off Joe McCarthy, but rather his own father, my grandfather, reacting to the spectacle of the Wisconsin demagogue. “Watch, Howie,” said my grandfather — an Austrian Jew, who had escaped Europe by a matter of days — to my dad. “This is what fascism looks like.”

He was wrong, of course. McCarthy may have had a kind of fascist spirit — there’s certainly an argument to be made for that — but he was a democratic politician, and there wasn’t anything he could really do to change that. Still, one only need remember McCarthyism to understand that out there, somewhere out past George Wallace and Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan, things can get weird, and seriously scary.

For decades, this wasn’t especially controversial. William F. Buckley was always proud of his work drumming John Birchers and anti-semites out of polite conservative society, and until quite recently, there was only an occasional peep to be heard on the right in defense of McCarthy. (Nor, of course, was the left too different; liberals purged communists from their ranks, and even went so far as to try to out-hawk the GOP on national security and, ultimately, Vietnam.)

Enter Jonah Goldberg. In Liberal Fascism, published last year and out this month in paperback, Goldberg doesn’t set out to salvage the reputation of the far right — he tries to write it out of existence entirely. (See his interview with Salon last year here.) Fascism, says Goldberg, is a mutant strain of leftism; Woodrow Wilson was a dictator and “war socialist,” the turn-of-the-century progressives were eugenicists, Hitler was a vegetarian, the New Deal was classic corporatist economics, and the New Left radicals were straight-up totalitarian. There is, obviously, a little bit to this. But not too much.

What it all adds up to, as Liberal Fascism would have it, is that visible in modern liberalism is a fascist ancestry, which explains the tendency of the modern left to classify all aspects of modern life as political. Michael Pollan wants you to eat organic? That’s liberal fascism. Sonia Sotomayor thinks ethnicity made a difference to her political and legal development? The Nazis were race-obsessed too. Administration officials want us to trust them with General Motors? Meet Barack Mussolini.

Hence, of course, the infamous discarded subtitle: “The totalitarian temptation, from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.” Everything you know is wrong. The extreme right is, in fact, the left. Stop calling conservatives fascists, because it’s not fair, and besides, liberals are the real fascists. Conservatism cannot be guilty of sharing a political neighborhood with fascism, because by definition to frown on the government in general, and particularly on its meddling in people’s lives.

In a critical review in the New Republic, Michael Tomasky wrote, “However much or little Goldberg knows about fascism, he knows next to nothing about liberalism.” This is altogether too generous. Let’s modify Tomasky’s statement with this: however much he knows about liberalism, fascism, or for that matter,  Maoism or Daoism, Goldberg would appear to know nothing about, of all things, conservatism.

It seems odd, after all, that a relatively orthodox modern American conservative is decrying the meddlesome state. Goldberg’s party, his magazine, and his movement are home to some of the most aggressive invaders of  private life anywhere in the American mainstream. Goldberg’s National Review has been at the forefront of women-in-the-home, gays-in-the-closet, torture-and-wiretap conservatism. This is supposed to be a small government footprint? I wouldn’t call Goldberg or NR anywhere near totalitarian, but some of those innocent Gitmo detainees probably feel like they’ve been stamped on by the boot from 1984. (Come to think of it, some of them probably did get literally stamped on by boots.)

Here’s the crucial problem. It’s clear that Goldberg has something other than the modern Republican Party in mind when he thinks of conservatism. That’s fair, I suppose, but when he lets slip what he is thinking of, the whole argument unravels. In an interview at the National Review Online this week, he absentmindedly uses the word “libertarians” where one imagines he must have meant “conservatives,” describing the unfair recipients of the dreaded “fascist” slur. And indeed, longtime observers of Goldberg will have noted that he’s always been much more enthusiastic about the free-market half of his party’s agenda than he has been about the social conservative half.

It’s the only way the argument in Liberal Fascism can work: Goldberg acts as if another book has already been written, definitively showing that libertarianism is the font of conservative authenticity. Anyone who writes about politics on the Internet has probably had the experience of using the phrase “begs the question” to mean simply “invites the question,” and been corrected by an overzealous commenter. “Begs the question” is a term of art among logicians; an argument begs the question when it begins by assuming its hypothesis is true, and proceeds from there. This is what Goldberg appears to have done. He has started at the end, by assuming that anything other than libertarianism cannot be a phenomenon of the right, and then built an enormous Rube Goldberg (no relation) argument from there, while the rest of us are left to puzzle out what he thinks about a populist like, say, Mike Huckabee.

There’s another, better, more honest book Goldberg could have written. Beginning at the beginning, rather than the conclusion, it would’ve been a welcome entry in the debate on the rudderless GOP’s future. It would’ve declared that the heart and soul of authentic conservatism is libertarianism, that free markets and free people go together, and that the experiment in so-called fusionism between the economic right and the cultural right is a failure. Such a book wouldn’t have been called Liberal Fascism, and it wouldn’t have had a smiley face with a Hitler mustache on the cover.

But a book like that wouldn’t ride the bestseller list for months. It wouldn’t make for embarrassingly fawning coverage for its author in his own magazine, because it would say things that would upset the author’s colleagues. Books like that aren’t very good bludgeons, and make no mistake, a bludgeon is what Goldberg was out to craft.

Goldberg complained in a recent interview that the left claims a monopoly on political virtue and wield “fascist” as a “cudgel” against anyone who disagrees with them. In response, he has claimed a monopoly on political virtue for the right, called the left fascists, and written a field guide for political thuggery. Since Obama has been sworn in, there’s been a noticeable trend of conservatives calling him — you guessed it — not just a socialist, but a fascist. Glenn Beck and the Tea Party-goers throw the term around with little apparent concern for the intellectual origins with which Goldberg acted preoccupied. Goldberg himself recently said on the Glenn Beck Show,

I’m not calling Barack Obama a Hitler and I’m not calling him Nazis and all the rest. But, you know, in fascism, we saw the people’s car. We call it the Volkswagen, where the state said what we’re going to do is we’re going to take over the auto industry, government and business and unions are going to get together and we’re going to create cars to fill a political need rather than a market need and give people these cars.

All of this came to an extremely unpleasant head this week when James Von Brunn walked into the Holocaust Museum in DC and shot a guard. Liberals pointed out that Von Brunn seemed quite close to the much-decried warning issued by the Department of Homeland Security about right-wing violence. Some have also wondered, furthermore, why it was that extreme rightists seem to be active only during Democratic administrations. These were reasonable questions, which a reasonable conservative might answer by saying that one ought to be able to object to Obama administration policies without looking like Timothy McVeigh. Instead, Goldberg, Beck, and others have launched a campaign to establish that Von Brunn was, in fact, a left-fascist just like Obama.

Dave Weigel reports,

“From what I can tell,” explained Jonah Goldberg, the author of the 2008 bestseller “Liberal Fascism” and a writer for National Review, “his hatreds echoed the kind of stuff we hear from the Kos crowd, Chris Matthews, Andrew Sullivan et al.” Goldberg called Von Brunn “objectively crazy,” but argued that “his hatreds would be easier to find at an ANSWER rally than at CPAC.”

Rush Limbaugh echoes him nearly verbatim, saying Von Brunn “has more in common with the marchers and protesters we see at left-wing rallies.”

Red State’s Erick Erickson tweets, “holocaust shooter, like left wing bloggers hates Bush, Israel, the war, Christains, capitalism. the list goes on and on.”

And most astonishingly, but drawing obvious inspiration from Goldberg, Andrew Breitbart practically screams that the neo-Nazi Von Brunn is a multiculturalist lefty:

This guy’s a multiculturalist just like the black studies and the lesbian studies majors on college campuses. This guy was a 9/11 Truther. This guy’s hardly a right-winger. This guy’s political philosophy is more akin to the drivel that you hear on a college campus that delineates us by group — not by individuality. It’s the exact opposite of my political philosophy.

This is what Goldberg has given us. In an effort to shield mainstream conservatism from the unfair “fascist” epithet, he’s taught his own comrades to speak in near-perfect Newspeak. “It’s red meat outside,” Goldberg admitted to Jon Stewart, of his book’s cover image and title. Rather than make an honest argument, he’s stashed a weapon near to hand for Republicans — and at precisely the moment when conservatism needs honest internal arguments. Liberals are going to have to fight this for decades, the way they did being called communists. And now it’s out in paperback.