Liberal Fascism: A (Really Long) Review

Yesterday I completed Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. This book is something of a sensation, rising to #1 on Amazon (as of this writing it is #5) and spawning considerable discussion.  You can follow some of that discussion on Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog.  Goldberg, a writer for National Review and a syndicated columnist, has written a fine work of intellectual history, skillfully tracing the many connections between Fascist and National Socialist thought and American Progressivism.  As the modern "liberal" is the inheritor of the Progressive mindset (indeed, the term "progressive" is coming back into vogue), we should be aware of these connections.  In short, I can recommend the book.  Goldberg's marshaling of evidence to show the common intellectual parentage of the European movements and Progressivism is impressive.  On the other hand, as Goldberg's history moves toward the present his book becomes more confused and to that extent less successful. 

Goldberg has gone to great pains to explain the potentially inflammatory title of this work.  The title comes not from Goldberg's desire to throw bombs at the left but instead from the mouth of leading Western socialist H.G. Wells, who once called for a "liberal fascism."  This was before WWII and the horrors of German style fascism would be made known to the world.  Goldberg also continuously makes the distinction between how fascistic ideas have taken hold in a relatively decent America and how they turned violent in a Europe with a very different (namely less democratic) history.  For Goldberg the term "fascism" is a descriptive term, not necessarily one of opprobrium.  Because of its historical connection to the Holocaust, fascism is certainly now a dirty word, but Goldberg wants to show that one can tease out a fascistic policy program separate from racial politics (this is especially true in Italy, the birthplace of the Fascist party, and very much less true of the Nazis, for whom anti-Semitism was always part of their program).  That program was popular among Progressives in America. As Goldberg effectively demonstrates, there was "something in the air" in the early 20th Century creating conditions where this kind of politics could take hold on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit in different forms due to circumstances. 

The book is most successful in laying out the historical antecedents of fascist thought.  Without going into too much detail (this post will be long enough), Goldberg lays out six basic characteristics of European fascism.  First, it was socialist and thus antagonistic towards Bolshevism only as a rival for the working class, not as a matter of economics.  As many have pointed out, the Nazi party was properly named the National Socialist party. The fight with the Communists was partially over turf and partially over the nature of socialism (should it be a nationalist phenomenon or a internationalist phenomenon).  Second, fascists, as part of their socialism, attacked capitalism as exploitive of the working class and fed the resentments of the working classes.  Next, there was a glorification and romanticizing of power, especially that of the state and the great leaders who ran the state.  Fourth, the fascists tended to glorify the idea of war as an organizing principle. In war a people are united and willing to accept state intervention for the good of the cause.  Those who oppose the cause are easily portrayed as traitors.  Fifth, fascists saw conventional morality as typified by family and religion (especially Christianity) and a threat to their cause. In an attempt to build the new Fascist Man, conventions must be overthrown and the family and church subsumed under the arm of the state.  Finally, fascists portrayed themselves as pragmatists who were above ideology and partisan differences.  Especially economically they were willing to do "what works."  In practice that meant applying the rule of experimentation to economic problems.  Administrators schooled in the scientific method should be put in charge of society to create programs "that work." 

Those familiar with American intellectual history will already recognize many of these characteristics in the American Progressive movement of the early 20th Century.  Many Progressives, Woodrow Wilson is a primary example, were schooled in universities highly influenced by the same German philosophy that laid the groundwork for European fascism.  Progressives tended to reject the limited government/natural rights founding of America as too constraining. Herbert Croly denounced the tyranny of "the Word," by which he meant constitutionalism.  Woodrow Wilson and others attacked the notion of static "Newtonian" approach to society in favor of a "Darwinian" view of society as an organic being, one that cannot be constrained by past thought or past generations.  As Goldberg ably discusses, Progressives had a zeal for experimentation and the science of administration (indeed, Wilson is one of the founders of the field of public administration).  As Goldberg puts it at one point, "Free societies are disorganized."  This frustrated the Progressives who saw progress in scientific planning, not random choice.  In addition, Goldberg discusses the Progressive distrust of traditional religion and family as enemies of progress and "enlightened administration."  One of the highlights of the book is the treatment of the Progressive glee at the American entry into WWI, allowing them to truly organize the nation on a wartime basis. As Goldberg later discusses, FDR would eventually do the name thing during the Depression, using the New Deal to fight the moral equivalent of war.  Both Wilson and Roosevelt were more than willing to use the power of the state to propagandize in favor of their policies and to label as traitors those who did not accept their policy proposals. For example FDR's National Recovery Administration threatened jail time for those who refused to put up the famous NRA blue eagle.  In a separate chapter Goldberg demonstrates the Progressive fondness for eugenics, perhaps summed up by Progressive icon Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who as a Supreme Court justice favored forcible sterilization of the mentally retarded, stating in the particular case, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."  Or as H.G. Wells wrote in an introduction to a book by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, "We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us (272)." 

As this post in already enormous, I will briefly sum up the rest of the book.  Goldberg takes these  Progressive  ideas and traces them to contemporary liberalism.  This is of limited success.  The Progressive (and fascistic) tendencies are most clear on the radical left of the 60s, with its obsession with violence, revolution, and power all in the name of reworking civilization on enlightened grounds.  In the latter half of the book Goldberg does tend to see fascism everywhere.  For example, he portrays the Kennedy administration as a quasi-fascistic youth cult.  Well, Kennedy was young and he would have been politically foolish not to make the best of that fact. Most astoundingly, Goldberg, a card-carrying conservative, sometimes strays precariously close to arguing that the Cold War was a false crisis drummed up to justify government power.  For example, he argues that Kennedy's promotion of putting a man on the moon was "sold to the public as a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was overtaking America in science."   Well, weren't they?  Was it not important for American to compete with the Soviets in science and in space?  Usually when a politician yells "crisis!" he is crying wolf; but sometimes there is actually a wolf (or in this case a bear). 

In his take on contemporary liberalism Goldberg is a bit too quick to find a liberal fascist under every bed (or in every do-gooder organization).  Goldberg is guilty at times of reductio ad Hitlerium i.e., that an idea is discredited simply because Hitler held to it (Hitler liked dogs, therefore people who like dogs, like Jonah Goldberg, are Nazis).  Again, sometimes when people are frustrated and critique modern consumerist bourgeois/middle class life they are fascists.  Sometimes they are just frustrated with modern consumerist bourgeois/middle class life.  Indeed, Goldberg favorably cites Christopher Lasch's harsh critique of Hillary Clinton's desire to use the state to take the place of parents.   Well, if there was ever a guy who was frustrated with modern consumerist bourgeois/middle class life, it was Christopher Lasch! In the same vein, Goldberg writes as if every film that expresses unease with the modern condition is guilty of incipient fascism.  File this under "trying to prove too much." In a final criticism, Goldberg sometimes cannot decide whether liberal fascists are committed to modern scientific government running our lives or to an anti-scientific critique of reason.  He needs to explain this seeming contradiction. 

Goldberg is on firmer ground when he discusses the ways modern Progressives use "the children" as the equivalent of war, an organizing principle to which no one can object and which justifies any state intervention into our lives. This is best seen in his review of Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village (and lots and lots of government).  Clinton, Goldberg points out, begins with a distrust of parents and a reciprocal trust in government experts who, armed with credentials and scientific training, are much better able to raise your children than you poor slobs armed with common sense (read: unenlightened prejudice) as your only parenting tool. Goldberg also is effective in disabusing us of the myth that corporations are conservative.  First, when is the last time you heard of a corporation giving large sums to pro-life or pro-traditional marriage groups?  But corporate funding of socially progressive causes (such as "family planning") is common. Second, the early Progressives actually liked corporations.  These Progressives had drunk deeply from the draught of Darwinism (or a form of).  They believed in survival of the fittest.  If large national corporations ate up smaller companies, than that was the way of nature.  The object, then, was to use the state and its scientific administrators to manage these corporations for the public good.  Goldberg argues that both sides are happy.  The Progressives are happy because they get their enlightened administration, and the corporations are happy because the statist regulation will drive away any potential competition as the "little guy" cannot afford the massive entry costs created by said regulation.  This is known as corporatism or corporate socialism, and the "fat cats" love it. 

Let me close what might be the longest post in SDP history with a suggestion.  Continuously through Liberal Fascism Jonah Goldberg speaks of the  statist/collectivist agenda of the liberals. Liberals want to regulate the things we buy, the places we work, how parents parent, the things we eat, and, through their commitment to "diversity," even the thoughts we think. Liberals reject the limited government and natural rights philosophy of our founding. But "liberalism" is the politics of "liberty."  Liberalism, or as Goldberg likes to call it, "classical liberalism," is committed to limited government, constitutionalism, natural rights, property rights, free exchange, and assumes a kind of moderate, virtuous citizenry capable of self-denial. If this is liberal, then modern liberals aren't liberals.  They reject these core ideas or, as with the "living Constitution," reinterpret them in ways that indicate a clear break from the founders' purposes.  Why else did FDR think we needed a Second Bill of Rights?  Was the first one insufficient?   A theme runs through Progressive thought: the ideas of the American founding are too static and too limiting for the pragmatic, scientific government we now know is necessary for progress.   The real liberals are what we now call "conservatives."  This makes Goldberg's book confusing at times as he talks about "liberals" like Hillary Clinton who want (as Clinton has advocated) large television screens placed in public areas that constantly play videos showing us the latest in government approved scientific parenting techniques.  This is liberty?  The libertarian economist Milton Friedman never stopped calling himself a liberal.  Perhaps modern conservatives can take a lesson from him.  They should call themselves what they are, liberals, and call the left what they are, Progressives.  That's truth in labeling.

Update (if you actually make it this far): We get a mention at National Review (what, no link!).  Contrary to Jonah's interpretation of this review, I give the first half of Liberal Fascism a big thumbs up and thumb 3/4ths of the way up for the book's second half.  So for those wondering about the position of my thumb, that's more positive than sideways for the second half of the book.