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. He chooses his scholarly data selectively and sometimes misleadingly in the service of his demonstration.
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 goes about this task with a massive apparatus of scholarly citations and quotations. The bottom line is that Goldberg wants to attach a defaming epithet to liberals and the left, to “put the brown shirt on opponents,” as he accuses the liberals of doing (p. A sensitive analysis of what fascism drew from all quarters of the political spectrum would be a valuable project. 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. That’s too bad, because there really is a subject here. The very mention of a “Third Way” puts one instantly into the fascist box.
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). He doesn’t leave room for such complexities as convergences, middle grounds, or evolution over time.
The reader perceives at once that Goldberg likes to put things into rigid boxes: right and left, conservative and liberal, fascist and non-fascist. It is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left” (p. So Jonah Goldberg pulls out all the stops to show that fascism “is not a phenomenon of the right at all. 392).įeeling oneself a victim is wonderfully liberating. 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. So Jonah Goldberg has decided it is time to turn the tables and show that “the liberal closet has its own skeletons” (p. “The left wields the term fascism like a cudgel” (p. Conservatives “sit dumbfounded by the nastiness of the slander” (p. The liberals started it by “insist that conservatism has connections with fascism” (p. Jonah Goldberg tells us he wrote this book to get even. His latest book is Anatomy of Fascism (Vintage, 2005). Robert Paxton is emeritus professor of history at Columbia University.
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