StickWithANose

After Beck and doughy pantload served up their own particular view of ‘Liberal Fascism’ this past Friday night, real historians are [at last] pushing back against this tragic re-writing of history. For those who aren’t politically active, this may all appear to be much ado about nothing, however it is deadly serious. The only real defense that a society has against the madness of historical occurrences such as the rise of fascism in the early 20th century is our memory of it. The reason that doughy pantload and Beck are so dangerous is that they are, in effect, erasing our memory of what fascism was while they are constructing a unified ‘other’ to be defined as dangerous to the polity. In short, they are behaving as fascists in the name of stopping what they claim is a rising tide of fascism.

So, for those of you who have friends and family who send you crazy chain mail garbage about the evil left and its fascistic-commie-socialistic agenda to destroy America, you can pass along the following links:

The Scholarly Flaws of Liberal Fascism

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.

An Academic Book – Not!

Even if it purports to be (i.e.  masquerades as) a thoroughly researched ‘alternative’ or ‘secret’ analysis and history of fascism, Liberal Fascism is to the trained eye a patent exercise in propaganda.  Even ‘polemics’ is a euphemism here, implying a provocation to heated debate rather than the attempt to pass off an Ersatz for the real thing.  An example of such propagandistic ‘substitution’ is the Nazi attempt to popularize an anti-Semitic variant of jazz to counter the appeal to young Germans of the ‘degenerate’ U.S. original, resulting in grotesque and deeply unfunny parodies which fooled no genuine jazz lover anywhere in the Reich!

Goldberg’s book perverts historical and historiographical truth with the scarcely hidden agenda (perhaps the real ‘secret’ alluded to unwittingly in the subtitle) of tarring and feathering with negative, anti-democratic, and inhumane connotations a broad current of reformist policy and social justice campaigns which has for decades been a legitimate current of liberalism within U.S. democracy (and not exclusively the Democratic sector of it).  It does so with the blatant aim of making this current guilty (by association) of some of the most heinous crimes ever committed against humanity.  It is a work of sustained pseudo-historical calumny and defamation disguised under the (constantly slipping) carnival mask of an ‘alternative history’.

Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusion

Yet even The Doctrine of Fascism would not be fascism in Goldberg’s hands.  For fascism is not fascism here.  It is anything Goldberg wishes it to be; notably trends in modern American politics and culture that he clearly dislikes.

The Roots of Liberal Fascism: The Book

Fascism, Nazism, Communism, the Roosevelt administration, and the modern Welfare State share degrees of government intervention in the economy.  They are not equivalent, and there is no evidence that government planning leads to totalitarianism any more than drinking tea leads to opium addiction.  This is a classic logical error.  Arendt detailed how it was the totalitarianism shared by Hitler and Stalin that created similarities in terms of ruthless government repression.

There is a problem, then, for Goldberg to adopt outdated and repudiated ideas from the 1930s and 1940s—skip over 50 years of scholarship—and then helicopter in to claim we in the now live under a regime of “liberal fascism.”  Goldberg is not alone in his beliefs, however, as the Tea Party and town hall movement rhetoric demonstrates…

Jonah Goldberg does not list the John Birch Society as a major source, but he should have, since his book is like a compendium of JBS articles published over the last fifty years.  These ideas are now ubiquitous among right-wing populists in the Tea Party movement.  Am I suggesting that Birchers, the Christian Right, and right-wing libertarians have taken over the Republican Party?  Yes, although old-fashioned conservatives and political pragmatists are putting up a splendid fight for control of the Party.  Do I think right-wing TV, radio, and print media are awash with right-wing conspiracy theories pioneered by the Birchers?  Yes, that’s what my research shows.

A younger generation now carries the torch of anti-collectivism forward.  It was young acolytes of right-wing fanatic Lyndon H.  LaRouche, Jr. who created those Town Hall protest placard images of Obama morphed into a Hitler avatar with a little extra mustache and hair.  The irony here is that LaRouche is an actual neofascist who has spent his career calling everyone he despises a fascist.  LaRouche has more pages of content on Wikipedia than most U.S.  Presidents;  and fanatic fans spent years trying to keep the term “fascist” off of LaRouche’s main entry.