Palin Resigns as Governor

[Harlowe]

Oh good lord none of that is the same as modern day liberal American politics. Jesus, quit reaching for the ridiculous to make a point.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

Oh good lord none of that is the same as modern day liberal American politics. Jesus, quit reaching for the ridiculous to make a point.

Did I say it was, or are you just assuming because I said Progressivism?

I was referring to Progressivism as Teddy, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR. I wasn't even trying to pull it into modern day context (which is easy to do, btw).

[Lurker]

Whatever you were trying to do, Partha is correct that the social safety nets of today are much more robust than anything around in the 1930's.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

I was trying to say: Marxism, Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, and Progressivism are all the same thing.

[Lurker]

I was refering to your response to Partha here. Partha was right about the safety net now compared to the 30's. You were wrong.

I was trying to say: Marxism, Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, and Progressivism are all the same thing.

Did Glenn Beck tell you that? Interesting that you got defensive when Harlowe challenged you about this, but you really were trying to say they are all the same. They were never the same, then or now.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

They are all derived of the same ideologies, hence all the same.

Yes, Lurker... Glenn Beck told me that...

Actually I'm reading a book none of you would ever pick up called Liberal Fascism.

[Lurker]

I'd prefer they rebuild and become a stronger (less beholden to the fringe elements) party.

Not looking likely.

[Arkaron]

I am reading Goldberg's work, if only because future students will likely confront me with it.

Here is a fun review of Liberal Fascism from the website American Conservative.

Idegologies are not closed entities which 'give birth' or otherwise 'spawn' others. Clearly they are influenced by the time which fosters them, but progressivism is not the same as Marxism, is not the same as fascism. Goldberg's citation of the National Socialist Party platform doesn't help either, as the party platform does not account for Nazi behavior, or Hitler's dissolving of the SD. If Hitler was so very 'left', it would seem odd to have done this.

[Ddrak]

They are all derived of the same ideologies, hence all the same.

Actually I'm reading a book none of you would ever pick up called Liberal Fascism.

That book is seriously flawed if it thinks all those ideologies are derived from the same place. It's especially telling that it pumps up one of the old strawmen that Hitler's Nazis were somehow "left wing" just because their party had the word "Socialist" in it. You could equally say they were obviously closer to the modern GOP because they were raving authoritarian nationalists. The truth is that they weren't any wing on the modern political spectrum.

Anyone trying to put politics, particularly fascism, on a linear scale is pushing an agenda.

Dd

[Fallakin Kuvari]

I'm likely portraying what the book says very wrong, but whatever. I just like pissing Lurker off.

[Lurker]

You aren't portraying the book incorrectly. It really is that bad. And you aren't pissing me off at all.

I actually find it amusing what passes for conservative thinkers these days (Beck and Goldberg! Ha!!!) and the affect they have on someone with no internal filter or common sense.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

Yea, no internal filter...

There is a very high probability that I am portraying the book incorrectly, sorry to burst your bubble.

I realize I'm not pissing you off, its just fun to try.

[Harlowe]

From the reviews of the book, it doesn't sound like you portrayed it incorrectly at all and really, claiming you were just trying to get on Lurker's nerves is only part of it, you do actually buy into this bullshit and you know it. You were called out on the the book's ridiculous claims and rather than maybe consider that you are pushed a bullshit agenda and filter some of this information with a dose of healthy skepticism, you claim "just trying to annoy someone". Come on Fall, you keep falling for extremist nonsense and you know it.

[Harlowe]

Here is a fun review of Liberal Fascism from the website American Conservative.

I think it's worth quoting the whole thing (even though it's a wall of text here) because sometimes people that really should read it avoid it, so lets make it easy for them...

Not without reason was Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism widely expected to be a bad book. As many predicted from the title, Goldberg does not content himself with rebuking those who call anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. Instead, he invents reasons of his own for calling anyone who disagrees with Jonah Goldberg a fascist. Liberal Fascism confirms anew George Orwell’s remark—cited by Goldberg without irony—that fascism has no meaning today other than “something not desirable.”

Expecting an unkind reception, Goldberg has packed his book with caveats. “I do not believe liberals are evil, villainous or bigoted,” he writes. “I have not written a book about how all liberals are Nazis or fascists. … Liberals today are not responsible for what their forefathers believed.” Nevertheless, liberals must “account” for their history and “live in a house of distinctly fascist architecture.” Liberal economics are a “fascist bargain” and Hillary Clinton’s It takes a Village explicates “the liberal fascist agenda.” Liberals have “totalitarian temptations residing in their hearts.” Patient exegetes can determine for themselves which claims Goldberg is actually making and which he means to take back.

In the meantime, one can make out three reasons for calling liberals the true fascists. First, Goldberg points out that liberalism and fascism have many elements in common. Both fascists and liberals favor a minimum wage, an expansive social safety net, heavy regulation of industry, and redistributive taxation, but stop short of advocating the abolition of private property. Both scorn constitutional limits on government, indulge in economic populism, and see the working classes as their natural constituencies. Both distrust bourgeois values and traditional religion. On these points and others, Goldberg observes, not only do liberalism and fascism agree, but they reject the ideology of the American conservative movement.

That liberalism and fascism happen to overlap is not surprising. One can find just as many similarities between fascism and movement conservatism: both assail communism, exaggerate security threats, rationalize wars of aggression, and uphold nationalism (what sentimentalists call patriotism) and its symbols (flags, founding myths, worship of national heroes). Nothing in logic compels the ideas of liberalism, fascism, or movement conservatism to cohere into a system. On the contrary, creative theorists can mix sundry political ideas as freely as the ingredients of a cocktail. Given the vast range of questions to which competing ideologies purport to provide answers, the real surprise would be if any two ideologies had nothing in common at all.

Goldberg nonetheless sees ideologies as discrete wholes. He makes much of his discovery, for example, that the Nazis supported organic farming and animal rights and even goes so far as to admonish us to “grapple with the fact that we’ve seen this sort of thing before.” Readers can spare themselves the energy. That Nazism and contemporary liberalism both promote healthy living is as meaningless a finding as that bloody marys and martinis may both be made with gin. Repeatedly, Goldberg fails to recognize a reductio ad absurdum. He tells us that Himmler bemoaned the Christian persecution of witches, just like Wiccan feminists do today, that Hitler once described his doctrine as “reality-based,” just like today’s progressives describe theirs, and that Mussolini was quite smart “by the standards of liberal intellectuals today.” In no case does Goldberg uncover anything more ominous than a coincidence.

Often the parallels between liberalism and fascism prove only that they use the rhetorical strategies available to them. John F. Kennedy’s successors did not need obscure socialist theorists to tell them about the power of myth to unite their followers. The concept of a “third way” recurs in any ideology that claims to combine the best of various alternatives. Conspiracy theories run amok not just among Nazis and anti-Bush leftists but across the political spectrum, doubtless because they have more cognitive appeal than the counterintuitive models needed to understand how the modern world actually works. Goldberg’s own tendency to blame the world’s ills on a handful of evil philosophers from Rousseau to Heidegger is itself a kind of conspiracy theory. That does not make Goldberg an unwitting Nazi.

In elaborating liberalism’s similarities to fascism, Goldberg shows a near superstitious belief in the power of taxonomy. He devotes a whole chapter to proving that Nazism was left-wing. Hitler was a revolutionary, Hitler was anti-business, Hitler was a socialist: therefore Hitler was a leftist. Very well, but clearly one can also place Hitler on the Right. An ideology does not come under some kind of curse just because it is put in the same category as Hitler’s. Nor by lumping Hitler in with one’s political opponents can one can somehow burden them with his crimes. Other than scandalizing one’s enemies, little is accomplished by applying the categories “Right” and “Left” to Hitlerism.

Goldberg’s second argument for “liberal fascism,” presented as the official thesis of the book, is that liberalism and fascism share the same intellectual heritage. Like others who look to intellectual history for insight, Goldberg resorts to genealogical metaphor: liberalism is the “daughter” of progressivism, which is the “sister movement of fascism.” Thus liberalism today has an “embarrassing family resemblance” to fascism. But ideas do not simply beget other ideas; still less do they pass on genetic defects. These metaphors obscure the lack of any actual causal link between succeeding ideas.

Progressivism, for example, did not in any meaningful sense lead to liberalism. On the contrary, in 1922, Walter Lippmann, the leading liberal intellectual of the 1920s, wrote Public Opinion, one of the most trenchant critiques of populism and democracy (and, with it, progressivism) ever penned. Lippmann went on to become Mussolini’s most unsparing American critic, precisely because Lippmann saw in fascism the same dangers that he saw in progressivism. If we must describe intellectual history in biological terms, then it would be more accurate to say that liberalism drove progressivism into extinction than that progressivism gave birth to liberalism.

Even if an American species of fascism (i.e., progressivism) did lead to liberalism, as opposed to merely preceding it in time, this still would not mean that liberalism leads to fascism. For one thing, liberals are entitled at least once a century to change their minds. Even if some who we might call liberals once delighted in Woodrow Wilson’s suppression of dissent, fretted over the pollution of America’s genetic stock, or urged Franklin Roosevelt to assume dictatorial powers, today’s liberals may disown these ideas if they like. Associating modern liberals with the dubious judgments of their predecessors is an ad hominem argument, and not even a very beguiling one.

Indeed, liberals plainly have changed their minds when it comes to nearly every damning quotation that Goldberg unearths. This goes not just for the white supremacy of Wilson or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger but for liberals’ preferred political theories as well. For example, borrowing heavily from the enthusiasts at the Claremont Institute, Goldberg thinks it significant that progressive intellectuals scorned individual rights and the Declaration of Independence. Well, liberals these days do not. Goldberg cannot force liberals to stop championing the Declaration right now just so his attacks on liberalism can be vindicated.

At times, Goldberg seems prepared to concede the unimportance of intellectual history. “One objection to all this might be: So what?” he writes. Instead of answering his own question, he moves on to his third, most ambitious reason for calling liberals fascist: namely, that liberalism and fascism share the same inherent tendencies. Whatever the differences between liberalism and fascism, however much liberals are not actually evil, they both seek the same dolorous ends.

Now, it is unclear how exactly liberalism and fascism share a tendency—which Goldberg portentously dubs the “totalitarian temptation”—that, say, Goldberg’s own movement conservatism does not. Still less is it clear how this tendency actually works. It may suit the purposes of ideologues—who need to manufacture bogeymen to keep their followers entertained—to see ideologies as organisms with inherent tendencies to develop in certain ways. Goldberg, by contrast, has spent some time learning the unpredictable history of 20th-century ideologies. Yet he accuses liberals of harboring a hidden, unacknowledged agenda, even as he flies into a state of high dudgeon when they accuse him of the same thing.

The idea that liberals suffer from a “totalitarian temptation” is in any case without merit. To begin with, far from discerning liberalism’s telos, Goldberg does not even describe it correctly. At one point, he writes that liberals cavalierly “dismiss abstract arguments involving universal moral principles.” On the contrary, with the exception of a few eccentrics such as Richard Rorty, liberals do not hesitate to argue from abstract, universal moral principles such as human rights or equality. Celebrity intellectuals such as Martha Nussbaum even invoke Aristotle to prove that liberalism is everywhere and at all times morally correct. Whatever the errors of liberalism, a failure to appreciate abstract moral obligations is surely not among them.

Goldberg falsely saddles liberalism not just with relativism but with all manner of alleged errors having nothing to do with liberalism. At one point, he exhumes the likes of Derrida and Foucault in order to pummel them once more for introducing postmodernism, deconstruction, and other continental horrors into the world. What this tiresome routine has to do with liberalism escapes the reader. From the outset, liberals opposed these fads as fiercely as conservatives. Just ask Ronald Dworkin or Brian Leiter. Goldberg, like many movement conservatives, grossly overestimates the influence of postmodernism, doubtless because avowed nihilists make such good straw men (if not good theater, as Derrida and Foucault well knew).

Not only does Goldberg misunderstand liberalism, but he refuses to see it simply as liberalism. Goldberg’s liberals do not just favor a larger role for government, but worship a Hegelian God-State; they do not just welcome the putative moral advances of the 1960s, but are fascinated by apocalyptic violence; they do not just engage in identity politics, but are ushering in “a Nietzschean world where power decides important questions rather than reason”; they do not just hope to curtail tobacco use and fast foods, but are trying to create a Brave New World. Mere disagreement hypertrophies into a cosmic battle that must decide the fate of the universe.

For all his striving for theoretical sophistication, Goldberg manages to come off as something of a philistine. He treats the great philosophers less as thinkers than as figurines to be arranged on a chessboard, each capable of one or two moves. Thus Herder stands for nationalism, Hegel for the divination of the State, William James for the denial of truth, John Dewey for social engineering, Nietzsche for nihilism, and so forth. (Oddly, Goldberg reserves his most curt disdain for those theorists, such as Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt, who faced the truth the most fearlessly.) These names do not lend Liberal Fascism gravitas so as much overweigh it with an importance it cannot bear.

To be fair, Goldberg did not come up with his ideas about liberalism on his own. He is a quintessential second-generation conservative, a man who grew up in the movement and chose to make his career within it. Nearly all the authors in the movement’s recommended reading list—Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, Robert Nisbett, Allan Bloom—appear in Liberal Fascism’s footnotes. Not surprisingly, the silliest and most extravagant arguments in his book are also the most conventional, at least to anyone familiar with the ideology of movement conservatism.

Indeed, Liberal Fascism reads less like an extended argument than as a catalogue of conservative intellectual clichés, often irrelevant to the supposed point of the book. Here you will read that Rousseau conjured all the evils of the modern world, that the influence of the Frankfurt School is destroying traditional values, that closet Nietzscheans are spreading the disease of moral relativism, and that Deweyan faith in “planners” is corroding our liberties. Intelligent liberals will not cry foul at Liberal Fascism so much as groan. They were not fixed in these formulated phrases before and they will not be so fixed now.

Goldberg does at times display a blush of shame. He qualifies his conclusions to the point of taking them all back, insisting that he does not actually mean to say that liberals are dangerous totalitarians. He grants that some of his points are trivial and others may appear outrageous, so that nothing he says should be taken as both true and interesting at the same time. He claims that movement conservatives also suffer from the totalitarian temptation, so that we are “all” fascists now. Why then link liberalism in particular with fascism? Here Goldberg is surprisingly candid: because, he argues, liberals do it to conservatives all the time.

He’s right, of course. Many liberals do impute nefarious designs to conservatives. With just a modicum of restraint, Goldberg could have written a very good book. “Look,” he could have said, “‘Fascism’ has no meaning today, but, in any case, not only does conservatism owe nothing to fascism, but, historically, conservatives in America generally opposed fascism while liberals and leftists often were sympathetic.” Instead, lacking even the excuse of ignorance, he chose to sling the term “fascism” around as casually as the most vulgar leftist. It does not speak well of Goldberg that, by his own admission, he wrote his first book not to enlighten but to exact revenge.

Liberal Fascism completes Goldberg’s transformation from chipper humorist into humorless ideologue. Perhaps it was hubris that made him do it. The last important book by a conservative was Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987, whose ideas had been in circulation for many years before. Goldberg may have convinced himself that by penning yet another disquisition into the “true nature of liberalism,” he could become the first movement conservative in a generation to write something lasting. In the end, he succeeded only in recycling 60 years worth of conservative movement bromides.

[Lurker]

Here are a couple reviews from the left to go along with the one from the right Arkaron posted.

Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History

Jackboots and Whole Foods

The book has been out a couple years now. It really is as idiotic as Fallakin described.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

I'm not even half way through the book, but he does make an interesting case that so far has some weight.

I will admit I need to do some digging into the names (Huey Long, Father Coughlin) and newspapers/media types he is referencing.

[Harlowe]

That the review posted in it's entirety is from the right, should be telling. Seriously.

What weight? Oh my god, it's utter nonsense.

[Ddrak]

If he's only half way through it, it may still be setting a reasonable groundwork to go completely whacky in the last half. I haven't read it (or skimmed it even) so can't say.

Dd

[Harlowe]

Well based on the comments he's made so far, it doesn't sound like he hasn't reached the ridiculous part.

[Lurker]

This is from page 33, so you can judge for yourselves. Trust me, the stupid starts on page one.

Historians in recent years have revisited the once "settled" question of who supported the Nazis. Ideological biases once required that the "ruling classes" and the "bourgeoisie" be cast as the villains while the lower classes--the "proletariat" and the unemployed--be seen as supporting the communists and/or the liberal Social Democrats. After all, if the left is the voice for the poor, the powerless, and the exploited, it would be terribly inconvenient for those segments of society to support fascists and right-wingers--particularly if Marxist theory requires that the downtrodden be left-wing in their orientation.

That's pretty much gone out the window. While there's a big debate about how much of the working and lower classes supported the Nazis, it is now largely settled that very significant chunks of both constituted the Nazi base. Nazism and Fascism were both popular movements with support from every stratum of society. Meanwhile, the contention that industrialists and other fat cats were pulling Hitler's strings from behind the scenes has also been banished to the province of aging Marxists, nostalgic for paradigms lost. It's true that Hitler eventually received support from German industry, but it came late and gengerally tended to follow his successes rather than fund them. But the notion, grounded in Marxist gospel, that Fascism or Nazism was the fighting arm of capitalist reaction crashed with the Berlin Wall. (Indeed, the very notion that corporations are inherently right-wing is itself an ideological vestige of earlier times, as I discuss in a subsequent chapter on economics.)

In Germany the aristocracy and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis. But when Hitler demonstrated that he wasn't going away, these same elites decided it would be wise to put down some insurance money on the upstarts. This may be reprehensible, but these decisions weren't driven by anything like an ideological alliance between capitalism and Nazism. Corporations in Germany, like their counterparts today, tended to be opportunistic, not ideological.

The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of the later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic--including environmentalism, health food, and exercise--and, most of all, the need to "transcend" notions of class.

For these reasons, Hitler deserves to be placed firmly on the left because first and foremost he was a revolutionary. Broadly speaking, the left is the party of change, the right is the party of the status quo. On this score, Hitler was in no sense, way, shape, or form a man of the right. There are few things he believed more totally than that he was a revolutionary. And his followers agreed. Yet for more than a generation to call Hitler a revolutionary has been a form of heresy, particularly for Marxist and German historians, since for the left revolution is always good--the inevitable forward motion of the Hegelian wheel of history. Even if their bloody tactics are (sometimes) to be lamented, revolutionaries move history forward. (For conservatives, in contrast, revolutions are almost always bad--unless, as in the case of the United States, you are trying to conserve the victories and legacy of a previous revolution.)

Even without correcting errors of fact, his logic is just stunningly bad and childlike.

“Liberals are the voice of the poor and some poor in Germany supported the Nazis so it must be a leftist movement! Cause there are no right wing poor people! Right? And did you know Dachau hosted the world's largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced organic honey? Just like leftists!

Goldberg is as big an ignoramus as Beck.