It’s About Neo-Fascism Not Liberal Fascism
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in Ideas, Liberalism, RepublicansJonah Goldberg, author of the provocative new book Liberal Fascism is upset at how his book has been received. He believes most critics are missing his main point which is:
[T]o the extent that fascism of any kind will come to America, it will do so in the guise of something “progressive.” Indeed, American progressives, particularly before Hitler arrived on the scene in the 1930s, were openly sympathetic to Italian fascism. This isn’t to say they copied it (or the fascism of Soviet Russia), as many claim. But rather that the ideas that gave birth to and fueled American progressivism — philosophical pragmatism, Bismarckian “top-down socialism,” Marxism, eugenics and more — share common intellectual sources and impulses with those that gave us both socialism and fascism.
Mainly Goldberg just seems pissed off that “fascism†has come to be applied nearly exclusively to politicians and ideas on the right/Republican side of the spectrum. He wants to show that the roots of fascism can be traced to leftist ideology. Great. Fine. Except, as Callimachus at Done With Mirrors points out in an excellent essay on the subject, Goldberg’s whole premise rests on a faulty notion of the political spectrum and lacks a workable definition of fascism.
If we strip fascism of historical context and see it as an action rather than an ideology, we could give it a contemporary meaning such as: any political policy which suppresses personal liberty in order to achieve a higher cultural, nationalistic or societal goal. Neither liberalism nor conservativism as practiced in America are inherently suppressive. However, I could easily identify neo-fascist elements on both sides from hate-speech laws to warrantless wiretapping, from gun control to abortion restrictions.
In this definition, fascist does not have to mean evil or even wrong – but it is still worthy of great suspicion. A fascist policy is one that restrains the liberty of the individual. Whether that restraint is acceptable is a case-by-case debate. But the more a nation suppresses individual liberty the more fascist it becomes so that, ultimately, fascism would be nothing more than an intellectually complex justification for authoritarianism.
A truly fascinating book might examine the historical context of fascism and then explore how the neo-fascist elements of our society are affecting our concepts and practice of freedom. Unfortunately, Goldberg seems more inclined to focus exclusively on delegitimizing the left. Still, his book has the potential to spur some great debates.
This is the Reader’s Digest version of the post. To read the whole, longer version, visit:
Maverick Views.
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January 22nd, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Callimachus’ point is well taken, but I think one should be careful. However you want to view the relative position of the ideological tentacles is fine with me in terms of pragmatic political effect. But one thing does lead to another and it is perfectly appropriate for Goldberg to point out that Nazism had a good dose of identity-politics and identity-politics is a good dose of modern liberalism. (Modern liberal identity politics have legalized racial discrimination in the form of affirmative action. Black women have per capita 3X the abortion rate of white women.) The modern liberal state is racists…with Nazi like effect.
More clear – fascists view the state as the primary means/mechanism of societal transformation. To whatever exent this applies to the neo-conservatives –my feelings are hurt. I did find this interesting:
I wonder what neo-fascist elements you find unworthy enough to “delegitimize”? It seems like you might have a particular group in mind.
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Dos, I’m not thinking of any specific group. Mostly I believe accusations of of “fascism” tend to be hyperbolic or grossly inaccurate. That’s the whole idea behind creating the term neo-fascism. Fascism as action not ideology. To that extent, I think both liberals and conservatives have issues where they feel it’s appropriate to use the power of the state (or other controlling institutions be they religious or educational) to supress individual liberty in order to promote some “higher” objective.
While there were certainly liberals who supported fascism and there were elements of liberal thought that played within the WWII-era fascist regimes, I think Goldberg’s point is more to attack leftist ideology than it is to truly illuminate the causes of historical fascism and how fascist acts may continue in the present. He wants to delegitimize the left rather than have a more comprehensive discussion. Or so it seems.
I’m playing with linguistics and theories here. There’s another post trying to get out.
September 8th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Didn’t Henry Ford write the infamous work “The International Jew” that inspired Hitler? Ford was no “leftist”. Mussolini was once a member of the Italian Socialist Party, a standard European Social-Democratic Party not a band of fanatical far left extremists but a center left party. Mussolini broke with this during the war, the way many nationalists broke away from the Socialist movement. In the US the right Socialists broke from the Socialist Party of America to form the “National Party”. As for how fascism came about the centrists had as much to do with Fascism’s rise as anyone else. No dictator can take power without the active support of the political “center”. Without a Ribbentrop or a Fritz Thyssen, or a Henry Ford, fascism would’ve been just another dead political movement of ultra-nationalists.
The rise of fascism cannot be understood without looking at what happened after the end of WWI in Italy and Germany. It grew out of the defeat of a working class political movement that called itself Communist. The Freikorps in Germany became the first cadres of the SA. These were the thugs culled from German armed forces after the war and hand picked for their fanatical nationalistic patriotism that blamed “Jews” for inventing “Communism” to destroy Germany. In the US today people think that there is a “Communist” world government conspiracy to make the United Nations the world government. It only takes a couple hours to read, but Mein Kampf still gives us an understanding of fascism if we aren’t afraid to read the ideas of those who we hate. Mussolini once described fascism as the perfect union of capitalism and the state. Arbeit Macht Frei was placed over the entrances of concentration camps not for the benefit of Jews interned there, but for the first victims of the camps, Communists.
Otto Von Bismarck and the Volkische Partei in the Germany of the 1870s were the forerunners of the modern fascists and they weren’t “leftist” at all. Bismarck created the first Social Security and National Health Insurance programs and initiated the first “anti-socialist” laws, as well as attacking German Catholics. Anti-semitism in Europe arose its ugly head and took on a modern racial, as opposed to religious, character during the Dreyfus Affair, helping give birth to both modern fascism and zionism.
All I can ask people to do is to sweep away the “opinionated” rhetoric regarding historical perceptions and study some actual history. The whole purpose of linking a generically termed “leftism” or “liberalism” as being the origin point of fascism is to let off the political hook the right. If the left created fascism, it also created those who fought it. The truth about the centrist politicians of the world was that they all did business with fascists and had no problem with fascism as long as it didn’t invade their own countries. Stalin only signed a pact with Hitler in hopes that he would attack the west first. The west only attacked Germany when they realized that the Nazis would attack them too.
Fascists did view themselves as the fulfillment of the enlightenment, so in a sense they were connected to political liberalism. One could say they were the bastard children of German social democracy. One could say they were created by a lot of wealthy capitalist bankers and businessmen who saw in a party of kooks and crackpots their salvation. All of these points contain some partial truths perhaps. The real truth is the pragmatic political center went over to the fascists because fascism sounded good to them at the time.