books

Early thoughts on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism

By J. Wesley ⋅ May 15, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

When I first saw the cover for Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, I was amused, but also worried that it would be another entertaining bit of fluff like Glenn Beck’s Inconvenient Book. It is nothing of the sort. In all honesty, I haven’t enjoyed a book this much since Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and that was about fifteen years ago. Liberal Fascism is perfectly pitched to the middlebrow — neither smashmouth nor turgidly academic.

I’ll delve into the meat of the book in future posts, but for today I’ll share Goldberg’s working definition of fascism:

“Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action of the state is justified to achieve the common good.It takes responsibility for every aspect of our life, including health and well-being; and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.” p.23 (emphasis mine.)

My graduate studies have focused primarily on World War II and the interaction of fascism, Communism, Nazism and Ukrainian Nationalism. I’ve also spent some time on the Progressive Era. Goldberg has done a really solid job of interacting with the contemporary scholarship on the subject. For one thing, his work is transnational, which is all the rage these days. In the case of Liberal Fascism, transnational history isn’t just a trendy methodology, but an essential means of understanding the relationship between fascism and today’s liberalism. Both movements originated in the same historical period and grew from common intellectual roots — the socialist and “Progressive” movements of Europe and the United States.

What makes Goldberg’s treatment of the Progressive Era so compelling to me is that even many historians on the Left are criticizing the Progressive movement for its racism, nationalism, militarism, paternalism, and so forth. Woodrow Wilson comes in for strong criticism these days for his rather totalitarian actions during WWI. Goldberg simply takes this analysis a step further, drawing very credible lines between Progressivism in the U.S. and Fascism in Italy. This rings true to me.

As I read further, I’ll definitely be writing more. Be sure to check in!