Sunday, March 23, 2008

An utterly ridiculous definition of fascism

The chief "rival identity", of course, is that of conservatism, and Goldberg, a noisy conservative pundit, has as his stated agenda the need "to dismantle the granite-like assumption in our political culture that American conservatism is an offshoot or cousin of fascism." He makes it abundantly clear that when some dopey lefty calls George W. Bush (or, for that matter, Jonah Goldberg) a fascist it really grates his cheese, and so he has set out to even the libellous score. He has taken it upon himself to make the case that fascism really has its antecedents on the left - that the American Progressive movement "was a sister movement of fascism." He shows that many American progressives in the 1920s, and even into the 1930s, expressed admiration for aspects of Italian or German society - Lincoln Steffens, or Rexford G Tugwell. (He also makes it clear with 32 citations of the New Republic that he considers it something like the historic house organ of liberal fascism.)

Goldberg proceeds to trace the development of liberal fascism from Woodrow Wilson - Goldberg states outright (he likes outing thoughts in their wildest form) that Wilson was "the twentieth century's first fascist dictator" - to Roosevelt to Kennedy to Johnson to SDS to Hollywood, culminating, natch, in Hillary Clinton's secret plan (very secret, for most of us) to have children removed from their families and reared by the state. Whatever their intentions, each and every one of the aforementioned liberal figures is nothing more than a victim of "the totalitarian temptation: the belief that there is a priesthood of experts capable of redesigning society in a 'progressive' manner".

Goldberg clearly means to shock us with these truffles that he has dug out of the woeful soil of the twentieth century. But very little of the story he tells is news to students of history. We had already heard that Steffens said of the Soviet Union, "I have been over into the future, and it works," so it is not exactly a shock to read that he had kind words for a similarly regimented society. We similarly understand that the Wilson administration did indeed shut down The Masses and fan racism and xenophobia and round up radicals, and no liberal today thinks of these moves as things to be proud of or to duplicate. We are also acutely aware that some New Dealers were fans of the totalitarian Soviet Union. Roosevelt's second vice-president was one such, and he kicked Henry Wallace off the ticket in 1944 for just that reason. Since Roosevelt did not manage to keep Wallace's expulsion out of the papers, it is not exactly a secret.

We have also recognised, since at least the 1950s and in some prescient instances even earlier, that certain consanguinities between the far left and the far right did exist in those days, and that the Nazi programme was in some respects a left-wing programme, appealing on a class basis - and, always, a racial basis - to German workers and the petit bourgeoisie. It was not called National Socialism for nothing. Goldberg goes into great detail on all this in his chapter titled - are you sitting down? - "Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left".

~ from Jackboots and Whole Foods ~

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