LETTER FROM AMERICA
Are American liberals "nice fascists"?
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NEW YORK: If you were trying to come up with the title of a book designed to get it onto The New York Times best-seller list, one title you would assuredly not choose would be "Liberal Fascism" - too serious, academic in tone, heavy.
And yet, this past Sunday, there it was: "Liberal Fascism" by the conservative columnist and blogger Jonah Goldberg - the subtitle is "The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning" - appearing in the No. 10 spot in its first week on the list.
Why?
In fact, to the dismay of liberals, there's often a deeply conservative book of one sort or another that sails onto the best-seller list, though these are usually of the populist rant variety, written by radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh or television fixtures like Ann Coulter, their books less a mark of literary merit than of the fact that their authors are celebrities.
Goldberg is no celebrity. He's a serious and thoughtful writer of opinion pieces for the Los Angeles Times and National Review Online, neither of which gives him anything like the pre-existing audience enjoyed by the likes of Limbaugh or Coulter. His book didn't get its commercial heft from the fame of its author.
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Goldberg's book does seem to have touched off a certain sense of vindication on the right of the spectrum, a liberation from a long-term liberal practice - exercised via their alleged domination of the mainstream media - of discrediting conservative beliefs by labeling them fascist.
And Goldberg doesn't merely make the case that the label is unfair. His turning of the tables is more thorough and, to the conservatives who perceive themselves as unfairly labeled, more gratifying than that. His argument is that, actually, fascism is not a right-wing or conservative idea at all. It's always been a leftist notion, and even today, a lot of liberal beliefs have, unbeknownst to liberals themselves, fascist origins.
"Ever since I joined the public conversation as a conservative writer, I've been called a fascist and a Nazi by smug, liberal know-nothings, sublimely confident of the truth of their ill-informed prejudices," Goldberg writes.
"What I'm mainly trying to do," he says, "is to dismantle the granitelike assumption in our political culture that American conservatism is an offshoot or cousin of fascism."
"Liberal Fascism" belongs to a category of books appearing for more than a decade that have attempted to expose post-Vietnam War liberalism, otherwise known as political correctness, as not truly liberal - because of its tendencies to demand total obedience to whatever its cause of the moment is and to portray dissenters as not just wrong but immoral. (I published such a book in 1993.)
But Goldberg's book takes the argument into new territory, reinterpreting large swaths of American history in order to support his point that the left has always been fascistic and the right, well, genuinely liberal - in the sense that true conservatives respect limits on governing power, encourage both individual choice and responsibility and disavow social engineering.
His main villain among those he calls American fascists is Woodrow Wilson, who, he argues, turned the United States during World War I into "a fascist country, albeit temporarily."
Before anybody had heard of Mussolini (who in his early years in power was widely admired by American progressives), Wilson established the first propaganda ministry, shut newspapers and magazines, encouraged vigilantes and formed dozens of boards to subordinate every aspect of life to the great cause of winning the war to end all wars.
That's a strong argument, because, after all, who would think of the moralistic and well-intentioned Wilson, whose decision to enter World War I was certainly a defensible one, a fascist? But Goldberg's point isn't to liken Wilson to Hitler. Wilson, he understands perfectly well, was entirely different than Hitler, whom he would have despised.
Goldberg's point is rather that a lot of what the American liberal culture takes as good - and he lists a lot of things, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps to Hillary Rodham Clinton's ideas about it taking a village to raise a child - bears a similarity to some of the intellectual underpinnings of fascism.
But is it true, and if it is true, does it matter? Goldberg makes a convincing case that there was indeed a lot in the early, original version of fascism, as practiced by Mussolini in the 16 years before he was more or less taken over by the Nazis, that appealed to American progressives, who saw it as an effective way to mobilize people and get things done.
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