A Book Review of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism

In the final analysis, Jonah Goldberg’s epic opus Liberal Fascism deserves little of the firestorm of controversy that erupted.  As it turns out, most critics appear to have reacted to the title alone, eschewing the hard work of actually reading the book itself.  If they had read it, they would have found little of the hard-right ranting that the title appears to presage.  Instead, Liberal Fascism is a lengthy and often wordy professorial exploration of numerous complex and interwoven themes of communalism that Goldberg attempts to lump together into a loose conglomeration called fascism.

Goldberg’s efforts succeed in critiquing and tearing down the hasty use by many liberals of the asbolutely pejorative “fascist” label to describe pretty much everything they disagree with.  “Fascism”, Goldberg correctly notes, has become a rhetorical cudgel wielded almost exclusively by the left against the right with the purpose of evading any duty to actually respond to an argument.

The irony of such abuse is the heart of Goldberg’s critique.  In detailed example after detailed example from the historical archives of fascist speeches and writings, Goldberg documents the close association between the fascist theories of the 1930s and the socialist and progressive projects of the left.   While Goldberg repeatedly and explicitly takes pains to emphasize that modern liberals are not Nazis (in fact, Goldberg’s frequent return to this disavowal renders failure to recognize this element is a red flag that the critic hasn’t actually read Goldberg’s book), he labors successfully to highlight their ignorance of their own intellectual history.  Conservatives, he notes, are forced in public discourse to repeatedly acknowledge their own flawed intellectual ancestors and explain how conservative thought has evolved to correct or at least adjust to these errors.  Liberals, however, often tend to exempt themselves from any reflection or reconsideration of their roots, instead simply assigning the failings of their socialist and fascist preogenitors to conservatives or, alternatively, simply to the American project as a whole.

While succeeding in showing a historical association with fascist thought underpinning many liberal projects, Goldberg fails in an underlying duty to explain clearly what fascism intrinsically is.  While he points out the important fact that fascism is conceptually distinct from the racist and genocidal mindset of what could instead be called Hitlerism or Nazism, Goldberg throws a wide net in lumping together the disparate themes he finds within the fascist tradition.  Indeed, Goldberg seems to conflate fascism with anything that could be broadly described as “communalism”, casting conservativism as intrinsically individual.  When all communal projects are “fascist”, it becomes too easy to find associations between fascism and liberalism.  Everything from government intervention into the economy to Robert Putnam’s community bowling leagues can then be deployed as evidence of latent fascism and those who seek to encourage such things as indebted to a morally suspect political philosophy.  Goldberg even goes so far as to expand fascism to encompass pragmatism, which renders political centrists supposedly indebted to the fascist tradition as well.

By including too much within the “fascist” tradition, Goldberg inadvertently embraces the very same pejorative rhetorical twist for which he criticizes liberals — the use of “fascism” to delegitimize without actually answering an argument.  For example, while Goldberg successfully notes that corporatism — the seperation of society into functional/sectoral components used by central planners without regard for individual preferences — derives from strong roots in fascist thinking, he does not explain why this in and of itself is always a bad thing.  Instead, it is simply assumed that anything linked to “fascism” and therefore opposed to individualism is contrary to liberty.

Goldberg’s work thus provides a useful contribution to the study of ideologies, in particular the roots of much of leftist thought that have been obscured beneath self-serving and sometimes even dishonest characterizations from the liberals and leftists who otherwise dominate both academic and popular culture discussions.  Because of its well-informed challenge to conventional partisan memes, Liberal Fascism would even serve well in a seminar study on political ideology.  But the book must be read with a critical eye, noting at points its own performance of that which it critiques.

See also the Liberal Fascism blog on National Review Online.