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One of the nice side effects of very bad books is that they occasionally give rise to very good reviews. And so it is with Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which has sparked some genuinely interesting ruminations on the nature of historical fascism and the relevancy of its contemporary advocates. John Holbo's post, "Heil Myself!", is actually one of the finest pieces of writing I've ever read in the blogosphere. As Holbo notes, Jonah fears Hillary Clinton's invocation of "the village," but says not a word for the "primordial, vaguely mystical, hierarchical social order" which animates Burkean conservatism (a strain of conservatism I've often heard Goldberg defend). Holbo goes on to muse:
There are two reasons why ad hitlerem arguments tend to be rude and crude. (Everyone knows Godwin’s Law is law. Here’s why, more or less.) First, the Holocaust. It’s pretty obvious how always dragging that in is not necessarily clarifying of every little dispute. Second, a little less obviously, ad hitlerem arguments are invariably arguments by moral analogy. Person A espouses value B. But the Nazis approved B. Not that person A is necessarily a Nazi but there must be something morally perilous about B, if espousing it is consistent with turning all Nazi. The trouble is: with few exceptions, the Nazis had all our values – at least nominally. They approved of life, liberty, justice, happiness, property, motherhood, society, culture, art, science, church, duty, devotion, loyalty, courage, fidelity, prudence, boldness, vision, veneration for tradition, respect for reason. They didn’t reject all that; they perverted it; preached but didn’t practice, or practiced horribly. Which goes to show there is pretty much no value immune from being paid mere lip-service; nominally maintained but substantively subverted.As the Jews say on passover, had Goldberg's book only given us Holbo's post, well, dayenu. But David Neiwert, who actually studies contemporary fascism, also examined Goldberg's effort. "Liberal Fascism," he concludes, "is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits...it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history." But they're necessary, Neiwert argues, because there is a contemporary totalitarian movement, but it doesn't find its home in the post-modern, culturally permissive left. It finds its home among the religious extremists, dogmatic individualists, and cultural traditionalists of the right. There is fascism at home, but Goldberg is not drawing attention to its adherents, much less waging war on them. He's ignoring them, and cheapening the word that describes their vicious ideology by sprinkling it across a lot of blather about Whole Foods and smoking bans.
