Liberal Fascism

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com |

Frontpage Interview's guest today is Jonah Goldberg, a columnist for the LA Times as well as a nationally syndicated columnist. He was the founding editor of National Review Online, where he remains an editor-at-large. His new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning became an instant New York Times bestseller and remains at the center of much controversy.

FP: Jonah Goldberg, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Goldberg: Thanks very much for having me.

FP: Why was this book necessary?

Goldberg: We'll, let's see. I needed to write a book. And, to a somewhat lesser degree I needed to write this book. But in a more cosmic sense, I think Liberal Fascism was necessary for several reasons. First, I really do believe that the prevailing liberal elites, the common intellectual culture, the zeitgeist -- however you want to describe the forces of enlightened opinion -- hold the bedrock faith that the left is the sole arbiter of political morality. And, the further away -- rightward -- from them you move, the closer to get to evil. The most common, or at least useful, word for that evil is "fascist." Attacking that enormous presupposition root and branch is an incredibly important task for a host of reasons, though I think many of them are pretty obvious.

For conservatives, the simple effort to correct the historical record is valuable. Lots of historians and intellectuals -- mostly on the right -- have made the argument that fascism was a form of leftism or in the revolutionary tradition. But those who made a sustained case did so for very academic or otherwise small audiences. Those who reached wider audiences -- Paul Johnson, for example -- either never made the sustained argument or hadn't tried in over half a century. I've received scores of emails and letters from conservatives thanking me for finally spelling out what they've long suspected but couldn't articulate. I'm very proud of that.

FP: The reaction to your book in the liberal camp?

Goldberg: While the reaction from liberals has been disappointingly predictable -- or predictably disappointing -- I think there's a necessary lesson for them in my book. Liberal intellectuals are convinced that they are an anointed, even priestly, class. Whenever liberals of yesteryear did anything wrong they are instantly transmogrified into conservatives. Real liberals are definitional incapable of evil action. Michael Tomasky's inane review of my book is a good example. He insists that where liberalism goes off the rails into coercion "real liberals" get off the locomotive and attempt to derail it. This hubris is deadly in all sorts of ways.

It reminds me of George Clooney saying “Yes, I'm a liberal, and I'm sick of it being a bad word. I don't know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues.”

I think this really reflects the way many liberals see the past. The "right side of social issues" is defined as liberal side. Whether or not the actual liberals of the day held that position doesn't matter. So, for example, when reading about eugenics you'll find lots of liberal writers simply identifying the racist/eugenic position as "conservative" or "rightwing" and then identifying the liberals as the ones holding the "good" position. As I show in my book, this is the height of nonsense.

There's an enormous danger not only to liberalism, but to society in general, when the syllogism "good things are liberal and therefore liberals are good" suffuses so many of our debates and assumptions.

FP: Tell us a bit about how fascism is, and has always been, a phenomenon of the Left.

Goldberg: There are at least two ways of tackling this argument. The first is via in intellectual DNA of fascism, the second is -- for want of a better word, the emotional DNA of fascism.

On the intellectual side there's Mussolini's own history. He was a committed socialist. His father - a member of the First International along with Marx and Engels - read him Das Kapital as a bedtime story. Benito Mussolini was named after Benito Juarez (Benito is not an Italian name). Mussolini earned the name “Il Duce” as the leader of the Italian Socialists. His intellectual lodestars were from the left. Georges Sorel was the ideological midwife of both Leninism and Italian Fascism. Countless leading liberal, progressive or just plain leftist intellectuals were pro-fascist in the United States, Italy and Europe. The philosophical ideas that fired the minds of American and British progressives and socialists were also the same ideas that inspired the Italian Fascists and so on. We could do this all day.

But I think the second way of looking at things is the easier and more dispositive. Imagine you're a visitor from Mars and you're given a checklist of characteristics that define leftwing and rightwing regimes. Call it a field guide for ideological zoology. I argue that the Right, in the Anglo-American tradition, is defined by two pillars of thought:

[1] reverence or respect for tradition, religious orthodoxy, the sanctity of the family, old-fashioned morality, etc.

[2] classical liberalism and all that implies: the sovereignty of the individual, free markets, limited government and so on.

By these two criteria, where does our Martian visitor place Fascism and Nazism? Certainly not on the Right.

Now we can have a wonderful discussion about where on the Left Nazism and Italian Fascism belong. There are interesting and important distinctions one can make not only between Fascism and Bolshevism but between Italian Fascism and German Nazism. But in the Big Picture sense of things, I find it impossible to refute that a bunch of revolutionary regimes, at war with tradition, markets, religion, the family, morality and the rest should be placed on the Left side of the ideological spectrum.

FP: The relationship between Nazi Germany and the New Deal?

Goldberg: It's probably better to say “the relationship between Nazi economics and New Deal economics.” Although I suppose that leaves out some of the aesthetic similarities between the New Deal and the early Nazi regime.

But it might be more useful for me to recount my basic argument about progressivism and fascism as it relates to the New Deal. One area where I break with many of the so-called Old Right critics of the New Deal (and to a certain extent with Amity Shlaes, whose new book “The Forgotten Man” I love), is that I don't think the Brain Trusters were trying to copy either the Soviet Union or Fascist Italy.

Lots of conservative critics of the New Deal often point to the pro-Soviet writings from these intellectuals as proof they were trying to do the same thing here. They also note how infested with Red spies and fellow travelers the FDR Administration was.

All of those are fair arguments, but they're ultimately insufficient. Rather, I argue that the Brain Trusters were in effect Wilson retreads eager to recreate the war socialism of WWI. These social planners couldn't forgive the American people for turning their backs on collectivism at the end of the war. So, in the 1920s, these intellectuals - Jane Addams, John Dewey, Rexford Tugwell et al -- looked longingly on the “progress” the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy were making. They felt that those guys were beating us at our own game.

So while there were fascinating similarities between the “three New Deals” - that's Wolfgang Schivelbusch's phrase -- I don't actually argue that the New Dealers were outright copying Mussolini and Hitler, so much as trying to pick up where they'd left off. To the extent that Nazism, Fascism and Bolshevism were inspirations to the New Dealers it was that these other “experiments” proved to the progressives that they'd been on the right track all along.

That said, the similarities between the American, Italian and German New Deals was widely noticed and commented upon by countless observers starting with FDR, Hitler and Mussolini themselves. Mussolini hailed FDR as a fellow fascist dictator. Mussolini reviewed FDR's book, Looking Forward, proclaiming the author a kindred spirit. The way Roosevelt "calls his readers to battle," he wrote, "is reminiscent of the ways and means by which fascism awakened the Italian people." Hitler informed the U.S. ambassador, William Dodd, that New Dealism was also "the quintessence of the German state philosophy."

FP: The links that tie the Left to Mussolini?

Goldberg: Well, it depends which links. I spend a good deal of time demonstrating how leading American liberals responded positively to Mussolini and I can recount all of the editorials from The New Republic and the testimonials from Lincoln Steffens et al if you like.

But I think the more interesting - at least to me 3 months into my book tour - aspect is the emotional kinship I sort of referred to earlier when talking about the visitor from Mars test. The left has this amazing weakness for dictators. I'm sure readers of Frontpage know this pretty well. From Stalin to Castro to Hugo Chavez there's simply something about “men of action” that appeals to the left. I think the most interesting link between the Left and Mussolini is that he marks the beginning of this trend in 20th century America (though progressives were also very keen on Otto Von Bismarck as well).

You know that famous old joke about how Castro got his job through the New York Times? Well, the reporter responsible for lionizing Castro, Herbert Matthews, had done the same thing for Mussolini some three decades earlier.

Mussolini was enormously admired among American progressives precisely because he seemed to represent the coming age of action, experimentation, pragmatism and collectivism. Pretty much everybody back then believed that the age of democracy and classical liberalism was over and the intellectual social planners would have to chart a new path for us. Mussolini and was hugely influenced, directly and indirectly, by American Pragmatism. Both he and FDR often sold their programs as applications of William James' philosophy, particularly the need to run domestic policy as the “moral equivalent of war.” The Italian Fascists wanted to get beyond ideology, they rejected political labels, they fetishized unity as a good unto itself, sought to tear-down the edifice of the “old ways” and they considered action and activism to be the hallmarks of progressive politics.

I think these remain the motivating passions of much of the Left today.

FP: Jonah Goldberg, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Goldberg: Hey my pleasure. I'm here all week. Try the veal.