Liberal Fascism: From The Minimum Wage To Organic Baby Carrots

The National Review's editor-at-large, Jonah Goldberg, is in the midst of a promotional whirlwind for his satirical masterpiece, 'Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning' (which I discussed previously- here). The National Review even just added a specific Liberal Fascism blog for Mr. Goldberg. Eat your heart out, Madame Coulter!



Salon's Alex Koppleman did an in-depth interview with Goldberg earlier this month about the book. There's some many wonderful nuggets in here, I don't know where to begin. Let's start at the beginning-

What's the book about?

It's a revisionist history.

Well, at least he's honest. Continue, please!

For 60 years most historians have been putting fascism on the right, or conservative, side of the political spectrum. What are you able to see that they weren't?

...To sort of start the story, the reason why we see fascism as a thing of the right is because fascism was originally a form of right-wing socialism. Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist, he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I...

Or maybe it's because he founded the Fascist Party. But again, continue...

Related to your definition, at least as I read the book, was something that's been controversial about it. Especially because of one of the earlier iterations of the subtitle, ["Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods"] there's a perception that your argument comes down to things like both Nazis and liberals being proponents of organic food. Is that how it works? Because the Nazis liked dogs and I like dogs, I'm a Nazi?

No, no. I mean, I try to reject that kind of thing ... I don't believe that liberals are Nazis; I believe that if Nazism came to the United States it is entirely possible that liberals would be at the forefront of the battle to stop it. [BLUEDUCK'S NOTE: Notice how he is unsure if us liberals would oppose Nazism if it came to America... but no, he's not comparing us to them at all!] So would conservatives. I'm not trying to do any argument ad Hitlerum in this book.

But what I am trying to do, at least in the chapter that you're talking about, is show how -- [take] Robert Proctor, who wrote an award-winning, widely esteemed book called "The Nazi War on Cancer." He points out that this organic food movement, the whole-grain bread operation, the war on cancer, the war on smoking, that these things were as fascist as death camps and yellow stars. They were as central to the ideology of Nazism as the extermination of the Jews.

Just sit on that one for a moment. Seriously. He tries to backpedal from this as soon as he said it, saying "that is not the same thing", even though he just implied that it is. This is a truly awful man.

He then goes on some more on the evils of organic food, which he seems to believe some imaginary dictator is forcing on him (paging Dr. Freud, clearly this is a man whose mom forced vegetables on him at supper, and he has issues about it), stating "you have people saying that you can't smoke in your own home or that you can't eat certain foods". He does, however, concede that not all laws and edicts are evil. "The autobahn was fascistic -- that doesn't mean that we should ban highways," he says. Phew!

Want more? No? Well, here it comes anyway-

I mentioned seat-belt laws, which are really aimed at the individual who's supposed to be wearing the seat belt. And on the right, there's the Terri Schiavo debate.

Yeah. Well, but the Terri Schiavo debate is an interesting example. The Nazis were grotesque euthanizers. Long before they went to the Jews they started exterminating the mentally ill, the enfeebled, what they called "useless bread gobblers," people who couldn't contribute to the society. And there are all sorts of criticisms that I think are legitimate that you can aim at pro-lifers, but you can not argue that pro-lifers are somehow Nazi-like in their support of the pro-life cause, because it is exactly contrary to the way the Nazis operated to believe that every life is sacred.

Get that? The people-- those darn activist judges, 85%+ of Americans-- who supported Michael Schiavo's personal decision to remove his wife's feeding tube were grotesque Nazi euthanizers. But he's not calling people Nazis, why do you keep saying that?!??

More-

You write about militarism being central to fascism, and a militaristic strain remaining in today's liberalism -- the war on cancer, the war on drugs, the War on Poverty. [BLUEDUCK'S NOTE: Don't forget The War on Terror] Why include the war on drugs formulation with liberalism? It was Richard Nixon who declared it, then it withered under Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan really brought it back and was the drug warrior.

I think that's probably a fair criticism. But I should start at the beginning ... What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war ... They're not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they're still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it's all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that's what I'm getting at.

Barack Obama's calls for unity are equivalent to the drug war? Brilliant. He continues-

As for the war on drugs part, I think you make a perfectly fine point, except I would argue that Nixon was not a particularly conservative guy. Measured by today's standards and today's issues, Nixon would be in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Yes, but only because soulless goons like you dragged the GOP so far to the right since then.

Finally, he says to the book's critics-

And if you can't get past the cover and the title, then you're not a serious book reader and you're not really a serious person.

Yessir, if you're judging this book by its title, cover, and content, then you are not a serious person (unlike Jonah, who is very, very serious person). You may in fact be a Nazi. Not that he'd ever compare anyone to them. Duh.