Book review: Does liberalism equal fascism?
Conservatives are used to leftists calling them fascists. In his new book, Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg reveals that the true fascists in our midst just might be on the left side of the political spectrum. In an interview with Western Standard radio, Goldberg discussed his book and also delved more deeply into matters of political philosophy. This review is based not only on Liberal Fascism, but also on the answers its author gave in response to some concerns the interviewers had with his book.
Terrence Watson - March 5, 2008
As he reiterated in the radio interview, Goldberg is not calling all liberals--and certainly not all modern liberals--Nazis. However, his book does describe many of the ideas American liberals favour--from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson--as examples of fascism. Fascism with a friendly face, perhaps, but as authentically fascist (in their own way) as Adolph Hitler, who according to Goldberg should be considered a “man of the left.”
Prior to the interview, Political Animals wondered if Goldberg’s book was founded on a basic mistake. As I asked him, isn’t it the case that there will always be a family resemblance between different political ideologies, since each is devoted to answering a similar set of human problems? For example, modern liberal societies (Canada), social democracies (Sweden), theocracies (as in Iran or Saudi Arabia), and avowedly fascist regimes (Nazi Germany) all share a number of characteristics. You will find, for example, that governments of each kind will collect taxes, build roads, fund public schools, impose some kind of mandatory social security scheme on their citizens, subsidize certain businesses, and keep a standing army. But only in the latter two societies are gays persecuted and killed for doing nothing more than engaging in consensual sexual activity.
In the interview, Goldberg agreed that Canada was an example of liberal fascism--the fascism that comes with a friendly face. Presumably, he would say that Iran and Nazi Germany are just examples of fascism without the friendly face; call it “fascism with a mean face,” if you like. Goldberg would call both Canada and Nazi Germany fascist because both do all the things I listed in the previous paragraph, even though one is friendly and the other is mean. But nastiness (to some scapegoat minority, whether gays or Jews) is arguably constitutive of fascism. You can’t have “fascism with a smiley face” any more than you can have something like married bachelorhood.
Even if what I’ve called nastiness is not constitutive of fascism, it seems like a mistake to try to describe liberalism as a kind of fascism on the basis of a comparison between Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village and the policies of the German Nazi Party. Draw up two lists and you might find a 90 per cent match between them. But this doesn’t make Clinton’s ideology an example of fascism any more than the 97 per cent match between Warren Kinsella’s DNA and the DNA of a chimp makes Kinsella a chimp. Some differences make all the difference.
Nor does the fact that Kinsella and the chimp have a common ancestor prove that Kinsella is a chimp. We need more than this. We need to know if Kinsella and the chimp share any essential similarities. It is unclear that Goldberg’s book gives us this kind of comparison. Fascists believe state action is justified in order to achieve the common good, he claims, just as liberals do. But almost every political ideology (except, perhaps, some variants of libertarianism) thinks that the function of the state is to achieve some sort of common good. Of course, ideologies differ about what the common good amounts to, but you’ll never find an ideologue claiming that the state ought to do whatever it wants, common good be damned.
The interview did reveal a similarity between modern liberalism, modern conservatism, and fascism. This particular similarity is important because it seems to get at the essence of each of these movements--not only that, but it does so in a way that suggests a similar, fundamental problem with each.
Borrowing a slogan from the late William F. Buckley, first coined by Eric Voegelin, what these three modern movements have in common is that each attempts to “immanentize the eschaton.” Or, in common parlance, modern conservatism, liberalism, and fascism each attempt to bring about a heaven here on Earth. A different heaven in each case, for sure, but each its own picture of a timeless, unquestionable (and ultimately inevitable) state of perfection.
Those who stand in the way of the end of history should be marginalized and demolished. In Canada, this impulse to immanentize the eschaton takes the form of hate speech laws that aim to completely eliminate racists from society but are now being used to stifle legitimate debate about, for instance, radical Islam. In the United States, the drive for perfection has manifested itself in a costly and socially devastating “war on drugs” that has put millions of harmless addicts in prison.
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