Liberal Fascism
From Neoredemptive
| Liberal Fascism | |
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Jonah Goldberg
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An "alternate history" of the American political left that emphasizes its similarities and affinities with historic fascism.
Doc's Take
Spotting some parallel themes with The God of Sex -- particularly fascism's need to supplant transcendent religion with a monistic people-state-god that does not tolerate dissent, just as sexual revisionism needs to supplant a Judeo-Christian creator-creation distinction with a pagan monism that erases sexual distinction and will not tolerate restraint. They feel like flip sides of the same coin, but I haven't read enough of either book to say for sure yet.
Goldberg defines fascism thusly:
Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy. (p.23)
This is useful in that it provides several yardsticks against which a proposed policy or form of statecraft can be measured:
- Strong concentration of authority in a "national leader" whose actions are portrayed as "the will of the people" without deference to mechanisms which might more accurately reflect the will of the people (republicanism, democracy)
- Refusal to circumscribe the role of the state ("everything is political"), coupled with expansionist statism ("responsibility for all aspects of life")
- Hostility toward dissident speech and action
- Consistent practice of demagogy/demagoguery
Some things Goldberg calls out that I think are important:
- Totalitarianism does not refer to the total authority of a single dictator (that would be autocracy or authoritarianism), but rather the right of the state to take an interest and intervene in any aspect of the lives of the people. "Every issue is a public issue."
- The "cult of the experts" is a common property of totalitarian regimes -- a few domain experts know better than the unwashed masses, and therefore justify acting against the people's preferences for their own good
- The French Revolution was strongly proto-Fascist (according to this definition).
- The United States was functionally Fascist under Wilson during World War I, and since the New Deal has consistently demonstrated "smiley-face fascist" tendencies under left and right administrations.
- Fascism derives its philosophical legitimacy from Rousseau's notion of the social contract.
- The Roman Catholic Church denounced Italian Fascism as idolatrous -- "Statolatry" -- "an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, a real pagan worship of the State." (p.41)
- The French Revolution's insistence upon its own rationalism did not make it so; most such pleas were really appeals to a new functional deity, the "general will".
- German Workers' National Socialism (Nazism) was a kind of bastard cousin to Italian Fascism, and there was little love between the two
- The Nazi party was fundamentally a reform/revolutionary party (and thus, not "conservative" in the "reactionary" or "status quo" sense) with socialist talking points ("we are supposed to see a party in favor of universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the aged, the expropriation of land without compensation, the nationalization of industry, the abolition of market-based lending--a.k.a. 'interest slavery'--the expansion of health services, and the abolition of child labor as objectively and obviously right-wing" drips like sarcasm from Goldberg's pen - p.69 - one of many such jabs in the book).
- The politics of the "third way" -- "beyond left and right" -- is another common fascist theme.
- The "virtue of war" as a means to compel an otherwise liberal society to comply and organize under the management of "experts".
- 1960s youth culture as the third wave of American fascism:
Historically, fascism is of necessity and by design a form of youth movement, and all youth movements have more than aq whiff of fascism about them. The exaltation of passion over reason, action over deliberation, is a naturally youthful impulse. Treating young people as equals, "privileging" their opinions precisely because they lack experience and knowledge, is an inherently fascist tendency, because at its heart lies the urge to throw off "old ways" and "old dogmas" in favor of what the Nazis called the "idealism of the deed." Youth politics--like populism in general--is the politics of the tantrum and the hissy fit. The indulgence of so-called youth politics is one face of the sort of cowardice and insecurity that leads to the triumph of barbarism.
While there's no disputing that Nazism's success was deeply connected to the privations of the great German Depression, that should not lead one to think that Nazism itself was a product of poverty. Even before World War I, Germany was undergoing a revolution of youth. The war merely accelerated these trends, heightening both idealism and alienation. Klaus Mann, the secular Jew and homosexual novelist, spoke for much of his generation when he wrote in 1927, "We are a generation that is united, so to speak, only by perplexity. As yet, we have no found the foal that might be able to dedicate us to common effort, although we all share the search for such a goal." Mann understated the case. While young Germans were divided about what should replace the old order, they were united by more than mere perplexity. A sort of youthful identity politics had swept through Germany, fired by the notion that the new generation was different and better because uit had been liberated from the politics of corrupt and cowardly old men and was determined to create an "authentic" new order.
German youth culture in the 1920s and early 1930s was ripe with rebelliousness, environmental mysticism, idealism, and no small amount of paganism, expressing attitudes that should be familiar to anyone who lived through the 1960s. "They regarded family life as repressive and insincere," writes one historian. They believe sexuality, in and out of marriage, was "shot through with hypocrisy," writes another. They, too, believed you couldn't trust anyone over thrity and despised the old materialistic order in all its manifestations. To them, "parental religion was largely a sham, politics boastful and trivial, economics unscrupulous and deceitful, education stereotyp4ed and lifeless, art trashy and sentimental, literature spurious and commercialized, drama tawdry and mechanical." Born of the middle class, the youth movement rejected, even loathed, middle-class liberalism. "Their goal," writes John Toland, "was to establish a youth culture for fighting the bourgeois trinity of school, home and church."
(p.165-166, emphasis in original; in this I hear echoes of The God of Sex as well as the emergent church's cult of youth)
- "We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink." (p.172)
- Cult of Action:
Sure, fascism had its theorists, but in the streets, fascists cared about victory more than doctrine. "In a way utterly unlike the classical `isms,'" writes Robert O. Paxton, "the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is `true' insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood." Or as Mussolini himself put it in his "Postulates of the Fascist Program," fascists "do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form." (p.177-178)
- On "multiculturalism" and the left's complicity in rejecting "white logic" in deference to each race having its own immutable epistemology:
Similarly, rejecting the Enlightenment [with its assumption that "reason" is a universal human capability] for "good" reasons is still a rejection of the Enlightenment. And any instrumental or pragmatic gains you get from rejecting the Enlightenment still amount to taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox you're standing on. Without the standards of the Enlightenment, we are in a Nietzschean world where power decides important questions rather than reason. This is exactly how the left appears to want it. (p.282, parenthetical added to clarify context)
- On the common misconception that fascism is big business' use of the state as a pawn to its own interests:
The fascist bargain goes something like this. The state says to the industrialist, "You may stay in business and own your factories. In the spirit of cooperation and unity, we will even guarantee you profits and a lack of serious competition. In exchange, we expect you to agree with--and help implement--our political agenda." The moral and economic content of the agneda depends on the nature of the regime. The left looked at German business's support for the Nazi war machine and leaped to the conclusion that business always supports war. They did the same with American business after World War I, arguing that because arms manufacturers benefited from the war, the armaments industry was therefore responsible for it. It's fine to say that incestuous relationships between corporations and governments are fascistic. The problem comes when you claim that such arrangements are inherently right-wing. If the collusion of big business and government is right-wing, then FDR was a right-winger. If corporatism and propagandistic militarism are fascist, then Woodrow Wilson was a fascist and so were the New Dealers. If you understand the right-wing or conservative position to be that of those who argue for free markets, competition, property rights, and the other political values inscribed in the original intent of the American founding fathers, then big business in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and New Deal America was not right-wing; it was left-wing, and it was fascistic. What's more, it still is. (p.290)
- On the meaning of "civil society":
That is not Hillary's civil society. In a book festooned with encomiums to every imaginable social work interest group in America, Mrs. Clinton mentions "civil society" just once. In a single paragraph she dispatches the concept as basically another way of describing the village. "[C]ivil society," she writes, is just a "term social scientists use to describe the way we work together for common purposes." No, no, no. "Civil society" is the term social scientists use to describe the way various groups, individuals, and families work for their own purposes, the result of which is to make the society healthily democratic. Civil society is the rick ecosystem of independent entities--churches, businesses, volunteer and neighborhood associations, labor unions, and such--that helps regulate life outside of state control. Bowling leagues, thanks to the Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, are the archetypal institution of civil society. Bowling leagues are not mechanisms for working together for "common purposes." The late Seymour Martin Lipset even demonstrated that although many labor unions were corrupt and illiberal, so long as they remained independent of the state--and the state independent of them--they enriched democracy. In Clinton's village, however, there is no public square where freee man and women and their coluntary associations deal with each other on their own terms free from the mommying of the state. There are no private transactions, just a single "spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose" managed by the state. This is the Volksgemeinschaft rebord as a Social Gospel day-care center. (p.339, emphasis in original)
- On Children and Law:
In her 1973 article "Children Under the Law" in Harvard Educational Review, she criticized the "pretense" that "children's issues are somehow beyond politics" and scorned the idea that "families are private, non-political units whose interests subsume those of children." Fast-forward twenty-three years, to her April 24, 1996, address to the United Methodist General Conference: "As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn't really any such thing as someone else's child . . . For that reason, we cannot permit discussions of children and families to be subverted by political or ideological debate." These two quotations sound at odds, but the intent is exactly the same. [...] What clinton means when she says we cannot permit ideologues to "subvert" the discussion on children is that there can be no debate about what to do about children. And what must be done is to break the unchecked tyranny of the private home, as the progressive icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it. (p.347)
- On child care as an industry:
If, as liberals often suggest, the suppression of science for political ends is fascistic, then the campaign to cover up the dark side of child care certainly counts as fascism. For example, in 1991 Dr. Louise Silverstein wrote in American Psychologist that "psychologists must refuse to undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother-care." The traditional conception of motherhood is nothing more than an "idealized myth" concocted by the patriarchy to "glorify motherhood in an attempt to encourage white, middle class women to have more children." (p.352)
- On the "Wrong Turn":
The myth of the Wrong Turn at the heart of liberal fascist ideology doesn't merely generate exotic conspiracy theories and pseudo history, but, as suggested above, it promotes a profound moral relativism. Indeed, feminism's embrace of Wicca is a perfect illustration of the pagan narcissism mentioned earlier. Many Wicca ceremonies conclude with the invocation "Thou Art Goddess." There are no explicit rules in Wicca, merely exhortations to cultivate "the Goddess within," to create the spirituality that best conforms to your already-formed prejudices, desires, and instincts. (p.371)
- On the Family and Tyranny:
The traditional family is the enemy of all political totalitarianisms because it is a bastion of loyalties separate from and prior to the state, which is why progressives are constantly trying to crack its outer shell. (p.377)
- On gay marriage:
My guess is that gay marriage in some form is inevitable, and that may well be for the best. Indeed, the demand for gay marriage is in some respects a hopeful sign. In the 1980s and 1990s gay radicals sounded far more fascistic than the "radicals" of the early twenty-first century who ostensibly want to subject themselves to the iron cage of bourgeois matrimony. The relevant question for conservatives hinges on the sincerity of the left, which is impossible to guage because they have internalized an incremental approach to their Kulturkampf. Is gay marriage an attempt to blend homosexuals into a conservative--and conservatizing--institution? Or is it merely a trophy in their campaign for acceptance? In the 19902 "queer theorists" declared war on marriage as an oppressive force. The ACLU has already taken up polygamy as a civil rights issue. Al and Tipper Gore wrote a book arguing that families should be viewed as any group of individuals who love each other. These are echoes of ideas found in the fascist past, and conservatives can hardly be blamed for distrusting many on the left when they say they just want marriage and nothing more.
Interestingly, Goldberg never makes the connection explicitly that the very notion of state-licensed marriage is another outworking of the progressive eugenic instinct.
Goldberg repeatedly quotes G. K. Chesterton, which of itself endears him to me -- the best scholars and champions of both political and religious liberty are, almost to a man, well-read fans of Chesterton. My own appreciation of Chesterton has been increased significantly by this book -- in understanding the profoundly anti-democratic forces at work in western progressivism in Chesterton's time, it's easier to appreciate what seemed to be his unprompted tangents and excurses in defense of democracy and personal liberty.
