Last year I reviewed Jonah Goldberg’s fine best-selling book Liberal Fascism.

Here and here. Two of my better efforts (I’d say), so have a look if you have not rummaged that far back in the blog.

Jonah has had his own blog talking about the book and its many ideas. But he is now closing that chapter.

He gives some pertinent thoughts on all the accusations being bandied about by Republicans and Democrats alike that their opponents are using ‘Hitler-like’ tactics:

… the obvious and pressing threat is not from a Hitlerite-Orwellian dictatorship but from a Huxleyan namby-pamby mommy state. That sort of system could seduce Americans into becoming chestless subjects of the State in exchange for bottomless self-gratification and liberation from the necessity of adult decision-making.

Yes, there’s a danger that such a society could then be susceptible to some darker vision that lionizes the lost manhood of a half-forgotten past. But, by that point, this would be America in name only, if even that ("U.N. District 12" has a nice ring to it).

And this is on the button:

What the fascists were or are primarily known for is not necessarily dispositive to the question of what they actually were. Speaking for myself, the relevance of the generous social welfare programs and anti-smoking programs is to point out that the Nazis weren’t exactly what we’ve been told they were. Sure, they were violent and hysterically devoted to an authoritarian leader, but they were also more than that and their popularity with the German people cannot be easily chalked up to those features either.

The Nazis did not rise to power on the promise of bringing war and violence. They just didn’t. They rose to power by promising national restoration, peace, pride, dignity, unity and generous social welfare programs among other things including, of course, scapegoating Jews. People forget how Hitler successfully fashioned himself a champion of peace for quite a while.

Liberal Fascism is all about the blandishments of collectivism and the implicit or explicit glorification of the role of the State in our lives (see Polly Toynbee passim). As I wrote last year:

However, one serious weakness in the unique British model is that having grown bit by bit, our liberties and principles can erode bit by bit. We may never notice the process happening. Even if we do, how to stop it?

 

In the deep way our system works (namely relationships based ultimately not on legal requirements but rather on trust, decency and honour) there are few robust legal ways to attempt to do so. The more so as publicly funded PoMo liberal fascists in academies, NGOs and think-tanks sneeringly ‘deconstruct’ such basic values as intrinsically meaningless, which in turn allows politicians and civil servants to begin to ‘deconstruct’ their responsibilities too.

 

This for me is the main danger in the UK’s current binge of Big Statism as inflated by unrelenting EU requirements.

 

Not just a sly erosion of responsibility and our freedoms. Much worse, erosion of the very idea of responsibility, of freedom as something worth having – and worth fighting for.

 

Arrangements of an astonishingly subtle sort which have helped define some of the highest standards for public life and process ever seen in human history might casually come to be dismissed as boring, old-fashioned – not part of the ‘contemporary narrative’.

 

Is there a point at which Liberal Fascism via Big Government wins?

 

Has an unrecognised tipping-point been reached – and (worse) been passed? When state-sponsored passive cynicism and attendant public spending are so enormous a part of our lives that instead of our owning the state, the bland state owns us?

 

How would we tell?

 

Would we care?

Still waiting for the answers.