(Transparency Note: I met Jonah on a cruise back in 2005 and enjoyed his ideas and company. But we were not lovers.)

What to make of Jonah Goldberg’s remarkable (if long) new book Liberal Fascism? Plenty.

His basic thesis boils down to three propositions:

  • First, non-trivial parts of today’s Western Leftist/progressive style and policy substance draw on collectivist totalitarian revolutionary ideologies prevalent in the early part of the last century, as espoused overlappingly by Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.
  • Thus second, whereas ‘The Left’ have usurped a monopoly on calling conservatives they dislike ‘fascists’, in fact that epithet can be applied to them – probably more honestly
  • The key divide in contemporary politics is not between collectivist Rightists (eg ‘compassionate conservatives) and collectivist Leftists (eg ‘it takes a village’). Instead it lies between Collectivists who insist that More State is the only answer to most problems, and people of a more libertarian frame of mind who suspect that Ever More Collective State means Ever Less Individual Freedom – and ultimately Ever Surer Ruinous Decline.

 The book backs up these bold claims with a barrage of examples. Mussolini a hero with great ideas? ‘Enlightened Nazism’? Arresting thousands of people for expressing political dissent? Anti-competitive practices against the little guy by Big Business in partnership with Big Government? Promoting a healthy population by stopping ‘race degeneracy’ through the uncontrolled breeding of “swarms of black and brown and dirty-white and yellow people”?

All this and much more is spelled out in this book in excruciating, even eventually numbing detail. Not as the ravings of conservatives of different stripes but rather as the carefully worked through and noisily championed ideas of some of the greatest Left or progressive thinkers and leaders of the pre-WW2 age in the USA and across Europe, as later reanimated in the heady 1960s.

Warming to his theme, Goldberg delivers a penetrating critique of Hillary Clinton and her beliefs. He shows how they were born in some of the darker depths of American Marxist/communist activism warmly sympathetic to the Black Panthers and other violent fanatics.

He agrees that Hillary’s ideas today “are not evil. Nor do they sound fascist to modern ears – indeed, that is the whole point.”

But he also insists that Hillary’s language draws directly on intellectual roots in pre-WW2 socialist/fascist collectivism and evinces creepy collectivist ambitions, eg where privacy and family life is concerned. Her “spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose” replaces the fist with the hug: “an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny”. And not so nice, when one sees injustices now perpetrated by courts operating away from public scrutiny with caring bureaucrats in the British family law area.

Goldberg describes Nazi racism as “an expression of a deeper impulse to define the individual by his relationship to the collective”. That semi-mystical vision of society is (he argues) remarkably similar to much progressive rhetoric today, which addresses fundamental questions about existence (eg re the environment) by insisting (a) that they can only be answered collectively; and (b) that the state alone can and must turn collective ideas into action. He agrees (of course) that important parts of the Right too yield to these totalitarian temptations.

Goldberg concludes that the only reliable, principled answer to autocratic tyranny and tribalised yearnings for supremacy of the working class (Communism), the nation (Mussolini Fascism) or the race (Hitler Nazism) lies with another approach. With those who believe in private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how to live within these guidelines. These core principles are “the only true radical political tradition in a thousand years”.

In his discussion with Glenn Reynolds on an Instapundit podcast, Goldberg says that too many Conservatives choose to take the easiest pot-shots at the areas where Leftism is obviously weak. He wanted to hit Leftists on one of their most ambitious and now hardened lies, including their denial of any overlap between Communism and Nazism/Fascism.

He succeeded. Hence the Howls of Rage (or studied bafflement – see eg a snarky headline review by Michael Mann at Amazon.com) from different Leftist/liberal positions:

  • As anyone knows, Hitler’s Nazism was (it is said) quite different from Mussolini’s Fascism
  • But in any case it is an outrageous banal lie to claim that either of them were socialist movements with plenty in common with Soviet communism or other authentic socialist strains of thought of the time (Note: see also this refreshingly honest defence of a key Stalinistic bastion: anything which hints that Fascism and Communism were ‘as bad as each other’, or even that Fascism was a response to a Communist threat, weakens “a post-war European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity”.)
  • Even if there were ‘errors’ and obvious collectivist elements in earlier Left-progressive thinking, so what? Times were different then. Those mistakes have been corrected by the Left, although of course not by the Right.
  • As evidenced by Hillary’s wise and far-seeing policies on the one hand, and bone-headed Bushitlerism on the other
  • So either Goldberg is talking self-evident partisan nonsense
  • Or he is just malevolently ignorant.
  • Most likely both.
  • QED. Stupid book.

Yet a nerve has been touched. The book’s original print-run of 18,000 copies has turned into an eleventh edition – now at 188,000 copies and going strong.

Back in 1998/99 I had a mid-career break at Harvard. The best course I joined at the Kennedy School was led by Jeff Eisenach (who helped launch the Progress and Freedom Foundation and is now at Criterion Auctions, working on cutting-edge issues of markets and competition policy).

Eisenach took us back a century and more to the first days of emerging heavy mass production, and described how Machine Age images entered our thinking and terminology. He brought out just how hard it is now to grasp the scale of the extraordinary emotional impact brought about by all that unprecedented new Bigness.

Huge impersonal machines. Stunning machine noise. Unimaginable machine speeds. Warfare waged by machines. Machines flying. All from European and American white-skinned genius, leaving supposedly primitive blacks and browns and yellows trailing far behind.

These inventions and the social upheaval they brought amazed intellectuals and caused a whole new way of political thinking to emerge: that society too was in essence a single vast machine, capable of (and indeed depending on) being regulated and controlled by the intellectual elite. Human beings became ‘the masses’, mere cogs toiling for a collective ‘higher’ purpose.

Eisenach’s point (and maybe an extension of Jonah Goldberg’s analysis too) was that after an Age of Heaviness we are entering a new and quite different digitally democratised Age of Lightness and Smallness. An age of Mass Differentiation, not Mass Standardisation, in which metaphors of biology (swarming, exponential growth) and not metaphors of Newtonian mechanics (inputs and outputs, balance of payments) are now more apt. In these circumstances Big Unwieldy Government as it developed for Machine Age management purposes becomes a serious obstacle to fluid social change and growth, not the main solution 

A vast subject. For now suffice to say that Goldberg is dead right. Communism, Nazism and Fascism alike were ideologies based on Machine Age Bigness. They shared an explicit socialist/collectivist core, aimed at submerging the individual in a choreographed mass. They all promoted revolutionary violence and calculated lies to try to seize the moment and control the past, the present and future.

Goldberg accordingly does humanity a favour by setting down a detailed reminder of just how far those same ruinous collectivist ideas (and to a degree methods and policies) appealed in democratic societies too. And why the turmoil of two World Wars led to the dramatic expansion in the role of the state and so helped bring a lot of those ideas into democratic practice, with consequences for us all today which are partly benign – but also partly not benign at all.

In short, Goldberg puts back on to the table core questions of political life:

Where might we need collective action to deal with issues which individual action can not solve?

And if we need collective action, is the State the best or only way to get good results?

To be continued