by Matt Hanson

originally published in Flak Magazine

            If a curious and well-intentioned reader were to pick up a copy of The National Review's edition of Jan 28, 2008 he would be greeted by the giant, yellow, archetypal "have a nice day" smiley face staring out from the cover.  What might take Everyreader aback is that the smiley face is, in this case, smeared with a Hitler moustache.  Our reader would then, no doubt, excitedly open the pages to the lead article containing excerpts from Jonah Goldberg's new book to find three photographs surrounded by text.  The first, naturally, is of Adolph Hitler.  The caption reads- oddly- "a sworn enemy of capitalism".  The reader might pause a bit, perhaps shrug obligingly (he was a sworn enemy of pretty much everything), and move on.  Next he would come to Benito Mussolini's baleful gaze.  The caption would be a quotation from Il Duce himself: "Socialism is in my blood."  This might strike a pang of fear into our humble peruser.  Images of the toiling masses working and groaning in the veins of the man who ruled with an iron fist flash through the mind.  A shudder, and the reading picks up with renewed vigor.  After about a page or so, the third and final photograph is of one of the Democratic nominees for President (hint: it's not the black guy) with a striking, unequivocal proclamation: "the face of fascism in our time." Gadzooks!  Our everyreader squirms and shifts his weight.  Maybe I'll vote McCain after all!       

            This is not to disparage the editorial staff of the recently departed William F Buckley's ghetto-blaster for their mischievous wit and attention to detail. Calling your argumental opponent, the politician of your choice, or the President of The United States a fascist is not only your God-given right as an American, it's also one of the things that makes life worth living.  What matters, though, is whether or not you know you're joking when you do it.  It's fun for the whole family, provided no one is actually trying to write in earnest a near-500 page tome of empty claims, "straw man" hysterics, elisions, and false comparisons in order to avenge themselves for having been cruelly maligned by mean and nasty liberals since time of birth.  The book jacket hints at this:   

"The quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore."         

            For it is they, the cunning lasses (why is it always the women?), who have cleverly time traveled and shape-shifted from Mussolini's squadristi to the minions of academia, Hollywood, the media, and the patrons of Whole Foods held in thrall to "the cult of the organic." And we all know whom "They" are voting for.  The latent assumption of Goldberg's book is that no one else has been heretofore brave enough to mention what Tom Wolfe, excitedly quoted by the author in speeches and on the back cover, calls "the greatest hoax of modern history." Namely, that there's been a secret ideological thread passing from Hitler and Mussolini to FDR and Kennedy and the mushily described 'politics of meaning', and Goldberg apparently claims to be suitably unbrainwashed as to have called the liberals out, once and for all, on poor form and Gestapo tactics.  I, for one, am shocked and chagrined.  I didn't know that Hillary Clinton was "the face of fascism in our time" or a proponent of "touchy-feely, nicey-nice" fascism and, by simple logic, voting for her (were I to entertain the idea of doing so) would, in essence, be voting for a fascist, which would make me.....what, exactly?      

            The word fascist is, admittedly, a slippery one to define.  The image seems to rule the meaning in most cases.  The word originated from the bundles of birds rods tied with ribbon to an axe, or fasces, which were carried by the Roman senate to indicate strength through unity and political authority- particularly that of life and death.  Cicero carried one, as did Cincinatus and Caesar.  During an announced dictatorship (interestingly, a viable political option for desperate Romans), attendants to the dictator kept the axes close at hand, a symbol of the dictator's ultimate power.  It occurs all over the world, from Swedish police to French architecture.  There are fasces at the Lincoln Memorial, the seal of the Senate, and in the walkway leading into the office of the White House Chief of Staff.  It's clutched in the eagle's grip on the dollar bill.  George Orwell remarked that regardless of the fact that fascism is empirically a political and economic system- an actual state of affairs, in other words- he has heard it applied to enough contrary phenomena that the word seems to have been abused to within an inch of its life.  Liberals have called conservatives fascists as much as the other way around, war resisters and war advocates the same, all the way down to "farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting....Kipling, Gandhi, Chang Kai-Shek...homosexuality...astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."       

            Goldberg has the good sense and sanity to not, NOT, be calling all liberals fascists.  He says so, consistently and clearly, both at the outset, in the conclusion, and at various points in his arguments when he seems to feel like he's gone too far: "Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project...(two pages later)...when I say that the politics of meaning, and Hillary Clinton's ideas in general, are fascist, I must again be clear that they are not evil."   What he does do is call pretty much every liberal hero of the last century a latent (and sometimes completely overt) fascist and highlight most of the left's social and economic policies as fascist(ic), leaving room for a leftist reader to feel very, VERY respectfully disagreed with.  This might seem akin to the line of conservative thought which compares Bill Clinton to Mussolini or calls the ACLU a bunch of terrorists, but I'm sure Goldberg has the good taste not to say such silly, supercilious, and sensationalistic claptrap.  He is, one hopes, more concerned with raising the level of political discourse.  That's why he was going to subtitle the book "The totalitarian temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton" and assumingly thought the better of it, changing it to the more abstracted and malleable "...to the politics of meaning."  Because to say such a thing would be, well, slander.  And we've certainly had far too much of that.      

            Goldberg, to his credit, has done some homework.  There is quite a bit of interesting information here, the problem is that the information is provided with a background noise of ideological axes being ground to bits.  Goldberg, like most conservatives, is deeply offended by most kinds of statist reform, and the various permutations thereof.  He hates the idea of "big government" (rather than the modest visions of public administration offered by, say, Newt Gingrich or Richard Nixon) and thus presents chapter headings like "Roosevelt's Fascist New Deal", "Kennedy's Myth to Johnson's Dream: Liberal Fascism and the Cult of the State", and the terse, Pravda-esque understatement of "Liberal Fascist Economics."     

            Given the brash packaging, the arguments are worn rather thin from constant repetition.  The right's been saying these things since (at least) FDR, about most liberal Presidents since FDR, and will continue to rail against FDR in all his future incarnations. Repeating a set of beliefs ad nauseaum does not make them true. For Goldberg, liberal economics are fascist because "They" take your money away from you and put it where they decide is best.  "They" don't trust in your God-given pluck and common sense and let you make your own decisions because your rulers hold you in contempt.  Just like Hitler!  And what's more, they want to smile as they do it: Goldberg consistently rails against modern liberalism's "touchy-feely" and "namby-pamby" qualities.  The soft machine seeps ever deeper into our souls, what with smoking bans, political correctness, universal health care, and It Takes A Village. Goldberg is provoking non-existent controversy: everybody, left and right, hates the nanny state.  The historical parallel is weak, as well.  Mussolini didn't take possession of Italy by gently rubbing it behind the ears.        

            Being skeptical about the State is a perfectly valid and welcome political stance, and it's as American as Thomas Jefferson, baseball and cheating on your taxes.  But when one is to try and say something without saying it, as Slate's Timothy Noah remarked and continue not saying it for several hundred pages, therein lies the problem.  It's a rhetorical peek-a-boo that gets more and more tiresome as the game goes on.  The syllogism that Goldberg tries to construct out of Elmer's glue and toothpicks crumbles at the merest touch. To conflate one stance (National Socialism a la the Third Reich) with another (The New Deal) based on a thin silhouette of shared attributes (yes, they each used government influence to mobilize and transform their societies) then one is committing a pretty common and rather pernicious form of intellectual bad faith.  A philosophy taken to its extreme form can shed light on the internal problems of said philosophy, but it does not exemplify it.  If Mussolini was a true Socialist then the Crusades were a mass gathering of Christian fellowship.          

            The straw man appears, reappears, and begins to get larger and larger.  Goldberg spends a lot of time tearing into various offshoots of leftist thought which haven't been particularly relevant or influential for quite some time.  Nobody I know, and nobody I can remember reading, has quoted The Weathermen or The Port Huron Statement or what-have-you with the thrill of recognition or the zeal of a convert....ever.  If the subject is even brought up in casual conversation, I've never even heard it mentioned positively by anyone.  The obnoxious, whiny, radical chic'd suburbanite youth who ran around the fringes of the 60's chanting "up against the wall, motherfucker!" or ranting about "pig city" aren't filling any reading lists or spurring the youth to mayhem.  They mostly just sound like dicks.  Goldberg is correct to point out their incipient fascism and their violence and naivete, but it's not the most earth-shattering thing in the world to have discovered.  Or to have railed against.  Way to stick it to the man!       

            What's funny is that he don't realize how funny this is.  Goldberg spends a bit more time than necessary on "Iron Pants" Johnson, who swung his weight around for FDR and was known to claim that anyone who didn't get in line with the New Deal would get "a sock in the nose".  The umbrage that's taken on behalf of him and others is to confuse the direness and despair of the Third Reich from the merely frivolous.  There are, and have always been, more than a few Iron Pants Johnsons running loose in the Grand Old Party, and it seems a shame to have wasted our time with fascism on a couple colorful characters just after the Jazz Age.         

            He is also very much in error when he claims that liberals do not, or are not expected to,  own up to their own history.  This is patently false, as any reader of consistently bestselling liberal criticism (Zinn, Chomsky, etc) would know.  And liberals in power can be far from excusable.  FDR did indeed put the Japanese in internment camps during World War 2, and it was to his everlasting shame. (It's worth pointing out that when liberals encourage the inclusion of these kinds of events into textboks, it's often the right who complains about teaching children to hate America).   It is fairly common knowledge that no matter how avuncular and earnestly well-meaning a political figure can be in both public and private, there is always (at least) a fascistic temptation.  This is just a sad truth, especially in difficult times.  What matters is that there are critics and activists who are on guard against it.      

            President Bush himself drew appropriate flak for accurately remarking that being a dictator sure makes things easier. As much as he hated doing it, the great John Adams did indeed sign the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, Woodrow Wilson advocated "crushing out" dissidents and "hyphen-Americans" prior to World War one.  All of this is well known and well documented by anyone of the left with a passing interest in the subject.  It's worth noting, for the present day, that most of these infringements occurred while leading up to or during a time of war.      

            What Goldberg particularly leaves out in his critique of Wilson is that much of his argument has been made before.  The irony is that it was made by members of the left- who, in many cases, were much farther to the left than Wilson himself.  This can include the likes of Eugene Victor Debs, Edmund Wilson, Jack Reed, and most if not all of the IWW.  The great novelist (and one-time fellow traveler) John Dos Passos described him thus:      

"He strained every nerve of his body and brain, every agency of the government he had under his control; (if anybody disagreed he was a crook or a red; no pardon for Debs)...In Seattle the wobblies whose leaders were in jail...whose leaders were shot down like dogs, in Seattle the wobblies lined four blocks as Wilson passed, stood silent with their arms folded staring at the great liberal as he was hurried past in his car, huddled in his overcoat, haggard with fatigue, one side of his face twitching.":       

            Goldberg is not completely off the mark in criticizing Wilson.   It was a raw time, to be sure.  It's just that it's a problem- and a major one- to condemn "the leftist tradition" for complicity (which is ostensibly "hidden" and "secret" to begin with)  while eliding the fact that it was other, more radical leftists who were outraged about it, too, as it was happening and without apology.  Weirdly, Goldberg quotes Randolph Bourne (*Link 8*), who won a place the hearts and traditions of liberal dissenters for his essay "War is The Health Of The State" and was a fierce and stylish critic of Wilson, America's entry into World War One, as well as an upholder of social justice and democratic cosmopolitanism.  His essay, linked above, contains much of what Goldberg argues- the similarity in wording is striking- and from a position farther to the left than Howard Dean tripping on acid at a Dead show.      

            If Wilson is an influence on the politics of today (and how many times have the words "Wilsonian idealism" been applied to our current Administration?) then it follows that his critics, who were pretty vocal about it then, are relevant now as well.   Liberals can take pride in the fact that they have a tradition of dissent against that lineage, and that means something.  For that matter, there are Wilsonians on the left today who aren't stomping around in jackboots.  Wilson's legacy (for example) is a debate which has been going on for generations.  It's a mistake to believe that a political movement can't or won't or hasn't been able to question itself, ever.  On a slightly different tack, as someone once said, there's nothing that pisses off a radical more than another radical.  It's worth noting, to this effect, that Communists killed Mussolini.        

            And, to bring it full circle, we have the current Administration.  There are plenty of people who are all-too-willing to yelp the f-word at the POTUS at the slightest provocation.  But that doesn't disqualify an earnest investigation into his more ethically dubious acts.  His connection to Ken Lay connects the State with buisness corruption, his "faith-based initiatives" could easily be seen to be "a religion of government" all their own, the Patriot Act speaks for itself, as does the wiretapping, Ari Fleisher's "people need to watch what they say, watch what they do", his Administration's manufactured and manipulated intelligence leading up to the war, Gonzales' firing the judges does seem like a bit of court-packing, does it not?  Then you've got Halliburton, Blackwater, Guantanamo bay.  Bush's State has indeed been pumped up on something more than happy faces and guileless goodwill since taking office, as both the left and the right have pointed out, including (to his credit, even though he does it in passing) Goldberg himself.    Conservatives have proved that State power, its use and abuse, is not the sole problem of liberals.  But, to Goldberg and many others, it seems that it's really the Left who deserves to be called out on their authoritarian impulses.  But it might only seem that way because he's a.....