Liberal Fascism: A Long Review

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism makes a number of different arguments. These are: 1) that modern American conservativism is unjustly called Fascist by various left-wing critics; 2) tu quoque, that American liberalism could as easily, if not more easily, justly be called called Fascist; because 3) American liberalism is vaguely related to Fascism in both its intellectual history and modern character; or 4) more closely related to Fascism—a claim that Goldberg keeps on raising, then saying he doesn’t really mean. These claims are bundled together, in a manner that is polemically effective but does not conduce to clear historical analysis. Some of what he claims is true, but it is so mixed up with the tendentious and the unpersuasive that he tends to discredit his entire line of argument.

The trouble begins with a matter of basic definitions: What exactly is fascism? What exactly is liberalism? What is the relationship between the two of them? Goldberg oscillates between claiming a close relationship, and a more distant one—in the same paragraph he writes that “what we call liberalism—the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism—is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism. .... liberalism is the well-intentioned niece of European fascism.” (2) Child or niece?—there’s a rather important distinction. Niece, Goldberg generally (but not universally) says—but the distinction turns on claiming that there is a broader fascism, of which “European fascism” or “the oppression, cruelty, and tyranny of classical fascism” (161) is only one variant. What then is this broader fascism, which encompasses American Progressivism, Fascism, and Nazism?

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. (23)

So also his definition of totalitarianism: “The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it.” (21) But both these overlapping definitions are far too generic. They are, as far as I can tell, recycled Voegelin: “The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.” The contrast is to conservativism or classical liberalism, which understand “that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life.” (14) Goldberg’s definition of fascism corresponds far more closely to utopianism; his critique of fascism is that of the authoritarian—totalitarian—temptation that derives from utopian thought. Fascism is indeed an aspect of utopian thought—so are communism, socialism, and liberalism—but his definition is not exclusively Fascist. What it misses is the institutions and practices that defined Fascism, as much as its aspirations. It is not just nationalist thought, but nationalist policy that defines fascism; not just militaristic rhetoric, but militaristic policy. More to the point, the concrete institutions of a paramilitary party that has taken over the state and claimed an effective monopoly of political activity, the abrogation of the procedures of liberal democracy, the actual militarization of society, the successful penetration of the state into the everyday life of the individual, and a very significant degree of actual state regulatory control over the economy, all ought to be considered part of the definition of fascism. A definition of a political ideology that is dependent solely on ideas, and does not include institutions and practices, has little or no analytic power.

(For a conservative, Goldberg is oddly interested in naked ideas throughout. It is revealing, for example, that he thinks that the fact that Mussolini was “astoundingly well read” argues against the portrayal of him as a “bumbling oaf.” (34) Goldberg ascribes this dichotomy to “the standards of liberal intellectuals” (35), but, not least because he combines this analysis with his dismissive description of (Hitler’s and) FDR’s political talents as instinctive (34), it seems to reflect his own opinion as well. And note also his list of abstractions on p. 176: “deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, pragmatism, relativsim.” He takes these to “dissolve the concrete foundations of truth” (176)—but his truth, throughout, is oddly disembodied. Goldberg’s intellectualism is indeed peculiarly like his vaunted antagonists in academia.)

(Note also, that Goldberg’s defense of conservatism is that conservatism—when defined as classic liberalism—has little in common with fascism. But the crux of the critique of conservatism is not that conservatives were particularly fascist in their beliefs, but that in practice they were willing to accommodate themselves to Fascism, and displayed distressingly little attachment to liberal democracy. Goldberg indeed recognizes this fact: “In Germany ...when Hitler demonstrated that he wasn’t going away, these same elites decided it would be wise to put down some insurance money on the upstarts. .... Corporations in Germany, like their counterparts today, tended to be opportunistic, not ideological.” (58-59) Just so—and this practice, not their thought, is what gave conservatives a bad name in the Fascist generation.)

So if we substitute “utopianism” for “fascism,” this thesis is unobjectionable, indeed uninteresting: liberalism and fascism are indeed both utopian ideologies, and liberalism can reasonably be called the utopian niece of fascism, just as Jacobinism is fascism’s utopian grandfather. Radicals right and left are utopian, but the mere fact of their radicalism doesn’t necessarily make them fascist. But Goldberg is also arguing for a tighter tie between fascism and the left—between fascism and socialism—and a greater tie between fascism and American Progressivism. There is something to be said for both theses: Goldberg fairly accurately recounts the intellectual history that argues for an understanding of fascism and Nazism as socialist heresies, that highlights New Deal figures such as Hugh Johnson as unpleasantly sympathetic to fascism, looks at the progressive roots of eugenics and the eugenic roots of the welfare state, recounts the many H. G. Wellses on the Anglo-American left who spoke as favorably of Mussolini as of Lenin or Stalin, and who wrote yearningly, to their dishonor and to our just alarm, of a liberal fascism, highlights the unpleasant power- and state-worship of American progressives, that aligns them particularly with Fascist thought, (Nota Bene: Walter Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind provides the nineteenth-century, Carlylean background for this unpleasant strand in American thought.) and also highlights the rhetorical and intellectual debt modern American liberals owe to these dubious forebears.

But Goldberg also oddly distorts the history—partly to extenuate Italian Fascism, partly to blacken the names of Wilson and the New Deal. These distortions should be addressed in some detail, because they discredit his entire book.

* Goldberg minimizes the racism of the Italian Fascists. No, Italian Fascism was not overwhelmingly anti-Semitic until 1938. But there was anti-Semitism within the Fascist party from the beginning—particularly strongly in the Trieste branch, influenced by Austro-Hungarian anti-Semitism—and Mussolini’s shift toward anti-Semitism in 1938 drew upon existing intellectual resources within Italian Fascism. More to the point, Italian Fascist racism was marked by the near-genocidal suppression of the Senussi in Libya, 1931-33, and the mass-murderous conquest of Ethiopia—which included the use of poison gas. The main targets of Italian Fascist racism were Libyans and Ethiopians; that Jews were not its main target does not absolve Italian Fascism of the charge of racism.

* Goldberg states that “many Fascists were actually impressive, respectable men who earned not only the cooperation of the police but they sympathy of both judges and the common man. In a national contest between two broad factions, the Italian people—workers, peasants, small-business men, and professionals, as well as the well-to-do and wealthy—chose the Fascists over avowed international socialists and communists.” (48-49) To which one must ask—so what? What has this to do with justice, morality, law, liberty, or democracy? Goldberg, the anti-populist (47) should know that these facts have nothing to do with the (de)merits of Fascism.

* “In 1924 he [Mussolini] held reasonably fair elections.” Goldberg has a sunny view of the widespread violence, and threats of violence, that marked the 1924 election.

* “The Austro-Hungarian Empire ... accepted Jews, Czechs, and the rest of the non-Teutonic rabble as equal citizens.” (62) This reflects the odd nostalgia for the Dual Monarchy that comes from reading deeply in certain Austrian theorists of economic and political freedom. The exact phrase is “equal subjects”—and a citizen of the Great Republic ought to know the difference.

* “The “social space” the Nazis were fighting to control was on the left.” (70) It is true that the Nazis and the Communists attracted a good deal of the same sort of bully-boys. But the increase in the Nazi vote in the late 1920s correlates closely with the collapse of the vote for the DNP and DNVP—rightist parties—and the political space they fought to control was on the right. Furthermore, the Socialist vote, and the SPD, remained remarkably cohesive through to 1933—and after 1945, it was the same men, both the leaders and the voters, who resurrected the SPD. The collapse of the rightist parties of Germany under the pressure of Nazism, and the resilience of the Social Democrats, minimizes or contradicts Goldberg’s thesis.

* “If the events that transpired [in America] during and immediately after World War I occurred today in any Western nation, few educated people would fail to recognize it for what it was.” (80) Now, Goldberg deliberately excludes mention of other countries from his study—but this brings the obvious retort that precisely the same catalogue of “fascist” actions he imputes to Wilson in the US could be imputed to Lloyd George in Britain and Clemenceau in France in World War I, and to Churchill in World War II—state regulation of the economy, imprisonment of enemy aliens (in Britain in World War One, including the British wives of resident German men), the alignment of progressivism and militarism, etc. This does not disprove the contention that such actions were Fascist—but it ought to demonstrate that Wilson was no unique devil-figure, but typical among Western politicians in his response to World War One.

* “Wilson arguably did as much if not more violence to civil liberties in his last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first twelve.” Yet Goldberg notes earlier that 2,000 people died in the Fascist takeover of Italy (48). Who died because of Wilson? There is a great difference between 2,000 dead, with all the chilling effects on free expression, on liberty, attendant thereupon, and 2,000 deported—a difference that makes the comparison to Wilson slanderous both to Wilson and to America.

* “The progressives in Congress actively supported or went along with virtually every major military excursion of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. .... it fell to the conservatives in Congress to fight expenditures on such things as the ‘big navy.’” (91) It’s one thing to oppose expenditure, another to oppose military expansion as such. Outside Congress, figures such as William Jennings Bryan and Mark Twain were notable opponents of our conquest of the Phillipines, for example—neither, I believe, particularly conservative figures.

* Goldberg provides no weight (106-16) to the fact that America was at war in 1917 and 1918. (This despite his statement that “During wartime this country has historically done whatever it takes to see things through.” (160)) All states behave differently in war than at peacetime—all democracies too—and ought to behave differently. The state is supposed to organize economic resources for winning the war; “dissent” often is treason, and ought to be suppressed and censored; civil liberties are and should be restricted—by legislative consent ideally, by executive authority if not. Now, the United States has preserved civil liberties more and more in each war—William Rehnquist’s All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime covers the subject---but in no war have we preserved all our peacetime civil liberties, and it would have been suicidal and immoral (immoral not least because suicidal) to do so. If we are not to recognize that war makes a difference, why not label Lincoln the first Fascist?—providing an abolitionist politics of meaning as he suspended habeus corpus and conducted the War of Northern Aggression. (A paleo-libertarian, Daniel Larison-esque point of view, toward which Goldberg’s line of argument leads naturally.) Why not Manifest Destiny?—so utopian, so expansionist, so murderous of Indians. Andy Jackson, expelling the Cherokee? Or the American elite, fusing Puritan sermons and revolutionary politics to summon up the mobs to hound 150,000 Loyalists from America? Goldberg can only make Wilson a devil-figure by ignoring the moral exigencies of wartime, and the wartime precedents of America’s earlier history. And note, incidentally, that unlike Lincoln, Truman, Johnson, or Bush, Wilson received from the American Congress a declaration of war on Germany in 1917—a legal fact of great significance.

* And in any case, nothing in Wilson’s America includes party violence to suspend democracy. The American Legion was not affiliated with the Democratic Party. Neither were the Boy Scouts. All sorts of ugly epithets can be applied to Wilson’s administration—authoritarian, statist, illiberal—but fascist is a misnomer.

* “It’s hard to see how [Roosevelt’s claim that his policies possessed] orderliness absolves a policy from the charge of fascism or totalitarianism.” (122) Actually, this is central to the claim of fascism. Utopian radicalism, among other things, subverts all procedure—all law, all bureaucratic order—to an immediate judgment of virtue—utopian radicalism dissolves legality and bureaucratic order. The definition of Fascism is also of a practice of increasing dissolution of rational chains of bureaucratic procedure before charismatic authority. Mussolini’s “bumbling oaf” reputation in good part consists of his very Fascistic insistence on doing everything himself—more than he could possibly handle—thus condemning the Italian state to increasing incoherence. Martin Broszat’s The Hitler State also dissects the increasing incoherence of the German state as a direct result of Nazi ideology. Now, Roosevelt’s administration has also been described as involving overlapping channels of authority, directed by Roosevelt’s charismatic authority—which rather supports the idea of Roosevelt as Fascistic—but the overwhelming adherence of the New Deal to bureaucractic orderliness is in point of fact a very strong argument for its democratic, non-Fascistic character.

* “The problem with this sort of [Rooseveltian, third-way] triangulation is that you end up moving to whatever you believe is the epicenter between two ever-shifting and hard-to-define horizons.” But isn’t much of conservatism similarly, well, pragmatic? What of the idea of Tory men and Whig measures? What of Russell Kirk?:

The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old. Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.

How does this differ from Third Way thinking?—and note the idea of the nation as an organism. Isn’t that terribly fascistic?

* The fact that Mussolini and Hitler called the New Deal Fascistic (147-48) is more illuminating to the history of fascist propaganda than to the history of fascist thought.

* “Mussolini didn’t launch a war until a full sixteen years into his reign.” (150) Does this mean the lapse between 1922 and the invasion of Albania in 1939? This ignores the Spanish Civil War, Ethiopia, the suppression of Libya, saber-rattling in the 1920s—and the fact that Mussolini’s militaristic inclinations had to be deferred while he built up the power of the Fascist party in Italy, and Italy’s armed forces. Normally Goldberg gives more weight to inclination than to practice—this sentence does the reverse, and is in any case factually wrong.

* Roosevelt, in the extraordinary crisis of 1933, may have considered dictatorship (151)—but, again, what matters is what he did, not what he contemplated. As for what he did—the CCC and the WPA (152ff) don’t qualify as paramilitary adjuncts of the Democratic Party taking over the federal government and suspending elections, engaging in street violence with Republicans, etc. Short of that, labeling them “fascist” is highly unpersuasive, and rather slanderous, even after all of Goldberg’s caveats. (“FDR’s sins were nowhere near those of Hitler or Mussolini.” (160))

* “Patriotism is not the same thing as extreme nationalism or fascism.” (197) This sentence undoes much of Goldberg’s critique of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and almost as much of his critique of Wilson. What if the Blue Eagle parades of the 1930s, and the harassment of German-Americans in World War I, were expressions of patriotism, not nationalism or fascism? Then virtually all of the examples that substantiate his thesis can be attributed to something other than fascism.

What else? Goldberg’s classic-liberal standpoint to some extent conflates socialism with the welfare-state. Note, incidentally, that he recapitulates here the attitude of pre-World-War-One liberals in Europe and America, who condemned all the trappings of the welfare state as socialist—and therefore prompted many supporters of a non-revolutionary welfare-state to consider themselves socialists. Socialist policy platforms, before and after the First World War, include a great deal of the welfare state—so therefore do Fascist policy platforms—and the social democratic and Christian democratic welfare states finally consolidated after World War II therefore owe a great deal, in theory, in bureaucratic plan, and in bureaucratic personnel, immediately to the Fascists and more distantly to the Socialists. (But democratic France and Britain between the wars were also throwing up such ideas, not just among Nazis and Socialists, which bore fruit after the war.) Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent is quite good at tracing the continuities between Fascist Europe and putatively democratic post-war Europe—so strong, that any “Fascism” in America pales by comparison, in terms of intellectual and institutional influence, and in terms of moral culpability. (Heck, let’s make the obvious paleolibertarian point: Israel was founded as a far more National Socialist state than America—complete with utopian mission on earth, nationalist ideology, socialist collectivism, and a paramilitary party (Labor, Haganah) heavily intertwined with the state. You think Roosevelt’s a fascist? What about Ben Gurion?) But the continuities also point out that the welfare state is not irredeemably tainted with any particular ideology—it can be socialist, fascist, or democratic, indiscrimately. The only result of calling the welfare state fascist is to abandon it to fascists—or at any rate, to liberals.

Goldberg’s book is a polemic, and one ought not therefore judge it by the standards of a professional work of history—it’s has a different aim from a work of history. Indeed, this is very much a work of “useable history”—little potted history lectures in service of modern political points. But this genre characteristic very severely limits its persuasiveness as a work of history. That is, Goldberg continually interrupts his historical narrative to make comparisons to modern-day events or words, generally liberal. The cult of Mussolini is like the cult of Che Guevara. (33) Sorelian thought is like Al Sharpton’s lies about Tawana Brawley, or “lying for justice.” (37) But the historical point Goldberg is trying to prove is the similarity of liberalism to fascism—and to use all these modern-day liberal examples is to assume the point has already been made. If he wanted to make his argument more strongly—historically, if not polemically—he should have addressed himself first to Mussolini, Hitler, Wilson, etc., and segregated all the modern-day references in the chapters on modern-day liberalism.

A good deal of the book rests on rhetoric. Mussolini promised a “Third Way”—so do modern liberals. (5) (Save when it doesn’t: “Alas, it is difficult to take his [Wilson’s] liberty-loving rhetoric too seriously.” (92) That is, he argues the similarity of language, of imagery, also argues for a similarity of thought, of policy—that to speak of “the moral equivalent of war” is somehow to be fascistic. Besotted as I am with the importance of rhetoric, and of words, Goldberg goes too far. Yes, liberals talked of a War on Poverty—but Gordon Brown also called the fight against poverty "the greatest moral crusade of our times," and this shouldn’t be read as meaning that Brown feels a deep affinity with Catholic theology of the eleventh and twelfth century, plans to liberate the Holy Land, or intends for British armies to commit pogroms against the Jews of Central Europe along the way. Language does matter—but perhaps one shouldn’t read too much into it. Again, actual policy and actions matter as much as the language—the argument by language alone is oddly divorced from reality—an argument from an ivory tower.

An odd note on religion: “while Christianity was being made into a true state religion, its transcendent and theological elements became corrupted.” (87) What is a theological argument doing in this book? Who, precisely, judges what is correct Christian theology, and what is corrupt? Goldberg is not speaking as a Christian—as any sort of religious man—in this book. This is itself a political judgment of religion—a classical liberal one—and for subordinating religion to a political value system, itself corrupting and worthy of condemnation.

Much of the book is a critique of the character of Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, etc. A good deal of this is petty and beside the point. To the extent it is cogent, it argues for what we might call a “Fascist temperament”—which is a very much more diffuse thing than a Fascist ideology. Now, there is some value in throwing up examples of a Fascist temperament, and they should help govern our political choices—but it provides us much less clear political guidance.

Goldberg clearly identifies his brand of conservatism with a Hayekian (139), anti-collectivist, classical liberalism. Among other things, this leads to a certain horizon effect—he is so far from certain political movements, that he cannot distinguish among them. For example, he states that “Since Wilson ended up governing largely as a New Nationalist, the subtler distinctions between his and Roosevelt’s platforms do not matter very much for our purposes.” (93) It is true they don’t matter very much for a Hayekian classical liberal—but this tells us as much about Goldberg as it does about Wilson and Roosevelt. There are real distinctions to be made among the various “collectivist” ideologies, and a book, a man, or an ideology that cannot discriminate among them is of limited utility either for historical understanding or political guidance.

Finally, consider the following statements: “Liberalism is a culture and a dogma much as conservativsm is.” (317) “Alinsky shares with the fascists and pragmatists of yore a bedrock hostility to dogma.” (322) “Ultimately the issue here is that of dogma. We are all dogmatic about something. We all believe that there are some fundamental truths or principles that demarcate the acceptable and the unacceptable, the noble and the venal.” (404) Now consider the following statement from Kirk: “Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. .... Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata.” I am sure Goldberg could make reference to “an enduring moral order” as a rough synonym to “conservative dogma”—but I think Kirk, at least, would raise an eyebrow.

This book restates certain Hayekian critiques against utopian radicalism—some old talking points, some new intellectual history, the latter of some value. I have not discussed what I find less troubling—but I do not think the value of what is correct makes up for the many problems of this mediocre book.