I’ve never met Jonah Goldberg, the conservative writer for the National Review and the LA Times. I rarely highlight his work, and in those rare instances in which he mentions mine, he dismissively refers to me as “this guy.” We’re not, in other words, close, and I’ve never been the target of one of his unpleasant diatribes.
There is, however, something of a parlor game surrounding Goldberg, in which we, the progressive audience, take a degree of delight mocking him for his odd, often incoherent, political commentary. I’ve reveled in the parlor game myself, from time to time. This game intensified, of course, once people learned that he was hard at work on a book called, “Liberal Fascism,” featuring a smiley face with a Hitler mustache.
After years of anticipation, the book is now on bookstore shelves. Salon’s Alex Koppelman chatted with Goldberg about the book and the worldview that shaped it, and published the interview today. It’s a fascinating read, which is difficult to excerpt, but there were a few exchanges of note. This is probably the most important:
AK: Related to your definition, at least as I read the book, was something that’s been controversial about it. Especially because of one of the earlier iterations of the subtitle, [“Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods”] there’s a perception that your argument comes down to things like both Nazis and liberals being proponents of organic food. Is that how it works? Because the Nazis liked dogs and I like dogs, I’m a Nazi?
JG: No, no. I mean, I try to reject that kind of thing … I don’t believe that liberals are Nazis; I believe that if Nazism came to the United States it is entirely possible that liberals would be at the forefront of the battle to stop it. So would conservatives. I’m not trying to do any argument ad Hitlerum in this book.
But what I am trying to do, at least in the chapter that you’re talking about, is show how — [take] Robert Proctor, who wrote an award-winning, widely esteemed book called “The Nazi War on Cancer.” He points out that this organic food movement, the whole-grain bread operation, the war on cancer, the war on smoking, that these things were as fascist as death camps and yellow stars. They were as central to the ideology of Nazism as the extermination of the Jews. Now, that is not the same thing. And I want to be really clear about this: That is not the same thing as saying that banning smoking is as morally disgusting and reprehensible as trying to wipe out the Jewish people. You can say that something is as much part and parcel of an ideology and not say that it is as evil.
I read this a few times, trying to better understand the point Goldberg hoped to make. I’m afraid I’m at a bit of a loss.
Ezra, who has been the target of Goldberg’s unpleasant diatribes, responded:
But then, what’s the relevance of it? That’s the incoherence that bedevils the whole book. Jonah protests that his repeated efforts to use benign political ideas to draw connections between reprehensible political movements and the contemporary American left are not an effort to create equivalence, or even say anything at all. If that’s true, however, most of the book is pointless, largely a collection of odd trivia about various totalitarian movements. If it’s false, then the book is misleading, mean-spirited, and filled with pretty reprehensible slurs; a manipulative series of attempts to create the impression that liberalism is like fascism by redefining fascism to include liberalism, and leave the reader with a sense of equivalence that the author can then deny. By making the definition a bit less odious — “The autobahn was fascistic,” says Jonah, “that doesn’t mean that we should ban highways.” — Goldberg seeks plausible deniability for what the book actually does, which is smear his political opponents with the most vicious analogies available in our discourse. Or he can argue that it really does nothing at all.
Indeed, that’s the recurring problem with the interview, and presumably, the book.
Also, consider this gem.
AK: You write, “[Liberalism] is definitely totalitarian — or ‘holistic,’ if you prefer — in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists.”
Couldn’t that just as easily be said of the American right? You’ve got, certainly, conservatives judging entertainment from political perspectives; I remember discussion on [National Review group blog] the Corner of the 2006 Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl through a political lens. There were “Freedom Fries” and boycotts of French food and wine. And, I mean, your wife worked for [former Attorney General] John Ashcroft, so you know that on the right, sex can certainly be political.
JG: I will first stipulate right upfront that I agree with you that there are lots of places on the right where this is so, and I don’t like that stuff either … That said, I don’t think that the equation between liberalism and conservatism goes as far as you would like to take it. You know, you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don’t have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn’t really go on.
I’m tempted to highlight how very foolish this is, but why bother? It’s probably sufficient to let Goldberg’s comments stand on their own.
This was also striking:
JG: [Mussolini] said a lot of stuff. He was sort of a buffoon in that sense; he was constantly changing his definitions of fascism and talking out of one side of the mouth, then out of the other side of his mouth, largely because of the sort of pragmatic idea he had about politics. But in terms of the policies he implemented and where he came to, once again, at the end of his life, he always clung to the policies that were associated with the left side of the political spectrum.
One wonders if Goldberg appreciates the irony.