Jonah Goldberg
Liberal Fascism:The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Doubleday, 487 pages, $27.95
Liberal Fascism came under attack even before it had gone
through the formality of being published or made informally
available as uncorrected proofs. Lexington, The
Economist’s usually urbane Washington columnist, devoted
the first of two dismissive comments to it nine months
before publication. “Progressive” critics in the blogosphere
were positively sulphurous in the month before it appeared.
A gaggle of critics on Amazon discussed, with
counterexamples (“A dark and stormy night … etc.”),
whether this was the worst book ever written. It was still
ahead when I last checked.
What seems to have induced this frenzied rejection is the
book’s title suggesting that fascism is a liberal or
left-wing phenomenon. That argument is certainly in the
book. Indeed, Jonah Goldberg, a friend and National Review
colleague, writes early on that he was inspired to write it
partly by irritation at the endlessly repeated liberal claim
that fascism is a sort of extreme or covert conservatism so
that if you strike a conservative, a fascist will strike you
back.
His starting point, therefore, is to point out that fascism
is a collectivist doctrine, worshipful towards the
centralized state, socialist in economics (Nazism, remember,
is short for National Socialism), hostile to both
tradition and capitalism—in short, a left-wing ideology
opposed in almost every respect to classical liberal
conservative individualism. It is this argument that has
