On Thursday, I said that David Neiwert’s review of my book, Liberal Fascism, in The American Prospect was the sort of “shallow, cliché ridden, attack-the-messenger stuff that I would expect Ezra to find so persuasive.” But it turned out I’d misquoted Neiwert, for which I apologized. I also said I was bleary from the slog of promoting the book and maybe I was too harsh. Well, now — as they used to say of Nixon — I’m tanned, rested and ready (minus the tan). So with fresh eyes let me say that Neiwert’s review is the sort of shallow, cliché ridden, attack-the-messenger stuff that I would expect Ezra to find so persuasive.
First, there’s the opening where he tries ever so slightly to tag me as a member of the David Irving Holocaust-denier camp. Then, he whines that I don’t have any credentials and I have no qualifications other than “right-wing nepotism” (You can expect this bleat to get ever louder, by the way, if the book becomes a bestseller). I like that, because it seems it’s only right-wing nepotism that bothers the party poised to nominate the wife of the last Democratic president, a party which remains a cargo cult to the Kennedys — every member of whom (save for pro-Nazi papa Joe) got where they are from nepotism (as for the charge I'm the product of nepotism: Yawn).
Okay, on to the substance.
The intellectual dishonesty of Neiwert's first grown-up paragraph is glorious in its majesty. He writes: “The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: Of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance. Goldberg isn’t content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire enterprise, in fact, is classic
Newspeak.”
Judging from this, you’d think I just made-up the phrase from whole cloth. Nowhere does Neiwert mention that I get the phrase from H. G. Wells, quite possibly the most influential English-speaking public intellectual during the first third of the 20th century. It was H. G. Wells who sought to rechristen liberalism as “Liberal Fascism” or — again, his words — “Enlightened Nazism.”
Then there’s the omnipresent canard that I must be wrong because of fascism’s “overwhelming
anti-liberalism.” Neiwert is again displaying either his ignorance or his dishonesty. It is absolutely true that a great many academic definitions — Ernst Nolte’s “fascist negations” for example — cite fascism’s anti-liberalism. And it is true that Mussolini and Hitler spoke of their disdain for liberalism many times, and there are many quotes to that effect. But guess what? These two
European statesmen were speaking in — wait for it! — a
European context where liberalism generally means limited government: classical or “Manchester” liberalism. They were most emphatically not talking about
progressivism or
socialism, which are the correct label for American liberalism and/or the American left (as I demonstrate at length in my book).
Secondly, the same sources Neiwert and others cite to cough up this anti-liberalism hairball also usually include another attribute of fascism: It was “anti-conservative” (also on Nolte’s, and many others’, lists). But here’s the fun part:
American conservatism is a blend of European conservatism and European liberalism. In other words, the two halves of American conservatism — traditionalism plus classical liberalism — are
both considered decidedly un-fascist by most academics who study the topic, as well as by the original fascists themselves.
Let’s move on.
After tendentiously over-reading my discussion of Orwell he writes: “Goldberg proceeds to define everything that
he himself considers undesirable as ‘fascist.’” I hear this a lot, and it’s flatly untrue. There were things about the New Deal I find both fascistic and defensible. I think Kennedy had a great many positive attributes. I say that there are many progressive reforms that I thought were worthwhile. And, for all of the deliberate misreading of my “We’re All Fascists Now” chapter, and the deliberate ignoring of my “The Tempting of Conservatism” essay, you’d still think it would occur to these people that maybe I’m not simply using the word fascist the way the Left does. Indeed, I state quite openly that I shop at Whole Foods all the time.
Then there’s some throat clearing about how I misstate the state of the academic consensus on fascism. That’s too weedy to get into here, but I don’t believe I do and I think fair-minded readers will see this simply by reading the introduction.
As a nice break for the reader, he then writes something interesting and intelligent, albeit predictably tendentious. If only he’d started the review here:
So when Goldberg proclaims early on: “This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists,” more thorough observers of history might instead just shake their heads. After all, the facts of Mussolini’s utopian/socialist origins and the Nazis’ similar appeals to socialism by incorporating the name are already quite well known to the same historians who consistently describe fascism as a right-wing enterprise.
What these historians record — but Goldberg variously ignores or minimizes — is that the “socialism” of “National Socialism” was in fact purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered “socialist” support to purely “Aryan” German business entities, and that the larger Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of Mein Kampf are devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war against “the Left,” and not merely the Marxism that Goldberg acknowledges was a major focus of Hitler’s animus.
Yes, it’s true. Many historians call Nazism a right-wing enterprise. One of the arguments of my book is to demonstrate that these historians are wrong to do so. If that enrages the trade guild controlling most of academia, them’s the breaks. But simply saying that people say my view is wrong doesn’t make it wrong. I marshal hundreds of pages of evidence to back up my points. Neiwert thumbs through the indexes of a few books to make his. Moreover, I am hardly alone in this point of view. Friedrich Hayek, Paul Johnson, Richard Pipes, Milton Friedman, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, John Lukacs, Joshua Muravchik, A. James Gregor, Michael Ledeen, Ayn Rand, and — as I show in my book — countless contemporary observers of classical fascism agree with my view in whole or in part.
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