My Super Duper Hyper Qualified Defense of Jonah Goldberg

I’ve seen the pictures from Liberal Fascism, and yes, the idea “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” is almost too mockable, especially considering you can’t really get a education degree from Swarthmore. But, oddly enough, it’s rather uncontroversial among historians, namely Sheri Berman, that fascism was, in fact, a creature of the left. Henry Farrell, in his summary of Berman’s The Primacy of Politics, explicated the direct link between Euorpean Social Democratic movements and Fascism:

In Berman’s narrative, as in Polanyi’s, there were two antidotes on offer to “economic collapse and social chaos” - social democracy and fascism. Social democracy and fascism were both the result, according to Berman, of long standing intellectual debates within the left over the relationship between economics and politics. Both were movements created by socialists who had grown weary of the passivity of traditional socialism as set out by Engels, and explicated by Kautsky. The reigning orthodoxy emphasized the primacy of economics – economic progress would ineluctably lead to the victory of socialists, who merely had to bide their time… those who advocated active politics had a difficult time doing it within mainstream socialism. On the one hand, social democrats, who wanted socialists to get involved in electoral politics and take power through non-revolutionary means such as getting involved in coalition government, weren’t able to bring other socialists along with them…some socialists embraced a more radical notion of politics and of revolution that had little time for bourgeois democracy… This helped create the conditions for a synthesis between the nationalist movement and elements of the socialist movement in Italy and Germany. National Socialists retained many of the aspirations of social democrats, and made many of the same promises. Like social democrats, their main appeal was that they offered economic stability and security to the masses. Hence the first part of Berman’s argument – that fascism was, in a sense, social democracy’s dark twin. They shared common ancestry in internal debates among socialists. There was crossover between the two, as erstwhile social democrats became fascists. Finally, there were substantial similarities in their economic policies, and in the ways that they tried to appeal to mass publics. Both represented revolts against a kind of ideational orthodoxy, in which the economic base determined the limits of politics.

Now Goldberg’s argument, that social democracy/American left-liberalism is a species of fascism is incredibly wrong. First of all, we don’t have any social democratic party or movement in the United States, and the claims of national or ethnic solidarity are generally creatures of the right, not the left. More importantly, what made fascism, well bad, was not that it represented a third way between revolutionary Marxism and market liberalism, or that it promised all sorts of social programs and national solidarity, but the chauvinistic nationalism, the excess power and worship of the state, the destruction of individual freedoms, and oh yeah, genocide and expansionist war.

While we should denounce Goldberg, or really just let him denounce himself by putting his book out, there is a very serious, thoughtful, argument to be made that after World War I, Social Democrats and Fascism were movements with a great deal of similarity. Of course, Goldberg isn’t the one to make it.