Why Would Jonah Goldberg Do Such A Thing?

Alex Massie looks at Spencer Ackerman’s hilarious takedown of the first 24 pages of Liberal Fascism and realizes that Goldberg’s definition of fascism is so broad that it would include just about every government in history. Massie then ponders, why would Goldberg use such a lame, watered down definition of fascism?

If Goldberg’s definition stands then most political regimes in history should be considered “fascist” to one degree or another. Does he really mean to water down fascism to the point at which it becomes a meaningless catch-all phrase? Probably not. So why is he doing so?

Mr. Massie, I hate to sound pedantic here, but the answer is pretty obvious. If Goldberg defined fascist as most people do — lots of ethnic/national particularism, reaction against modern culture, disavowal of pluralism, state totalitarianism, labeling moderns and liberals as weak, etc — then he wouldn’t be able to call 20th century American liberalism a fascist movement. This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

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.

What Was So Great About the Industrial Revolution

In her review of Farewell to Alms, Deirdre McCloskey writes what may be the best single paragraph on the Industrial Revolution in the history of economic history.

We economic historians nowadays, agree that down to the 17th or 18th century England was trapped as the
world has been since the caves in a Malthusian logic: no rapid innovation, so that more mouths always
meant, soon, less bread per mouth, and the life of man was brutish and short. We all agree that the
escape from the Malthusian trap is the most important event in world history, and we agree on the
magnitude of the escape: in the teeth of gigantic increases in population “the richest modern economies
are now ten to twenty times wealthier than the 1800 average.”8 We agree that innovation, not capital
accumulation, was its cause. We agree that it happened first in Holland and England and Scotland.
We agree that in China and especially in Japan there were some signs c. 1600 that it might happen
there, and some of us think that it was Qing and Tokugawa lack of freedom and egalitarianism and the
honoring of merchants that stopped it. We agree that since then the rewards to labor have increased
and the rewards to capital and land have fallen, contrary to the predictions of the classical economists,
including Marx. We agree that the poor of the world have been the largest beneficiaries of the escape
from the Malthusian trap. We agree, in other words, on a great many findings from 1944 to the present
that will strike the average devotee of Karl Polanyi or Louis Althusser or Barbara Ehrenreich as bizarre
and counterintuitive.

Via.

Parsing Imperialism

Rashid Khalidi’s WaPo piece on imperialism in Iraq is excellent. He states the simple fact that should have been obvious to policymakers before the war: Middle Easterners have a long memory of Wester imperialism and were very unlikely to support any reincarnation of it, no matter how rotten the regime that was being replaced. The history of direct military intervention by the West in the Middle East has not been pretty:

what people in Iraq and all over the Middle East remembered was two centuries of Western powers attempting to bring their countries under imperial control through military force. They recalled decades of Western petroleum companies controlling their oil. And unsurprisingly, the United States quickly became as unpopular as the European colonial powers had ever been. Iraq has changed everything. In Washington, a city obsessed with the present, it was easy to forget that as recently as a few years ago, the United States was not particularly disliked in the Middle East and that al-Qaeda was a tiny underground organization with almost no popular support.

Add on the support for numerous dictatorial regimes and the overthrow of Mossadegh and it’s downright baffling that anyone expected the US to be greeted with anything besides open hostility and suspicion. After reading John Judis’ TAP piece and many a Yglesias post, it’s clear to me that old style imperialism is the best lens through which to view Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East and maybe even abroad.

The trouble with using the fairly straightforward historical analogy of 19th and 20th century European imperialism to describe the invasion of a sovereign country and the installation of a friendly government is the moral baggage caught up in the term. To most, imperialism is not simply a particular grand strategy, but a necessarily and irrevocably violent and oppressive strategy that must be resisted. While I use the term imperialist as a neutral descriptor, that’s an outlier. I don’t want to say that “resistance” to imperialist US actions is obligatory or even legitimate or to valorize the insurgency in Iraq, yet those sentiments are so often implied by those who are fond of the particular descriptor, that it becomes hard to sort out.

What’s wrong with imperialism is that it simply doesn’t work, as Judis says, ” If there is any lesson from the 130-year history of imperialism, it is that the natives eventually grow restless.” We have, sadly, yet another data point in support of this hypothesis.

What is France?

Caroline Weber has a fascinating review of Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France in Sunday’s Times The basic conceit of the book is that “France” the modern nation-state, cultural and political unit is a rather recent invention, really only dating back to the mid 19th century. The geographic territory of France was much more of a mishmash of highly regionalized culturo-linguistic groups that had little contact with each other and would never even imagine themselves as part of a single political or cultural unit. “France” was Paris and its environs and everything else was..well, whatever it called itself.

“Before the revolution,” it turns out, “the name ‘France’ was often reserved for the small mushroom-shaped province centered on Paris.” What’s more, beyond that relatively small oasis, “France was a land of deserts” — of huge vacant spaces that had still not been accurately mapped in their entirety and that most natives never even tried to explore. (As late as the mid-19th century, it seems, “few people could walk far from their place of birth without getting lost.”)

Why is the history of France-before-France important? Because much of what can be said about the creation of France can be said about Belgium, Spain or Great Britain. Belgium, as we all know, is already cleaving apart, and Spain and England both have separatists within their national borders.

It used to be, however, that this cleaving of countries and grafting them together were incredibly violent processes (with respect to Basques in Spain, it still is); it looks like for the next few decades, if Belgium is any sign, we may begin to see the splitting up of European nation-states into more homogenous regions, with certain state functions — monetary policy, defense, central banking - moved up to the EU level and things like trash collection and cultural-linguistic senses of solidarity (which can be construed as a public good) moved downward to smaller jurisdictions. As Will Wilkinson puts it:

the goods states should provide. But then why shouldn’t Scots, Basques, Walloons, etc., have their own states — especially if that these turn out to be, in practical terms, something like a very grand garbage collection jurisdictions with monetary policy, defense, and other big ticket public goods outsourced to the larger supranational jurisdiction? If the more encompassing jurisdiction reinforces a cosmopolitan sense of identity that balances local ethno-cultural identities, then all the better.

I’d be very curious to know what the liberal blogosphere’s resident expert on 19th century cultural and ideological history, Dana Goldstein, has to say about the process of turning the geographic region that we call France into the modern political and cultural unit we know today.

Reconciling Malthus and Simon

Bryan Caplan makes a smart criticism of Gregory Clark’s Malthusian history of the Industrial Revolution– namely that population growth increases the supply and demand for goods, enables economies of scale and allows for greater specialization and efficiency gains from trade. Caplan contends that England’s population in 1800 of around 9 million, which was a 70 percent increase from the (estimated) 1700 population of 6.5 million, provided the spark or tipping point for the Industrial Revolution.

Once you accept the long-run benefits of higher population, praising the Black Death for raising the average standard of living is severely myopic. Halving the population may double the standard of living of the survivors in the short-run. But in the long-run, a smaller population delays the arrival of modernity. On Clark’s account, it took England about two centuries to return to its pre-plague population. On his own terms, then, it is entirely possible that - but for the plague - the Industrial Revolution would have begun two centuries earlier.

In fact, once you take the long-run benefits of population on living standards seriously, the “Malthusian trap” takes on an new cast. Perhaps the real trap is that you have to be pretty rich to keep a big population alive long enough to reap the long-run benefits of a big population. For the pre-modern era, this story fits the facts as well as Clark’s, but it has the added virtue that it fits the facts of the modern era as well.

Clark’s position: that the Black Death was sweet for the English standard of living and Caplan’s: that population growth is the only way to ensure innovation, are easily reconciled. Clark’s argument is that from about 100,000 BC to 1800, the world was stuck in a Malthusian trap — any population increases spurred by gains in efficiency would be brought back down by increased disease and decreased resources. For about 800 years, however, the rich were bearing more children, and having more children survive, than the poor. Clark’s theory is that the values of the rich — the survivors — of thriftiness, low discount rate, delayed time preference, good hygiene and the lot enabled the industrial revolution to finally take off in 1800.

But at the same time the Industrial revolution was taking off, England’s population was growing, so shouldn’t the Malthusian trap kicked in? Well, no, Clark argues, because finally England’s population was able to not squander efficiency and population gains and instead advance technological efficiency even further and continue with more technological innovation. What happened immediately after 1800 is amazing, the population absolutely skyrocketed. Ultimately, the two views can be reconciled pretty easily. England’s population was growing from 1700 to 1800, but as this chart shows, it increased by some 300 percent in the 19th century. What made 1800 special, in Clark’s view, is that there was sufficient downward movement of those traits that are amenable to industrialization and wealth creation, so that the efficiency and population gains of the 18th century weren’t brought back down by a Malthusian death check. Instead, England transitioned into the second stage of the “demographic transition”: when death rates fall precipitously, while birth rates monentarily remain at their preindustrialized rates, and then start a much slower decline — resulting in massive population growth:

This is where Simon’s model, reproduced below, comes in. With the population increasing as technological innovation and efficiency gains continued apace, the positive network effects of increased population on further technological development were able to take hold without a Malthusian check. In Clark’s approximation, you need a few hundreds of years of Malthusian dynamics to slowly transform the traits and values of a population before Simon’s model can apply.

A Little Matter of Genocide

Michael Crowley’s TNR article about the duplicitous and unseemly nature of many ex-congressman lobbying for the US not to recognize the Armenian genocide raises all sorts of rankle about how god damned dishonorable the whole affair is.  There are clearly lots of symbolic politics involved.  The Armenians have historically been pushed aside in the 20th century “Olympics of sufferings” and have finally accumulated enough clout in America to make recognition a serious prospect.

Turkey, on the other hand, is irrationally obsessed with those who “insult Turkishness” or whatever, even leading them to them to pass a law, commonly called Article 301 - “A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be imposed to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years.”  They then charged the most famous and respected Turk in the intellectual community, Orhan Pamuk with violating this law.  So clearly, the Turks are sensitive to this entire genocide issue.

The question I’ve never heard satisfactorily answered is this:  What happens after the US government recognizes the genocide?  Besides pissing off the Turks, that is.  Will all the genocide deniers, like Bernard Lewis, immediately come to realize the folly in their ways?  I know the genocide happened, the consensus in non-Turk academic circles is that it happened.  Besides diaspora Armenians and Turks, who cares?  If Turkey is serious about withdrawing all sorts of military support and shutting down the Incirlik base, then perhaps it just isn’t worth it to “recognize” the genocide.

If I were Armenian, I would hold a totally different view, and think that what I wrote above was callous and despicable.  But the brute matter of the fact is that this recognition is purely symbolic for the Armenians, and deadly serious for the Turks.  Surely, we should do our best to get Turkey out of their absurd policy of genocide denial and suppression of those who dare speak about it, but aggravating them in a way they have indicated they will find incredibly offensive probably isn’t the best way.

Could There Have Been a Hitler Without Nazis?

Arnold Kling wonders:

 Difficult counter-examples for Tolstoy might be leaders of the middle of the twentieth century, including Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Does one really want to argue that England without Churchill would have resisted the Nazis as vigorously and effectively? Even more difficult, who is prepared to argue that Hitler or Mao merely reflected and articulated the deeply-held values of their societies?

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle, “great”leaders can change history or put in forward large programs and culture shifting events, but they can never do so on their own.  They need to have a populace and culture that is receptive to whatever world changing program they want to institute.  Hitler is a great example of this, would there have been a Holocaust without Hitler? Probably not - but could have Hitler instituted his mass slaughter without the willing participation and support of the German people?  Definitely not.

The communist totalitarians might be a counter example to this, but I’m not so familiar with the history, culture and attitudes of Russia and China at the time of their epoch shattering changes to really say so authoritatively.