The Daily Hatch

Liberal Fascism (3) – Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

Below is  a portion of the blog post Interviewing Jonah Goldberg About His New Book, Liberal Fascism by John Hawkins. I thought you would enjoy it:

Yesterday, I interviewed Jonah Goldberg about his new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

What follows is a slightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Well Jonah, you say they’re not militaristic at all, but Bill Clinton went on a lot of “peacekeeping missions”…and liberals seem much more generally willing than conservatives to use our troops for (missions of that sort)…

I think that’s right. There is this notion that you get from liberal foreign policy — that comes straight out of Wilsonianism — that foreign adventure is only worthwhile when it’s not in our natural interest. That’s why Haiti was important. That’s why Somalia was important.

But, the second something is in our national interest, it’s because Halliburton wants us to do it. It’s a weird mixture of idealism and cynicism. Because we’re the bad guys and it’s a blame-America-first mentality, whenever we do things that we need to do as a matter of Realpolitik, the Left seems to have huge problems with it, but whenever we do things that are purely altruistic, it’s our moral imperative to do it.

I’m sympathetic to the moral imperative stuff, more than most people, but I’m more sympathetic to doing it if it’s in our national interest. That comes first. I’m all in favor of helping little old ladies who are being mugged by gangs. But, I think it’s even more imperative, if the gang is mugging the little old lady and me, that my first priority has to be to protect myself before I can do anything for anybody else. It’s there where I think a lot of liberals fall down and think we shouldn’t be doing anything in our national interest.

Now conservatives, rather famously, have a deep and abiding dislike and mistrust of the federal government and believe that private industry does almost everything better than the government does. Is a belief like that ultimately compatible with fascism?

No, the whole point of fascism is centralizing. That’s why they were socialists. All these idiots who go around Googling stuff on the web, they find Mussolini saying, fascism is anti-liberalism and anti-Liberal.

Well, the liberalism that Mussolini was talking about was Manchester liberalism, classical liberalism, free market, capitalistic, individual rights liberalism. That is what the fascists stood against. It’s a totalitarian society, inherently hostile to private property. They believe the state was by far the best means of governing and running society.

One of the things that prompted me to write the book was this fundamental misunderstanding of what conservatism is in America and this slander, this projection, where liberals see in themselves similarities to fascism and project those things on to us.

I often like to ask college kids, except for the murder, bigotry, and genocide, what is it exactly about Nazism that you don’t like? And they can’t name anything. But, conservatives can come up with all sorts of stuff. They were socialists. They wanted free health care. They hated Christianity. They hated tradition. They were statists at the end of the day. All of those things are inherent to fascism and what was anathema to fascism was the idea that you can have, what the scholars of totalitarian theory call “islands of separateness” — that churches can go their own way, that corporations can operate without coordinating with the state, that individuals can have free consciences, that there can be free debate, free and open discussion.

What the Nazis implemented was something called the Gleichschaltung, which is a German word for coordination…and the idea was that the entire society needed to work like a giant machine, where all the cogs were linked together and everyone pushed in the same direction.

Here’s a fascinating quote from your book that I’d like you to expound on a bit, “What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a world view we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics.”

That’s right. The Nazis, unlike the Italian fascists — and this is one of the key points people keep not wanting to hear — Italian fascism was not racist, it was not anti-Semitic. It only became anti-Semitic when the Nazis grew so powerful and the Italians grew so weak that they had to cave in to Nazi demands. They fought Nazi demands, tooth and nail, about cooperating with the Holocaust.

The Nazis believed in racial essentialism — that the Aryan race was unique, was pure, was special, that there was no such thing as universal humanity. You know, Hitler had this long section in Mein Kampf where he concludes that Jews aren’t human beings, that they’re a different species.

They talked constantly, in the same way that we hear academics today talk about “dead, white European males,” “white logic,” Eurocentrism, logocentrism, and all these sorts of things. These ideas come straight out of the intellectual tradition that led to Nazism, that flourished under Nazism, and indeed, the words deconstruction and logocentrism, these all come out of the Nazi intellectual project. What they believed fundamentally was that human beings could be categorized in little boxes and they could never escape from them. It was an iron cage of identity.

Today on the Left, we have people, like Richard Delgado at the University of Colorado, who says that blacks and Hispanics should flee the enlightenment as fast as they can because there is no way that the regime of white privilege could ever assimilate people who are born black or Hispanic, because you can never transcend your identity or your gender. It’s where the whole logic of quotas come from, it’s where the whole logic of Affirmative Action comes from. It’s the idea that black people think like black people and white people think like white people and therefore, the only kind of diversity you can have is diversity by skin color, gender, and sexual orientation.

The key distinction here though is that Nazi philosophy was rankly evil in applying this. Their quotas, their approach to this sort of thing was flatly evil and exterminationist. That is not what the Left wants to do today. They’re much more benign. There’s not a lot of love for Jews on the hard Left, but their thinking is that they’re trying to help the victims of discrimination, they’re trying to improve the lives of others. It’s a nice sort of approach. It’s a well intentioned approach.

But, it doesn’t have nice consequences. I think it’s bad for social harmony. It’s bad for the people it’s designed to help. Moreover, that sort of categorical thinking is very similar to the thinking we saw under the Nazis.

Liberal Fascism (4) – Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

Uploaded by TylerNull on Feb 17, 2008