I certainly agree that if people think Obama will become a Hitler, or even a Mussolini, they need to do some more thinking. But I think this bit from David [Frum] is a sort of sleight-of-hand I’ve encountered many times before. He writes:

Contra Rush Limbaugh, history’s actual fascists were not primarily known for their anti-smoking policies or generous social welfare programs. Fascism celebrated violence, anti-rationalism and hysterical devotion to an authoritarian leader.

That’s all true, but misses an important point. What the fascists were or are primarily known for is not necessarily dispositive to the question of what they actually were. Speaking for myself, the relevance of the generous social welfare programs and anti-smoking programs is to point out that the Nazis weren’t exactly what we’ve been told they were. Sure, they were violent and hysterically devoted to an authoritarian leader, but they were also more than that and their popularity with the German people cannot be easily chalked up to those features either.

The Nazis did not rise to power on the promise of bringing war and violence. They just didn’t. They rose to power by promising national restoration, peace, pride, dignity, unity and generous social welfare programs among other things including, of course, scapegoating Jews. People forget how Hitler successfully fashioned himself a champion of peace for quite a while. Limbaugh’s counter-attack on liberals, specifically Pelosi, is exactly that, a counter-attack. He was saying that if liberals are going to call conservatives Nazis for opposing nationalized healthcare maybe they should at least account for the fact that Nazis agreed with them on the issue, not conservatives. If liberals want to have a fight over who is closer to fascism, I see no reason why conservatives should cower from that argument, particularly since the facts are on our side. But I reject entirely the idea that liberals today are literally Nazi-like, particularly if we are going to define Nazism by what “they were known for.” Liberals don’t want to invade Poland or round up Jews. As I’ve said many times, one naive hope I had for my book was that it would remove the word “fascist” from popular discourse, not expand its franchise. Alas, on that score the book is a complete failure.

~ Jonah Goldberg

jasencomstock:

Ultimately, however, the War on Terror is fascistic not because of its airy and obscure metaphysical assumptions about the existential plight of man. Rather, its most tangible fascistic ingredient is that it is an invaluable “crisis mechanism.” GWB constantly insists that WoT is the defining crisis of our time. Skeptics are called traitors, Islamo-Facists, &c.  Alternately, Neo-Conservatives like me cast themselves in the role of nurturing caregivers. When GWB appeared before Congress in early 2002, he proclaimed that the world has a “fever” and explained that when your baby has a fever, you “take action.” You do whatever your doctor says. No time to debate, no room for argument. We must get “beyond politics.” In practical terms this means we must surrender to the global security state and create the sort of “defensive dictatorship” Neo-Conservatives yearn for.

Clever, but I don’t buy it. As I have commented previously:

One can argue that the conservative approach to fighting terrorism makes government too powerful, or that the use of the Islamic threat to incite Americans amounts to little more than demagoguery. And if that’s truly the case, then it would qualify as an excess of the right that would need to be re-evaluated in light of basic conservative principles. In contrast, the [modern] left’s philosophical and intellectual foundation is one of expansive government power. Is there any realm (besides sexual freedom) [that] liberals [don’t] want to regulate or oversee? The left wants to dictate what cars we drive, how much energy we use, out nutrition, our education, and even wants to regulate the ridiculously mundane—like outlawing crossing the street while listening to an iPod?! Goldberg writes that “environmentalism gives license to the sort of moral bullying and intrusion that, were it couched in terms of traditional morality, liberals would immediately denounce as fascist” (p19).

Conservatives often couch their support for an empowered, terror-fighting government in terms of security and protection. If that’s a case of wanting to be judged by ends but not means, by intentions but not costs, then I will readily admit that conservatives are guilty of one of liberalism’s sins.

Ultimately, however, environmentalism is fascistic not because of its airy and obscure metaphysical assumptions about the existential plight of man. Rather, its most tangible fascistic ingredient is that it is an invaluable “crisis mechanism.” Al gore constantly insists that global warming is the defining crisis of our time. Skeptics are called traitors, Holocaust deniers, tools of the “carbon interests.” Alternately, progressive environmentalists cast themselves in the role of nurturing caregivers. When Gore appeared before Congress in early 2007, he proclaimed that the world has a “fever” and explained that when your baby has a fever, you “take action.” You do whatever your doctor says. No time to debate, no room for argument. We must get “beyond politics.” In practical terms this means we must surrender to the global nanny state and create the sort of “economic dictatorship” progressives yearn for. (p. 382)

The beauty of global warming is that it touches everything we do—what we eat, what we wear, where we go. Our “carbon footprint” is the measure of a man. And it is environmentalism’s ability to provide meaning that should interest us here. Almost all committed environmentalists subscribe to some variant of the Wrong Turn thesis. Gore is more eloquent than most in this regard. He rhapsodizes about the need for authenticity and meaning through collective action; he uses an endless series of violent metaphors in which people must be “resistance fights” against the putatively Nazi regime responsible for the new Holocaust of global warming (again, on the left, the enemy is always a Nazi). Gore alternately blames Plato, Descartes, and Francis Bacon as the white male serpents who tempted mankind to take the wrong turn out of an Edenic past. What is required is to reunite our intellects, our spiritual impulses, and our animalistic instincts into a new holistic balance. Nothing could be more fascistic. (p. 383)

~ Jonah Goldberg

Now, when I say that the politics of meaning, and Hillary Clinton’s ideas in general, are fascist, I must again be clear that they are not evil. Nor do they sound fascist to modern ears—indeed, that is the whole point. Today we equate fascism with militaristic language and racism, but war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a great many of the metaphors for political discourse and for everyday conversation in general. So many of these words and phrases are part of the vernacular today that we don’t even realize their roots in battle and blood (“entrenched positions,” “storm fronts,” “hot shot,” and so on). Liberal fascism isn’t militaristic, but the same passions that prompted progressives to talk in terms of “industrial armies” and “going over the top” for the Blue eagle lurk beneath today’s liberal rhetoric. War was seen as a communal, unifying experience that focused the public’s mind on the common good and whose passions and discipline could be harnessed to socially “useful” ends. Today the modern left is in many ways openly antiwar and avowedly pacifist. But liberals still yearn nostalgically for the unifying experiences of the labor and civil rights movements. The language is obviously nicer, and the intent is objectively “nicer,” too. But at the most substantive level, the politics of meaning stands on Mussolini’s shoulders. (p. 328-329)

The politics of meaning is ultimately a theocratic doctrine because it seeks to answer the fundamental questions about existence, argues that they can only be answered collectively, and insists that the state put those answers into practice. (p. 336)

~ Jonah Goldberg

The most revealing aspect of Clinton’s career prior to her arrival in Washington was her advocacy for children. Clinton wrote important articles, often denounced by critics as advocating the right of children to “divorce” their parents. She never quite says as much, though it seems undeniable that she was pointing down that road. But the child-divorce debate was always a side issue. What is more important, Hillary Clinton’s writings on children show a clear, unapologetic, and principled desire to insert the state deep into the family life—a goal that is in perfect accord with similar efforts by totalitarians of the past… This is hardly a view unique to myself or to the denizens of the American right…The late Christopher Lasch came to a similar conclusion. Lasch, one of the most perceptive students of American social policy in the twentieth century, and no partisan right-winger, reviewed all of Clinton’s relevant writings for an article in the left-leaning journal Harper’s in 1992. The result is a sober (and sobering) discussion of Clinton’s worldview. Lasch dubs Clinton a modern “child saver,” a term critical historians apply to progressives eager to insert the God-state into the sphere of the family. While Clinton cavils that she wants the state to intervene only in “warranted cases,” her real aim as she admits, is to set down a full and unversal “theory that adequately explains the state’s appropriate role in child rearing.” To this end, she advocates the abolition of “minority status”—that is, the legal codification of what distinguishes a child from an adult. This would be a great progressive leap forward in line with—Clinton’s words—“the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of married women.” Finally, “children, like other persons,” would be presumed “capable of exercising rights and assuming responsibilities until is it proven otherwise.” (p324-325)

Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project. The last thing she would want is to promote ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism, or aggressive wars of conquest. But it must be kept in mind that while these things were of enormous importance to Hitler and hid ideologues, they were in an important sense secondary to the underlying mission and appeal of Nazism, which was to create a new politics and a new nation committed to social justice, radical egalitarianism (albeit for “true Germans”), and the destruction of the traditions of the old order. So while there are light-years of distance between the programs of liberals and thos of Nazis of Italian Fascists or even the nationalist progressives of yore, the underlying impuse, the totalitarian temptation, is present in both. (p. 327)

~ Jonah Goldberg

An old reblog, via (hilker) (complicatedshoes) (sds)

It’s ironic that in the 1930s it was far from out-of-bounds to call the New Deal or FDR fascist. Yet for the two generations after World War II it was simply unacceptable to associate the New Deal with fascism in any way. This cultural and political taboo has skewed American politics in profound ways. In order to assert that the New Deal was the opposite of fascism—rather than a kindred phenomenon—liberal intellectuals had to create an enormous straw man out of the modern conservative movement. This was surprisingly easy. Since “right-wing” was already defined as anti-Roosevelt, it did not take much effort to conflate the American right with Nazism and fascism….

The myth of right-wing fascism only began to unravel decades later thanks to an unlikely figure: Ronald Wilson Reagan, a former Roosevelt Democrat. In both 1976 and 1980 Regan refused to retract his opinion that the early New Dealers looked favorably on the policies of Fascist Italy. […] Reagan’s refusal to back off his claim was a watershed moment, though the taboo remains largely intact. But why was the taboo there in the first place? One answer is both obvious and entirely understandable: the Holocaust. As one of the signature evils of human history, the extermination of European Jewry colors everything it touches. But this is terribly inaccurate, in that various other fascist regimes don’t deserve to be blamed for the Holocaust, including Fascist Italy. Nowhere here do I suggest that New Dealism was akin to Hitlerism if we are to define Hitlerism solely in terms of the Holocaust. But fascism was already fascism before the Holocaust. The Holocaust chronologically and to a certain extent philosophically was the death rattle of fascism in Germany. To use the last chapter of German fascism to explain away the earlier fascisms of Italy, America, and elsewhere is akin to reading the wrong book backward. And to say that the New Deal had nothing in common with fascism because the later New Dealers stood opposed to the Holocaust is to say that there is nothing distinct or significant to fascism save the Holocaust—a position that no serious person holds.

Indeed, it seems almost impossible to deny that the New Deal was objectively fascistic. Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress’ war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they’d deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). In 1942 he flatly told Congress that if it didn’t do what he wanted, he’d do it anyway. He questioned the patriotism of anybody who opposed his economic programs, never mind the war itself. He created the military-industrial complex so many on the left decry as fascist today.

In 1936 Roosevelt told Congress, “We have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.” As Al Smith noted, the upshot of this statement is that Roosevelt didn’t mind an authoritarian government, so long as representatives of “the people”—that is, liberals—ran the government. But if anybody “we” dislike gets control of the government, it would constitute tyranny.

This kind of skewed rationale gets to the heart of liberal fascism. Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism. The anti-dogmatism that progressives and fascists alike inherited from Pragmatism made the motives of the activist the only criteria for judging the legitimacy of action. “I want to assure you,” FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”

Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.