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Bertram Gross wrote Friendly Fascism in 1980, which explores the evolution of the fascist idea after its supposed defeat in WWII. Although he wouldn't have termed it "liberal fascism" the way Jonah Goldberg has (no doubt in an effort to give American reactionaries a brush to tar liberals with), that's basically what it is -- fascism with a friendly face, instead of the classical fascist boot in the face. As for his line about thinking that liberals and conservatives would likely fight fascism were it to emerge, I think he's wrong; I think it's already here, and has been for a long time.
I think liberals particularly are ill-suited to combat fascism -- I think their tendency toward ecumenical thinking makes them ill-disposed to combat fascists. They're too busy trying to accommodate and manage fascists, and only too late realize that they've been played and outmaneuvered.
Conservatives aren't very motivated to battle fascists, because it meets what they see as pressing social needs -- protecting business from too much democracy, smashing labor unions, disempowering intellectuals and teachers, crushing effete bourgeois liberalism (and its corrupting effects on natural society), ending civil and human rights in the interests of state power, and, of course, killing socialism.
Richard Evans' "The Coming of the Third Reich" and "The Third Reich in Power" are both useful (and frightening, in the light of the Bush Years) history books on Nazism, and how it came to be, written by an actual historian. For anybody in Bush's America, vital reading.
I can't entirely object to what Goldberg is talking about, although I think he's writing this as a bludgeon to attack liberalism in general (even as he, paradoxically, touts liberal free-market-driven societies). But isn't the Market as totalitarian as any other abstraction? Seems like any time you subordinate living people to some abstraction, be it God, State, Party, Race, Gender, Market -- you end up in a totalitarian mess, and people get hurt.
The 21st century's battlefront will be between human rights and property rights. Given the state of the world, I think property rights are winning -- torture, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, permanent war -- these things are destroying human rights, and yet they're in place. But property rights are safer than ever. You can see where the priorities are. The friendly fascist will be gung-ho on property rights, and won't give a rat's ass about human rights.
