Letters to the Editor
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What the hell were you thinking?
This guy can get all the free advertising for his book of lies he wants on Fox or talk radio, why is a liberal website giving space to this idiot? I didn't even read the interview, I don't need to, because I understand that conservative=liar. What part of this do YOU not understand? These people already have their own exclusive forums, let's not give them ours too!
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So now liberals can be called Commies AND Fascists
Which is exactly why the book was written.
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So there!
Goldberg could have saved a lot of paper and ink by simply crossing his little arms and yelling at liberals: "I know YOU are but what am I???"
And I understand that Salon wants to show that it is open-minded and all, but there's a point where somebody giving polite and thoughtful consideration to such moronic assertions is just embarrassing to read.
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"That's a great question..." but no answers
This was a fascinating and disturbing interview. Alex Koppelman did a terrific job of challenging Jonah Goldberg over and over again; but whenever the point was too effective, Goldberg would simply say "that's a great question," and either question the quotation or redefine the answer to keep coming back to "liberal = fascist = bad." Making fascism equivalent to socialism is a neat trick, but isn't the core of Hitler's (and Mussolini's and Franco's) fascism the Leader (Führer) Principle: that one person calls the shots? However much you want to bring out the socialist aspects, the Führer Principle is pretty clear cut: Everything may serve the State, but the State is run by one specific person alone. Hitler's own efforts were very clear at that point-- the decisions always ended with him alone, absolutely. Dictatorship is simply not identical to socialism, and looking for definitions of fascism are thus beside the point. The failures of socialism are a whole other topic, but anyone who reads even the Communist Manifesto will be well aware that nothing even approaching Communism has ever really been tried, let alone practiced. Why not go to the heart of the matter? Regardless of whether people claim conservative or liberal values, whether they nationalize or "internationalize," total control over people is an attempt at dictatorship. Forget the artificial left/right distinction: dictatorship is dictatorship regardless of espoused values, because the behaviors are the same.
I imagine his book might be very interesting, in the sense that any revisionist history may help illuminate one's own views of history, but in this interview at least he, too, seems to define "fascist" as "evil" and wants to force any liberal impulse into it. If he must try to create a new concept that embraces both ends of the traditional political spectrum, why not come up with a new term rather than the term he admits is ill-defined and carries baggage? Presumably because he does think liberalism is bad, and he is finding ingenious ways to equate Hitler implicitly to liberals. That's a reason not to try for a more objective term, to deliberately take advantage of the emotional message and the ambiguity. His disavowal of his cover, for example, is disingenuous at best -- as he did in this interview, he's explicitly claiming one thing, but the emotional message and the overall pattern all points the same way in the end. If he seriously objected to the cover, it would be different -- as indeed he changed his subtitle so many times. It's offensive, and he knows it, and he allows it. And I suspect he is using it.
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"And he said a lot of stuff. He was sort of a buffoon in that sense; he was constantly changing his definitions of fascism and talking out of one side of the mouth, then out of the other side of his mouth"
The jokes write themselves.
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Couldn't Finish the Interview
Boring. This guy has nothing to tell me. I doubt he has anything to tell anyone else, either.
But, then, the title kind of gives it away.
Aren't there other, better authors/books you might review in these pages ? You know, in case I might want to buy said tome on account of it says something, you know, Interesting.
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Idiocy
This guy is so idiotic I can refute him in two sentences.
"We stand for the maintenance of private property ... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order."
- Adolph Hitler
Who does this sound most like a liberal or a republican? DUH!
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A different message for each audience
Goldberg put on his rational, media-genic face for this interview, attempting to show he's not really calling liberals nazis, he's just trying to make an arcane political point about the true nature and definition of fascism.
At the same time, I'm quite sure every National Review/Free Republic drone who buys this book will find it a perfect vindication for his paranoid view that laws against sexual harassment and burning leaves are just the first step on the road to gulags.
Goldberg might be able to bluff in front of mainstream and liberal audiences (and not very well, I might add) but his bread and butter comes from off the right-wing mouth-breathers.
Still, I thought it was a good interview by Koppelman
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not actually a new observation
While it seems like Goldberg is purposefully obscuring Fascism and Totalitarianism (I could be wrong) the idea that totalitarianism can eminate from the left is, of course, one of the founding principles of neoconservatism. People have been saying that leftist government interferes with everyday life too much since FDR if not earlier, and that government presence should be scaled back. Thanks Ayn Rand, but only the priveleged and the crazy can really support that view, and deny the oppressiveness of capitalism on vast swathes of the population; this is all a matter of perspective. Not that I don't think totalitarianism can eminate from the left; it most certainly does. The mandated health insurance compromise, the drunk driving laws, or the smoking bans of my home state, MA, reeks of such overextension of power. But facism is a different story, and dismissing the chauvinist male aspect as part of certain types of facism robs it of its particularlity. In fact, what I think Goldberg seems blind to is how facism, intellectually, begins as a conservative reaction to the oppressiveness of the mandates of the masses expressed in leftist politics. I am thinking about the traditionalism of Eliot, Pound and even Heidegger--all of whom rejected liberalism, communism, and mass culture as part of disease which was limiting the process and freedom of Man's being. This response--and subsequent embrace of high culture traditions--has a powerful draw to it, one I often feel, and certainly is part of what happened at the birth of neoconservatism, as a bunch of leftist intellectuals swung hard right. However, it is essentially an attempt to recapture a whole in the face of disintegration and the influence of mass life on the individual. That, in my opinion, is the type of unforgiving and uncompromising search for purity that is the true expression of the facist intellectual. Which mirrors populist facism in the ideological search for the fate or inner purpose of a nation, or people, which again hinges on an ideal of purity. So while much liberalism can be totalitarian, I do not think it has that search for purity that really is the essence of facism; liberals often accept and embrace fragmentation and cosmopolitianism, the things conservatives see as currupting. Goldberg seems another case of missing the point by commiting the sin he accuses liberals of i.e. overdeterming all other issues with economics. But neoconservatives have been doing that since the begining of the movement, this is nothing to get hysterical about. They have always been perversly marxist.