Jonah Goldberg a "pundit"? The guy has yet to thread two coherent thoughts together. Unless that is what the word "pundit" implies...

Fascism is left-wing? So that makes Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, socialists? Has Goldberg ever read any European history?

Why on earth waste precious space for a crassly ignorant cretin like Goldberg? He is a joke even to the rest of the right-wing punditry.

Please, do not ever, ever, publish another photograph, of this porker again. He is as revolting outside as he is inside.

the definition of fascism isn't all that mysterious - "everything for the state" said by Mussolini himself...in other words the individual serves the needs of the state and presumably sacrifices for the state...in liberalism the state serves the needs of the individual - property rights and individual freedom are primary values. To equate the two is ludicrous.

Everyone seems to forget that fascism has one element that other collective systems leave out - that is the use of the military to control the population and enforce the government dictates.

"To be neoconservative is to bear almost daily witness to the resurrection of Adolf Hitler." (timothy noah nytimes book reivew) These Neocons beleive they own the rights to the Holocaust and have turned it into a kind of francise. Nevermind that Hitler also murdered 3 million non-jewish Poles, or that many Polish Jews welcomed and cheered as Stalin's troops put Christian Poles into boxcars and shipped them off to Siberia never to be heard from again. That is neither here nor there to the NeoCons, all that matters is that their victimization during the Holocaust has turned into a valuable political asset. If you disagree with a Neo-Con you are automatically labeled anti-semitic, if you beleive Israel shouldn't still be occupying and stealing Palestinian land you are an anti-semite with Hitleresque tendencys, if you mention that non-jews were also Hitler's victims, you are said to be a Holocaust denier...it goes on and on. When will the media call them out on this? When will Salon?

I don't question Goldberg's ability to generate media buzz, and land the choice interviews -- his mother IS, after all, Lucienne Goldberg, she of the Linda Tripp machinations and a dirty trickster for Nixon back in the day. And Jonah cut his "journalistic" teeth as a pro-impeachment apologist, ginning up mendacities out of whole cloth, much like this leaden tome.

What I find ironic is that Doubleday/Random House's parent company, Bertelsmann is a German media company that was busted for covering up its Nazi past by the BBC back in 2002.

I suppose Goldberg's high ethical stance doesn't have any qualms about that -- just pumping a disinformation meme that muddies the waters most recently clarified by Naomi Wolf's “ten signs of impending fascism” and requiring a rightie muddling of such dangerous truths.

Climbing in bed with ex-Nazis to accuse "liberals" of being fascists isn't self-contradictory. Not in the least.

Eh, I wouldn't exactly call Liberalism "related" to Fascism. But I would say that Liberalism is an inherently authoritarian political ideology, or at least it displays very authoritarian tenancies. If you're honest with yourself as a Liberal you'll have to agree.

BTW the political spectrum is not a line or a bullshit "circle" (that's retarded), it is in fact an axis, with the top of the y being Authoritarianism and the bottom being Anarchism, and the left of the x being leftism and the right being conservatism. This paints a way more accurate picture of what the political field looks like. Hence you can have Authoritarian Leftists (Stalinists), Anarcho-Rightists (Lazzi-faire capitlists) and visa versa.

Oh and I find the Ron Paul supporters here really funny. What are you even doing on this Liberal website?

It would be interesting to challenge taught notions that simplistically equate European Fascism with American Conservatism. I was tempted to buy the book until I read this interview: if Jonah Goldberg cannot even be consistent in answering some friendly questions and chooses to spend most of his time claiming that readers shouldn't take some of what he says at face value while simultaneously demanding that they take the rest of it more seriously than they do (color coding might have helped), then I'll wait for a coherent book on the subject.

Historical revisionism (and political, and social) far too often consists simply of the replacement of one set of stereotypes for another, stereotyping sadly busked up with additional claims of rectitude and "justice-seeking" that reject all further discussion as "un-just." There's a "unified" system for you, practiced not only by the Jonah Goldbergs but also the Noam Chomskys among us.

These tendencies have painfully diminished the argumentative power of both the left and the right.

My father, who left Germany in '33, had said to me that as far as he, a Jew, was concerned, the fascism wasn't the bad thing - the anti-semitism was the bad thing. He, and Goldberg, did not see that fascism was not merely a form of popular collectivism, thus tarring every form of group action with the label "fascist". True fascism also must have national, ethnic, sexual, and cultural imperatives - it requires an "us" and a "them". The Republican's nativism and anti-immigrant fervor is a prime example. Not to mention their homophobic terror. And the kitschy sentimentality attached to the cherubic unborn, not the annoying already-born.

So, while Democrats do, indeed, see Gov't as an agent of collective will, which can seem coercive to folk who want to smoke indoors, flirt with their secretaries, and avoid paying for worker safety, it is Republicans and the right who claim that there is a National Identity, tied to religious and cultural identities, and what they see as Personal Virtue (they have reluctantly, though thankfully, abandoned ethnicity as a clique marker).

Both the left and the right in the USA seem to desire collective action, with government as the tool. But it is on the right that this action is toward enforcing religious, sexual, and cultural norms. Those, it seems to me, are the markers of noxious "Fascism!", as opposed to this neutral, academic fascism which Goldberg purports to be studying.

And, of course, now that Goldberg has teased out a second, defanged, definition of the word "fascism", much confusion can be fomented, like with the word "theory". This way the right can use the word on liberals, getting their emotional rise from the right. And any liberal who complains will be frowned on as a bad sport - chill out! Don't they know that the smart people have found that fascism isn't so bad?