Via Matthew Yglesias, the great thinker Jonah Goldberg has published the “book” that I mocked a couple of years ago: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Its jacket features this immortal line about my alma mater (also in the Amazon summary text):
Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
Who needs Ann Coulter when you have Jonah Goldberg?
But the best part, as I noted back in 2005, is that Goldberg has a long history of denouncing Nazi analogies:
1/5/01: “Nazism and the Holocaust are hardly joking matters. So let me be very careful in how I talk about this.
“If you honestly think John Ashcroft or elected Republicans in general are Nazis, then you are either a moron of ground-shaking proportions or you are so daft that you shouldn’t be allowed to play with grown-up scissors.”
…”Calling someone a Nazi is as bad as calling them a “nigger” or a “kike” or anything
else you can think of. It’s not cute. It’s not funny. And it’s certainly
not clever. If you’re too stupid to understand that a philosophy that
favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the
scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the
free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic,
and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should
use this rule of thumb: If someone isn’t advocating the murder of millions
of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn’t
assume he’s a Nazi and you should know it’s pretty damn evil to call him
one.”
6/19/02: “[T]he use and
abuse of Nazi analogies has been a major peeve of mine for quite some
time.”
9/4/03: “Suffice
it to say that the Nazis weren’t simply generically bad, they were uniquely
and monumentally evil, not just in their hearts but also in literally
billions of intentional, well-planned, and bureaucratized decisions they
made every day.“And yet, in polite
and supposedly sophisticated circles in America today it is acceptable
to say George Bush is akin to a Nazi and that America is becoming Nazi-like.
Indeed, in certain corners of the globe to disagree with this assertion
is the more outlandish position than to agree with it.”…”When you say that anything
George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust
into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not
genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years…“Darn those
Republicans” does not equal “Darn those Nazis.” The Patriot
Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not
all be guilty of terrorism, but it’s more than reasonable to assume they
are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing
as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don’t get carted
off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter
Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing
the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The
Jews weren’t terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say
that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely
interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to
trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even
if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they
are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime
of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.
Update 12/18 1:13 PM: Matthew Yglesias says it’s not an analogy for Goldberg — he’s literally saying liberals are fascists:
Brendan Nyhan thinks he’s got Jonah Goldberg nailed as some kind of hypocrite, citing such past Goldbergisms as “the use and abuse of Nazi analogies has been a major peeve of mine for quite some time” and “Suffice it to say that the Nazis weren’t simply generically bad, they were uniquely and monumentally evil, not just in their hearts but also in literally billions of intentional, well-planned, and bureaucratized decisions they made every day”.
As I understand it, though, the difference here is that in Liberal Fascism Goldberg isn’t drawing an analogy. He’s saying that “the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood” just are the “modern heirs” to the American tradition of fascism “an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries.” Contemporary American liberalism, in short, doesn’t resemble Nazism. Rather, according to Goldberg it’s a variety of fascism, albeit a “friendly” one.
While that’s certainly what it appears from the book jacket text, we don’t know yet. But in any case the hypocrisy charge stands — how can Goldberg possibly square what he wrote before with the book? I’ve emailed him to ask for an answer…