Goldberg: Swarthmore teachers are fascists

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...

Comments

[f. stop fitzgerald]

We kind of ask for it when we post Swat stickers all over everything, no?

[JFred]

Goldberg may have an out. Nazis are not generic fascists, they are specifically genocidal racist fascists.

Mussolini, who invented fascism, did not push the genocide, he merely failed to stop it — Overwhelmed by his stronger ally. The early days of Italian fascism, even when in power, were not genocidal like the Nazis.

So maybe that's the distinction Goldberg is making.

Of course, none of this persuades me Goldberg is right on his issues. I haven't even read his book.

[Sean-B]

With a January 8th release date, we should at least see a release sometime in August, or maybe early 2009.

(If someone buys the book from your link, Brendan, do you profit? Seems kind of bizarre...)

I too would like to see how goldberg defended himself on this - even though its obvious he will try to parse the differences between making analogies with "nazis" and show how very different "fascists" are in comparison.

But we know his true intent was to associate fascists with nazis, given the hitler likeness of his perception of smiley faced liberals.

Goldberg shouldn't be so peeved at the analogies between the nazi and repub parties today -- When i do it, its always about the danger signals from the 1930's repeating themselves: Like, by the way people are so easily convinced that foreign enemies want to destroy them, how purity is important and that the sick mentality of the lynch mobs, furthering a nazi agenda, was a form of providence,