Fascism is the socialism of "race", Marxism is the socialism of "class", how many times do we have to go over this!

The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg

April 26, 2013

Dear Reader (Note: This "Dear Reader" gag redacted on account of the sequester. Thanks a lot, heartless Republicans!).

I'm writing to you from the Dunkin' Donuts in Chestertown, Md. Why, you ask. Because vests have no sleeves, of course.

Oh crap, sorry. That was the opening for my Dadaist newsletter that I do on the side. You can sign up for it at meltingclockcoveredinants@altavista.andalusiandog.org

.No, actually, I'm writing from the Dunkin' Donuts for several reasons. First, donuts. Second, I gave a speech last night at Washington College (a great little school from what I can tell) and woke up in the campus guest cottage (which is preferable to that time I spoke at Hillsdale and woke up in a windowless panel van in the woods with like 500 decapitated Barbie dolls and Professor John Miller behind the wheel, his cackling laughter echoing out from the cavernous headpiece of his University of Michigan Wolverine mascot suit). And Washington College just happens to be in Chestertown, Md. (It helps if you imagine me saying that like Bruce Dern in one of history's most underrated movies, Diggstown, explaining that Diggstown just happens to be in Olivair County.) And, even though Chestertown does not have a Starbucks, everyone knows that 

Dunkin' Donuts coffee is in fact superior to Starbucks anyway. On this there can be no debate.

Like the opera singer who ate too much dairy before rehearsal said, I'm sorry for all the throat clearing. So let's just get to it.

About Last Night

Last night's speech went pretty well. It was billed as being on the "future of conservatism," even though my speaker's bureau had told me it would be on Liberal Fascism. So I had to call a bit of an audible and go with my old standby of erotic interpretive dance. I shouldn't have to say it, but I left no one disappointed.

During the Q&A a very attractive girl who'd spent much of my talk rolling her eyes and chatting with her friend, asked me a pretty typical question. She asked, more or less: How can you expect the Republicans to have a future if you go around antagonizing liberals, who are half the country, the way you did tonight?

I responded with a few points. First, I did my "Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield." Then I did "dog pointing at water fowl." I followed up with "Billy Hayes furiously pointing at Rifki in Midnight Express." And I closed with the crowd pleaser "Bill Clinton pointing out his nightly selections from the intern pens."

Once I was done with my interpretive dance "points," I adjusted my form fitting unitard and made some verbal ones.

I explained that I was not there as a Republican and that I don't speak for the Republican party. The GOP is simply the more conservative of the two political parties and as such it gets my vote. I speak for myself, for conservatism as I understand it, and -- it should go without saying -- the riders of Rohan.

Second, liberals -- as in people who actually call themselves liberals -- make up only about 20 percent of the electorate, while people who self-identify as conservatives make up 40 percent of the country. So even if I was speaking for Republicans, the idea that the key to Republican success lies in avoiding antagonizing liberals is just plain weird. Besides, liberals have had a great run of late antagonizing conservatives. Shouldn't that mean liberals are doomed?

I made a few other (verbal) points. Deep Space Nine, much like Brussels sprouts and Swiss armed neutrality, is underrated, etc. But here's the interesting part ("We'll be the judge of that," – The Couch). A central theme of my speech was that conservatives should spend less time demonizing liberals and more time trying to understand why so many people find the liberal message of "community" appealing.

I suggested that maybe what she took for my "antagonizing" could more plausibly be described as me offering "hard truths" she didn't like hearing. This made her quite angry. One might even say it antagonized her. And that's fair enough. No one likes being told that their anger stems not from being wrongly insulted but from being rightly told that they're wrong ("Gimme a second; I'm still trying to follow that" -- The Couch).

Still, I find this representative of a lot of campus liberals. They seem to think that the first sin of conservatism is disagreeing with liberals, as if it is simply mean-spirited to think liberals are wrong.

Facts, Horrible Facts

Second perhaps only to the glories of women's prison movies, this was one of the earliest themes of the G-File, going back to the ancient origins of National Review Online, when I would personally tattoo this "news" letter on the back of a dwarf and have him run to each reader and take his shirt off. It was really inefficient.

What was I talking about? Oh right, the "meanness" of disagreement. Without getting into the weeds of the immigration or gun-control debates, there's a certain liberal attitude that disagreement is just nasty. If you point out that background checks or "assault weapon" bans won't work, the response is anger and frustration that you just don't get it. 

That's because, as Emerson once said, "There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact." Whenever I talk to liberal college kids, I think of this line, because when I disagree with them it hurts their feelings (I would say their tears are delicious, but even I recoil at the image of me running out into the audience and licking the cheeks of weepy college kids).

Tito Puente Liberalism

Years ago, Ramesh and I wrote a piece together on the liberal tendency to hold that the only good conservative is a dead conservative. I can't find it right now because the NRO archives and search functions are working about as well as Happy Hour at a Jewish deli in Riyadh. But take my word for it, it's there.

The point of the piece was that the moment a conservative dies, liberals stop reviling him and start revering him in order to make the living conservatives look bad. It is literally (as Joe Biden would say when he means figuratively) like liberals unleash a zombie army of dead right-wingers to feast on the flesh of living Republicans. It's like that scene in Stripes where Bill Murray tells his whining girlfriend to stop bagging on Tito Puente. "Tito Puente's gonna be dead, and you're gonna say, 'Oh, I've been listening to him for years, and I think he's fabulous.'"

I bring this up because as conservatives struggle to figure out how to navigate themselves out of the current rough patch, it's worth keeping a simple fact in mind. Whichever faction of conservatism comes to define the Right in the years to come, that is precisely the faction that liberals will decide is the most evil. I guarantee it. In the 1990's, neoconservatives were very popular among liberals because they were seen as the good outsiders pushing back against the eeeeeeeeevil Christians. When, all of a sudden, the neocons went from being the perceived outsiders to the perceived insiders in the Bush White House, the neocons suddenly became the most evil Republicans ever.

For the last couple of years, libertarianism has been the new form of "good right winger" for many liberals. I promise you, if Rand Paul or some other libertarian becomes the leader of the GOP, suddenly libertarianism will go from being an admirably unthreatening philosophy to a creed of Randian greed and cruelty. Liberals are always capable of finding something appealing in conservative factions that are out of power (see just about everything Sam Tanenhaus has ever written about conservatism; "if only conservatives went back to being quirky cape-wearing defenders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire!"). It is only when a faction of the Right threatens to take the reins of power from the Left that they become terrifying. In other words, it is not conservative ideas that are scary and "antagonizing," it is the idea of not being in charge anymore that really frighten liberals.

By all means, if it is necessary for conservatives to change then change is necessary (Viscount Falkland paraphrase for the win!), but if you think there is a position conservatives can take that will make liberals stop calling conservatives "dangerous" or "extremists," good luck with that.

My column earlier this week touched on this. FDR and Truman didn't cast (very liberal) Republicans as Nazis because of what the Republicans wanted to do in power, they cast Republicans as Nazis because they had the temerity to want to be in power. George W. Bush was an evil dictator for doing x, y, or z. When Obama does x, y, or z it's okay because Bush was Bush and Obama is Obama. So long as conservatives insist on not being liberals and trying to win elections, they will "antagonize" liberals. So trying to find a conservative agenda that doesn't antagonize liberalism is like trying to find a hairstyle that will make a grizzly bear not want to eat you.

Vichy Lives

For those of you without long memories or a properly functioning Way Back Machine, you may not know that I wrote a book called Liberal Fascism. Unlike a golden retriever I once knew who ate a whole paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye, I'm not going to vomit up the whole book here. But one of my core arguments was that fascism was a phenomenon of the Left if you go by what constitutes being on the right in the Anglo-American tradition. (One reason liberals hated the book is that I defined my terms.) In America and England, conservatism has many varieties, but an emphasis on individual liberty and a limited government runs through all of them.

On the European continent things were different. An American libertarian pilgrim in, say, late-19th or early-20th century Germany searching for a political home would be like when Ellwood asks the bartender, "What kind of music do you usually have here?" in The Blues Brothers. She responds, "Oh, we got both kinds: country and western."

In Germany they had two kinds of political philosophies, statist and really statist. American progressives liked the former more than the latter. From LF:

No European statesman loomed larger in the minds and hearts of American progressives than Otto von Bismarck. As inconvenient as it may be for those who have been taught "the continuity between Bismarck and Hitler," writes Eric Goldman, Bismarck's Germany was "a catalytic of American progressive thought." Bismarck's "top- down socialism," which delivered the eight-hour workday, health care, social insurance, and the like, was the gold standard for enlightened social policy. "Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy; assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old," he famously told the Reichstag in 1862. Bismarck was the original "Third Way" figure who triangulated between both ends of the ideological spectrum. "A government must not waver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward," he proclaimed. Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 national Progressive Party platform conspicuously borrowed from the Prussian model. Twenty-five years earlier, the political scientist Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's welfare state was an "admirable system . . . the most studied and most nearly perfected" in the world.

Anyway, like me after eating two bratwursts, I could go on but I probably shouldn't. But the thing I want to get to is that my argument was received by the Left the way my dog responds to that woman in yoga pants doing Tai-Chi in the park, i.e. with total irrational rage and contempt. (It really is awesome when Cosmo sees someone doing Tai-Chi at the dog park. He starts barking wildly "What are you doing!?" "Your strange poses and movements make me uncomfortable!" "Stop that!" "I'm Serious! Your weirding way defiles all I hold holy!") A couple of years after Liberal Fascism came out, the History News Network organized a symposium on the book (at first they didn't even want to invite me to participate or respond). The 800-pound gorilla in the gang-up was Robert O. Paxton, arguably the leading living scholar of fascism. You can read his critique here, and my omnibus response here I loved it, because it reassured me that while I didn't necessarily get every single thing right, if that was the very best the scholarly community could do to rebut my book, that meant, well, I won.

Anyhow, I bring all of this up because Robert Paxton has a really interesting essay in the current New York Review of Books in which he unwittingly echoes so many of my arguments. French social democracy -- what we would call liberalism in America today -- is deeply indebted to Vichy fascism. The French Left has an instinctual aversion to hearing this because they find such facts mean. The modern welfare state is not antithetical to fascism but essential to it. Etc., etc. He writes:

All the modern twentieth-century European dictatorships of the right, both fascist and authoritarian, were welfare states. The current American conservative agenda of a weak state associated with laissez-faire economic and social arrangements would have been anathema to them, as an extreme perversion of a despised individualistic liberalism (in that term's original sense). They all provided medical care, pensions, affordable housing, and mass transport as a matter of course, in order to maintain productivity, national unity, and social peace.

As Glenn Reynolds might say: Heh.