Some Thoughts on Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”

by Micah Tillman

A post by The Free Liberal’s Paul Gessing caught my attention a little while back. In it he was surprised to find himself “Agreeing With Jonah Goldberg.” Goldberg had written a piece on the self-rebranding of liberals as “progressive,” and Gessing hoped “the hard-core left’s abandonment of ‘liberal’ [would] allow centrist and freedom-embracing political movements to re-take the term.”

I was reminded of Gessing’s post on Sunday, as Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism hit #3 on the New York Times Best Seller’s List for hardcover nonfiction. Since I have a hard time telling many of the people who claim to hate fascists from the fascists of history, I’ve often wondered whether fascism could be defined at all. The more I’ve read Goldberg’s answers to critiques of his book (over at his National Review blog) however, the more I think everyone agrees “nationalism” or “statism” forms at least one part of the definition.

After all, Gessing, who doesn’t like Goldberg, calls liberals “statists” in the post mentioned above; then Goldberg himself labels liberalism “fascist,” and calls the “ideology of Nazis and Italian Fascists” “hyper-statist”; and then Goldberg quotes a critique of his book by Megan McArdle, in which she provides a list of “attributes commonly used to define fascism” — which includes “nationalism.”

There might also be agreement that what McArdle calls a “Great Leader” must be a part of any fully-fascist movement. It seems to me that all the countries I’d want to call “fascist” were characterized both by their nationalism/statism and cult-of-personality, anyway.

But there are two things which have come up in the process of Goldberg’s defending himself, which I think are simply wrong. For instance, Goldberg attempts to defend conservatism against a list of fascism’s components from a piece by David Neiwert (which Neiwert gets from a piece by Umberto Eco).

One of those components is, “The rejection of modernism,” due to “traditionalism.” While fascists love technology, Eco says, their “rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.” The National Socialists’ “praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden).”

I would claim, however, that Eco’s claim (and therefore Neiwert’s use of it) is too confused to be of any use. It intermixes the concept of “modernity” with that of “modernism.” Modernism is a philosophical approach to the world, which attempts to make way for new things by undercutting presently-oppressive authorities. This undercutting of authority is always made in modernism by an appeal to an older, more original, more primordial authority.

Modernity, on the other hand, is the result of modernism. It is what the modernist revival of more-fundamental authority (so as to make way for what is new) produces. Modernism, since its origin in Descartes and Bacon, has given rise to many things: revolutions in science, medicine, economics, politics, etc. But to be against any one of these products is not to be against modernism.

In fact, the appeal to “blood and earth” as more fundamental than an economic system like capitalism — so as to pave the way for a new (e.g., National Socialist) system — is a modernist move par excellence. It is a rejection of one part of modernity, not a rejection of modernism.

In fact, if modernism’s move is made a way of life, instead of a one-time event, what you will get is a continual undercutting of present authorities — by appeal to “older” or more fundamental authorities — in order to let in or create the new. In other words, you have “continual revolution” (or perhaps “progress” or “flow” or “in-vention” or “openness to the other”).

And with all this you begin to get a picture of the philosophical moves made by “post-modernists,” from self-styled anti-fascists like Deleuze and Guattari and to leftists like Derrida and Caputo.

So if Eco and Neiwert are right, they’re using the wrong word. They should be speaking about “modernity.” But why would rejecting one part of modernity make you fascist, when rejecting other parts of it (as Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Caputo, etc. do) doesn’t?

And if they really mean “modernism,” we’re still confused. What they describe as a rejection of modernism is, in fact, just more modernism.

A second attempt at specifying the nature of fascism which I would reject has to do with McArdle’s use of the word “new” in the following: “The fascist ideal, which I'd liken to the dream of making every citizen behave like a cell within a mighty body, driven by a Great Leader functioning as the brain, was in many ways a new and pernicious vision.”

In fact, this “organicism,” as Goldberg calls it, is nothing new. Goldberg traces it back to “German romanticism and 18th and 19th century European nationalism generally.” But we can go further. St. Paul describes the Church in the same way (run searches for “body Christ” and “Christ head” in any online Bible, e.g. bible.crosswalk.com).

And we can go back even further than that, to Plato’s Republic. There Plato argues that the human Soul and the City are structurally-identical, having the same basic parts which are interrelated in the same basic ways. And even though Plato’s ideal city would be ruled by an entire class of rational leaders (who took turns governing as they came of age), it would have to begin with a single “philosopher king.”

The more I ponder these issues, in other words, the more ludicrous it appears to me that fascism either could or should be defined by what happened in two European countries in the first half of the 20th Century. There’s something much deeper, more universal, about it.

And if Goldberg is right that fascism is an “impulse that resides in all of us” (Deleuze and Guattari would agree), perhaps we all, conservative and liberal, should be on guard against ourselves, not just each other. (Libertarians, however, are fine, of course.)

Micah Tillman is a Lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. His blog can be found at http://micahtillman.com/.