Liberal Fascism

January 28, 2008

One of the alternate-universe experiences I’ve had is from reading extended passages of Jonah Goldberg’s new book Liberal Fascism. In this book, Goldberg furthers the neo-conservative “I’m rubber and you’re glue” message by arguing that fascism is not (as is commonly believed) a conservative political theory but a liberal one instead. Liberals are the ideological heirs of Hitler. He does this first by confusing authoritarianism with fascism, and then by drawing as many stretch-comparisons as possible between fascist attitudes and liberalism. Then he simply ignores or discounts those elements of fascist ideology which would appear to be conservative, not liberal, attributes. Dave Neiwert has an extended, multi-post analysis on this. And if this argument concerns you as much as it does me, I recommend you read as much of Neiwert’s analysis as you can manage; the book is currently ranked #2 in “politics” and #9 overall on Amazon, so you’re likely to hear this line from your more conservative friends sometime in the near future.

Posted in Politics