Sunday,
February 03, 2008
We're
All Fascists Now; according to Jonah Goldberg
WARNING:
Jonah Goldberg is slightly Right of Attila the Hun. :) Some of what he says is
accurate and illuminating, but beware.
The
term "Fascism" is used by lIberals and Conservatives vs their
foes, basically just as a code word for "evil." usually having no
Idea as to what it's principles
were, and that FDR built his "New Deal" on the concepts
first instituted in Italy by Mussolini, and that Bill
Clinton. and Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, and
particularly John Edwards with his populism, follow Mussolini basic
theories, albeit with more hugs than mugs.
One
must keep in mind that Mussolini's
father was a Communist, as was Mussolini, who had a Communist Mistress,
who was a in a position to advance his career. Later Mussolini repudiated
the Communists, and became a SOCIALIST, but a Right Wing
Socialist who fought tooth and nail with the Right wing SOCIALISTS. The
Left wing Socialists attempted to discredit Mussolini by labeling him a
"Right Winger"
If
you don't read this you will NEVER
be able to adequately debate the subject. From the Salon and Washington Post.
"We're All
Fascists now"
An interview with conservative pundit
Jonah Goldberg, who argues that fascism is left-wing, not right-wing, and that
contemporary liberals are fascism's
intellectual offspring.
Salon
Magazine
By
Alex Koppelman
January
11, 2008
Jan. 11, 2008 | Jonah
Goldberg is not a popular man among liberals. The son of Lucianne Goldberg, the
literary agent who played a pivotal role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he
already had that as a strike against him when he began his career as a
conservative political commentator in the late 1990s. A writer and blogger for
the National Review and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, he's now a frequent target for the mockery of liberal
bloggers.
But nothing has inspired the ire of liberals
quite like Goldberg's new book, "Liberal
Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics
of Meaning." There was the provocative cover, which
adds a Hitler mustache to the familiar yellow smiley-face icon. Then there was
the book's ever-changing subtitle. Originally
"The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary
Clinton," ...
In the book, Goldberg attempts to convince
readers that six decades of conventional wisdom that have placed Italy's Benito Mussolini, fascism on the right side
of the ideological spectrum are wrong, and that fascism is really a phenomenon
of the left. Goldberg also attributes fascist rhetoric and tactics to
Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and describes the New Deal's descendants, modern American liberals, as
carriers of this liberal-fascist DNA. In a sense, "We're All Fascists Now," as Goldberg
puts it in one of his chapter titles. Salon spoke with Goldberg by phone.
What's
the book about?
It's
a revisionist history. It's
an attempt to reconfigure, or I would say correct, the standard
understanding of the political and ideological context that frames most of the
ideological debates that we have had since, basically, World
War II. There's this idea
that the further right you go the closer you get to Nazism and fascism, and the further left you go the closer you
get to decency and all good things, or at least having the right intentions in
your heart.
For 60 years most
historians have been putting fascism on the right, or conservative, side of the
political spectrum. What are you able to see that they weren't?
There are a lot of historians who get fascism
basically right. There are a lot of historians who don't.
I think the Marxists have been part and parcel of a basic propaganda
campaign for a very long time, but there are plenty of historians who
understand what fascism was and are actually quite honest about it.
To sort of start the story, the
reason why we see fascism as a thing of the right is because fascism was
originally a form of right-wing socialism. Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist,
he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important
socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist
activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a
right-winger is because he supported World War I.
Originally being a fascist meant you were
a right-wing socialist, and the
problem is that we've incorporated
these European understandings of things and then just dropped the socialist. In
the American context fascists get called right-wingers even though there is
almost no prominent fascist leader -- starting with Mussolini and Hitler -- who
if you actually went about and looked at their economic programs, or to a
certain extent their social program, where you wouldn't
locate most if not all of those ideas on the ideological left in the
American context.
You write about how historians have had
difficulty defining fascism. How did you come up with the definition of fascism
that you use in the book?
Well, yeah, it's
very hard to come up with a definition of fascism. And one of the things
that I've found that was kind of
amazing in this process, especially since the book has come out, is how people
can't let go of fascism as a morally
loaded term for evil. [George] Orwell
says fascism has come to mean anything not desirable as early as 1946, and it
is amazing how it is so ingrained in our political psychology to see
"fascist" basically just as a code word for "evil."
So anyway, I'm
sorry -- my definition of fascism I get in large chunks from Eric Voegelin, the political philosopher. He
wrote this book "The Political Religions," and I see fascism as a
political religion. That doesn't
mean I think there's some book, like
a bible, that if you read it you will become a convert to this political
religion. Rather I think it is a religious impulse that resides in all of us --
left, right, black, white, tall, short -- to seek unity in all things, to
believe that we need to all work together to go past any of our disagreements
and that the state needs to be, almost simply as a pragmatic matter, the
pace-setter, the enforcer of this cult of unity. That is what I believe
fascism is.
Related to your definition, at least as I
read the book, was something that's
been controversial about it. Especially because of one of the earlier
iterations of the subtitle, ["Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation
From Hegel to Whole Foods"] there's
a perception that your argument comes down to things like both Nazis and
liberals being proponents of organic food. Is that how it works? Because the
Nazis liked dogs and I like dogs, I'm
a Nazi?
No, no. I mean, I try to reject that kind of
thing ... I don't believe that
liberals are Nazis; I believe that if Nazism came to the United States it is
entirely possible that liberals would be at the forefront of the battle to stop
it. So would conservatives. I'm not
trying to do any argument ad Hitlerum in this book.
But what I am trying to do, at least in the
chapter that you're talking about, is
show how -- [take] Robert Proctor, who wrote an award-winning, widely esteemed
book called "I think we need to remember that something can be
fascistic ... and not be evil"
Along those lines, you write, "What
is fascist is the notion that in an organic national community, the individual
has no right not to be healthy; and the state therefore has the obligation to
force us to be healthy for our own good." And you cite the example of a
state legislator who wants to ban using iPods
when crossing the street. Under that definition, how are, say, seat-belt laws,
helmet laws, laws against drunk driving, the drinking age, all that, not
fascistic?
First of all, again, I think we need to
remember that something can be fascistic just like something can be socialistic
and not be evil. It can just be wrong ... And so I think you can make the
argument that a lot of the things you cite are fascistic in one sense, but that
doesn't mean they're automatically bad ideas. The autobahn was
fascistic -- that doesn't mean that
we should ban highways.
That said, a lot of the things you listed, if
I heard you right, are laws for preventing people from harming others.
And that is a legitimate function of government: to protect the general
welfare, to protect people's privacy
and property and lives. That is perfectly within the Anglo-American
tradition of constitutional law and all the rest. But where you get into scarier
territory is when you have people saying that you can't smoke in your own home or that you can't eat certain foods or that because of the
healthcare system that we have and that Democrats want to expand, since harming
yourself costs the taxpayer money, you have no right to harm yourself.
I mentioned seat-belt laws, which are
really aimed at the individual who's
supposed to be wearing the seat belt. And on the right, there's the Terri
Schiavo debate.
Yeah. Well, but the Terri
Schiavo debate is an interesting example. The Nazis were grotesque euthanizers.
Long before they went to the Jews they started exterminating the mentally ill,
the enfeebled, what they called "useless bread gobblers," people who
couldn't contribute to the society.
And there are all sorts of criticisms that I think are legitimate that you can
aim at pro-lifers, but you can not argue that pro-lifers are somehow Nazi-like
in their support of the pro-life cause, because it is exactly contrary to the
way the Nazis operated to believe that every life is sacred.
You write, "[Liberalism] is
definitely totalitarian -- or 'holistic,' if you prefer -- in that liberalism today sees no
realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to
what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports,
entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political
salience for liberal fascists."
Couldn't
that just as easily be said of the American right? You've
got, certainly, conservatives judging entertainment from political
perspectives; I remember discussion on [National
Review group blog] the Corner of the 2006 Steelers-Seahawks Super
Bowl through a political lens. There were "Freedom Fries" and
boycotts of French food and wine. And, I mean, your wife worked for [former
Attorney General] John Ashcroft, so you know that on the right,
sex can certainly be political.
I will first stipulate right upfront that I
agree with you that there are lots of places on the right where this is so, and
I don't like that stuff either ...
That said, I don't think that the
equation between liberalism and conservatism goes as far as you would like to
take it. You know, you have environmental groups giving out kits and
instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind
of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing
doesn't really go on.
I don't
have any problem with liberals or conservatives criticizing stuff that goes on
in the popular culture ... [I]t's
when you want to dragoon the state into these things, everything from hate
crimes to these early interventions in childhood. You read "It Takes a Village"
and Hillary [Clinton]
declares that basically we're in a
crisis from the moment we're born
and that justifies the helping professions from breaking into the nuclear
family at the earliest possible age.
You have a lot of this stuff
on the right, I agree. [George W.] Bush had his marriage counseling stuff that
he wanted to propose, I didn't like
that. I think Ashcroft gets a very bad rap, but one of the things I did not
like was him basically having this philosophy that since the federal government
was an agent for a left-wing agenda that therefore it should be an agent for a
right-wing agenda. I agree with you to that extent, that that stuff is bad, and
it constitutes a kind of right-wing progressivism that I really do not like and
I see in people like Mike Huckabee and I see to a certain extent in
compassionate conservatism, as I discuss at the end of the book.
You write about militarism being central
to fascism, and a militaristic strain remaining in today's
liberalism -- the war on cancer, the war on drugs, the War on Poverty. Why
include the war on drugs formulation with liberalism? It was Richard Nixon who
declared it, then it withered under Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan really
brought it back and was the drug warrior.
I think that's
probably a fair criticism. But I should start at the beginning ... What appealed to the Progressives about
militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was
that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best
tool then known for mobilization ... That is what is
fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing
society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond
ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly
speaking, pretty pacifistic. They're
not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they're still deeply enamored with this concept of the
moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to
the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it's all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to
move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things , all of
that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that's what I'm
getting at.
As for the war
on drugs part, I think you make a perfectly fine point, except I
would argue that Nixon was not a particularly conservative guy. Measured by
today's standards and today's issues, Nixon would be in the liberal wing of the
Democratic Party.
Next page: "I think the same thing applies to the radicals in
the 1960's ... their actions were fascist"
You've
talked about Mussolini remaining on the left and remaining a socialist, and in
your book you've got a lot of quotes
from the 1920s about that, but I'm
wondering -- how does that fit in with what he wrote and said later, especially
"The Doctrine of Fascism" in 1932?
I'd
need to know specifically what he wrote in "The Doctrine of
Fascism." It's been
about three years since I've read
it.
He says, for example, "Granted that
the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does
not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism,
liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to
believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right ',
a Fascist century."
Yeah, I'm
perfectly willing to concede there's
a lot of stuff Mussolini says, but you've
got to remember, by '32, socialism
is starting to essentially mean Bolshevism. And if you get too caught up in the
labels, rather than the policies, you get yourself into something of a pickle.
The right in Europe back then was authoritarian; the right
was a kind of right-wing socialism ... What was dead, according to
intellectuals across the ideological spectrum, was 19th century classical
liberalism.
But in the book you say, "Mussolini
remained a socialist until his last breath," and in 1932 he's writing, "When the war ended in 1919
Socialism, as a doctrine, was already dead; it continued to exist only as a
grudge," and he also says, "Fascism [is] the resolute negation of the
doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism."
Yeah, but that's
the point. Scientific and Marxist socialism, and certainly the people who
subscribed to that stuff, was international socialism. That's what made Mussolini a right-winger,
because he was against international socialism and he was for national
socialism.
But [Mussolini] never gave up on the program of
socialism, he never gave up on this idea that the state was the ultimate
arbiter and director of economic arrangements. He never gave up on the idea
that the rich should be brought under the heel of the state. And there's this funny thing -- we still live with these
categories where nationalism and socialism are supposed to be these opposite
things. This is sort of a hangover from the days where socialism was defined as
international socialism and nationalism was defined as national socialism. But
at the end of the day, nationalism and socialism are essentially the same
thing. When we nationalize an industry, we're
socializing it. And when we say we want socialized medicine, we're saying we want nationalized medicine. We need to
understand that that's the context
Mussolini was coming from.
And he said a lot of stuff. He was constantly
changing his definitions of fascism and talking out of one side of the mouth,
then out of the other side of his mouth, largely because of the sort of
pragmatic idea he had about politics. But in terms of the policies he
implemented and where he came to, once again, at the end of his life, he always
clung to the policies that were associated with the left side of the political
spectrum.
But he repudiated historical materialism,
dialectical materialism.
Yeah. But I think the problem is you get into
one of these sort of overly doctrinal, "let's
go to the text" approaches where words get confused for things. Stalin
never repudiated Marxism, but in almost every way, the checklist for the
anatomy of fascism applies to Stalinism ... Saying that you still believe in
the dialectic and the cold impersonal forces of history found in "Das Kapital" or "The Communist Manifesto" isn't
an abracadabra thing where all of a sudden that means Stalin was really a
Marxist or wasn't a fascist in terms
of how he actually operated.
And I think the same thing
applies to the radicals in the 1960s; quoting the Port Huron Statement doesn't really change what the radicals did in the
streets when they were actually fighting, when they were blowing things up,
when they were supporting the Black Panthers
who wanted to assassinate police, when they were taking over universities. The
fact that they said they were in favor of peace and Marxism is almost meaningless
when compared to their actual actions, and their actions were fascistic.
What I thought was interesting about your
definition of fascism was that nationalism seemed to be missing ... Stanley
Payne, whom you quote and say is "considered by many to be the leading
living scholar of fascism," in his definition of fascism, the first thing
he says is that it's "a form of
revolutionary ultra-nationalism." How does that fit with contemporary
liberalism, which is often derided as being unpatriotic, anti-American?
That's
a perfectly legitimate question. I think classical fascism, the fascism that
we all think of when we hear the word "fascism" -- Italy, Germany
and to a certain extent Spain, they were ultra-nationalistic, I don't dispute that, I think that is absolutely the
case. I just would want to emphasize that that ultra-nationalism comes with
an economic program of socialism. There's
no such thing as a society undergoing a bout of ultra-nationalism that remains
a liberal free-market economy. The two things go together.
I don't
say that contemporary liberalism is the direct heir of Italian fascism. I say
it's informed by it. It's like its grandniece. It's
related, they're in the same family,
they share a lot of genetic traits, but they're
not the same thing.
I think that you do have nationalism
percolating up in the form of left-wing economic populism, the John Edwards branch of liberalism, which is for
raising trade barriers. He says time and again, the first thought of every
economic decision of a president should be what protects the American
middle class, which -- according to some fairly doctrinaire understandings
of fascism, it's an ideology of the
middle class, nationalist economics and all that kind of stuff --
there's some meat there. So I do
think you do see nationalism in that regard, in terms of economics.
Today's
liberalism, there's a strong dose of
cosmopolitanism to it, which is very much like the H.G. Wells "Liberal
Fascism" I was talking about ... These trans-national elites, the Davos
crowd who really want to get beyond issues of sovereignty so they can organize
and guide the planet on issues like global warming, invest a lot more in the
U.N. I think that is much more of the threat coming from establishment
liberalism today, but I do think there is a lot of nationalism there too.
Next page: "That's the fascism in Hillary Clinton's vision ...
[I]t's hugs and kisses and taking care of boo-boos"
Payne also says that a "fundamental
characteristic" of fascism was "extreme insistence on what is now
termed male chauvinism"... How does that fit in with contemporary
liberalism, especially Hillary Clinton, who was at one point in the subtitle of
your book?
But there's
another dystopian understanding of the future, which we get from
[Aldous] Huxley's "Brave New World."
That was a fundamentally American vision ... [T]he vision of the
Huxleyian "Brave New World" future is one where everyone's happy. No one's
being oppressed, people are walking around chewing hormonal gum, they're having everything done for them, they're being nannied almost into nonexistence. That's the fascism in Hillary
Clinton's
vision. It's not the Orwellian
stamping on a human face thing, it's
hugs and kisses and taking care of boo-boos. It is the nanny state. That
is a much more benign dystopia than "1984," but
for me at least, it's still a
dystopia. An unwanted hug is still as tyrannical or as oppressive -- not as
oppressive, but an unwanted hug is still oppressive if you can't escape from it ... [O]ne of the biggest
distinctions between what I'm
calling liberal fascism ... and classical fascism, is that classical fascism
was masculine and violently oppressive and today's
liberalism is feminine and not oppressive but smothering with kindness.
One of the things
Mussolini also wrote in "The Doctrine of Fascism" was, "In
rejecting democracy Fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political
equalitarianism, the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity
and indefinite progress." So I'm
wondering again how that fits.
I'm
not trying to dodge anything, I just would have to look at it in the context
and see where he is coming from on that. I do think that there is a fundamentally
undemocratic passion running through parts of contemporary liberalism.
Again, invoking lines from something
Mussolini wrote and trying to say, "This contradicts what we see in front
of us," has some utility, but it can only take you so far when you have to
look at what Mussolini actually did. Mussolini
was a pragmatist ... Pragmatists say what's
useful. They do what's useful. There
are other things you could point out in Mussolini's
record that are inconvenient for me. For a time he was a free trader, in the
very early days of fascism ... What unites, in some sense, fascism and
contemporary liberalism and a lot of other isms is their pragmatic sense that
the government is smart enough and morally empowered to do good wherever and
whenever it sees fit. That is an undemocratic and illiberal perspective.
And you say you're not calling liberals Nazis, but...
I must say it 25 times in the book.
Yeah. But the cover has the smiley face
with the Hitler mustache. Does that undermine that message and lead to some of
these reactions?
Well, I'm
perfectly glad to concede that people who do judge books by their covers or
think it's more important to read a
title rather than read a book will be confused and jump to conclusions. But
these are people that I don't
generally respect. The cover was Random House's
invention, and I'm still sort of
ambivalent about it, but you make covers to sell books, you make titles
to sell books, even though my title comes from a speech by H.G. Wells ... The
cover, the smiley face with the mustache, is a play on something I explain on
basically Page One of the book, and it's
a reference to what George Carlin and Bill
Maher call smiley-face fascism. And if you can't
get past the cover and the title, then you're
not a serious book reader and you're
not really a serious person.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/11/goldberg/
Sticks and Stones
Who
has more affinity with fascism -- liberals or conservatives?
Washington PostReview
by
Michael Mann
Sunday,
February 3, 2008
LIBERAL FASCISM:
Secret History of the American Left From
Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
;
By Jonah Goldberg; Doubleday, 487
pp. $27.95
National Review editor Jonah Goldberg says he is fed up with liberals calling him a
fascist. Who can blame him? Hurling the calumny "fascist!" at
American conservatives is not fair. But Goldberg's
response is no better. He lobs the f-word back at liberals, though after each
of his many attacks he is at pains to say that they are not "evil"
fascists, they just share a family resemblance. It's
family because American liberals are descendants of the early 20th-century
Progressives, who in turn shared intellectual roots with fascists. He adds
that both fascists and liberals seek to use the state to solve the problems
of modern society.
Scholars would support Goldberg in certain
respects. He is correct that many fascists, including Mussolini (but not
Hitler) started as socialists -- though almost none started as liberals, who
stood for representative government and mild reformism. Moreover, fascism's combination of nationalism, statism, discipline
and a promise to "transcend" class conflict was initially popular in many
countries. Though fascism was always less popular in democracies such as
the United States,
some American intellectuals did flirt with its ideas. Goldberg quotes
progressives and liberals who did, but he does not quote the conservatives who
also did. He is right to note that fascist party programs contained active
social welfare policies to be implemented through a corporatist state, so there
were indeed overlaps with Progressives and with New Dealers.
But so, too, were there overlaps with the
world's Social Democrats and
Christian Democrats, as well as with the British Conservative Party from Harold
Macmillan in the 1930s to Prime Minister Ted Heath in the 1970s, and even with
the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations. Are they all to earn the f-word?
The only thing these links prove is that fascism
contained elements that were in the mainstream of 20th-century politics.
Following Goldberg's logic, I could
rewrite this book and berate American liberals not for being closet fascists
but for being closet conservatives or closet Christian Democrats. But that
would puzzle Americans, not shock them. Shock, it seems, sells books.
What really distinguished fascists from
other mainstream movements of the time were proud, "principled" -- as
they saw it -- violence and authoritarianism. Fascists took their model of governance from their experience as
soldiers and officers in World War I. They believed that disciplined
violence, military comradeship and obedience to leaders could solve society's problems. Goldberg finds similarities between
fascism's so-called "third
way" -- neither capitalism nor socialism -- and liberals who
use the same phrase today to signify an attempt to compromise between business
and labor. But there is a fundamental difference. The fascist solution
was not brokered compromise but forcibly knocking heads together. Italian
fascists formed a paramilitary, not a political, party. The Nazis did have a
separate party, but alongside two paramilitaries, the SA and the SS, whose
first mission was to attack and, if necessary, to kill socialists, communists
and liberals. In reality, the fascists knocked labor's
head, not capital's. The Nazis
practiced on the left for their later killing of Jews, gypsies and others. And
all fascists proudly proclaimed the "leadership principle," hailing
dictatorship and totalitarianism.
It is hard to find American counterparts,
especially among liberals. Father Coughlin and Huey Long (discussed by
Goldberg) were tempted by a proto-fascist authoritarian populism in the 1930s.
Some white Southerners (not discussed) embraced violence and
authoritarianism, as did the Weathermen and the Black Panthers
(discussed) and rightist militias (not discussed). Neocons (not
discussed) today endorse militarism. Liberals have rarely supported
violence, militarism or authoritarianism, because they are doves and wimps --
or at least that is what both conservatives and socialists usually say. To
assert that the Social Security Act or Medicare shows a leaning toward
totalitarianism is ridiculous. The United States, along with the rest
of the Anglo-Saxon and Northwestern European world, has been protected from
significant fascist influences by the shared commitment of liberals,
conservatives and social democrats to democr acy. Fascism is not an American,
British, Dutch, Scandinavian, Canadian, Australian or New Zealand
vice. It only spread significantly in one-half of Europe,, with some lesser
influence in China, Japan, South America and South Africa. Today it is alive in
very few places.
A few of Goldberg's
assaults make some minimal sense; others are baffling. He culminates with an
attack on Hillary Clinton. He quotes from a 1993 college commencement
address of hers: "We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos
of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil
society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market
forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us
up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than
ourselves." Such vacuous politician-speak could come from any centrist,
whether Republican or Democrat. But Goldberg bizarrely says it embodies
"the most thoroughly totalitarian conception of politics offered by a
leading American political figure in the last half century." Is he
serious? He then quotes briefly from her book It Takes A Village.
"The village," she wrote, "can no longer be defined as a place
on the map, or a list of people or organizations, but its essence remains the
same: it is the network of values and relationships that support and affect our
lives." One may question whether that is a profound definition or a banal
one, but does it deserve Goldberg's
comment that here "the concept of civil society is grotesquely
deformed"? Whatever Sen. Clinton's
weaknesses, she is neither a totalitarian nor an enemy of civil society.
In an apparent attempt at balance, Goldberg
indulges in very mild and brief criticism of conservatives who are tempted by
compassionate (i.e., social) conservatism, though here he uniquely refrains
from using the f-word. In the book's
final pages, he reveals his neo-liberalism (though he does not use the term).
Since neo-liberalism, with its insistence on unfettered global trade and
minimal government regulation of economic and social life, merely restates
19th-century laissez-faire, it is in fact the only contemporary political
philosophy that significantly pre-dates both socialism and fascism. Unlike
modern liberalism or modern conservatism, it shares not even a remote family
resemblance with them. That is the only sense I can make of his overall
argument.
But a final word of advice. If you want to
denigrate the Democrats' health
care plans or Al Gore's
environmental activism, try the word "socialism." That is tried
and tested American abuse. "Fascism" will merely baffle Americans
-- and rightly so. *
Michael Mann is professor of sociology at
UCLA and author of "Fascists."
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