Liberal Fascism: Jonah Goldberg Takes Reviewer Michael Tomasky Apart

It's a pleasure to read. Excerpt:

Tomasky’s biggest non sequitur denies that Hitler was a “man of the Left” because 1) one of Hitler’s first acts upon taking power was to ban trade unions and 2) he denounced “liberalism” and Communism. About the first point all that need be said is that if Hitler’s ban on independent trade unions disqualifies him as a leftist, then Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were not leftists either.

One might also note that socialists’ lethal hatred for rival socialists is hardly confined to the National Socialists of Germany. Lenin and Stalin, after all, had plenty of rival socialists killed. Tellingly, when Stalin decided that such adversaries needed to die, he called them “fascists.” Hence, Trotsky & Co. were executed for plotting a “fascist coup” against Soviet socialism.

And for those interested, the Nazis believed that the right to strike was no longer necessary because labor finally had a full seat at the table, as dictated by corporatist ideology. Obviously, the Nazis were wrong. But so were the Communists who did pretty much the exact same thing. This thinking was summarized by a Nazi-party newspaper: ‘‘We have a working people’s state here, and who would ever dream of striking against himself?”

Oh. Sorry. That was actually Pravda in 1989. (By the way strike-breaking under the corporatist New Deal was sufficiently severe that Eric Sevareid dubbed it fascist. See pages 121-122).

The “liberalism” that Hitler denounced, meanwhile, was the classical variety — my liberalism, in other words — and not that of Tomasky. One of the major points of my book is that contemporary liberalism is descended more from Progressivism than the classical liberalism of Locke, which it explicitly sought to overturn (hence Woodrow Wilson’s contempt for the constitution, Dewey’s dismissal of “natural” or “negative” rights, Croly’s rejection of “liberal principles”). Indeed, by 1912, classical liberalism had come to be dubbed “conservatism” by many Progressives. Tomasky does not refute this contention so much as he works around it, pretending not only that there is an unbroken philosophical line from Locke to Cass Sunstein (stop laughing), but that no reasonable person would object to the suggestion.

(As for why this assertion is so funny see, for example, Tom Palmer’s review of Sunstein’s “Second Bill of Rights.”). It is also around here that Tomasky says:

However much or little Goldberg knows about fascism, he knows next to nothing about liberalism. Anybody familiar with Liberalism 101 grasps that there is something deep within liberalism, from its earliest beginnings, that prevents it from degenerating into fascism, and that is its explicit recognition that the state must serve both common purposes and individual liberty.

And, he continues a bit further on, when the pursuit of common purposes “crosses the line into coercion, well, that is where liberals — I mean liberals who know something about liberalism — get off the train, and do their noncoercive best to derail it.”

What is this magical, wonderful “something” that lurks in “real” liberals? What is the secret gnosis that empowers these people to know instinctively when they’ve gone too far? Tomasky never says, he just knows on faith that this is true. It sure sounds like Tomasky is a votary to the political religion I argue liberalism has become.

Indeed, Tomasky perfectly illustrates another important argument in Liberal Fascism. According to liberals, liberalism is never wrong. When liberals do good things it is proof that liberalism is always right. When liberals deliberately do evil or bad things (albeit with “good” intentions), these errors are chalked up to the sins of America writ large or to “conservative” elements within progressivism. FDR’s rounding-up of the Japanese, Wilson’s racism, Dewey’s totalitarianism, Croly’s myriad Gnostic oddities, the University of Wisconsin’s devotion to eugenics: None of these things are laid at the feet of progressives or liberals, even though they were central to their respective projects.
History is full not only of examples of liberals failing to derail the locomotive’s rush to coercion, but of liberals actually shoveling as much coal into the engine’s furnace as possible. That is a big part of the “secret history” referred to in the subtitle of my book.