Liberal Fascism, pt. 2

So, we are supposed to see a party in favor of universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the aged, the expropriation of land without compensation, the nationalization of industry, the abolition of market-based lending—a.k.a. "interest slavery"—the expansion of health services, and the abolition of child labor as objectively and obviously right-wing.

Oh, and did we mention an obsession with fitness and even health food, and a desire to remove the influence of Christianity from government decision-making?

Suppose you took the platforms and/or programs of the Nazi and Fascist parties, stripped them of their respective racist and nationalist elements, and considered only their social and economic programs. Would they resemble the platform of the Republican or the Democratic parties?

Jonah Goldberg provides the answer. Aside from the quote above, which excerpts the Nazi Party's platform in 1920—shortly after Hitler joined—he also highlights some proposals from the Fascist party's platform. Just a few:

• Universal suffrage, including for women.
• Repeal titles of nobility.
• "A foreign policy… in opposition to all foreign imperialisms."
• Eight actual hours of work in a day.
• A minimum wage.
• The seizure of all goods belonging to religious congregations and the abolition of episcopal revenues. [In Italy, as in much of Europe at that time, these usually came from the State, not from the people's offering plates. In Italy I believe this is still the case.]
• A large, progressive tax on capital.
• The seizing of uncultivated farmland, followed by redistribution to cooperatives.

This does not sound capitalist, but like what I've heard of countries like the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, Cuba, and so forth. Some of these are likewise carried in the contemporary platform of the Democratic Party. To my knowledge, none are to be found in the Republican Party platform. In fact, Mussolini had been a raving Socialist, editing the Socialist newspaper Avanti!.

Both Nazi and Fascist parties lost early elections. After all, Germany and Italy already had Socialist parties, and it takes time to build party support and organization. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini had the patience for this sort of thing, and resorted to a change in emphasis, as well as open street battles with Socialists and Communists. Goldberg argues that the usual depiction of this change in tone pretends that there was a change in substance as well, but no change in substance actually occurred. Once they seized power, they largely implemented their platforms, making pragmatic accommodations with industry in order to govern. If the reader thinks that this pragmatic accomodation proves they were right-wingers, then the reader should remember that Lenin, after taking power, did exactly the same thing in Russia during the early 1920s. Stalin didn't get around to exterminating the kulaks until a decade later.

How then do Mussolini and Hitler get depicted popularly as right-wingers? Goldberg argues that historians do not in fact consider them right-wing capitalists or traditionalists; that popular impression is the lingering echo of Soviet propaganda.

Eh, what? Goldberg explains that the Soviets had a habit of labeling anyone who opposed them as Fascists and/or Nazis. This tactic was the brainchild of Leon Trotsky, and led to poetic justice when Trotsky lost a power struggle with Stalin. He ended up being labeled a spy for the Fascists, Nazis, and capitalists.

There's an example of this in an otherwise-awful Russian film, The Cuckoo. A Russian soldier meets a Finnish soldier and immediately starts calling him Fascist, in Russian of course. The Finn replies in German, Not Fascist! Democracy! The Russian replies, Fascism, democracy: they're all the same. That was more or less the Soviet point of view.

Goldberg then makes an argument that I found clever. For the sake of argument, assume that Hitler and Mussolini did move to the right. Goldberg points out they were nevertheless right-wing socialists. They were in no way, shape, or form right-wing capitalists, right-wing opponents of big government, right-wing low-tax advocates, right-wing opponents of race-based hiring (especially not the Nazis, although Mussolini didn't care about one's race), or even right-wing Christian evangelicals.

And the fighting with Socialists and Communists? That, explains Goldberg, was the consequence of trying to fight it out among each other. The use of red in the Nazi flag symbolized socialism, and according to Goldberg Nazis and Communists generally voted the same way in the Reichstag. He even relates stories of Communists whom the Party sent to start fights at Nazi Party meetings, but decide instead to change their party affiliation once they hear Hitler speak. Why? Hitler preached national socialism; Communists preached international socialism. After losing a war to most of the rest of the world, Germans were not so keen on all this internationalist crap that Lenin was preaching. (So to speak.) He also mentions how Italian Fascists railed in their newspapers against Nazism's racism. That was before the two became buddies of sorts.

This is one of the key points Goldberg hammers repeatedly. The prime difference between Fascists and Communists was not whether capitalism was evil; both agreed on that. Instead, it was whether to build national socialism or international socialism. Mussolini and Hitler discarded internationalist pieties in favor of building their respective nations or races. Communists maintained their dreams of an international workers' revolution, instead of the national revolutions that Hitler and Mussolini engineered.

So Goldberg seems to have answered quite effectively some of the questions I mentioned in my last entry on the book. Unfortunately, some of my discontent with the writing style remains, including one I forgot to mention last time:

• Things still seem out of order. Goldberg discusses Mussolini, then takes a few pages to discuss what he calls Jacobin Fascism. Essentially, this is meant to explain how the roots of Fascism lie in the French Revolution. This would have been better developed in a chapter of its own before Mussolini, I think, and with more detail.
• There are a few impolite references to people with whom Goldberg disagrees. I neglected to mention that in the Introduction he repeatedly refers to the numerous 20th century apologists for Communism as "useful idiots". According to American conservative lore it was Lenin's description of such people. (Wikipedia disputes the use of the term, but it does appear to summarize Lenin's attitude at least.) Goldberg never explains this in the text, and I doubt most people know the origin of the term. They might end up thinking Goldberg is name-calling. (In a way he is, but not in the way they think.)

I do think Goldberg is succeeding at defending his thesis. I am especially impressed by the answer to the question I posed above: if you removed the nationalism and racism from the Fascist and Nazi parties, would they resemble more the Republican or the Democratic parties?

Of course, nationalism in the case of the Fascists, and racism in the case of the Nazis, were not minor points to their platforms. Nationalism and racism are today supposed crimes of the American conservative movement. (I recently mentioned that they haven't helped themselves by singing Jesse Helms' praises. Goldberg shows up in that entry as one of the exceptions to that shameful episode.)

Goldberg is making hints about tying racism and nationalism to the American left wing. Before I get there, I'd like to admit my bias in his favor. Most American segregationists I've read about never struck me either as particularly capitalist. Jim Crow laws are hardly an example of a government's laissez-faire attitude to the economy; I've read that during the Civil Rights era a one-time newspaper in the nearby town of Petal, MS made the point that perhaps Mississippi's poverty could be attributed in part to the fact that its economy was chained down along with 1/3 of its population. Likewise, the North Carolina newspaper News and Observer carries on its editorial page a quote from Josephus Daniels, its legendary publisher, urging his followers to advocate for the poor. Wikipedia also notes that Daniels advocated for the poor. I vaguely recall (perhaps incorrectly) that Daniels was instrumental in setting up state-provided care for the mentally ill. Yet he was also a racist who whipped anti-black sentiment to such a raging boil that he helped instigate the only overthrow of a democratically elected government in the United States: the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. I can list a large number of other segregationists who likewise held what one might call progressive views, if only you ignored their racism.

Of course racism does appear on the other side as well; I've read somewhere that William Buckley, the founder of modern American conservatism, believed for a while that blacks were inferior to whites, but later changed his mind, and quite publicly.

The point Goldberg is trying to make—although I don't think he repeats it enough—is that the labels racist, fascist, and Nazi tend to be applied rather uniformly by supporters of the Democratic party against supporters of the Republican party whose words, proposed policies, and histories do not meet any serious definition of those terms. Rather, the left simply likes to wield the term as an incredibly useful cudgel. I agree with him that this is unfair, but I am not so sure that the stronger evidence supports reversing the accusation.

But, I have a bunch of chapters to go.

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Liberal Fascism, pt. 1 1/2

In my previous post on the topic, I mentioned the following:

This is part of the problem with conservatism as it is popularly understood: it attacks liberalism, it attacks government regulation, and it especially attacks taxes. But what does it offer? Unless your name is Terri Schiavo, it doesn't seem to offer much at all.

This is grossly unfair to conservatism, which has a lot of really good ideas that I want to see implemented.

I want to elaborate on that, and I want to do so in a way that illustrates just how grossly unfair conservatism is popularly portrayed. Here is an excerpt from an op-ed in today's Washington Post:

So [conservatives] advocated creating health savings accounts, handing out school vouchers, privatizing Social Security, shifting government functions to private contractors, and curtailing regulations on public health, safety, the environment and more. And, of course, they pushed to cut taxes to further weaken the public sector by "starving the beast." …But in practice, those ideas have all failed to deliver on the promises the conservatives made, and in many instances, the dogma has actually created new problems.

This should strike the reader as curious.

• Health savings accounts are underutilized. I doubt most people even know they exist, and many people who do know that they exist confuse them with Flexible Spending Accounts, where unused money reverts to the employer.
  
  I had a vague impression of HSAs, but had forgotten about them until I took my current job; USM offers a health plan that carries an HSA option. I jumped at the chance to take it, and would much rather not part with it. I'm hoping to build up enough savings in that account to switch to a lower-cost insurance plan in the near future. Unfortunately, my second daughter slowed the process of building up that account.
  
  If these had been available when I was a younger man, it would be another story. Since HSAs are only 5 years old or so, it is too early to judge their effect. I doubt anyone was convinced that IRAs would be successful after the first 5 years. If all employers offered HSAs, and if people didn't confuse them with Flexible Spending Accounts (where one cannot build wealth, and which employers are happy to offer for all-too-obvious reasons) HSAs could become quite popular.
• Handing out school vouchers: Waitaminut. I live in Mississippi, supposedly the most conservative state in the nation, and I don't have school vouchers available. In fact, I lived mostly in Virginia and North Carolina over the last decade. They're supposedly conservative too, yet they don't offer school vouchers either. What gives?
  
  On the other hand, if I lived in Washington, DC, one of the most liberal locations in the nation, I would have access to school vouchers. Likewise a few other spots (Minneapolis-St. Paul among them, as I recall). My vague understanding has been that school vouchers have been most popular with the people who use them—people who are, often enough, unable to afford private school, near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, and not traditionally identified with conservative voting habits. In spite of the vouchers, Washington DC still spends more per capita on its public schools than any other locality in the nation, and still fails to educate them.
• Privatizing social security never happened, largely because various interest groups managed to scare certain voting blocks—mislead them, often enough— and mobilize them against any reform. The closest genuine privatization I know of Social Security that actually took place is the Individual Retirement Account. According to Wikipedia, the origin of the IRA is nearly forty years ago. Again, I understand that IRA's are quite popular among people who actually have them (my father is ecstatic with his) and IRAs have made Social Security more solvent over time, not less.
  
  The only recent attempts at privatization that I know of involved proposals to allow folks like me to direct part of our Social Security tax towards an IRA-like vehicle. But, as noted, this has never once been enacted.
• Shifting government functions to private contractors: Here the author has a point, but only partially. While it's a favorite whipping boy of liberals that the Bush administration has done this, in fact the Clinton administration did an awful lot of it, with mixed results. In many cases, contracting has made things more efficient and less expensive: a good example bandied about among conservatives is the House Cafeteria, as opposed to the government-run disaster that is the Senate Cafeteria. In other cases, it has made things less efficient and more expensive, even disastrously incompetent. (Hurricane Katrina.) But the picture simply isn't as one-sided as he claims.
  
  Unfortunately, many conservatives do savage government, but I'd like to think that this is a misrepresentation of Reagan's idea. People quote Reagan's phrase, Government is not the solution to our problems; Government is the problem. But this is only a partial quote; it starts with four crucial words: In the current crisis… I maintain that Reagan was essentially correct: government is well-suited to solve certain problems, but not all of them. For the crisis the country faced then, government was not well-suited.
• Curtailing regulations on public health, safety, and more: Ah, yes. Remember President Bush's attempt to poison our children with unsafe drinking water? Government regulations on arsenic in drinking water were not considered problematic until a few weeks before President Clinton left office. That President Bush should have returned the regulations to the state they were for nearly all of President Clinton's term is a disaster.
  
  Likewise, John Stossel of ABC has an excellent documentary about our misconceptions as to how safe we really are. This shouldn't make us any less vigilant in rooting out things that are genuinely unsafe, but the drumbeat that 8 years of President Bush has made us significantly less unsafe strikes me as untenable.

Conservative ideas of reforming government are, to a large extent, much like Chesterton's quote on Christianity: It hasn't tried and failed; it hasn't even been tried.

My biggest gripe the Republican party is that, in six years of controlling both the White House and the Congress, they failed to enact any of the fascinating, genuinely conservative ideas on government reform. Instead, they spent most of their energies enacting a new "New Deal". The biggest accomplishments of the 6-year Republican hold on government was Medicare Part D and removing Saddam Hussein.* Neither of these ever struck me as especially conservative, even if a number of conservative talk show hosts in love with the president went to bat for both.

The previous six years with President Clinton and a Republican Congress enacted many more conservative ideas that not only worked, but were popular: streamlining government, for example; reforming Welfare, for another.

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*Admittedly, "removing Saddam Hussein" may not seem like an accomplishment at times, but while I was not in favor of the war, I am glad that Iraq is no longer under his thumb.

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Liberal Fascism, pt. 1

I'm reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. I thought I'd write a few thoughts while I'm reading it, much as I commented on Eugenio Corti's Trial and Death of Stalin a long time ago (1, 2, 4; there doesn't seem to be a part 3). Despite the fact that I like Goldberg and read anything of his that I can get his hands on, already I'm having issues with it. I'll mention some below. All the usual disclaimers apply, primarily that he's done the research so he probably knows a lot more of what he's talking about than I do. Still, here goes.

1. The biggest problem with the introduction is that things are out of order. Consider the following explanation of the title:

The introduction of a novel term like "liberal fascism" obviously requires an explanation. Many critics will undoubtedly regard it as a crass oxymoron. Actually, however, I am not the first to use the term. That honor falls to H. G. Wells, one of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the twentieth century… Nor did Wells coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become "liberal fascists" and "enlightened Nazis," he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July 1932.

I'd think that this would have appeared early in the introduction, perhaps on the first page. Instead, it appears on page 21. One has to slog through 20 pages before getting to this point, and while I enjoyed those 20 pages, I suspect that the back-and-forthing about Socialists, Communists, Soviets, Nazis, Fascists, and the French Revolution would lose a lot of readers.

Likewise, it may be the mathematician in me who doesn't understand popular writing, but Goldberg's definition of "fascism" should also appear early. Get your point out, then defend it, I say. Alas, Goldberg's definition of fascism appears on page 23, and the phrasing makes it look as if Goldberg is reluctant to define it all!

Finally, since we must have a working definition of fascism, here is mine: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy.

2. I don't like his definition of fascism. Again, I'm no political theorist, so maybe he knows better than I, but his definition sounds more like "totalitarianism" than "fascism". But I don't think that fascism is equivalent to totalitarianism. Goldberg doesn't spend time trying to distinguish between the two—not in the introduction, anyway—so it comes off wrong to me. I don't have a better definition to offer, and Goldberg rightly points out that it's difficult to define fascism, and for all intents and purposes nowadays fascism means anything that offends some political sensibility of an ardent left-winger.*

Nevertheless, there's a reason Mussolini called his party the Fascist party: he felt that an ancient symbol, the fasci, symbolized the strength of the Roman empire that he desired to resurrect.

The strength symbolized by the fasci is not inherently evil, just as the ancient Roman Republic was not inherently evil. Our very government has long used fasci in public art: look at the sticks grasped by the eagle on the back of the quarter, or at the back of the dime, and in a statue of George Washington in Congress. As Hitler did with the swastika, however, Mussolini gave the fasci a bad name.**

This nationalist chauvinism could distinguish fascism from other forms of totalitarianism. Mussolini believed that Italy was a place of inherently superior culture to the rest of the world and deserved an empire along the lines of Britain's and France's. Hitler likewise believed in the inherent enlightenment of an empowered German nation, although his notion of "nation" was racist, whereas Mussolini's was not, initially. (Amusingly, Mussolini was at one point the only European power to stand up to Hitler, mobilizing his troops when Hitler annexed Austria.)

I am shocked—shocked!—that Wikipedia has the same idea as I do. More or less.

Goldberg also seems to overlook the fact that Fascists were, from the beginning, violently anti-Communist. It's true, as he points out repeatedly, that ideologically Fascists and Communists held many of the same principles (again, see the Wikipedia page: central economic planning, collectivization, dictatorship). It's also true that Fascists grew out of Socialist parties, a historical fact that by itself should put the lie to the notion that Fascism is somehow an outgrowth of extreme conservative and/or capitalist thought. (The two are not the same in all countries.) However, this does not make them fellow-travelers any more than would the fact that Goldberg and Jesse Helms both opposed taxes and excessive government regulation.

Again, I've only read the introduction, so Goldberg may address all these issues in due course. I looked at the weblog he maintains for addressing reviews and letters, so in fairness I'll point to this entry, which is one of many dealing on the topic of nationalism and fascism.

3. American liberalism may contain totalitarian tendencies; it would makes sense as a natural temptation for any ideology that believes the government, used rightly, can solve our social ills. New York City Council did not fail to help Goldberg's arugment in the year 2006: from a footnote in the text, they tried with varying levels of success to ban pit bulls, trans fats, aluminum baseball bats, the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year olds, foie gras (I don't even know what foie gras is, and please leave me in ignorant bliss), pedicabs in parks, new fast-food restaurants in poor neighborhoods, lobbyists in various circumstances, cell phones in upscale restaurants, a well-known circus, Wal-Mart, and a bunch more that I don't care to copy.

But to say that American liberalism has totalitarian tendencies is rather far from saying that American liberalism has much in common with fascism, much less to title a book Liberal Fascism. Taking again the point that self-proclaimed fascists took nationalist chauvinism to the point of justifying an invasion of another country merely to enlighten its citizens (in such wise did Mussolini attempt to justify an invasion of Ethiopia to the Italian people), American liberalism today is the antithesis of fascism, at least in its "purer" forms today. Many American liberals would gladly sign the Kyoto protocol even if it meant reducing the nation to poverty.

4. My complaint in #3 is perhaps part of Goldberg's point.

Conservatives in America must carry their intellectual history—real and alleged—around their necks like an albatross. …Connections with dead right-wingers, no matter how tenuous and obscure, are trotted out as proof that today's conservatives are continuing a nefarious project. Why, then, is it so trivial to point out that the liberal closet has its own skeletons, particularly when those skeletons are the architects of the modern welfare state?

I think this is a fair complaint, and I enjoy it when Goldberg brings it up in his syndicated column or in other places.

Still, it reminds me of a book I read by Thomas Sowell, whose title escapes me. The book savaged "liberals" for making all sorts of invalid arguments against conservatives. About halfway through the book, I realized that Sowell was doing exactly the same thing to liberals.

So I think the book, if I even finish it, is going to disappoint me. Attacking the enemy may provide emotional satisfaction, but it doesn't provide a new vision. This is part of the problem with conservatism as it is popularly understood: it attacks liberalism, it attacks government regulation, and it especially attacks taxes. But what does it offer? Unless your name is Terri Schiavo, it doesn't seem to offer much at all.

This is grossly unfair to conservatism, which has a lot of really good ideas that I want to see implemented. Sadly, electing George W. Bush president seems to have killed that.

5. I find it irresistible to note that Goldberg seems to be one of the few popular conservatives who is happy to savage Bush as not being very conservative. Talk radio hosts still worship Bush and attack McCain for not having stood behind the president, but McCain opposed for example Bush's "compassionate conservatism" program. Goldberg doesn't mince words on compassionate conservatism:

I have tried to write a book warning that even the best of us are susceptible to the totalitarian temptation. This includes some self-described conservatives. Compassionate conservatism, in many respects, is a form of Progressivism, a descendant of Christian socialism. Much of George W. Bush's rhetoric about leaving no children behind and how "when somebody hurts, government has got to move" bespeaks a vision of the state that is indeed totalitarian in its aspirations and not particularly conservative in the American sense.

[emphasis added]

In the same vein, the last chapter is titled, The New Age: We're All Fascists Now. I'll read that even if I don't read the rest of the book.

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*He neglects to mention is that socialism or communism or even liberalism likewise more or less means anything that offends some political sensibility of a far right-winger. It's the only way that Goldberg's colleagues at National Review and on talk radio can say that McCain is not a conservative, but a liberal Republican.

**It perplexes me that Stalin, Mao, and the rest have not managed given a bad name to the hammer and sickle, despite being responsible for many, many more deaths.

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