Published Spring/Summer 2008
 
I'm Rubber, You're Glue
(on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning [New York: Doubleday, 2008])
by Lisa Fluet | ns 70
Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of the National Review, opens his recent study Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by dramatically observing that "There is no word in the English language that gets thrown around more freely by people who don't know what it means than 'fascism'" (2). Among concepts that have proven easy prey to confusion and obfuscation, apparently we need look no further for the winner; fascism has been the most habitually misapplied and misunderstood.
Really? It seems like there are other words in the English language—even other words in Goldberg's title—that could share this dubious honor. Goldberg's apparent concern lies with how the accusation of fascism in American public debate effectively closes down further debate. That is, to identify as politically left and to call someone who opposes you on the right a "fascist" dismantles the accused one's ability to participate in further deliberative discussion. Throughout Liberal Fascism, discrediting an opponent by calling him or her a fascist is revealed to be part of an implicitly fascist argumentative strategy.
Again, really? Liberal Fascism takes itself very seriously on points like this, but it's worth noting that a similar observation has been made, though to funnier effect, by The Daily Show's Jon Stewart. In an analysis of the "Hitler reference" in congressional hearings and political punditry, Stewart suggests that the invocation of Hitler has come to serve as "the go-to metaphor and comparison for anyone you have a minor disagreement with." The Hitler comparison, like the fascism comparison, will often weaken an argument, and betray the ignorance—or lack of a sense of proportion—of the comparison-maker. And yet The Daily Show does attempt to demonstrate the fundamentally bipartisan nature of such intellectually suspicious rhetorical moves: both Senator Robert Byrd and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld make inappropriate Hitler comparisons in Stewart's segment. However, making glib Hitler references is not presented as a rhetorical strategy comparable to strategies we might associate with Hitler or National Socialism. On the contrary—as Stewart concludes, somewhat impractically rejecting all attempts at comparison-making: "You know who was Hitler? Hitler." Casual Hitler comparison-making is both rhetorically misleading and, well, stupid—indefinitely delaying any thoughtful, legitimate consideration of to whom or to what Hitler and Nazism are being compared.
Unfortunately, in a book largely about the "fascism reference," Goldberg has not considered these issues. He argues that the twentieth-century American left, when comparing right-wing politics to fascism, "wields the term like a cudgel to beat opponents from the public square like seditious pamphleteers" (3). His book in turn offers a reversal: throughout Liberal Fascism, liberals function as the glue that fascism sticks to.
With "Islamo-fascism" as the most rhetorically-suspicious fascism comparison available in contemporary debate—and calmly endorsed in Goldberg's assertion that jihadism is "a quintessentially fascist religion" (404)—it's hard to credit the notion that the left is solely responsible for politically-motivated misapplications of the term. But Goldberg's anger focuses primarily upon the cudgel-bearing 1960s New Left—where he locates the origins of such misapplications—rather than the present. The real secret of Goldberg's history has little to do with liberalism or fascism; it is instead a deep frustration with what he presents as the left's co-optation of public intellectual debate since the 1960s, via the fascism-accusation device. Without that history of apparently constant cudgeling, he implies that movement conservatives would have a stronger presence as public intellectuals, in academia and elsewhere. Hence the meticulously endnoted heftiness of this book; Goldberg presents it as an intellectual and cultural history, as well as his entrée into the world of conservative men of letters. Moreover, in Goldberg's account, movement conservatives should be recognized as the besieged intellectual defenders of classical liberalism (in its most individualistic, free-market configuration), before it was seized and warped by the organic food- and health care reform-obsessed, nanny-state proclivities of the "liberal fascist" American left. To summarize: according to Goldberg, liberals are secret fascists, and conservatives are secret liberals.
In a review for The Nation, Eric Alterman hones in on the public intellectual aspirations of Liberal Fascism, and flatly pronounces this book "dumb" ("CC" 10). I would be inclined to agree completely, were it not for the fact that his review also tacitly suggests that books like this are rendered harmless by the stupidity of their arguments and by conservatives lowering the standards of debate—making Alterman long for the return of "the Friedmans of yesteryear" ("CC" 10). If one wanted to be convinced that liberalism is essentially "nice fascism," Goldberg is savvy enough to make that case to the conservative choir he's preaching to—and unfortunately, perhaps to others as well. The real question should not be, Is this book dumb? but rather, Why do books, pundits, and politicians making arguments like this continue to convince some of the people all of the time? We can liken Goldberg to Ann Coulter, as Alterman does, and dismiss him on those grounds, but dismissal runs the serious risk of not addressing the rhetorical hold that this form of argument seems to have on substantial numbers of American voters.
As Walter Benjamin (not cited by Goldberg) observed, fascism organizes people who feel dispossessed and victimized under existing economic, political, and social circumstances by not encouraging them to change those circumstances, whether through revolution or other means. Instead, "Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves" (Benjamin 241). The likes of Coulter and O'Reilly exemplify the chance to express yourself run haywire; but they also frequently distract their listeners, through the alluring spectacle of limitless, faux-populist self-expression, from voting in ways that might change existing economic conditions. One striking element of the set for Stephen Colbert's brilliant O'Reilly parody The Colbert Report—a portrait of mirrored Colberts stretching, seemingly, into infinity, that serves as a frequent backdrop to Colbert's closing monologues—captures the absurdity of someone desperately in love with his own expressed, expressing self. But the mirrored Colberts also suggest that the joke is primarily on those who view individual self-expression as a kind of idealized politics and as a substitute for anything that smacks of government intervention into personal life. Don't vote for candidates who will, as Goldberg says of Hillary Clinton, "attempt to take over American health care" (400); even having an ultimately unsuccessful health care reform plan in the 1990s serves as evidence, for Goldberg, of "the inevitable consequence of liberal empowerment" (340). He presents few better alternatives for getting medical care to those with no health insurance now; and indeed, the point is not to come up with solutions, but to suggest, repeatedly, that politicians who advocate anything that sounds remotely like a vestige of the welfare state are nice fascists, unwilling to listen to your own opinions about your own life. Your ability to express your personal feelings about your situation matter, in short, more than the impersonal governmental means by which your situation might be changed for the better. As Slavoj Zizek has suggested, this is one result of the dismantling of the welfare state in the United States: the "very insecurities" caused by that dismantling come to be presented as "the opportunity for new freedoms" (118) of choice and expression.
Yet the genius of Goldberg, Coulter, O'Reilly, and others like them lies precisely in their ability to present their own self-expression as perpetually under siege. And in this, they are far from dumb. The basis of their appeal is managing to sound like wrongly-accused heretics—Goldberg calls "fascist," in the mouths of accusing liberals, "a modern word for 'heretic'" (4). Liberal Fascism begins and ends with images of conservatism "besieged" by the rudeness of the left's comparisons of it to fascism. Of Gore Vidal's 1968 debate with the late William F. Buckley—Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi," Buckley called Vidal a "queer"—Goldberg observes that Buckley, "a patriotic, free-market, antitotalitarian gentleman of impeccable manners," was "goaded" into his outburst, "one of the few times in Buckley's long public life that he abandoned civility," by the accusation (411). Vidal's incivility is inexcusable, apparently, because it silences the intellectual dissent that Goldberg associates with Buckley: "You're under no obligation to listen to a fascist's arguments or concern yourself with his feelings or rights" (3). If we follow Benjamin, however, fascism operates not by rudeness, but by eliminating the possibility of individual and collective dissent towards the status quo entirely, through the illusion of individual self-expression as the only politics that matters.
There are, at least, two large ironies embedded within Goldberg's history of "liberal fascism." First, there is at least one other word that gets thrown around as freely as fascism by people who don't care to know what it means: that is, of course, "liberal," conveniently the other central term in his title. I would not group Goldberg among those who don't know what liberal means. He is, however, interested in making "liberal" mean lots of other things. If fascism suffers from too much expansion, Goldberg gives the impression that "liberal" hasn't been expanded enough. Yet whereas fascism comparisons often obscure that vehicle's tenor—which may, perhaps, merely be "something not desirable," as George Orwell argued—individuals who identify as politically conservative can rightly be accused of frequently leaving metaphor out of it entirely, and simply deploying the term "liberal" to denote something (anything) "not desirable" to them.
Another of Liberal Fascism's ironies: for someone tired of comparisons made by other people between fascism, and whatever they don't approve of, Goldberg is nevertheless willing to make this move himself. The obvious retort—that fascism was, perhaps, unique enough as a political ideology to drastically limit the rhetorical effectiveness of overeager comparison-making, from the left and the right—is not one that he addresses. Instead, he presents a considerable amount of research to back up his comparison between American liberalism and fascism, giving the overall impression that he is, at least, not making a casual case. Unlike Kevin Costner's character "Crash Davis" in the 1988 film Bull Durham (also dutifully cited)—who pronounces strikeouts unequivocally "fascist"—Goldberg isn't willing to say that anything can be compared to fascism. Just most things that the American left has stated, advocated, or fought for, throughout the twentieth century. But like the Durham Bulls' short-term catcher, he also wants both to instruct and to convey the uncontestable final word on the subject.
Goldberg draws his title from an address that H. G. Wells gave in 1932 to the Liberal Summer School at Oxford, subsequently published in a collection of Wells' essays, After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation. Wells serves as "a leading voice" in what Goldberg terms "the Fascist moment," "when many Western elites were eager to replace Church and Crown with slide rules and industrial armies." "Slide rules" offers a telling hint as to how Goldberg will define fascism throughout his book:
From health care to gun control to global warming, liberals insist that we need to "get beyond politics" and "put ideological differences behind us" in order to "do the people's business." The experts and scientists know what to do, we are told; therefore the time for debate is over. This, albeit in a nicer and more benign form, is the logic of fascism. (6)
The referent for Goldberg's "This" is a suggestive mix. Experts and scientists—those slide rule-bearers who supplant belief in Church and Crown with the authority of secular expertise—have been the liberal vanguard. And, because they suggest that health care, gun control, and global warming might warrant expert consideration and care, transcending ideological differences, they represent a benign form of fascism.
Goldberg's definition of fascism operates partly through this kind of bait-and-switch, where nice fascism equals the writers, intellectuals, and politicians who endorse professional, expert labor's claim to know more than you. And yet historian Harold Perkin argued of Wells that, in contrast, he was one of many intellectuals who contributed to the theorization of modern professional society in Britain—which saw its culmination, as Perkin described, in the administration of the British welfare state (131). Rather than collapse varied British and American instances valorizing expert labor into a "Fascist moment," a better parallel might be drawn between the British liberal history of public-sector professionals within the welfare state, and American sociological studies of the twentieth-century professional-managerial class, or the "New Class."
To invoke Alvin Gouldner's study from the late 1970s, Goldberg's problem really seems to be with the New Class: the twentieth-century development of a "flawed universal class" committed to both expert knowledge and the welfare state, "monitoring its knowledge and its work situation" and embodying "the collective interest," but only "partially and transiently, while simultaneously cultivating its own guild advantage" (Gouldner 7-8). The ideological differences between left and right in the contemporary United States, as Goldberg presents things, often boil down to whether you think that experts, scientists, and specialists know more than you about certain things and should have more control over public decision-making in those areas, or whether you refuse the interventions of those who (gasp!) bear information, on the grounds that even having a salaried class of people more informed about certain fields of inquiry is fascism—the nice kind, but fascism nonetheless.
The powerful levels of control that Goldberg attributes to liberalism's slide-rule experts are somewhat misleading; if anything, liberals have argued the opposite about the empowerment of the New Class in the late twentieth century. As Stephen Schryer observes, belief in the growing social and moral ascendancy of the knowledge-worker class in the United States as a powerful check upon the old, moneyed and property-owning class has largely been a wishful, postwar fantasy of the liberal left: "Gouldner's theory was one of the most dramatic failed prophecies of the late twentieth century....As the events of the 1980s showed, the old class in America was alive and well; it survived and flourished in the decades after Gouldner's prophecy" (663-64). One needn't fear Goldberg's "nice fascists"; as it turns out, they've never triumphed over the "old class" of owners in moral, social, or political terms.
The election of George W. Bush certainly supports the argument that the old, moneyed and property-owning class has hardly been stamped out. The election of Bill Clinton, however, does not conform as easily to this reading. The current Democratic candidacies of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama further suggest that the terms of twentieth-century debate about class that Gouldner introduced are still vital, even if his prophecies were overly optimistic and his scheme too wooden—with Old versus New classes simply replacing the concepts of bourgeoisie versus proletariat. We should note that the decision-making surrounding the current Iraq War was presented to the American public largely in terms of policy expertise wedded to a rhetoric of moral, humanitarian authority. The left-wing slide-rule experts at home, with their "nice fascist" suggestions about gun control and universal health care, really do far less damage when compared to their right-wing counterparts in US foreign policy under Bush—as Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky observed recently in The Nation, citing "expert" opinions on US involvement in Iraq from Richard Perle through Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Dick Cheney.
If we take the Bush presidency as an example, the inheritors of old-class wealth have apparently figured out how to deploy key attributes of New-Class professional ideology, like white-collar expertise and a moral authority presumed to represent the collective interest, in order to further their own class and political interests. At the same time they have branded the left as the party, and class, of elite, specialized knowledge and bullying, "liberal fascist" governmental interventions into private life. Eric Alterman has also argued that a crucial rhetorical linchpin of this process was Dan Quayle's definition of liberals specifically as a "cultural elite" which "allowed conservatives to continue to feel themselves oppressed even as they gained control of virtually all of the levers of political power in the United States and much of the news media" ("Who" 14). As Alterman suggests, "elite" has done for the right what Goldberg alleges "fascism" has done for the left as an accusatory device. And, not surprisingly, both terms seem interchangeable in much of Liberal Fascism's "cultural" critique. In addition, part of the right's rhetorical case against liberals has been built around the association of liberals with the idea of white-collar, upper-middle class membership—education, expertise, salary, careerism, culture—while failing to call attention to their own membership.
Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) spends some time on the origins of the conservatism that gave rise to studies like Goldberg's, emphasizing how, by the 1970s, the consolidation of a conservative intelligentsia establishment made "becoming a conservative intellectual...a good career move" (117). Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) explores how "free market" capitalism advances via the expert "crisis exploitation" of Friedmanite, controlled responses to the shocks incurred by natural disasters. In each case, the not-so-secret fact about the postwar American right is that it too has a class of slide rule-bearing professional experts, whether they be career think-tank conservatives, writers, politicians, or policy-makers. Their survival has been built upon disassociation from, and denigration of, the welfare state, and, perhaps even more significantly, upon disassociation from any kind of "class" affiliation, New or Old, bourgeoisie or proletariat.
Goldberg's title actually relies on quotes from two speeches, both of which attempt to articulate a plan of action for liberal politics: "Liberal Fascism" comes from H. G. Wells, and "The Politics of Meaning" is derived (in part) from comments made by Hillary Clinton on April 7, 1993, in a speech for the Liz Carpenter Lecture Series on Civil Society at the University of Texas at Austin. Wells and Clinton thus serve as the beginning and the culmination, respectively, of Goldberg's history of twentieth-century "liberal fascism," although he leaves open numerous questions of causality along the way. While I've attempted to articulate some of the shortcomings of Goldberg's arguments here, and I would include his bizarre depiction of the "fascistic nature" (335) of Clinton's It Takes a Village (1996) among those shortcomings, I want to conclude by emphasizing some of the useful, if unintended, consequences of Goldberg's juxtaposition of Wells and Clinton.
In his address to the Oxford Liberal Summer School, Wells defined liberalism as:
the implicit recognition of the possibility of one prosperous and progressive world community of just, kindly, free-spirited, freely-thinking, and freely-speaking human beings, and it is a struggle to release humanity from all that impedes our present realization of that possibility....Liberalism has been the friend of the debtor, the downtrodden, the masses....It expresses needs. (18, 21)
Yet by the 1930s, liberalism seemed to Wells "an extraordinarily feeble giant," surviving poorly "among a multitude of extremely fierce and vigorous dwarfs" (21):
Consider its patent feebleness at the present time. It has no grip on education. It has never established a grip on education. It lifts its piping reasonableness that is almost completely drowned amidst a clamour of violent short views in the Press....Need I remind a Liberal Summer School of that peculiar kicked feeling? (21-22)
For Wells, the "patent feebleness" of liberalism in Britain partly derives from "the dilatory indecisiveness of parliamentary control" (25). The particularities of the British situation render problematic Goldberg's easy transposition of Wells' assessment to a nationally non-specific "Fascist moment," but Wells' frustration with the "amateurism" (25) of parliamentary politics did lead him to express interest in more authoritarian models for achieving liberal ends. Philip Coupland has argued that Wells' troubled, and eventually repudiated, connection with Oswald Mosley reveals how his conception of "revolutionary praxis" in the 1930s did not compel him "to be either a liberal or an authoritarian"; he therefore "could seek 'liberal' ends by means which were anything but" (542). Mosley professed support for Wells' "Liberal Fascism" speech. Like Wells he advocated a government of elite technocrats over parliamentary democracy, and developed an interest in the Labour party as an alternative to the Liberal party—although Mosley ultimately viewed Fascist party affiliation as the better alternative to both. What distinguished Wells from Mosley was not his stance on the state of liberal politics, but his globalism; he rejected Mosley's association of nationalism with elite, technocratic governance. Liberalism as Wells defined it involved "one prosperous and progressive world community"; the problem with parliamentary democracy was partly what he perceived as its weak ineffectuality, but also its affiliation with national models of governance. Ironically, Wells' cosmopolitanism allied him most closely with the politics and professional social ideal that Harold Perkin conceived as the intellectual prehistory behind the postwar British welfare state. It allowed him to conceive a scope of possibility for human community beyond the nation, based upon progressivism, education, human rights, and technical expertise over the expression of human needs and service to human welfare. However, when faced with imagining what the future state might look like, for all his social prophesying he could not predict what Jed Esty has called the "shrinking island" of a postwar, post-imperial England organized around a welfare state. "Liberal Fascist" (Wells 24) was the only form of governance he could come up with for an expanded maintenance of liberalism beyond Britain and beyond the concept of nation-states altogether.
If Goldberg were not looking to find exploitable "a-ha!" moments of collusion between liberalism and fascism in the twentieth century, his book might have made better intellectual use of difficult moments from liberalism's history like this one. Just as Is this book dumb? is an unhelpful question, Are they Fascists? is not the most intellectually useful question when confronting figures like Wells, or when considering Hillary Clinton's rhetorical emphases on "meaning, authenticity, action, transformation" (Goldberg 330) in what Goldberg views as her "totalitarian" conceptualizations of civil society's function in child-rearing. In her address at the University of Texas, Clinton called for:
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. (np)
One should be able to argue, I think, that formulations like this are in need of some form of critique. But Goldberg's paradigm of "nice fascism" only distracts from the construction of that critique. Both Wells and Clinton call for liberalism to develop tactics for surviving the expert assaults of competing political ideologies that have little interest in the debtor, the downtrodden, or "the masses." If Wells emphasized the question of how liberal politics might devise ways of triumphing over "that peculiar kicked feeling" in governance, Clinton speaks to a more affective concern about what connects people to civil society and to liberal political goals, and from there to "something bigger than ourselves."
She's right to assume that such an affective capacity has to be learned as the effect of a deliberative, defining, and ultimately political process; she hardly presents the "politics of meaning" as an authentic, spontaneous attribute of human behavior. But questions concerning the relationship between individual responsibility over care, government programs and market economics fall before the abiding ineffability of the vaguely-defined "something" that has, apparently, emptied her and her audience out—hence the need for a society that "fills us up again." It is difficult to imagine what kind of practical politics could be constructed around feeling meaningfully whole, as it is equally difficult to imagine a counterargument (a politics devoted to preserving a feeling of meaningless emptiness?). The point is that there's nothing especially liberal about taking areas of concern that provoke deliberation—individual responsibility, market economics, government programs—and rhetorically transforming them into something that quells the need to argue further. Reclaiming that need ought to be the central goal of those who identify as liberals. It may not alleviate liberals' peculiar kicked feeling, but it is the only way to work towards realizing those connections to something bigger than ourselves.
Works Cited
Alterman, Eric. "Conservative Cannibalism." The Nation 10 March 2008: 10.
-----. "Who Are They Calling Elitist?" The Nation 14 April 2008: 14-18.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1989.
Cerf, Christopher and Victor Navasky. "Who Said the War Would Pay for Itself? They Did!" The Nation 31 March 2008: 26.
Clinton, Hillary Rodham. "Remarks by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton." Liz Carpenter Lecture Series on Civil Society. University of Texas at Austin. 7 April 1993. <http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady
/html/generalspeeches/
1993/19930407.html.> Accessed 2 May 2008.
Coupland, Philip. "H. G. Wells' 'Liberal Fascism.'" Journal of Contemporary History 35.4 (October 2000): 541-58.
Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
Gouldner, Alvin W. The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. New York: Continuum, 1979.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt, 2007.
Krugman, Paul. The Conscience of a Liberal. New York: Norton, 2007.
Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Schryer, Stephen. "Fantasies of the New Class: The New Criticism, Harvard Sociology, and the Idea of the University." PMLA 122.3 (2007): 663-78.
Wells, H. G. "Liberalism and the Revolutionary Spirit." After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation. London: Watts and Co., 1932.
Zizek, Slavoj. "Against Human Rights." New Left Review 34 (July-Aug. 2005): 115-31.
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