On Liberal Fascism

Goldberg’s two primary failings can be found on pages 2-3 and 13-14.

From page 2-3:

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.” Indeed, the more someone uses the word “fascist” in everyday conversation, the less likely it is that he knows what’s he’s talking about.

You may think that the exception to this rule would be scholars of fascism. But what really distinguishes the scholarly communist is its honesty. Not even the professionals have figured out what exactly fascism is.

Then, Goldberg goes on to selectively quote Roger Griffin, Emilio Gentile, Ernst Nolte, Stanley Payne, Gilbert Allardyce, and others. The problem is that this view is one that was surely the case before the mid-1980s, but a “New Consensus” has formed, in contrast to Goldberg’s claim that there is none. As a result, Goldberg uncritically runs with political religions theory. This is all well and good, although it is far less respected than the New Consensus and has more than its fair share of holes.

The second primary mistake is on pages 13-14:

At the same time, it must be noted that scholars have had so much difficulty explaining what fascism is because various fascisms have been so different from each other. For example, the Nazis were genocidal anti-Semites. The Italian Fascists were protectors of Jews until the Nazis took over Italy. Fascists fought for the side of the Axis, but the Spanish stayed out of the war (and protected Jews as well). The Nazis hated Christianity, the Italians made peace with the Catholic Church (though Mussolini himself despised Christianity with an untrammeled passion), and members of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael styled themselves as Christian crusaders Some fascists championed “state capitalism,” while others, such as the Blue Shirts of Kuomintang China, demanded the immediate seizure of the means of production. The Nazis were officially anti-Bolshevist, but there was a movement of “National Bolshevism” within Nazi ranks, too.

The one thing that unites these movements is that they were all, in their own ways, totalitarian.

Here, Goldberg lies through omission. He makes no mention of France, which had a strong authoritarian movement, but there are no grounds on which to claim that it was “totalitarian.” This omission is not because Goldberg is unfamiliar with French fascism, as both Nolte and Payne discuss it at some length in their works, among other authors. For Nolte, who was an earlier thinker than the New Consensus, the ultimate raison d’être for fascism was anti-Marxism. At the time Mussolini became a fascist, he had thoroughly rejected his Marxist, and materialist, past. The similarity that these groups have in common is, instead, a mind towards spiritual, integralist nationalism that would allow the rebirth of a people. The best symbol to represent fascism is not the Swastika, nor the fasces, nor one of the many variants of crosses used in Eastern Europe, but the Phoenix, which rises from the ashes of the old.

This nationalism is not of the same form as the American Revolution, French Revolution (which, laughably, Goldberg characterizes as fascist), or 19th-century national revolutions (1848 among them), which aimed at a more inclusive national unity, but a “Blut und Ehre” obsession with the territorially-grounded roots of national identity.

Instead of looking at the fundamentally nationalist-nature of fascism, he successfully derails his own book by instead focusing on social welfare programs, which have been supported by every ideology in modern history. As a result, he manages to conflate Communists, social democrats, social liberals (who he just characterizes as “liberals”), and fascists. Alas, he engages in the same taxonomic bullshit that Stalin produced when he characterized social democrats as “social fascists.” Ironically enough, Goldberg ignores that it was conservatives that cozied up with fascists in the interwar years, not progressives.

In sum, I can’t tell whether Goldberg is intellectually dishonest for partisan purposes or if he actually believes the pseudo-intellectual arguments he puts forth. Either way, this book is worth skipping. It does not add anything of use for those who actually know a thing or two about fascism, and will simply mislead those who sincerely wish to learn more about it.