The latest from Jonah Goldberg from what is becoming his unofficial fan site...
What was it Al Pacino said in Godfather III? "Just when I thought I was out – they pull me back in."
That’s sort of how I feel these days about the current fight over liberals and fascism. In case you haven’t noticed, fascism talk is everywhere. Nancy Pelosi with her Sixth Sense-ish "I see swastikas," Rush Limbaugh fighting back, Glenn Beck pounding the table, town-hallers hauling around pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache: These are good times to be moving a book called Liberal Fascism. And that leaves out the White House’s asking Americans to rat out neighbors who peddle "fishy" e-mail. It overlooks the fact that Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, and one of Obama’s health-care gurus, Ezekiel Emanuel, have written things that would fit nicely into my chapter on eugenics. And – oh yeah – it also leaves out that Obama has essentially nationalized much of the banking and auto industries while vowing to do his darnedest to make us more like European social democracies. The news out of this administration bolsters one argument after another in my book.
But the thing is, I’ve been arguing about fascism and liberalism nonstop for nearly two years now. And it is exhausting. Moreover, the glorious thing about the Obama Moment is that I can just say "look around" to those who thought I was imagining things when I first wrote the book and gave little thought to an obscure Illinois state legislator.
But there’s a problem. Many folks claim to see in Obama the makings of an actual Hitler and in Obamaism a repeat of the National Socialism of the 1930s. Worse, some think my book supports their fears. And maybe it does, though I hope not.
The simple truth is that I do not think it is in the cards for America to go down a Nazi path. I never said otherwise in Liberal Fascism either.
It’s important to keep in mind that, as bad as various other avowedly fascist regimes were, only the Nazis did what they did. Mussolini was a bad man and a dictator, but he was no Hitler. The Italians did bad things, but they don’t amount to a fraction of German crimes. Supposedly fascist Franco wasn’t nearly as bad as Mussolini, and Franco’s complicity in the Holocaust was nil. In other words, fascism brings out things in specific cultures at specific moments. Not only is Obama obviously not interested in being a Hitler, he couldn’t pull Hitlerism out of the American people if he wanted to.
Indeed, while I don’t think it is remotely right or fair to call Obama a crypto-Nazi (if by that you mean to say he’s a would-be Hitler), the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen may have overstated his case in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, but he was certainly right that the German people were Hitler’s willing enablers. The overwhelming majority of the American people – in their history, culture, bones, hearts, souls, DNA, and carbon molecules – are not like that. That goes for American liberals and leftists too. The extent and depth of liberalism’s obtuseness on the subject of fascism (and much else) stews my bowels, but American liberals are still Americans, and Americans will not goose-step behind a Hitler, period.
As I make clear in Liberal Fascism, the obvious and pressing threat is not from a Hiterlite-Orwellian dictatorship but from a Huxleyan namby-pamby mommy state. That sort of system could seduce American into becoming chestless subjects of the State in exchange for bottomless self-gratification and liberation from the necessity of adult decision-making. Yes, there’s a danger that such as society could then be susceptible to some darker vision that lionizes the lost manhood of a half-forgotten past. But, by that point, this would be America in name only, if even that ("U.N. District 12" has a nice ring to it).
