Fascism and the Left.

ONE OF THE CURSES of our time is people trying to turn "Left" and "Right" into moral categories on their own, as if very broad beliefs about the ends and means of politics are so morally determinant that further attention to details, specific implications and actions are insignificant.

One of the saddest variants of this pointless casuistry is to tag one's opponents with the label of "fascist!" It is a game that has mainly been played from the Left--on the grounds that fascism is clearly a "right-wing" movement--and started early: Stalinists labelled social democrats as social fascists until the Popular Front strategy required a change of rhetoric. When the Popular Front strategy was abandoned, the alliance with Nazism made returning to the insult impolitic, so social democrats merely became lackeys of capitalist imperialism--until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, led to an abrupt embracing of said capitalist imperialists and their lackeys.

The onset of the Cold War led to a re-launching of the fascist! canard as a rhetorical indulgence of the Left. Apart from its simple offensiveness, it has always been a silly and stupid indulgence. Part of the glue of the liberal-conservative alliance is an overlapping belief that there are real limits to what one can expect politics to do and that it is dangerous to go beyond those limits--on the grounds that the state is potentially dangerous; that political mechanisms are of limited effectiveness; that salvation is entirely a religious matter, not a political one. To accuse people whose politics is grounded in a sense of the limitations of politics as being "fascist" is to show either that you do not understand fascism, or that you do not understand liberal-conservatives, or that you do not care whether there is any truth to your rhetoric.

Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg has turned the Left's use of the fascism canard on its head in his bestselling Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, arguing that fascism is--au contraire!--a left-wing movement and that US liberals such as Hillary Clinton are the real inheritors of the fascist mantle.

There is no doubt Goldberg has touched a nerve--hence his book being a bestseller. And his sense of why it is so popular is probably correct. In a recent radio interview Goldberg said: "I think a lot of conservatives, they say hey, wait a second, I like free markets and individualism, I don't like the state, I don't like people meddling with me, I don't like socialism. How come I'm the fascist? ... this book tapped into a lot of that."

There are years of entirely understandable resentment to get off people's chests, and Goldberg has tapped into that. And tapping into unexpressed hopes or fears is what makes a successful intellectual entrepreneur.

Goldberg's thesis is clearly cathartic for many folk. But, a small voice asks, is it true? Is fascism really a "left-wing" movement? Are modern US liberals "nice" fascists, as Goldberg alleges? No, no and no.