March 15, 2008
Books essay: Don’t mention the F word
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
By Jonah Goldberg
Doubleday $27.95, 496 pages
Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don’t)
By Michael J. Gerson
Harper One $26.95, 320 pages
Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again
By David Frum
Doubleday $24.95, 224 pages
They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Doubleday $26, 336 pages
Ever since the “Reagan revolution”, conservative intellectuals have dominated the battle of ideas in American politics. But the success of Jonah Goldberg’s silly book, Liberal Fascism, suggests that American conservatism may now be in some intellectual trouble. The book has done well in the United States. It reached number three on The New York Times bestseller list. Yet it is dedicated to an absurd proposition – that American liberals are the direct ideological heirs of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. This is the kind of ya-boo politics that has deformed American talk radio for years. But it is depressing that you can get a bestseller out of such nonsense.
Goldberg is not a stupid man. A pundit and commentator, he writes fluently and occasionally amusingly – and he has read lots of books about fascism. The opening pages of his own work are a quasi-learned dissection of the central tenets of fascism. But the purpose of the book is not to understand fascism. It is to discredit American liberals. Goldberg piles example upon example, to draw harebrained comparisons between American liberals and fascists. Liberals buy organic food. But did you know that “Dachau hosted the world’s largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey”? Well, I never.
Over the course of almost 500 pages, Liberal Fascism pursues a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead us to an overwhelmingly stupid question: “Was Bill Clinton a fascist president?” Surprisingly, the answer to this question is No. Clinton, it seems, wasn’t even good enough to deserve the label fascist: “To say that he was a fascist himself is to credit him with more ideology and principle than justified.”
The remainder of this book review essay can be read here. Comments can be made below.
“Heilbrunn paints a portrait of an intellectual and political movement with great resilience and deep roots. At the end of his book, he writes that: “These reckless minds … aren’t going away”
Correct. Unfortunately, they have acheived a great success in the fact that the Neo-con ideology now is the face and heart of the Republican Party’s National Security and Foreign Policy. This is also the reason why I re-registered as a DTS (decline to state voter) as I do not want my Republican Party affiliation as being interpreteded that I support these “reckless minds”. No matter who the candidate was going to be McCain, Romney or Huckabee, the game plan by this movement, its brains and leaders, is such , that the Republican president’s national security and foreign policy team will be staffed by strategically placed neo-con cohorts…. individuals mentored in the movements many think tanks and/or currently in positions in government waiting to move up in yet another Republican administration. That’s it. There is no one else to do that. There is no one who can oppose them in Republican circles..go to battle with them or offer up a differing policy with any credibility and/or power. That is part of the gamepaln also….a Senator Jim Webb could of…but he did want many gifted Republican talents did …he left the party to become a Democrat!
The neo-cons care little for domestic policy. Their adoption and support of the Christian Conservative agenda was a cynical (and smart) tactical move to broaden their support in the Republican party just so that they could formulate and rule the national security and foreign policy agenda.
Posted by: Lisa-Helene Lawson | March 17th, 2008 at 5:26 pm | Report this commentGood points all, by Lisa-Helene Lawson. But as Bonner and Wiggin have pointed out (at too much length, perhaps) in their 2006 book “Empire of Debt”, the American infatuation with empire includes most 20th Century Democratic presidents as well, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson (though William McKinley, a Republican who was assasinated in a terror attack in New York (State) almost 100 years to the day before the attacks of 9/11/2001, was as imperialist as any).
Bonner and Wiggin argue that a belief that bankrupting our country for the sake of empire is a good thing has become virtually part of the American psyche. Can today’s world wide financial crisis, including the dollar’s being on life support, be disassociated with the desire for world domination that all too many Americans, not just neo-cons, seem to regard as part of the natural order of things?
Posted by: algasema | March 17th, 2008 at 6:04 pm | Report this commentApologies for my misspelling of “assassinated”.
Posted by: algasema | March 17th, 2008 at 6:08 pm | Report this commentThey ve something in common: Neocons are former Socialists, like Mussolini, who became anticommunists…
But after the Fall of Communism in 1989 we cannot talk about Fascism which was basically a reactionary movement, an anti-Communist theory.
Without Communism there is not room for anti-Communism.
Fascists brought their inspiration from different sources but basically the World which was destroyed by the French Revolution (dominated by the Church and Aristocracy) plus Nationalism in Germany, which is a new Revolutionary ideal increasingly extended over the World.
Before the French Revolution multi-ethnic Empires and kingdoms similar to India or Iran today, were the norm. Religion was much more important than Ethnicity.
If we think about the participation of the State in the Economy, there is not much difference in the USA between Democrats and Republicans as 25% of the American Budget is part of Defense.
Reagan´s Defense Keynesianism is well known and given the fact that even the internet was built by the State (Arpanet) it is evident there is a clear “Socialist” foundation in the newest economy.
American Liberals, in the other side, are better known for a “Christian” looking of universal health care.
And, on the other side, the most important issue which joins Neocons today is their support of Israel as they are usually fanatics for whom their nation is first Israel and only second the nation where they live and were born and are supposed to serve (USA, France, Spain) For them our nations are just a mean, a kleenex they can use for their main goal.
Posted by: Enrique | March 17th, 2008 at 6:53 pm | Report this commenthttp://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/16/opinion/ediraq1.php
In today’s IHT, on the OP-ED page we get a sampling of views of some Americans concerning Iraq. You will find the unrepentant views of neocons like Perle, Danielle Pletca and F Kagan as well as the views of Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and Inernational Affairs at Princeton.
Her remarks on the emblematic symbolism of the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Bagdad are probably the best summary of this affair:
quote:
Our government knew how to destroy but not how to build. We had toppled a regime, and in coming months we would dismantle Saddam Hussein’s bureaucracy and disband his army. But we did so with absolutely no understanding of how to build a liberal democracy, or even a stable, rights-regarding government with broad popular support.
Such a government requires a prosperous economy, a secure society and sufficient cultural unity to allow everyday interaction among different ethnic groups in workplaces, schools, hospitals, the army and the police. Protecting the symbols of a common and proud heritage is Democracy Building 101 - at least for anyone who understood anything about Iraqi history and culture.
Americans are still living with the aftermath of this ignorance, and we will be for decades to come. In 2003 and 2004, experts debated whether it would take one year or three to rebuild Iraq. Now we debate whether it will take 10 to 15 years or whether it can be done at all
………
Those broken and stolen statues from the museum are the enduring symbols of what has gone so wrong. They were easy to smash, so hard to repair.
unquote
It is a pity that Rachman devoted so little space to Heilbrunn’s book. In some ways it is more interesting than the other two (NY Review of Books Jan/17 and in the Guardian ).
Heilbrunn does quite a bit of forensic psychoanalysis on the class of Jewish intellectuals who converted their obsessive trotskyism into predatory imperialism of the present day neocons.
Unfortunately the poison of the neocon doctrine has infected too much of the present american political discourse. Ann-Marie Slaughter, Mearsheimer and others are a distinct minority.
McCain promises a a hundred years war and Hillary
“humanitarian” intervention.
It is really a very desolate future.
Posted by: MP | March 17th, 2008 at 11:35 pm | Report this commentFrancis Fukuyama’s “After the Neocons” is IMO the best essay on the movement which traces its roots back to the early 1940s.. He lists four strands in their thinking:
*a concern with democracy, human rights and more generally the internal politics of states
*a belief that US power can be used for moral purposes
*a scepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems
* a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends [a Burkean legacy]
With their ascendance to power the neocons jettisoned their Burkean legacy—probably the best, most conservative, strand in their thinking. But the rest remained intact.
I had thought that the debacle in Iraq would mean the end of this dangerous clique. But never say die. They seem to have more lives than the proverbial cat and more comebacks than Hillary Clinton!
The fascist taunts are of no consequence, merely a throwback to the neo’s Trotskyite origins. The damning epithet was originally used by the Communists against enemies of the Soviet Union—with time out during the alliance with Nazi Germany of course—both before and after WWII. Recall the taunts of anti-Semitic appeasers hurled by neoconservatives in the lead up to the Iraq invasion.. Could have come direct from the Kremlin!
Posted by: MaryCunningham | March 18th, 2008 at 9:32 am | Report this commentComments in relation to MaryCunningham’s post:
I haven’t read “After the Neocons”, but based on the brief excerpt above the characterisation seems off-target, or at least only accurate insofar as it pertains to the neocons’ historical foundations.
Although I’m far from being a neocon, the four strands of neocon thinking listed by Mary are all ones that I subscribe to, or in the case of the third one, sympathise with (I’m an internationalist, but recognise the limitations of international law and institutions).
For me this highlights the fact that Fukuyama’s list of characteristics is surely incomplete, missing as it does the desire to aggressively assert US national interests through military and other means. The neocon’s current albatross, Iraq, was clearly driven by (a skewed interpretation of) this last characteristic, whereas democracy, morals and human rights were merely retrofitted to the justification for war after the event. I say skewed, as it’s hard to conclude that Iraq has advanced the US’ national interests, though of course neocons would write this off as botched implementation of their watertight plan.
Indeed, this cynical pursuit of American dominance à la Project for a New American Century appears to have eclipsed the other, more noble tenets. It’s a shame that they didn’t stick to the old tenets – America would be a whole lot less isolated in the world now.
Posted by: DKM | March 18th, 2008 at 2:16 pm | Report this commentDKM–more initials!–the neocon zeal to “spread democracy” sounded great on paper but in reality it meant meant a role for America as univited invader and occupier. How noble is that? Not one neighbour of Iraq, except of course Israel, supported the project. Nor did the foreign policy “realists” of the architects of the Kuwait invasion, which actually was legitimate.
The Burkean caution about large projects of social engineering (IMO the only valuable part of the original neocon philosophy) was promptly abandoned when their neocon worldview gained prominence after 9/11. The decision to ‘remake Iraq as a democracy’ as well as being a great example of hubris could have come straight from the Jacobin movement, who also wished to spread the ideals of the French Revolution throughout Europe. (And what a disaster that was! Led straight to Napoleon.)
Posted by: MaryCunningham | March 18th, 2008 at 4:00 pm | Report this commentThis from LA Times comment entitled “Obama blew it” and written by Michael Meyers, an African American who is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition:
“In fact, I’d say that considering the nation’s undivided attention to this all-important speech, which gave him an unrivaled opportunity to lift us out of racial and racist thinking, Obama blew it.
I waited in vain for our hybrid presidential candidate to speak the simple truth that there is no such thing as “race,” that we all belong to the same race — the human race. I waited for him to mesmerize us with a singular and focused appeal to hold all candidates to the same standards no matter their race or their sex or their age. But instead Obama gave us a full measure of racial rhetoric about how some of us with an “untrained ear” — meaning whites and Asians and Latinos — don’t understand and can’t relate to the so-called black experience.”
Posted by: Lilly Evans | March 20th, 2008 at 10:17 am | Report this commentLilly Evans: If O had just made the statement ” we
are all human beings and we deserve happiness” he
would be intoning the constitution and the declaratrion of indpendence which sounds like “we are for motherhood and apply pie.”
This is too general.
We all know practically that the us has a huge
race problem that it must solve.
Posted by: MP | March 20th, 2008 at 1:19 pm | Report this commentHardly absurd: The university political correctness programs look fascist, and impose, not fascism and nazism, but fascist and nazi political theory. The theory underlying Fascism is anti capitalist corporatism, and the theory underlying nazism is corporate race theory. Universities impose corporate race theory, and doubt in that theory is apt to be punished.
Posted by: James A. Donald | March 23rd, 2008 at 9:33 pm | Report this commentBoth the extremist among American Liberals and the fanatic American Neocons are basically Marxist in their thinking as they look for a false Struggle of Classes, Sexes, Religions and Ethnicities…both of them were born from the same Marxist Mother.
Posted by: Enrique | March 23rd, 2008 at 11:20 pm | Report this commentIf conservative commentators have, as you say, dominated the battle of political ideas in the U.S., it is not because of the intellectual weight of those ideas. It is more because of the right’s slash-and-burn rhetorical style. Anger, hatred, vitriol, invective - these things attract more readers and viewers than does reasoned discourse, and they are what American conservatives have been selling.
Posted by: John B | March 26th, 2008 at 3:14 pm | Report this comment