David Neiwert has been debating with Jonah Goldberg of Goldberg's crackpot new book, Liberal Fascism. I posted the following comment (one typo corrected) at Neiwert's blog (Jonah's response Orcinus blog 01/11/08).
By the time I got through the sixth paragraph of Goldberg's response (dealing with European liberalism) I started having flash-backs to my college political science days. I imagined myself proofreading a paper I had written and seeing that paragraph and thinking, "Oh my God, if I turn in this paper written this way, the professor might just reject it altogether and tell me to go back and do some actual research this time."
It's true that history involves a lot of judgments. But that's a whole different thing than just making words mean whatever you want them to mean to construct a bogus case out of the air.
I would feel embarassed at saying much about it, because it would give Goldberg's playacting more value than it deserves. But to state what would be painfully obvious to anyone who actually knows what European liberalism was and is about, what the Nazis and fascists opposed about them included their commitment to constitutional government, individual political rights and democratic, competitive elections.
Goldberg distinguishes between European and American liberalism, which is valid as far as it goes. But in Germany in particular, liberalism was defined by parties and not just by philosophical definitions. The liberal movement that represented business interests during and after the 1848 revolution soon split into two groups, with the "National Liberals" becoming the party of Bismarck. Bismarck favored some liberal goals such as free market capitalism, nationalism and the secular state, while not being at all keen on the democracy part.
The democratic liberals were basically in opposition during the decades of the Empire (both Bismarck's and Kaiser Bill's) and reached their height of voter appeal in 1919, when the German Democratic Party (DDP) received 18.5% of the vote and became part of the Weimar coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Catholic Center Party. Those three were the real "Weimar parties" who defended democracy. The National Liberals were still around as the monarchist German Volkspartei, which polled 4.4% in 1919. By 1932, both remnants of the 19th liberals were virtually out of existence, the DDP getting 1.0% and the Volkspartei 1.9%.
The democracy and the democratic ideals that Hitler's National Socialists opposed were those of the DDP, the SPD and the Center; the Communists supported Weimar democracy in practice, more-or-less, except for a couple of attempts at armed revolution tossed in. Goldberg's description is such a garble of the historical facts it's mind-boggling.
To the extent that the Nazis opposed the German conservatives of the day, it would be because some conservatives shared the left's support of the Weimar democracy, as well as inevitable organizational competition. But German conservatives under Weimar weren't like the postwar Konrad Adenauer. Most of them were monarchists or militarists who opposed democracy. It was conservative politicians who Hitler persuaded to bring him into the government as Chancellor in January, 1933.
But, hey, if Goldberg is right that such giants of historiography as Joshua Muravchik, Michael Ledeen and Ayn Rand agree that fascism was a left-wing phenemenon, who am I to argue with that?
Tags: david neiwert, jonah goldberg, liberal fascism, weimar period
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