Some of the "isms" we're having to talk about these days

Mussolini and Hitler

January is only half over. But already the liberal blogosphere find ourselves contending with often-weirdly-provoked discussions of racism, anti-Semitism and (gulp!) fascism.

Not that I'm hesitant to discuss any of this stuff. Except that in my blogging days I've generally avoided discussing "fascism" in terms of contemporary politics, for reasons I mentioned in my review of Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism last year. Except for Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party in Italy, which actually called itself the Fascist Party, scholars of the phenomenon have a range of opinions on which historical regimes should be called fascist that would probably surprise most people who haven't dug into the topic a bit.

As much as my poli-sci-geek side enjoys this stuff, until now I've tried to avoid using the term "fascism" when discussing either historical regimes (except Italy) or contemporary movements. Also, in the sometimes eccentric American political vocabulary, "fascism" has been more like a cuss word than a definition. Everyone knows that "fascists" were the people we fought in our prototypical Good War, the Second World War. But beyond that, it hasn't had a whole lot of conceptual content in the ordinary political vocabulary.

Now along comes the National Review's Jonah Goldberg, son of Lucianne Goldberg (who made Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky famous), with a completely hack but high-profile argument that only liberals are "fascists". His book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, was just published and he's actively promoting it now. So, despite his argument being about as frivolous as it could be in content, I guess we're going to have to learn to talk about fascism explicitly now in current political terms.

Dave Neiwert has been way ahead of this curve. He's been writing for years not only about the real existing far right in the US but also specifically about the concept of fascism and how it applies to today's US political scene. He argues that the present-day conservative movement, including characters like Rush Limbaugh, Mad Annie Coulter and nativist groups who are very much a part of the Republican Party sphere, exhibit certain traits that he calls "proto-fascist". He has been giving Goldberg's book quite a lot of attention, not because it's substantive but because it presents a "teaching moment" to talk about the substantive issues involved and how hackwork like Goldberg's obscures them. One of his latest posts on the subject is The methodology of Liberal Fascism Orcinus blog 01/13/08.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, one of the anti-Obama themes that's floating around cyberspace, and has now broken into the once-prestigious pages of the New York Times, is that Obama is a closet Muslim and is at least soft on anti-Semitism. M.J. Rosenberg discusses this meme in Playing With Fire: Smearing Obama Among Jews TPM Cafe 01/15/08. See also Richard Cohen: Bad for the Jews by Ari Kelman, Edge of the American West blog 01/15/08 and Six degrees of Louis Farrakhan by Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber blog 01/15/08.

This is an instance similar to the infamous "swiftboating" of John Kerry in 2004 in which frivolous charges are cranked out by someone and then are picked up by the Establishment press without any kind of meaningful information provided to readers about the factual accuracy or substance of the charges. This particular technique under discussion in one way resembles the one used in the 1992 campaign when someone floated the completely groundless lunacy that Bill Clinton had once been an agent of the Soviet KGB and then Republicans flogged it by saying, hey, we're not saying it's true but why doesn't he come clean about it?

More-or-less obvious pandering to racist sentiment has been a standard part of Republican Presidential campaigns for some time. So it's no surprise that we're seeing a lot of it surfacing already, especially with Barack Obama one of the most prominent figures in today's Democratic Party. Pat Buchanan is a reliable source of such stuff and he's playing his role. In The Brothers and Sisters War Human Events Online 01/11/08. He reminds today's Republicans of one of those segregationist phrases that's so painfully obvious you wonder why they even bothered to "code" it at all:

This could get ugly. As Hillary's victory in New Hampshire is being attributed to the Bradley Effect - i.e, white racism - any Barack victory in South Carolina will now be attributed to the black vote, what in the Old South they used to call "the bloc vote."

And January is only half over!

Tags: anti-semitism, dave neiwert, fascism, jonah goldberg, liberal fascism, m.j. rosenberg, pat buchanan, racism