Refuting Jonah Goldberg's crackpot theory about fascism

Dave Neiwert, who has written extensively about Jonah Goldberg's crackpot book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (2007), a propaganda tract that argues the fascism and the National Socialist (Nazi) variety of it were leftwing political movements, organized an online symposium of academic experts on the topic at the History News Network that appears today.

Dave provides the Introduction, noting at the beginning that Goldberg himself declined to participate. As he explains, academic reviewers largely ignored it because in terms of its substance, it was a total crank work. But, as Dave explains:

And yet, here we are two years later, and it turns out that many people indeed have taken Goldberg’s book seriously. Not only was Liberal Fascism a national bestseller that to date reportedly has sold some sixty million copies worldwide, but its core thesis – that, "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left” – has become widely accepted conventional wisdom among American conservatives, and has played a significant role in the national discourse. Along the way, it morphed into the claim that the agenda of Democratic liberals, and particularly President Obama, was an innately fascist attempt to impose a totalitarian state, something Goldberg himself only intimated in the book, though he later confirmed it in a National Review article. ...

Goldberg’s thesis has become the running theme for Glenn Beck’s wildly popular Fox News program, in which Beck regularly insists that Obama is secretly a radical fascist (or Marxist, or socialist, or Communist, depending on that day’s flavor), and that the progressive movement – dating back to Woodrow Wilson – not only is at the root of all the nation’s miseries, but represents a concerted effort to remake America as a totalitarian state. Beck has regularly equated fascism with progressivism, a claim central to Goldberg’s book. And indeed, Goldberg himself has appeared on Beck’s show numerous times to promote these claims.

Beck is hardly alone in this regard. At various times, such right-wing pundits as Rush Limbaugh (for whom the claim was actually old hat), Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage have promoted the “liberal fascism” thesis as well.

I generally try to avoid the term "fascism" in reference to present-day regimes and movements, just because it became a vague epithet long before Goldberg's book was published. And also because it's a difficult historical concept. Mussolini's party in Italy called itself the Fascist Party, so it's safe to say they were fascists. The Austrian "Standesstaat" regime of 1933-38, usually called "clerical-fascist" in English, was closely modeled on Mussolini's movement and governing. Franco's movement in Spain was often called fascist, though one of the leading experts in the field, Robert Paxton, didn't include it as one of the fascist regimes he describes in his main book on the subject, The Anatomy of Fascism. And Hitler's Nazi Party and government are also commonly called fascist. But among historians and political scientists, there is a dispute over whether that dictatorship was similar enough to that in Italy that it should be called fascist, or whether National Socialism/Nazism should be seen as a distinct form of dictatorship. I generally only use the term in relation to those historical movements and governments in Italy, Germany, Austria and Spain. And I usually call the Hitler regime "National Socialist"' "Nazi" is an abbreviation of "National Socialist".

Here's a sample of the analyses at HNN. Robert Paxton:

Jonah Goldberg knows that making the Progressives, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and FDR the creators of an American fascism – indeed the only American fascism, for George Lincoln Rockwell and other overt American fascist or Nazi sympathizers are totally absent from this book – is a stretch, so he has created a new box: Liberal Fascism. The Progressives and their heirs who wanted to use government to rectify social and economic ills, and who, in Goldberg’s view, thereby created an American Fascism, acted with good intentions, rarely used violence, and had nothing to do with Auschwitz. Even so, they share an intellectual heredity and a set of common goals with the European fascists. So they go into the “Liberal Fascist” box.

Roger Griffin focuses on analyzing the pseudohistorical methodology Goldberg uses, e.g., when Goldberg argues, "Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century's first fascist dictator". (!!) This is important, because obsessive footnoting and citing of authorities is ironically one characteristic of a lot of anti-intellectual rightwing propaganda:

[Goldberg's book] owes its success partly to masquerading as a serious work of academic analysis, one which mendaciously claims to unmask the conventional wisdom within the political and historical sciences on the subject of fascism as politically biased and conceptually confused. Its true purpose is to uncover subterranean (and, to the non-paranoid, wholly fictitious) links between contemporary U.S. Democrats and the values of the same Axis regimes the U.S. fought so heroically on D-Day and beyond to rid the world of genuinely fascist totalitarian regimes. [my emphasis]

Of all the essays in this collection, Griffin's has the most stuffy academic tone. But he makes some very good points, including a really usefull summary of the academic consensus (such as it is) within the last decade on defining fascism.

Griffin does use the silly Republican grammar of "Democrat politics" at one point in his essay. But he makes an interesting side remark about the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse:

The idea that the U.S. under FDR was a totalitarian society in this sense is another example of the distortion of language and history that permeates this book (Marcuse accused liberal society of being totalitarian but at least this was based on a consistent Marxist critique of capitalism).

Actually, Marcuse's analysis was also based on a Freudian psychoanalytic understanding of the increasing role of guilt and internal psychological repression that Freud observed in advanced 20th century societies.

Marcuse's essay collection Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1973) includes a philosophical essay on the rejection of liberalism by the National Socialists, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in The Totalitarian View of The State". It originally appeared in German in 1934 as "Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitären Staatsauffassung" in the main Frankfurt School journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.

Matthew Feldman also describes the pseudohistorical nature of Goldberg's propaganda tract. He gives this description of the conceptual hash with which Goldberg and his like-minded admirers operate:

Yet even [Mussolini's book] The Doctrine of Fascism would not be fascism in Goldberg's hands. For fascism is not fascism here. It is anything Goldberg wishes it to be; notably trends in modern American politics and culture that he clearly dislikes. ... this is certainly not a book for anyone attempting a better understanding of fascist ideology, although it may be a useful barometer of the so-called "culture wars" in the contemporary United States. At points, Liberal Fascism even admits as much; for example, "one of the main reasons I've written the book [is] to puncture the smug self-confidence that simply by virtue of being liberal one is also virtuous" (317-8). Indeed, the book's first paragraph already sets out the real antagonists in Goldberg's account, namely "[a]ngry liberals" and "besieged conservatives." Regrettably, his hostility better characterizes the rhetoric of ideological rivals like fascism and communism – radical right-wing and radical left-wing, respectively, despite Goldberg's sleight of hand – rather than one end of a democratic spectrum. And you certainly wouldn't know that fascists and communists fought it out on the streets and battlefields for very different ideological doctrines. Instead, reading Liberal Fascism, you might think they rather liked one another.

I would add that in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, the Social Democrats also fought it out physically with the Nazis and other far-right groups allied with the Nazis, even though the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists never managed to cooperate actively in support of the Weimar Republic. The Catholic Center Party, on the other hand, which along with the SPD was one of the two core parties of the Weimar Republic, was severely handicapped in the early 1930s as street violence escalated because they didn't have their own party militia/fighting group/goon squad.

Chip Berlet:

Fascism, Nazism, Communism, the [Franklin] Roosevelt administration, and the modern Welfare State share degrees of government intervention in the economy. They are not equivalent, and there is no evidence that government planning leads to totalitarianism any more than drinking tea leads to opium addiction. This is a classic logical error.

Berlet also comments on the often under-estimated influence of the John Birch Society (JBS) on present-day Republican politics. The JBS is a virtual mother ship of bad ideas:

While working on an investigative article in the early 1980s, a harried Reagan White House switchboard operator mistook who I was and plugged me into the office of presidential adviser and ultra-conservative guru Morton Blackwell. We had a marvelous discussion about how important the John Birch Society literature was for training young conservatives; how he had shelves full of JBS material in his office; how he shared the JBS books with the White House Staff; and how he was trying to see if JBS and similar literature could be sent to U.S. embassy libraries around the world. Marginal ideas? Not.

Jonah Goldberg does not list the John Birch Society as a major source, but he should have, since his book is like a compendium of JBS articles published over the last fifty years. These ideas are now ubiquitous among right-wing populists in the Tea Party movement. Am I suggesting that Birchers, the Christian Right, and right-wing libertarians have taken over the Republican Party? Yes, although old-fashioned conservatives and political pragmatists are putting up a splendid fight for control of the Party. Do I think right-wing TV, radio, and print media are awash with right-wing conspiracy theories pioneered by the Birchers? Yes, that’s what my research shows. [my emphasis]

Berlet also adds an important cautions to liberals and progressives about assuming that anyone who attacks bankers or finance capital is a potential ally for progressive causes. Some of them are just anti-Semitic rightwingers.

Tags: jonah goldberg, liberal fascism, radical right

Habemus Obama?

When a new Pope is selected by the College of Cardinals, the public announcement is made, "Habemus Papum" (we have a Pope). After Obama's convincing win in Wisconsin, it looks like habemus Obama for the Democratic nominee. He doesn't have the delegate majority yet. But, as Tom Hayden observes in We Have a Nominee! Huffington Post 02/19/08:

What about Hillary Clinton's "firewall" states of Ohio and Texas? When the balance of forces shifts in a competition, when the general offensive is on, little can hold it back. Wavering voters shift their allegiances. Donors defect. The calculation of electability shifts. The old leadership is staggered, off balance, the ground collapsing under their feet. Even if Clinton wins in Ohio and Texas, the margins will not be enough to block his momentum.

Josh Marshall, focusing a bit more narrowly on the electoral demographics, concurs (Gut Check Time TPM 02/20/08):

The premise of Clinton's campaign after Super Tuesday has been her trump cards of female voters and working class/lower income Democrats. But that assumption is due for a major reevaluation. In each successive contest he's cutting more into those core constituencies. Tonight in Wisconsin Obama tied Hillary among female voters and beat her by 10 points among voters making less than $50,000 per annum.

We've had four big post-Super Tuesday primaries - in LA, MD, VA and WI. The topline numbers in each were relatively similar - ranging from 17% in Wisconsin to 29% in Virginia. But the underlying story is that from Louisiana to the Chesapeake to Wisconsin, the underlying demographic structure of the electorate, the playing field, as it were, got better for her. But it didn't help.

That bold Maverick McCain, faithful friend of the Christian Right, is already leveling his attacks at Obama. For instance, the Maverick mocks Obama's visionary speeches as consisting of platitudes. Given what's already out there and what's coming in the months ahead, I certainly hope Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers is wrong when he says, "Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter." (A Clinton Surrogate, A Dem Divide? by Dominico Monenaro MSNBC 02/20/08) And if you think that was a rough line from Buffenbarger, you're probably better off avoiding all news of the Presidential election until mid-November 2008. Because we ain't seen nothin' yet.

And no one should kid themselves about the ugly racial politics that have already been percolating up from the Republican id. The invaluable Bob Somerby has been following how the Establishment media has been quick to conjure up racial politics out of any allusion to voter demographics by the Clinton campaign. Most national political reporters regard Clinton as the Wicked Witch, so those mostly fake accusations of "playing the race card" have been directed at her, while parallel observations by the Obama camp have not been so regarded.

But now that their Wicked Witch is looking vanquished, the "press corps" will quickly begin slotting Obama into their standard mold for Democratic Presidential candidates: a flip-flopper, weak on national defense, effeminate, unsure of his own identity, lacking a coherent message. While Maverick McCain's ditziest ramblings will be treated as evidence of his sterling principles.

One of the most idiotic comments I've ever heard from a Big Pundit came from Newsweek's Jon Meacham in his Meet the Press appearance of 01/20/08:

MS. NORRIS: I mean, they [the Republicans] actually will talk openly about bringing Barack Obama down a few notches because they want to run against Hillary.

MR. MEACHAM: Because it's a known known, to give Secretary - former Secretary Rumsfeld his due. Hillary Clinton, they know what to do. Barack Obama, how do you run against the first African American nominee? It explodes all conventional campaign dogma in ways that completely will surprise and pleasantly and unpleasantly perhaps as they go forward. And I that that that's the - one of the things that's so scary about Obama to Republicans is they don't how to run against him. (my emphasis)

As I said at the time, the national Republican Party has been campaigning against black people since 1964. That's how they made the states of the former Confederacy their main base, by attracting the segregationist vote to the Republican Party through their "Southern Strategy" which everyone knew they were persuing but they always officially denied having.

We're already seeing how the press and Republican partisans are working to keep the race issue in play. Currently, the press script for the issue is that the Wicked Witch Hillary Clinton has been using race to polarize white voters against Obama. But now that Clinton's prospects for the nomination are rapidly receding, before you know it we'll be hearing about the Obama campaign is cynically "playing the race card" and unfairly accusing St. McCain the great Maverick and his new, improved Republican Party of racism.

Here are a few samples of the current state of play of the race issue. Carolyn Lochhead, a faithful reporter of conventional press wisdom, recently wrote about how Obama's candidacy shakes up racial politics San Francisco Chronicle 02/17/08. These are paragraphs two through four:

It was former President Bill Clinton who called the racial divide "America's constant curse" in his second inaugural address 11 years ago.

But it was after Bill Clinton injected race into the South Carolina primary last month that African Americans, one of the Democratic Party's most important voting blocs, abandoned his wife's candidacy in droves.

Obama's novelty is not that he is the first black candidate for president, but the first black candidate who is not running as a black candidate. Obama has scrupulously avoided racial stereotyping, yet his race is an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match.

As Bob Somerby has been known to say, gaze on the empty soul of your press corps.

Yes, in the strange and alien world on which Carolyn Lochhead report as they practice their arcane version of journalism, it was vile, racist Bill Clinton who "injected race into the South Carolina primary". Now, here in the world most of us mere mortals inhabit, it was the mainstream press corps who applied some bizarre, mystical reading of various comments by the hated Clintons to declare they were "injecting race" into the Presidential contest. True, Bill Clinton's remark after the South Carlina primary comparing Obama's win there to Jesse Jackson's in a previous contest could be twisted with somewhat less difficulty into a remark "injecting race", though that was scarcely a legitimate interpretation.

But, according to Lochhead, Obama in his contest against the Wicked Witch has "scrupulously avoided racial stereotyping". But then she continues in the same sentence to say, "yet his race is an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match". After all the talk about the "Bradley effect" in which white voters are thought to be reluctant to admit to pollsters that they are voting against an African-American candidate, now it's obvious to Lochhead that being African-American is an advantage for Obama, "an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match".

Yes, that's how reality looks to our sad excuse for a press corps. When the vile, awful Clintons even mention something about Obama's appeal to black voters, that's obviously racist campaigning. Yet as the Obama's campaign against St. McCain is appearing as the most likely shape of the Presidential general election, it's obvious, people, that Obama race is a key part of his appeal! And, no, writing such wildly contradictory things in two successive paragraphs doesn't seem to bother this unique group of people who report on our political campaigns. And, yes, it's hard to see how democracy can survive a press corps this broken over the long run.

You get the drift of Lochhead's sad report. One last quote from it also illustrates the modus operandi of our press corps:

It seems odd that during a time of war and terrorism, a mortgage crisis, health care worries and a teetering economy, that race would assert itself. Last summer, the Democratic contest seemed destined to focus on Iraq. Instead, it has become a lesson in demography.

If a report was being written about Planet Earth, it would say instead that during a time of war and terrorism, etc., the political press corps and punditocracy would obsess about race in the way they have. But in the world of press conventional wisdom, race asserted itself. It wasn't inserted by a badly broken press corps, oh no.

Here's rightwing hack Jonah Goldberg's take on it from last week: Obama's rhetoric, American realities Los Angeles Times 02/12/08:

There's more than a little truth here. It seems that Barack Obama can win blacks and that he can win whites; where he has trouble, electorally speaking, is winning blacks and whites.

You wouldn't know this from all the resplendent rhetoric about Obama's gorgeous mosaic of a campaign. Indeed, the audacity of Obama's hype is a marvel to behold.

No, that doesn't really make sense as analysis of the real world. But, remember, today's Republicans regard Rush Limbaugh the OxyContin Man and Mad Annie Coulter as sensible political pundits.

What good Republicans white folks are likely to take from columns like this is something along the lines of, "I wouldn't vote against a candidate because he's black. But I'm also going to stand bravely against the pressure of Political Correctness that expects me to vote for Obama because he's black. And that's obviously how he's campaigning."

Jonah tells us that "let the record show, there is a powerful thirst for a post-racial America, not least among conservatives." (my emphasis) Do I see a column on the "liberal plantation" hatching in the man's narrow little mind? Check this out:

Perhaps rather than serving to heal America's racial wounds, maybe Obama's campaign is more like a dye marker that helps us better diagnose the complexity of the problem.

Obama has had his greatest success winning white votes in states that are nearly all white, particularly those with caucuses. In non-homogeneously white states, he's only won when he's added enormous shares of black votes to his prosperous white liberal base - as he did in South Carolina.

For quite a while, I've been talking about Republican "neosegregationism". But this stuff is so much like the "oldo" version, just plain old "segregationist" is probably more accurate. (Translation for polite Yankees who prefer to believe the best of Republican white folks: "whites who actually know what those people are like wouldn't vote for one of 'em.")

Then there's is the ultimate hack, Dear Leader Bush's favorite historian - who else - Victor Davis Hanson. He writes in The Candidate, Starring Barack Obama Tribune Media Services (dated 02/18/08 at VDH's home page, but was published as early as 02/14/08) that Obama is a big phony because he's only half black but he's pretending to be black because, you know, being black is such a big advantage for a Presidential candidate due to the Political Correctness pressure to vote for him. Pressure before which all good, brave, conservative non-conformists and individuals will refuse to bow, of course. Here's Vic:

Obama's father was from Kenya, and he grew up for a time in Indonesia. But, otherwise, Obama was raised by his white mother and grandparents in a middle-class suburb in Hawaii - a unique upbringing in the 1970s but hardly so in today's multiracial and itinerant America.

At private school, he was sometimes known as Barry. Perhaps had he taken the name of his maternal family who raised him - Dunham - a Sen. Barry Dunham of mixed ancestry from Illinois would now not be causing quite the same sensation.

Indeed, a Sen. Dunham may have been viewed as a minority candidate to the same limited degree that a similar staid-sounding Gov. Bill Richardson resonated as a Mexican American.

For those who aren't up on their oldie movies, The Candidate of Vic's title is a movie in which Robert Redford plays a Senate candidate who is a big old phony.

The fall campaign is taking shape.

Tags: barack obama, carolyn lochhead, jon meachem, jonah goldberg, race, victor davis hanson

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

Liberalism and German National Socialism

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