May 2009: Liberal Fascism

Jonah Goldberg is an American journalist. In 2007 he published the provocatively titled Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Needless to stay, it caused a stir among the political class across the Atlantic. It has recently been published in the UK. Given that we are less involved in battles over what "left" and "right" now signify the book is unlikely to generate the same level of debate here, but will no doubt ruffle quite a few complacent feathers.

Liberal Fascism aims to draw the attention of contemporary liberals to the fascistic origins of much of their thought, beginning with a fascinating chapter on Mussonlini, the comitted socialist who was feted throughout the world before he become a hate figure and a representative of all that is odious in right-wing politics.

Goldberg is good on how the words "fascist" and "fascism" have become convenient and meaningless insults, as hollowed out of content now as they were in 1947 when George Orwell first made the point. If the author strays frustratingly close to the incestuous culture wars terrority that is modern American politics, he is, nevertheless, insightful and wonderfully irreverent. His ideas demand dialogue.

Liberal Fascism is our Blog of the Month for May. It's a forum and a space for letting off steam. Readers can engage directly with the author, and, given the subject matter, often do so vociferously. Goldberg is a classical liberal, who warns of the dangers of falling for the kind of progressive Utopian social projects that bedeviled the twentieth century. His central contentious point is that the totalitarian impulse is an impulse of the left, and his tracing of its development from the French Revolution through to today's anti-smoking lobbyists, is powerful and compelling.  

Goldberg should not be dismissed as a reactionary. We are in a mess of meaning and the kind of clarity on display here is needed to help relocate ourselves. Like John Carey in 1992's The Intellectuals and the Masses, Goldberg's achievement is to remind people of how the pre-Second World War intellectual elite, the likes of H.G. Wells, Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence, were very much taken with the kind of extreme ideas that were so horribly put into practice by the great tyrannies of the century, whether they be tyrannies of the left or of the right. Golderberg does not believe in the brave new world, and sees the idea that human life is perfectible for the insidious, quasi-religious cant that it is.