Michael Tomasky: What to make of Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism"?
Re: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning By Jonah Goldberg
In graduate school I had a professor, a famous Marxist, who devoted a significant portion of a lecture to the subject of artifacts. He was, of course, a historical materialist, and so he was trying to get us--his jejune and perhaps incurably indoctrinated charges who took capitalist existence at face value--to understand that ordinary things, everyday objects, were actually particular products in the great chain of production of a society, and signified something about the organization and the needs of that society. I suppose he might as well have invoked ball bearings or pulleys, but he used the example of locks: he asked us to imagine our civilization in ashes, and its ruins being combed over by white-coated researchers, like something out of a Twilight Zone episode. What would our vast assortment, our infinite variety, of locks tell them about what our society was like?
I kept thinking about my old professor as I battled my way through Jonah Goldberg's book. Suppose those researchers came upon not a consignment of padlocks, but a few copies of Liberal Fascism. Suppose also that they were to discover, tucked inside, a New York Times best-seller list from, say, February 3, 2008, which showed that enough Americans had purchased this work to propel it to number three on that list. What conclusions would they draw about a society in which such a work was not only published by a respectable publishing house, but also flew off the shelves into the devouring hands of a polemic-starved public?
Goldberg no doubt believes that he has written something that will provoke, traduce, and infuriate liberals everywhere. (For all his supposed fearlessness, though, he pulled one haymaker of a punch: the original subtitle of the book was The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. I'm mildly curious about the logic by which a writer who insists that Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were fascists thought that the original subtitle violated some canon of judgment or taste.) For about fifty or sixty pages, I confess, I took the bait, and did my best to work myself into a lather. By page 200--there are 405 pages of actual text--offense was beside the point, and I was mentally imploring the author to get it over with. By page 300, I was bored out of my skull. And by the time I made it to the final pages, I was wishing that I had been invited instead to review a multi-volume history of farm subsidies.
Read entire article at New Republic
In graduate school I had a professor, a famous Marxist, who devoted a significant portion of a lecture to the subject of artifacts. He was, of course, a historical materialist, and so he was trying to get us--his jejune and perhaps incurably indoctrinated charges who took capitalist existence at face value--to understand that ordinary things, everyday objects, were actually particular products in the great chain of production of a society, and signified something about the organization and the needs of that society. I suppose he might as well have invoked ball bearings or pulleys, but he used the example of locks: he asked us to imagine our civilization in ashes, and its ruins being combed over by white-coated researchers, like something out of a Twilight Zone episode. What would our vast assortment, our infinite variety, of locks tell them about what our society was like?
I kept thinking about my old professor as I battled my way through Jonah Goldberg's book. Suppose those researchers came upon not a consignment of padlocks, but a few copies of Liberal Fascism. Suppose also that they were to discover, tucked inside, a New York Times best-seller list from, say, February 3, 2008, which showed that enough Americans had purchased this work to propel it to number three on that list. What conclusions would they draw about a society in which such a work was not only published by a respectable publishing house, but also flew off the shelves into the devouring hands of a polemic-starved public?
Goldberg no doubt believes that he has written something that will provoke, traduce, and infuriate liberals everywhere. (For all his supposed fearlessness, though, he pulled one haymaker of a punch: the original subtitle of the book was The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. I'm mildly curious about the logic by which a writer who insists that Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were fascists thought that the original subtitle violated some canon of judgment or taste.) For about fifty or sixty pages, I confess, I took the bait, and did my best to work myself into a lather. By page 200--there are 405 pages of actual text--offense was beside the point, and I was mentally imploring the author to get it over with. By page 300, I was bored out of my skull. And by the time I made it to the final pages, I was wishing that I had been invited instead to review a multi-volume history of farm subsidies.