Liberals as Fascist? Bah, nonsense!

Recently I was told to read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism so that I would know the truth at last. Well, I’ve looked at it and at the National Review on line and seen the video of Goldberg speaking at the Heritage Foundation and I am convinced. The right wing is in panic mode.

Until recently Carl Rove was predicting a permanent Republican majority. But then George W. Bush happened and most of the people weren’t fooled most of the time anymore. Now Republicans have lost the House, the Senate, the White House and are within a confirmation of losing their majority on the Supreme Court. Republicans now hold only 22 governorships and in Rhode Island no Republican currently seems willing to run.

Rather than asking themselves what went wrong, the radical right now in control of the party that once boasted of Javits and Rockefeller and Eisenhower, Edward Brooke and the two Chafees, is constantly in attack mode. I’m reminded of French general Robert Nivelle before his disastrous assault on unassailable German lines in April 1917. When asked how he intended to break through, he responded with “Violence, brutality, rapidity” to which some had added stupidity. Attack is all they know. Goldberg’s nonsense is just another manifestation of the Nivelle mentality.

In a nutshell, Goldberg argues that as Hitler and Mussolini started out as Socialists, their fascism retained Socialist elements shared by modern Liberals. Nazis and Fascists had some progressive social ideas, it is true, but that is not what defined them. Liberalism comes from the Latin for free; it has a long tradition from at least the writings of John Locke and Roger Williams. Liberals believe that all men are created equal; conservatives of the south, at least, and Nazis and Fascists in Europe, disagree; they believe that there is a superior race; they take Darwin’s concepts and distort them to “prove” the superiority of our race (whoever “our” is) over all others. In America this was justification for segregation disguised as an appeal to states’ rights. In 1980 Ronald Reagan, the paragon of the American conservative movement opened his presidential candidacy by going to Mississippi, to the very neighborhood where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were brutally murdered because they were black and white trying to register black voters. He chose to announce there, there of all places, that “I believe in states’ rights ... I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.” And then later as president he went to Bitburg cemetery and paid homage to Nazi soldiers buried there. Liberals were outraged; nevertheless Reagan said of the German war dead, “They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps,” a visit to which he chose not to make.

Goldberg clouds his case with so many irrelevancies and unsubstantiated innuendos that I cannot cover them all in the 700 words allotted me. But race, race won’t go away. The Nazis were racists and so were the conservatives whose dogs attacked protesters in Mississippi and Alabama; when president Johnson signed the 1964 civil rights act he knew that we was signing away the south for generations, but he did it anyway and in 1968 Nixon’s Southern Strategy brought him to the White House as surely as the Willy Horton advertisement swept in the first president Bush in 1988.

Goldberg tries to separate conservatives from Nazis by suggesting that conservatives don’t send inferior races to their deaths. That’s true; so far. (See how innuendo works? Like that.)

They used to call Liberals commie pinkos; during the recent election they tried to make us congruent with terrorists; that didn’t work, so now they seek the roots of Liberalism in fascism. Hitler tried to end Christianity and substitute Teutonic gods, Goldberg informs. Do any of the Liberals you know worship Thor? But many of my liberal friends attend church or synagogue; Hitler was in favor of euthanasia. Are liberals? None that I know of. Who is against gay rights, Nazis, yes; conservatives, yes; liberals, no.

It’s not only the Nazis use the big lie technique.