"We're all fascists now"

An interview with conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg, who argues that fascism is left-wing, not right-wing, and that contemporary liberals are fascism's intellectual offspring.

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, Adolf Hitler, Conservatives, Liberals, News, Nazis, Fascism, Alex Koppelman

Jan. 11, 2008 | Jonah Goldberg is not a popular man among liberals. The son of Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent who played a pivotal role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he already had that as a strike against him when he began his career as a conservative political commentator in the late 1990s. A writer and blogger for the National Review and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, he's now a frequent target for the mockery of liberal bloggers.

But nothing has inspired the ire of liberals quite like Goldberg's new book, "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." There was the provocative cover, which adds a Hitler mustache to the familiar yellow smiley-face icon. Then there was the book's ever-changing subtitle. Originally "The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton," it became "The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods," before landing on bookstore shelves in its current form.

In the book, Goldberg attempts to convince readers that six decades of conventional wisdom that have placed Italy's Benito Mussolini, Germany's Adolf Hitler and fascism on the right side of the ideological spectrum are wrong, and that fascism is really a phenomenon of the left. Goldberg also attributes fascist rhetoric and tactics to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and describes the New Deal's descendants, modern American liberals, as carriers of this liberal-fascist DNA. In a sense, "We're All Fascists Now," as Goldberg puts it in one of his chapter titles. Salon spoke with Goldberg by phone.

What's the book about?

It's a revisionist history. It's an attempt to reconfigure, or I would say correct, the standard understanding of the political and ideological context that frames most of the ideological debates that we have had since, basically, World War II. There's this idea that the further right you go the closer you get to Nazism and fascism, and the further left you go the closer you get to decency and all good things, or at least having the right intentions in your heart.

For 60 years most historians have been putting fascism on the right, or conservative, side of the political spectrum. What are you able to see that they weren't?

There are a lot of historians who get fascism basically right. There are a lot of historians who don't. I think the Marxists have been part and parcel of a basic propaganda campaign for a very long time, but there are plenty of historians who understand what fascism was and are actually quite honest about it.

To sort of start the story, the reason why we see fascism as a thing of the right is because fascism was originally a form of right-wing socialism. Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist, he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I.

Originally being a fascist meant you were a right-wing socialist, and the problem is that we've incorporated these European understandings of things and then just dropped the socialist. In the American context fascists get called right-wingers even though there is almost no prominent fascist leader -- starting with Mussolini and Hitler -- who if you actually went about and looked at their economic programs, or to a certain extent their social program, where you wouldn't locate most if not all of those ideas on the ideological left in the American context.

You write about how historians have had difficulty defining fascism. How did you come up with the definition of fascism that you use in the book?

Well, yeah, it's very hard to come up with a definition of fascism. And one of the things that I've found that was kind of amazing in this process, especially since the book has come out, is how people can't let go of fascism as a morally loaded term for evil. [George] Orwell says fascism has come to mean anything not desirable as early as 1946, and it is amazing how it is so ingrained in our political psychology to see "fascist" basically just as a code word for "evil."

So anyway, I'm sorry -- my definition of fascism I get in large chunks from Eric Voegelin, the political philosopher. He wrote this book "The Political Religions," and I see fascism as a political religion. That doesn't mean I think there's some book, like a bible, that if you read it you will become a convert to this political religion. Rather I think it is a religious impulse that resides in all of us -- left, right, black, white, tall, short -- to seek unity in all things, to believe that we need to all work together to go past any of our disagreements and that the state needs to be, almost simply as a pragmatic matter, the pace-setter, the enforcer of this cult of unity. That is what I believe fascism is.

Related to your definition, at least as I read the book, was something that's been controversial about it. Especially because of one of the earlier iterations of the subtitle, ["Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods"] there's a perception that your argument comes down to things like both Nazis and liberals being proponents of organic food. Is that how it works? Because the Nazis liked dogs and I like dogs, I'm a Nazi?

No, no. I mean, I try to reject that kind of thing ... I don't believe that liberals are Nazis; I believe that if Nazism came to the United States it is entirely possible that liberals would be at the forefront of the battle to stop it. So would conservatives. I'm not trying to do any argument ad Hitlerum in this book.

But what I am trying to do, at least in the chapter that you're talking about, is show how -- [take] Robert Proctor, who wrote an award-winning, widely esteemed book called "The Nazi War on Cancer." He points out that this organic food movement, the whole-grain bread operation, the war on cancer, the war on smoking, that these things were as fascist as death camps and yellow stars. They were as central to the ideology of Nazism as the extermination of the Jews. Now, that is not the same thing. And I want to be really clear about this: That is not the same thing as saying that banning smoking is as morally disgusting and reprehensible as trying to wipe out the Jewish people. You can say that something is as much part and parcel of an ideology and not say that it is as evil.

Similarly, in terms of this organic stuff, I think it's important to understand that Mussolini is the guy who coins the word "totalitarian." "Totalitarian" has come to mean this Orwellian oppression, this political evil. Orwell uses the image of stomping on a human face forever. That is not what Mussolini meant by it. I'm not a big fan of Mussolini's, but he meant a society where everyone belongs, everyone counts, everyone is included. The most famous definition of fascism that he offers is, "Everything in the state, nothing outside the state." ... Today we don't use the word "totalitarian," because the connotations have been so hardened in our minds. But we use these other words like "holistic" all the time. This quest for wholism, this idea that everything goes together, that we are all part of a single political, social organism ... was deeply and profoundly central to the intellectual movements and eddies that fed into Nazism.

Next page: "I think we need to remember that something can be fascistic ... and not be evil"