alternative hippopotamus

Back when I was doing a comedy show I brought in a recurring character named Pavlov Chien. The basic idea was that he was a parody of a conservative. Partly his language was drawn from Orwell’s essay on political speech, partly from a composite sketch of those who profit from the suffering of others, and partly from Jonah Goldberg. As an example of the latter when Pavlov was confronted with his idiocy he would toss off an ad hominem like: “let me know when you’re through reading poetry to your bonsai plants and we can have a real conversation.”

I was reminded of this reading this bit in Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog. Here, he’s responding to a query from an academic:

Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you’re not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that’s not what you’re doing, then I suppose I don’t really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it’s not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn’t hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

I love this criticism!

Correcting arguably the biggest and most slanderous spin of the 20th century – that fascism and national socialism are somehow related to classical liberalism — strikes me as a pretty worthwhile subject for a book.

How is it that every allegedly racist sin committed by any Republican going back 50 years is relevant to today’s politics (so says Paul Krugman et al), but the eugenic and fascistic foundation of American progressivism – and hence American liberalism – amounts to intellectually unserious and uninteresting “trivia”?

Why is it relevant? One answer might be that because people such as yourself are constantly looking in the wrong direction for the fascist peril, you won’t spot it when it arrives.

Also, you are again condoning the slander of conservatives in this formulation because you have no condemnation for liberals who use the f-word against conservatives and, like so many other liberals, you only now suddenly think it’s unfair – and trivial!!! — when the arrow is more turned in your own (and more accurate) direction.

(Though I grant I’m using you as a stand-in for others, you may have spent your days in Beirut denouncing Namoi Wolf, Christopher Hedges and the legions of other liberals who have accused today’s conservatives of being Nazis and Fascists, including Ezra Klein just last week).

You assert that Fascism is synonymous with bigotry, murder and genocide and yet you don’t offer even the slightest concession that American conservatives aren’t fascists, you just suggest that connection of liberals with fascism is “trivial” so long as I’m not calling liberals Nazis.

Meanwhile, I don’t share your definition of Fascism and never would use it in that way against liberals. But, I’m the slanderer according to so many of my critics.

Your Jeffrey Dahmer metaphor is interesting. Dahmer was a damaged person. He was raised wrong. He learned the wrong lessons. And horrible things resulted. Well, lots of people are damaged, raised wrong and taught the wrong lessons but don’t turn out to be serial killers. They just lead sad lives in one way or another, often causing serious harms that admittedly don’t rise to the level of a cannibalistic serial killer. You suggest my book is pointless because so long as liberals aren’t like Nazis, there’s nothing worth saying about them with regard to progressivism’s “elective affinity,” (historian Peter Vogt’s words) for fascist methods and philosophy. Meanwhile, I’m saying that there are still plenty of bad things that don’t rise nearly to the level of Nazism’s badness which still warrant attention and concern. You and other critics claim that you believe Nazism was the maximum evil of the 20th century, but the argument you employ actually suggests it was more like a minimum. It’s like you’re saying, so long as damaged people don’t become flesh-eating serial killers, why get worked u? As long as the problems with liberalism don’t reach the level of Nazism or the Holocaust, well, then who cares?

I do, that’s who.

It may just be my overactive imagination, but reading the above I can picture Jonah starting to growl, then bark, then saliva dripping from his mouth he reaches the peak of his crescendo: It’s like you’re saying, so long as damaged people don’t become flesh-eating serial killers, why get worked u[p]? As long as the problems with liberalism don’t reach the level of Nazism or the Holocaust, well, then who cares?

It’s this sort of response that makes Goldberg the perfect living caricature of a conservative. A normal person, if asked what the point of writing a book called “Liberal Fascism” is, would say: To make a lot of money, stupid. Or: because it makes me mad when people call me a fascist. Or: I don’t like it when liberals pass laws against stuff that I like. That, and I suppose that at some point in their careers, all wingnuts have to make their bones by writing a screed against liberals.

To add to this, there’s the very funny habit Goldberg has of defining things in such a way that all debate is moot. If we define a fascist as someone who believes in regulation reducing pollution, limiting the use of hand guns, and favoring affirmative action for those classes that have historically been discriminated against, then yes, indeed liberals are fascists.

To be clear, I don’t believe that conservatives are fascists. Though, I do believe the tendency to authoritarianism is primarily a right-wing phenomenon. And, I do find it telling that Goldberg makes such an effort to ignore authoritarianism in this discussion.