(Further trace elements are located by Goldberg in the ideas of, among others, Hegel, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Georges Sorel.) Coming closer to our time, he reminds us that Benito Mussolini, who formed Italy’s fascist party, first won his title of Il Duce as the leader of Italian socialism, and even after switching allegiances did not become an economic conservative. He traces its origins ultimately to the French Revolution, and to the revolutionaries’ marriage of Rousseau’s concept of the general will and Robespierre’s terror. Take, to begin with, Goldberg’s insistence that fascism is in essence a movement of the Left. If nothing else, it forces one to think about both liberalism and fascism in unaccustomed, provocative, and sometimes illuminating ways. Of course, even as modified, Goldberg’s thesis will strike most liberals as preposterous and oxymoronic, and even non-liberals may find it profoundly counterintuitive.

“Milder, more friendly, more ‘maternal’” than its Nazi or Italian predecessors, liberal fascism is less likely to grind people under an iron heel than to want to smother them in a nanny-state embrace. This is not to say that Goldberg believes liberals have an affinity for storm troopers, lebensraum nationalism, or murderous anti-Semitism.

It is modern American liberalism, he argues, both in its early-20th-century origins and in its subsequent manifestations, that actually betrays close family resemblances to European fascism. In this book he not only repudiates its identification with conservatism but, as his title indicates, enthusiastically turns the accusation back on those who make it. As long ago as 1946, George Orwell concluded that the epithet was an item of political juvenilia, with no substantive reference beyond “something not desirable.”īut to the columnist Jonah Goldberg, a contributing editor of National Review, the term deserves to be taken very seriously indeed. The insult is at once so over the top and yet so devoid of meaning that most of its targets tend to shrug it off as unworthy of notice. People on the Left who have not yet been rhetorically housebroken, or who have simply forgotten their manners, have a habit of referring to conservatives as fascists. The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg