Fascism: Italian German and American.

• Author: Horwitz, Steven

National Review contributing editor and Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning might appear at first glance to be another in a line of loud, mean, and often anti-intellectual books by prominent conservative commentators. Given that the book's subtitle links the Italian Fascists and the modern Democratic Party and that its cover shows a 1970s smiley face adorned with a Hitler moustache, perhaps that first reaction is understandable. However, not judging a book by its cover has never been an apter rule than in the case of Liberal Fascism. Although Goldberg does permit himself a few moments of over-the-top liberal bashing, his book is for the most part a work of serious scholarship that attempts to identify important intellectual connections between the American Progressives and European Fascists of the early twentieth century and a number of trends in modern U.S. politics, many but not all of which are associated with contemporary American liberalism.

For the most part, Goldberg succeeds in this endeavor, calling our attention to the ways in which the Progressives, the Fascists, and much of liberalism share a fundamental distrust of markets, unintended social order, and other core ideas of classical liberalism. Goldberg's strengths are his destruction of the argument that fascism is "right-wing" and the way he draws powerful parallels between the line from American Progressivism to the New Deal and the ideas behind European fascism. As he tries to extend these parallels to the American liberalism of the 1960s and beyond, the argument weakens and becomes somewhat shriller, but it still contains a number of provocative insights on the way in which many of the assumptions that lay behind earlier European fascism remain in play in contemporary U.S. politics. The afterword, "The Tempting of Conservatism," points to trends on the right that reflect those ideas as well.

The introductory chapter announces the book's the bedrock theme in its title, "Everything You Know about Fascism Is Wrong." Part of what drove Goldberg to write the book, as he has indicated in interviews, is the frustration that many on the right (as well as libertarians) feel when their opponents label them as "fascists" for supporting classical-liberal ideas, especially free markets. That frustration springs from two sources; first, that the Fascists' actual policies had little in common with classical liberalism (which was, in fact, the set of ideas they opposed), and second, that the actual Fascist policies were much closer to those now espoused by the leftists who frequently throw the epithet around--hence, the descriptive term liberal fascism. The rest of the book offers support for both of these points.

The term liberal fascism itself accounts in part for the book's having been made the target of so much venom from the left. As Goldberg notes, he did not invent this turn of phrase. Much earlier, H. G. Wells used it to describe a position he was advocating that progressives adopt: keep the Fascist movement's collectivist policies, but do so with kinder, gentler, more enlightened motives. The phrase secret history in Goldberg's subtitle reflects his claim that the connections among fascism, progressivism, and modern liberalism have been lost, especially...