Me on Tyler and Dave on Jonah

I haven’t read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism so I won’t presume to review it, but I have read Tyler Cowen’s helpful commentary so I do feel entitled to review that. AAT, Tyler says some of Jonah’s points are:

The oft neglected but obviously true: For instance Mussolini really was a precursor of the New Deal and he was initially regarded with fondness by many on the American left. This sort of claim is the core of the book and it does stand up after you take all the criticisms into account. I am pleased to see it upend traditional "feel good" narratives of politics.

My first thought was—wait a minute, whoa, I learned that at night school in 1960. Who says it is “oft neglected”? What “feel good” narrative?

But then I reflected—the same mail cycle brought a missive from my friend Dave in which he said (growled):

Fascism essentially means direction of government to suit independent private profit-directed corporate entities (that is, not under government management though possibly given government direction) and in return the corporate entities allied with the 'national enterprise'. When Government exists primarily for Business and Business for Government, that is fascistic, even if not with all the militarized panoply of traditional fascism.

Well, I guess this is a fairly standard stuff, but for my money, insufficiently nuanced. I lobbed the ball back at Dave with a quote from Robert Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with trditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraint goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

—Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism 218 (2004)

And David fired back:

Are we sure only one guy wrote that? It has the look of a committee job.

Ha! He may not be so far wrong. The Paxton book is, I take it, the summum bonum of 30-odd years in the university seminar room, so inevitably it lacks the fervor of the sloganeer.

But maybe that is one more problem with fascism: it is slippery stuff and is too easy coarsened and vulgarized—as if it weren’t coarsened and vulgarized to begin with.

Oh, and thanks to Tyler for linking to this one, which I just added to my Amazon wish list.

Parting Shot: but at the moment, I’d still say that know-nothing populism is still more a feature of the right than of the left.