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.

Roosevelt's Gimpy Legs

Matthew Yglesias is raggin’ on Jonah Goldberg about pictures of FDR and his bum legs. Jonah says (link):

There were more than 35,000 pictures of FDR taken. Two show him in a wheelchair. Why? Because the press almost unanimously agreed that — despite the huge news value — depicting FDR as a cripple would be bad for the war effort. The few dissenting photographers from that consensus were routinely blocked or deliberately jostled by the senior photographers so as to shield FDR from embarrassment and the public from its "right to know."

Matt says (link):

Okay, this is a subject I know virtually nothing about. I do, however, know that FDR became president in 1933 after winning the 1932 election. The war in Europe didn't begin until 1939, and the United States didn't enter the war until 1941. Under the circumstances, that "depicting FDR as a cripple would be bad for the war effort" can't be the primary reason nobody ever did it.

Since I am older than Matt and Jonah cumulatively, I feel entitled to play the age card here again. I’ll stipulate that 1939>1932, but I think Matt may miss the point. I’m pretty sure I learned about Roosevelt’s gimpy legs while I was at Camp Mi-Te-Na on Half Moon Lake in Alton, NH. That would have been about 1944—i.e., smack in the middle of the war. I was told that they would hide his wheelchair behind the podium and that two of his sons would lift him up so that he would appear to be standing, and that at the end of his talk he would collapse back into his chair again. I was told that this was important because we didn’t want folks to know that he was a cripple during a war (how much of a secret it could have been if it was gossip among eight-year-olds—that is a matter for another day).

Anyway, it seems perfectly consistent to say that people thought it would be “bad for the war effort” during the war, even if it might have been “bad for some other reason” before the war started.

A propos of not much, there is a great picture of Mussolini at the podium —I guess I saw it in the Dennis Mack Smith biography—taken from behind, so you can see that he is standing on a milk crate. Little squirt.

Fn.: Hey, it’s still there! And they have an alumni weekend (link)!