Hahahaha Goldberg?
Jonah Goldberg tells us he wrote this book to get even. The liberals started it by “insist[ing] that conservatism has connections with fascism” (p. 22). Conservatives “sit dumbfounded by the nastiness of the slander” (p. 1). “The left wields the term fascism like a cudgel” (p. 3). So Jonah Goldberg has decided it is time to turn the tables and show that “the liberal closet has its own skeletons” (p. 22). After years of being “called a fascist and a Nazi by smug, liberal know-nothings” he decides that “responding to this slander is a point of personal privilege” (p. 392).
Feeling oneself a victim is wonderfully liberating. Anything goes. So Jonah Goldberg pulls out all the stops to show that fascism “is not a phenomenon of the right at all. It is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left” (p. 7). The reader perceives at once that Goldberg likes to put things into rigid boxes: right and left, conservative and liberal, fascist and non-fascist. He doesn’t leave room for such complexities as convergences, middle grounds, or evolution over time. Thus Father Coughlin was always a man of the left, and so was Mussolini (Giacomo Matteotti or the Rosselli brothers, leaders of the Italian left whom Mussolini had assassinated, would have been scandalized by this view). The very mention of a “Third Way” puts one instantly into the fascist box.
Jonah Goldberg tells us he wrote this book to get even. The liberals started it by “insist[ing] that conservatism has connections with fascism” (p. 22). Conservatives “sit dumbfounded by the nastiness of the slander” (p. 1). “The left wields the term fascism like a cudgel” (p. 3). So...
historynewsnetwork.org
