Happy New Year to All My Liberal Fascist Friends

Jonah Goldberg’s exercise in liberal-bashing isn’t out until early January, which means I haven’t read it, but the basic argument of Liberal Fascism is that Nazism really had quite a bit in common with the American left. The Amazon page includes this line: “Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term ‘National socialism’).”

Ah yes. Did you know that? Goldberg already has some useful idiot fans who declare his new book eye-opening and even life-changing, as if it had never occurred to them that Nazis were also ardent liars. So, a little history: The 1920s and ’30s, when Hitler rose to power, were mainstream days in the sun for an international movement known as “socialism.” Calling yourself “socialist” — even when you were a fascist — was the way to win votes. Germans were starving in a depression after 1929; they wanted a strongman; yet the notes on the Amazon page lapse into a tone of mild surprise that Nazis “believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs” and “inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life.” People, they were FASCISTS. For some reason the American right has trouble remembering what that means.

The early Nazi party in the ’20s did have socialist tendencies, because it was a grassroots workers’ party. But William Shirer pointed out in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that Nazism changed direction under Hitler and abandoned its early ideas in exchange for cash:

The party had to play both sides of the tracks. It had to allow Strasser, Goebbels, and the crank Feder to beguile the masses with the cry that the National Socialists were truly socialists and against the money barons. On the other hand, money to keep the party going had to be wheedled out of those who had an ample supply of it.

Goldberg’s premise, on its face, is so nursery-school stupid that it should end his career, if America has any instinct left for liberty. The Nazis were a gang of socialists like Germany’s current Nazi party — the National Democrats — are a gang of suffragettes. Has something gone wrong with Goldberg’s judgment, I wonder? Or can we expect a book from him based on the NPD’s own propaganda that argues German neo-Nazis will guarantee the Jewish vote if they ever win power in Berlin?

Sinclair Lewis predicted that “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross,” and in early 2008 I suspect we can add that it will be abetted by a slick runnel of horseshit like the revisionism in Goldberg’s book.

UPDATE: An article called Who Goes Nazi? from Harper’s in 1941 suggests that times haven’t really changed.

     posted 30 December 2007 by Michael Scott Moore