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Last update - 17:14 21/05/2008 A thin line between left and right By Rinat Harash Tags: fascism, Jonah Goldberg  Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg, Doubleday, 487 pages, $27.95 " Advertisement The world we live in is the words we use," said the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to the worldview on display in "Liberal Fascism," that's an understatement. In this ambitious analysis of modern political history, the conservative American journalist Jonah Goldberg tries not only to define words like "fascism" (a concept many academics still argue about), but also to convince us that it's quite similar to what we today call "liberalism." The discussion seems to have personal implications for Goldberg, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times and contributing editor to the right-wing National Review. "Ever since I joined the public conversation as a conservative writer," he complains, "I've been called a fascist and a Nazi by smug, liberal know-nothings, sublimely confident of the truth of their ill-informed prejudices. "What I'm mainly trying to do," he continues, "is to dismantle the granitelike assumption in our political culture that American conservatism is an offshoot or cousin of fascism." So Goldberg wants to set the historical record straight. So far so good. But what exactly is the meaning of such loaded words as "fascism," "right wing" or "left wing"? Goldberg rightly acknowledges that defining such concepts is a hard and imprecise business. Although he succeeds in explaining that right-wingers are traditionally pro-status-quo and those on the left are pro-change, his working definition of fascism, on which his whole thesis is based, is achingly inadequate. Fascism, he tells us, is "a religion of the state. It is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state." That includes "nationalistic appeals to unity, the celebration of martial values, the blurring of lines between public and private sectors ... and a cult of personality for the national leader." The problem is that this is a definition of what fascism advocates, but it leaves out what it is against -- the basic values of democracy. It's also a very wide and superficial definition that refers only to certain common manifestations of fascism. Keeping this definition in mind, Goldberg's claim is nothing new to the average student of 20th-century history: Fascism, like nationalism, was indeed originally a phenomenon of the liberal left, But Goldberg goes further than that. He actually asserts that the first appearance of "modern totalitarianism" in the Western world was in neither Italy nor Germany, but rather the United States, and that it was left-wing in origin. How did that happen? Goldberg asserts that, in the wake of the horrors of World War II, liberals have tried to distance themselves from their uncomfortable links with fascist ideology by calling their opponents "fascists" -- a word they employ when they want to characterize their enemies as embodying everything that is evil, racist and morally wrong, not to mention right-wing. Ever since the 1930s, Communists helped promote that semantic distortion by explaining the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany not as a failure of Marxism, but as a capitalist, conservative conspiracy that created "false consciousness" among the masses. Therefore, Goldberg notes, "the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand. In fact, conservatives are the more authentic classical liberals, while many so-called liberals are 'friendly' fascists." It should be noted here that Goldberg rightly describes classical liberalism, of which he is an advocate, as "political and economic liberty ... maximum individual freedom under the benign protection of a minimalist state." The cult of personality As opposed to that, says Goldberg, liberalism in its transformed sense "no longer meant freedom from tyranny, but freedom from want, freedom to be a 'constructive citizen,' the Rousseauian and Hegelian 'freedom' of living in accordance with the state and the general will." In order to prove this argument, Goldberg draws uncomfortable parallels between American and modern European history. He starts with Mussolini, who was the leader of the Italian Communist party before he became Il Duce, and labels him "Father of Fascism." Next to undergo Goldberg's examination is Hitler, whom he describes as a "man of the left." Then come presidents Woodrow Wilson, tagged "the 20th century's first fascist dictator" (because of his so-called tyrannical policy during World War I) and FDR, who created "the Fascist New Deal." The sixties aren't left out either: Nominally revolutionary organizations like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were in fact promoting "common crime" rather than political rebellion (One wonders whether that makes them fascist), and JFK advanced a fascist-like "cult of personality." Goldberg sees a similar pattern among some of Kennedy's Democratic successors, in Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" vision, for one, and in Hillary Clinton's supposed desire to insert the state deep into family life, along with her romanticist longing for "meaning" in politics. The common denominator of all these people, according to Goldberg, is their desire to empower and glorify the state in all areas of life -- a desire that is hazardous, in his view as a classical liberal, to individual liberties. But Goldberg's examples are almost absurd: Organizations like the Civilian Conservation Corps -- one of the most popular programs of FDR's New Deal, which drafted unemployed people to plant trees -- was, according to Goldberg, paramilitary training that symbolized the cult of war in American life. He even sees the environmental activism and organic food cult of today as reminiscent of the Nazi obsession with health. Organic does not a fascist make It's understandable, then, why somewhere around the book's halfway point, the reader may be irritated enough to want to toss the book out the window. "Get real!" you want to shout at Goldberg: None of these American politicians was a totalitarian dictator, none of them presided over, or promoted, a one-party system. The Civilian Conservation Corps was not the SS, and eating organic does not make one a raving fascist, even if there are some similarities between today's environmentalism and Germanic Romanticism. It all eventually comes down to definitions. Goldberg's superficial definition of fascism, as detailed above, enables him to throw Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and liberal America all into the same political basket. But when you do this, Nazi racism, which led to the Holocaust, is trivialized. Furthermore, nowhere in the book does Goldberg define fascism as anti-liberal, anti-individual, anti-democratic or anti-rational. But in its essence, fascism was a radical rebellion against the enlightenment values of rationalism and individualism. It negated the main political theories born out of these values -- liberalism and Marxism, both of which put the individual ahead of society. Thus, fascism expresses a negation of the very essence of the democratic political process, and offers a collective-national alternative to it. So, Goldberg may be right in labeling fascism "a religion of the state," but when he says that fascism was implemented in America, he's suggesting that it happened where it's constitutionally impossible. He looks only at the micro level -- at the so-called fascistic behavior of some American leaders, as he sees it, but forgets that on the macro level, the American democratic political structure, with its checks and balances, always restricts them. And it's not just the formal structure of American government that blocks fascism; as Alexis De Tocqueville brilliantly noted, individualism in America is inherent and resilient. During more than 200 years, it may have been at risk but still survived. Goldberg partly admits all of this, contradicting his own thesis, when he keeps apologizing and restricting his assertions: "Modern liberals are not cartoonish Nazi villains. They're campus student-life directors and diversity managers ... Liberal Fascists don't want to mimic generic fascist or communists, but they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision." It seems like the liberals Goldberg is thinking of are more to liable to be do-good naifs than fascists. Calling them "soft fascists" (as he does) is misleading: It makes one believe they're spending most of their time secretly plotting a coup d'etat. And when Goldberg asserts that "We do live in an 'unconscious civilization' of fascism, albeit of a friendly sort," he sounds almost exactly like a Marxist complaining about the "false consciousness" of the masses -- the very thing he himself criticized as distorting the real understanding of fascism. One must admit that Goldberg's important book is full of intelligent insights and analyses, such as the transformation of the meaning of "fascism" and his fascinating description of 20th century historical events and figures. He does a very good job reminding us that the far left and the far right are actually very close to one another on the political spectrum. He even succeeds where so many had failed before -- presenting history not with biased hindsight, but with the understanding of how people envisioned fascist ideas at the time. "Liberal Fascism," however, should be read with caution. It's more a political project than a work of historical research or political theory. Its main strength is not its academic accuracy, but its educational value, as Goldberg himself states: "I have not written a book about how all liberals are Nazis or Fascists. Rather, I have tried to write a book warning that even the best of us are susceptible to the totalitarian temptation." In that sense, Goldberg undoubtedly achieves his goal. Rinat Harash is an editor at Haaretz Hebrew edition, and a master's student in the political science department of Tel Aviv University. 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