Prometheus 6

First of all, I think we should mount a letter writing campaign to implore Comedy Central to post the whole 18 minutes of the interview with Goldberg on their site. Embed two commercial breaks if you want, I don't care.

Second, I found a friendly review of his book, "Liberal Fascism," through the efforts of OurFuture.org which is amazing. Remember, this is a friendly review.

Fascism, Liberal and Otherwise

Jonah Goldberg, my buddy and boss at NRO, has written a fun book called "Liberal Fascism"...

Despite the provocative title, he’s not saying that liberalism is the same as fascism, or that fascists were really liberals, or any such thing. [P6: See the Daily Show clip above]...

Some of his fans have praised Jonah for writing a work of history, but it isn’t, really. [P6: Of course not...if it were he couldn't say things like 'fascism really has a left-wing genetic code, and therefore it’s wrong to “blame” fascism on the right']...

On this central claim, Jonah is at least half right. [P6:...which means he's wrong]...

It doesn’t seem that Jonah is aware of this literature. But he’s got the concept right. Up to a certain point. [P6:...which means he's wrong]...

While certain French revolutionary ideas played into the creation of the fascist movement, and while Mussolini started life as a Socialist, and while various radical anarcho-syndicalists supported Mussolini from the very beginning (and some remained to the end), it is still a real stretch to say that fascism was somehow leftist. [P6:...which means he's wrong]...

So yes, there were fascists with leftist tendencies, but they were alienated from the regime, embittered by its reactionary nature, and eventually went elsewhere. If anything, their stories show how little ‘leftism’ survived the twenty years of fascist rule. [P6: Sounds like a Republican fantasy]...

...here’s where Jonah’s eccentric thesis, for all its provocative value, leaves history behind and strides into…vision, I suppose. [P6: Ooooh! Dis! Well, for a friend.]

Predictably, he has to downplay Hitler’s ideology. He calls Hitler a “pragmatist,” and then adds “saying that Hitler had a pragmatic view of ideology is not to say that he didn’t use ideology. Hitler had many ideologies. Indeed he was an ideology peddler.”

Whew! So much for the view—the fact—that Hitler was driven, from an early age, by an antisemitism so virulent that he would not rest until he had set in motion the Holocaust. Indeed, in one of “Liberal Fascism“‘s most unfortunate phrases, Jonah trivializes Nazi racism, equating it with some American political rhetoric:

“What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics.” And in case you thought he was kidding, he repeats it a few pages later: “What mattered to (Hitler) was German identity politics.”