The Political Phenomenon that Dare not Speak its Name
Jonah Goldberg has taken to reviewing every review of his book that doesn't agree with his book on a blog devoted to his book. Fair enough. If I had written a tome with a weak premise ripe for criticism I'd feel obliged to defend it with all my might too. But this latest one from the American Conservative (a paleo-con rag) seems to have really confused poor Goldberg. Let me quote the excerpt that Goldberg uses:
Progressivism, for example, did not in any meaningful sense lead to liberalism. On the contrary, in 1922, Walter Lippmann, the leading liberal intellectual of the 1920s, wrote Public Opinion, one of the most trenchant critiques of populism and democracy (and, with it, progressivism) ever penned. Lippmann went on to become Mussolini's most unsparing American critic, precisely because Lippmann saw in fascism the same dangers that he saw in progressivism. If we must describe intellectual history in biological terms, then it would be more accurate to say that liberalism drove progressivism into extinction than that progressivism gave birth to liberalism.
To this Goldberg responds, "I'm not entirely sure what point Bramwell thinks he's making here" before going on to deflate the myth of Lippmann being some sort of paragon of political consistency. The point isn't whether Lippmann was consistently correct, the point is whether he was correct on this one point, to which the answer is, I believe, yes. That's a debate we could have, but Goldberg doesn't. He just plays dumb and moves on. Lippmann, he claims, explicitly desired a dictatorship in America and even counseled FDR to that effect. This is the heart of Goldberg's evidence, apparently, but what's strange is his summary of it:
It seems to me that when a liberal counsels a president to become a dictator it's not crazy to suggest that he's flirting with something that might even be called "liberal fascism."
Why does Goldberg put his argument in quotes, as if to say liberal fascism is some sort of pseudo phenomenon, not real, and certainly not something to be taken seriously? And indeed, this was one of the fatal flaws I earlier identified about the book: it doesn't argue strongly in favor of its thesis. If Goldberg himself is putting the term he chose (and borrowed from H.G. Wells, as he never hesitates to point out) in quotes, doesn't that weaken the strength of the term itself? Attributing it to Wells only exacerbates the problem. It's as if he's saying, "there's this thing called liberal fascism, which the brilliant English-language writer Wells described, which I am appropriating to A) add intellectual gravitas to my weak thesis and B) pass the ball to in case of pointed criticism." Putting "liberal fascism" in quotes is one of the most telling instances of denial I've encountered since this whole fracas began.