I’ll have more comments next week when the book page is up. But, since I’ve pointed to the nice things said about the book, I should point to the less than nice things, when they are offered in a spirit of intellectual seriousness and honesty. Fred Siegel, for whom I have considerable regard, doesn’t like my book. That’s fine. His arguments are better than David Oshinsky’s and for that I’m grateful. The core of Siegel’s argument is here:
There is some truth to Mr. Goldberg’s comparisons, but it is limited. By cherry-picking liberal transgressions — or noting continuities between unappealing statist regimes and Progressive agendas — he demonizes American liberalism unfairly and ignores a counter-history. The social safety-net reforms of David Lloyd George, during the Liberal Party governments in Britain from 1906 to 1914, mattered more to American Progressives and New Dealers, as a model, than Bismarck ever did. But Lloyd George goes unmentioned in “Liberal Fascism,” as does a key political moment.
The term “liberal” came into common use following World War I, in reaction to the postwar Red Scare and to Wilson’s wartime conscription and autocratic measures (e.g., jailing people for their antiwar sentiments). In his seminal book, “Liberalism in America” (1919), Harold Stearns defined the new liberal creed by its “hatred of compulsion,” its “tolerance” and its “respect for the individual.” It was from this anti-Progressive strain of liberalism that we get both the modern First Amendment, rightly beloved by liberals and conservatives alike, and (perhaps to Mr. Goldberg’s chagrin) the American Civil Liberties Union.
In short, liberalism in America is an unstable mix of statist and libertarian tendencies. But Mr. Goldberg is eager to see everything in a simplifying, Manichean way: All that is not libertarian is at least proleptically fascist. Sizable government, even in moderate forms, is always about to roll down a slippery slope or take the road to serfdom. Thus he sees in Hillary Clinton’s misguided efforts to give children rights against their parents a modern form of “fascism.” But where Mr. Goldberg sees fascism liberals saw an attempt to use the state to protect vulnerable individuals — in this case, children — from the egregious neglect of their underclass parents.
Again, I have a lot of disagreements here, but these are at least thoughtful things to disagree with. A few quick ones off the top of my head. I’m quite familiar with Stearns and Liberalism in America. I think it buttresses my point about the intellectual amnesia of liberals that probably not one in a thousand well-educated liberals are familiar with either (indeed, search Nexis for Harold Stearns and “Liberalism in America” and you will get exactly zero results for as far back as Nexis goes). Stearns’ influence, in other words, can be easily overstated (particularly since he split the United States to live in Paris shortly after the war). More important, almost all of the liberals who formed the top-tier of the New Deal were, in effect, liberals in name only. They abandoned the word “progressive” not because they ceased being progressives but because America stopped liking progressives. Siegel doesn’t even attempt to rebut the pages upon pages of hardcore compulsion these progressives utilized in the New Deal long after this supposed rejection of Wilsonian compulsion took place. The New Dealers threw small businessmen in jail and forcibly yanked newsboys from the streets if they didn’t work for big companies. These were not Stearnsian liberals and saying otherwise doesn’t make it so.
That said, I certainly agree there is an “anti-compulsion” streak in liberalism, but as I try to show, there’s also a compulsion streak in liberalism and that’s a big part of the story that needed to be told. And, even the anti-compulsion streak is often used as a kind of social conformity. “We’re all individuals!” in the Monty Python sense of the word.
A similar defense can be offered for why I didn’t tell the story Siegel wanted me to tell about Lloyd George: because that’s the story that didn’t need telling, again. I’ll leave it to others to decide how much I cherry-picked. But do remember the subtitle of the book says something about a “secret history” not “a well trod history.”
Siegel also writes:
Thus when in his late chapters he insists that the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and the retailer Whole Foods are in one way or another expressions of fascism, the reader has to wonder whether he is writing with a wink. How is the DLC fascist?
Here some full disclosure might have been in order. If Wikipedia is correct, Fred Siegel is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute which is affiliated with the DLC. Regardless, from a quick search of my book, the DLC appears exactly once. And I provided the reader exactly the sort of limited sense in which one could say the DLC is fascistic. Siegel didn’t need to make it seem as if I don’t answer his question, perhaps in an effort to make me seem more promiscuous than I am. I write as part of a much longer and detailed discussion of fascist economics:
In reality, if you define “right-wing” or “conservative” in the American sense of supporting the rule of law and the free market, then the more right-wing a business is, the less fascist it becomes. Meanwhile, in terms of economic policy, the more you move to the political center, as defined in American politics today, the closer you get to true fascism. If the far left is defined by socialism and the far right by laissez-faire, then it is the mealymouthed centrists of the Democratic Leadership Council and the Brookings Institution who are the true fascists, for it is they who subscribe to the notion of the Third Way, that quintessentially fascistic formulation that claims to be neither left nor right.
I could be wrong in the passage above, but Mr. Siegel should know exactly in what sense I am calling the DLC fascist.
Anyway, I have more disagreements but they’ll have to wait until next later.