I apologize for using so much space to respond to such a thin review. But as I’ve put off reviewing Noah’s review for so long, I figured I might as well be thorough. Besides, I think the weakness of his review says a lot about the strengths of my book. Noah begins with some throat clearing about our antagonistic history (let the record show that Tim writes about me a lot, not the other way around). But he even gets that wrong. I haven’t liked Tim Noah for years. And his animosity towards me, I believe, stretches back to the time I called him a journalistic hall-monitor. And, for the record, what annoyed me about Noah’s years of whining about my book was his relentless insistence that he knew all he needed to know about the book without ever reading it. What bothered me about his insistence that it would be an “Ann Coulter book” had nothing to do with what I think about Ann, and everything to do with what Noah meant by the comparison. He insisted it was going to be a stupid, shallow and trivial book. But now, fyi, he admits he was wrong. He writes: “Goldberg lays out his argument knowledgeably and calmly. He seems to have done his homework, which was not inconsiderable.”
Anyway I’m sorry to dwell on this schoolyard nonsense, but it’s more interesting than Noah’s actual review (which is not to say it’s interesting).
Let’s get to the substance. At first Noah takes the “nothing to see here folks” approach so common out there. He writes:
Goldberg’s argument begins with the observation that well into the 1930s, the American progressive movement had more admiration than scorn for Benito Mussolini, who coined the words fascist and totalitarian, and even for Adolf Hitler. This isn’t news to anyone with even a glancing familiarity with American history. Goldberg further argues that fascism initially evolved from and positioned itself as a muscular brand of socialism (hence Nazi, an abbreviation for “National Socialist German Workers Party”). Also true, and also known to most educated people.
The first part is just flatly untrue. Having spent the last few years deep in these weeds, I can tell you that there are lots and lots of educated liberals who know nothing about the extent of liberal and progressive affinity for fascism prior to World War II (some have even written books nominally about American fascism in seeming total ignorance of this history). Noah’s attempt to brush it off with a “we knew that already” is simply lame. Not to belabor the point, but colleges do not teach this history — most popular historians don’t mention it either — so college kids do not learn it. And college kids then go on to be grown-ups who often think they are educated. And even among those liberal intellectuals who do know some of this stuff, they minimize, dismiss or distort the significance of it.
For instance, take his second observation that most educated liberals have always known that Nazism “evolved from and positioned itself as a muscular brand of socialism.” Well, there are lots of people on the left who would deny this even today, claiming that Nazi socialism was never anything of the sort. But more importantly, where exactly are these we-knew-this-all-along liberals today? How come they never do any intellectual heavy-lifting to explain to their fellow left-leaning cognoscenti that laissez-faire capitalism has nothing to do with Nazism? What does it say about these well-educated liberals that they know of Nazism’s socialist roots and nature but do and say absolutely nothing about it? My aim in the book isn’t merely to inform readers of the facts in my book, but to account for those facts and to note how the left hasn’t come to grips with them – and why. All of this seems to have gone right over Noah’s head.
Still, it’s worth noting that Noah joins David Oshinsky and Matt Yglesias in conceding the primary argument of the book: That fascism is a phenomenon of the left. He makes no effort to rebut this claim. Rather, he simply musters a theatrical yawn.
In this, Noah reminds me of Bill Murray’s girlfriend in Stripes. Murray claimed that when Tito Puente died, his girlfriend would claim she always loved his music. Similarly, now that I drive a stake through the heart of what Tom Wolfe calls the greatest hoax of modern history, he gripes “we knew that already.” Sorry, not buying it.
While he makes no effort to defend Mussolini and Hitler from the charge of leftism, Noah is more eager to defend Wilson from the charge of fascism. He writes:
According to Goldberg, Wilson’s belief in an expansive role for government (example: creation of the Federal Trade Commission) was linked to his less-admired taste for government repression (example: the Palmer raids). Well, maybe. A simpler explanation for the latter would be that throughout American history, presidents have tended to trample on the Bill of Rights during times of unrest, starting with the Alien and Sedition Acts, which was signed into law by President John Adams 17 years before Bismarck was born.
The tendentiousness of this will be evident to most people who’ve read my Wilson chapter. First of all, from what I can tell, the Federal Trade Commission doesn’t even appear in that chapter. Second, Noah’s being cute with the bit about the Alien and Sedition Acts, but it’s hardly as if I’m alone in finding the Progressive fondness for Bismarck significant. This point has been made from Eric Goldman to Fareed Zakaria to countless others. Third, I don’t think it needs to be a particularly partisan or rightwing argument that when a bunch of people who believe individualism needs to be crushed take over the government, they are going to be less than dogmatically opposed to trampling civil liberties.
Indeed, Noah suggests that my argument may indeed be right. He simply prefers to offer a “simpler” one. That sounds about right.
Then Noah writes:
“Woodrow Wilson,” Goldberg declares, “was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator.” That would be news to Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts Republican who successfully opposed U.S. entry into the League of Nations.
Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t this a complete non-sequitur? I’d respond to this, but I first need to understand what point Noah thinks he ‘s making.
Noah again seems to think he’s caught me in some contradiction when he writes:
Here Goldberg is, for instance, trying very hard not to call Franklin Roosevelt a fascist:
This is not to say that the New Deal was evil or Hitlerian. But the New Deal was a product of the impulses and ideas of its era. And these ideas and impulses are impossible to separate from the fascist moment in Western civilization. … Franklin Rosevelt was no fascist, at least not in the sense that he thought of himself in this way. But many of his ideas and policies were indistinguishable from fascism. And today we live with the fruits of fascism, and we call them liberal.
Thirty-five pages later, Goldberg can hold back no longer. “[I]t seems impossible to deny that the New Deal was objectively fascistic,” he crows, imposing without irony a Marxist analysis.
Well, first of all: So what? Noah seems to miss that I’m not calling FDR a fascist in his gotchya quote. I’m saying that the “New Deal was objectively fascistic” – which it was. Again, this isn’t an argument unique to me or a few aging Marxists. For just one example, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s recent book The Three New Deals (reviewed here by David Boaz.)
As for my imposing “Marxist analysis,” that might be a more legitimate criticism in other parts of the book (I have my answers to that criticism, by the way). But using the word “objectively” is simply not objectively Marxist (was Orwell a Marxist?).
Noah starts to wrap up with this observation:
The rest of Goldberg’s argument unfolds as follows: Wilson begat FDR, who begat contemporary liberalism. The only reason the United States didn’t remain a fascist country like Italy or Germany or Spain was “American exceptionalism,” i.e., the public’s resistance to tyranny over the long term. But Democratic presidents from Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton continued either to impose fascism or to bring the country terrifyingly close to it. To demonstrate this, Goldberg is obliged to render an ever-more-flexible definition of the word fascist.
As evidenced with his inability to grasp that calling the New Deal fascistic isn’t the same thing as calling FDR Hitlerite, Noah has a hard time letting go of the fact that “fascist” isn’t an interchangeable term with evil. This is odd since he claims to know that many of the heroes of liberalism liked fascism and presumably he doesn’t think they were all evil. This myopia causes him to misunderstand much of the rest of the book, even when I explain what I’m saying quite clearly many times.
What am I saying? In brief: Because liberalism has not come to terms with it’s intellectual history; because liberals are constantly looking in the wrong direction for signs of fascism on the horizon; because fascism and progressivism share many of the same intellectual wellsprings; fascistic ideas, arguments and impulses continually spring up from the left, but few are willing or equipped to recognize them. We’ve come to believe that everything good or “progressive” is simply the opposite of fascism. This is dangerous (and stupid) because fascism only succeeds when it’s packaged in a popular and progressive way. I’m not saying that if you like organic tofu, you’re a Nazi who wants to round people up. I’m not saying you’re evil either. I’m saying, for example, that if you’re ideologically invested in the cult of organicism, you might ponder the significance of the fact you’re standing on the shoulders of some troubling giants.
Similarly, I’m saying that if you believe that A) fascism is evil B) that economic policies are primarily about morality and justice and C) that fascism is defined by a symbiotic relationship between government and business you might want to come to grips with the fact that you’re suffering from some profound cognitive dissonance.
And, again, I do not say this is entirely a problem for the left. These impulses and temptations are written into the human heart. But they have a harder time manifesting themselves among modern conservatives because we are dogmatically and intellectually opposed to statism and the politicization of life. Obviously, there are exceptions to this on the right, and I’ve been criticizing them for years.
Noah ends with some concentrated foolishness. He writes:
So, what’s more fascist, liberalism or conservatism? It’s a moronic question. The United States is not, nor has ever been, anything close to a fascist country. But if compelled to choose, I should think it’s more useful to consider what political thinkers had to say about fascism not before the full extent of its horrors became known to the world but after. As it happens, the Canadian Web site Sans Everything unearthed two obituaries for Francisco Franco, the fascist Spanish dictator, in the Nov. 21, 1975, issue of Goldberg’s beloved National Review. One, by F.R. Buckley (William’s brother) called Franco a Spaniard out of the heroic annals of the nation, a giant. He will be truly mourned by Spain because with all his heart and might and soul, he loved his country, and in the vast context of Spanish history, did well by it.
The other, by James Burnham, stated, “Francisco Franco was our century’s most successful ruler.” If John Kenneth Galbraith said anything like this, I missed it.
I’ll post more about Franco later (there’s ample evidence he wasn’t even a fascist, but simply a strongman). But a few short points. Noah begins by essentially ridiculing my observation that the founders of modern liberalism had deep ideological, emotional and intellectual affinity for fascism, at home and abroad. But he ends by trying to have it both ways by trying to play the same game. The quote from F.R. Buckley is interesting, but it hardly demonstrates anything like the case I make in my book. Lots of Catholic anti-Communist conservatives defended Catholic anti-Communist strongmen. I am unaware of NR ever advocating a Franco-style regime in the United States. As for the statement by Burnham reads to me like an analytical point, not a normative one.
I don’t know about John Kenneth Galbraith (I’ll investigate) but if Noah wants far more damning statements from Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John Maynard Keynes, Gunnar Myrdal, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Charles Beard, Herbert Croly, WEB Du Bois, Margaret Sanger, Rexford Tugwell, Gertrude Stein, Saul Alinksy and countless others, I can provide them. And unlike Tim, I can actually explain why they’re relevant.
Oh and if he wants contemporary quotes from liberals and leftists who still like militaristic dictators who argue for an organic connection between the people and the state, who crush dissent and all the rest, he might want to spend a few minutes on Google looking up what countless liberals and leftists have had to say about Fidel Castro (a huge fan of Franco’s by the way) and Hugo Chavez. Of course, Tim will say that they don’t count because they’re socialists. To which I’d respond, he needs to read my book again, this time with a bit more effort.
Update: Re: Noah’s point about Henry Cabot Lodge, several readers have set me straight. For example:
I think he’s saying that if Wilson was truly a “dictator,” Lodge would
have been unsuccessful in preventing the entry into the league. That
says nothing, of course, about whether or not Wilson was a fascist.
Me: Fair enough, though there are a few responses to this in addition to the point above. Both Mussolini and Hitler still had to deal with political opponents and institutional obstacles even after they assumed power. The question of when someone becomes a dictator can be a very technical or a very literary one. Maybe we can revisit it sometime. But in Wilson’s case, I’m talking primarily about the man and what he got away with. It’s true that eventually the system constrained him — as did some strokes that crippled him physically and politically. Indeed, one of the central points of my book is that American exceptionalism prevented a harsher and more typically fascist form of dictatorship from taking hold here. But given the standards in the American context for what constitutes dictatorship, I think the charge that Wilson was for a time a dictator is entirely defensible.