Media This Week

Fred,

Can you be more specific? I didn't read the book, never said I did, but I watched the interview.

Dain,

Your assessments are far off the mark. It's hard to believe you either read the book or listened to the interview.

Jonah Goldberg is an example of how just how much the rhetoric of the old left has been adopted by the new right, buttressing the accusation of paleocons that neocons are in fact more left wing than often thought.

Goldberg abuses the word Fascism in a manner typically reserved for angry college students who call anything they don't like "Fascism", though admittedly better defended and thought through. I watched the interview and noticed he even cited A. James Gregor, probably the foremost scholar on the subject. Yet his sloppy use of the term in the title of his book would seem to negate this familiarity. Gregor explains just what Fascism was, as outlined by Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini themselves; its specific formation is original and unique to Italy in the early twentieth century. The Nazis are not Fascists, for example, but National Socialists, with important differences between them. To argue otherwise is a rehash of the official Marxist line of the time that anything that isn't specifically Communist and perhaps even pro-Soviet is de facto "Fascist".

Golberg is as irresponsible as the people behind "Islamo Fascism Awareness Week", confusing globally minded mystical theocrats with scant apprecation for political economy and industrialization with secular nationalists devoted to industry, corporatism and the philosophy of Actualism.

I understand the urge to reach for the dreaded "F" word when attempting to sock it to your enemy, but someone of Golderg's intellect should not shy away from calling something by what it is. Perhaps there isn't a term for the current Hillary Clinton style political approach other than "big government liberalism" that would best fit, but certainly designations other than Fascist would better fit her viewpoints. I would argue that "corporate liberal", "Fabian", "managerialist", etc., is a more appropriate description.

Nice interview. Interesting premise to the book, which accounts for its quick notoriety in an election year. The book is already sold out locally, and put on back-order until the publisher prints more. Congratulations to JG.

One can already see this book generating "Hillhitler" as a pejorative term to match "Bushitler" of the past few years, should Mrs. Clinton win the presidency. If she skillfully anticipates the potential linkage during the campaign, she could easily throw off any personal association of her views with fascism by either a visit to the Holocaust Museum, or by taking on the theofascist mullahs of Iran.

One very prominent part of fascism is its religiosity, and I do not remember any part of the interview discussing fascism's deep roots in salvific theological doctrines.

That was a great interview with Jonah Goldberg.