Thursday, May 08, 2008  California Events I'll be out there on May 13 and May 20. Details. 05/08 10:04 AM Monday, May 05, 2008 Socialistworker.org on Fascism From a reader: Jonah, I certainly found this link interesting. It was written in 2003, and though the site is definitely socialist, this article actually presents a fairly mature view of Fascism in America. I know the definition the author uses is different from yours, but the readiness with which he equates Wilson and Roosevelt with fascism is interesting. It's nice to see someone on the far left that understands calling all Republicans fascists is stupid.
05/05 07:34 PM 
Fascism At The Movies The comments section here is encouraging. 05/05 05:52 PM I Can't Believe I Didn't Post This Yet From the Wall Street Journal: Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor. Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct." The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why. After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded. Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.
05/05 05:49 PM War & Its Moral Equivalents Readers of the book know that one of its central arguments — deviating from the Old Right explanations of the New Deal — is that the Brain Trusters were in reality Wilson retreads, literally an/or intellectually. They wanted to recreate the war socialism of the Wilson era under the logic of the "moral equivalents of war." Anyway, I thought this email fit in nicely: Wow. I just found this audio recording of Roosevelt campaigning for the 1920 election. Has Obama been spending time in the LOC sniffing the FDR vinyls? Then again, the constant crisis mode via war is plainly evident here.
"It would be an unusual and much to be wished for thing if in the coming presentation of the issues a new note of fairness and generosity could be struck. Littleness, meanness, falsehood, extreme partisanship these are not in accord with the American spirit. I like to think that in this respect also we are moving forward."
"I feel that our children will come to revere it [the war]... for the splendid unity of action which extended to every portion of the nation. It would therefore... confirm ill to our high standard if any person should in the heat of political rivalry seek to manufacture political advantage out of a nationally conducted struggle. We have seen things on too large a scale to listen at this day to trifles..."
"It is that same vision of the bigger outlook... which will I am sure lead us to demand that the men who represent us in the affairs of the our government shall be more than politicians. That they shall subordinate always the individual ambition and the party advantage to the national good."
"Even if a nation entered the war for an ideal, so it has emerged from the war with the determination that this ideal shall not die. It is idle to pretend that the declaration of war of April 6, 1917 was a mere act of self-defense, or that the object of our participation was solely to defeat the military power of the central nations of Europe. We knew then as a nation, even as we know today, that success on land and sea could be but half a victory. The other half is not won yet. The cry of the French at Verdun, "They shall not pass" and the cheer of our own men in the Argonne, "We shall go through," these were essential glories, yet they are incomplete. To them we must write the binding finish — it shall not occur again — for America demands that the crime of war shall cease. "
05/05 09:15 AM Sunday, May 04, 2008 Mail Call Cont'd From a reader:
Subject: LF & Comic Books Thought that would grab your attention, Jonah: I guess I'm too conditioned now to read a paragraph like this and go, "why, of course": Wertham, Beaty notes, is often libeled as a pop-culture McCarthyite, when he was in fact a progressive scholar who ran a clinic in Harlem, and his research on black children was used in the legal challenges to segregation. Beaty contends that Wertham had legitimate questions about the social impact of art on socially vulnerable children. After your book, I guess I can see that it's easy to get McCarthyites and progressives confused.
05/04 01:22 PM Mail Bag From a reader:
Dear Jonah:
I loved Liberal Fascism!
After reading it, I thought of something else that supports what you are contending - East Germany.
If Fascism and Communism were polar opposites, then how could East Germany adopt Communism with such ease?
I don't know if this is something you've addressed or not, but I think the reality of the East German state supports your contention.
I look forward to your next book. 05/04 01:21 PM I Couldn't Have Said it Better From last week's Scrapbook item on Paul Auster's retrospective on 1968:
....Anyway, Paul Auster—who "was not a violent person" at the time—was, instead, "a quiet, bookish young man, struggling to teach myself how to become a writer, immersed in my courses in literature and philosophy at Columbia." But when Columbia announced plans to build its new gym with a separate entrance for the general public—"the . . . plan was deemed to be both unjust and racist"—the quiet, bookish, nonviolent Paul Auster was suddenly transformed into somebody "crazy, crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs." So crazy, in fact, that he joined his fellow undergraduates in sudden, violent protest, not so much against the gym but "to vent their craziness, to lash out at something, anything, and since we were all students at Columbia, why not throw bricks at Columbia, since it was engaged in lucrative research projects for military contractors and thus was contributing to the war effort in Vietnam?" Readers with long memories will recall the spectacle of Columbia undergraduates—children of privilege enrolled at a distinguished Ivy League institution founded when New York was still a British colony—invading classrooms and administrative offices, manhandling deans, professors, and fellow students, stealing and destroying books and documents, vandalizing chambers devoted to learning, roaming corridors in search of fodder to burn. The Columbia strike of 1968 made a temporary celebrity of a student named Mark Rudd, and publicized the episode's emblematic slogan: "Up against the wall, motherf—r!" It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster: Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence. . . . The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and so off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park. Much to my astonishment, I was with them. What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books? He was helping to tear down the fence. He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen -others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act. One of the great parlor games of modern scholarship is pondering how the German people—citizens of the land of Bach, Kant, and Goethe—could find themselves marching in step behind Adolf Hitler. Well, Paul Auster and his Boomer companions at Columbia offer a clue. Here is as plain and startling a description of the mob mentality—together with the attendant hysteria and romanticized violence—as you are likely to find in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, nicely camouflaged in the language of nostalgia and social protest. If, in this presidential election year, anyone wonders how the political left grew estranged from the American mainstream, yielding the politics of the past four decades, they need only read Paul Auster's tribute to the Columbia strike, written "alone in this room with a pen in my hand" as "I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."
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Me: I should say that one of the more surprising significant silences about my book relates to what I have to say about the 1960s. I spoke to a class at my alma mater, Goucher College, last week and it was, I think, the first time I'd been confronted about my view that the Black Panthers were — and remain, to the extent they're around — a thoroughly fascist organization. 05/04 10:35 AM Friday, May 02, 2008 Progressives v. Big Business Barry Loberfeld in a review of Jonathan Chait's book, over at Frontpage: So, what's all this about the primacy of the "market"? Elsewhere in the book (p. 48), Chait informs us that the economic policy of current conservatism is "nothing that a Friedrich Hayek or a Milton Friedman would recognize as his own." And in a discussion of this conservatism's "material self-interest" (pp. 76-79) — which is actually a listing of a few examples of corporate welfare under Bush 43 — he asks, "How, one might wonder, could anybody regard this great mass of government subsidies as a triumph of the free market?" Rhetorician, answer thyself.
The best we get is this: "The rise of the business lobby has distorted — and, finally, corrupted — the Republican Party...," which is true — if we were talking about the Progressive Era. But regarding that period Chait rehearses a superstition that puts the flat-Earth faithful to shame: "[M]any of the reforms the Progressives set in place were met by fierce opposition from corporations. Yet eventually much of the business community accepted them ... [including] reasonable regulation." "This history," he explains, "runs against the mythology ... in which American business is seen as a constant, thoroughly evil, and near omnipotent force" (pp. 48-50). Chait's "history" has been exposed as mythology itself by the scholarly research of historian Gabriel Kolko, who documented how the Progressive regulatory agencies were "invariably controlled by leaders of the regulated industry, and directed toward ends they deemed acceptable or desirable ... [mostly] because the regulatory movements were usually initiated by the dominant businesses to be regulated," e.g., the Interstate Commerce Commission and the railroad industry. Kolko's work was embraced by free-market economists from the conventional Friedman to the radical Murray Rothbard, who all stressed the same point: Big Business loves "business regulation" (especially the funded-by-taxpayers and crippling-to-smaller-competitors parts). Chait concedes that by the Johnson administration corporate support for regulation became obvious to all, but he characterizes the regulation as something corporations accepted altruistically because they sincerely believed it benefited the "country as a whole." Yup, that's what he writes. Only under George W. Bush has corporatism become the special-interest pursuit of privileges for connected businesses.
05/02 04:47 PM Rush Limbaugh & LF A friend asks: Hey, Rush Limbaugh has Andy McCarthy on today. How come he didn't have you on? LF is even more in his wheelhouse, in that he's constantly going on about
the long-term depravity of liberalism. Did you run over his dog?
Me: Actually, I get asked this sort of thing a lot. Limbaugh was pretty much the only major conservative radio host not to have me on to talk about the book and, reader/listeners tell me, he often discusses the work of other NRO contributors but not yours truly. Years ago, he'd often riff positively on something I've written. But I can't remember the last time that's happened (at least that I've heard of). The short answer is, I have no idea why this is the case. Maybe he just doesn't like me. Maybe I wrote something he didn't like. I really don't know. I've met him once, and been in the same room with the guy a bunch. But, I have no idea if it's just an oversight or if there's something more serious at work. I've got no grudge or anything. Though, obviously, no author — at least no conservative author — would pass on the opportunity to discuss his book on his show. But it looks like it's not to be. 05/02 01:19 PM All Aboard! Continued From a reader: Hi, Jonah,
Yes, and Tomasky also has to give a positive account of "non-coercive liberalism," not just tell us that it's the kind opposed to coercive liberalism. What does it look like to have a society that puts all sorts of power in the hands of the state, but "non-coercively"?
Let me guess. It's a society in which almost everyone's a liberal and the overwhelming majority vote in support of big welfare state policies. "There's no coercion; we're voting that way. We've deliberated peaceably in the forum and most of our society's members have gotten on board. All aboard!" Alright, so there's your positive account.
The problem is the loss of liberty (a pesky issue that seems to dog totalitarianism no matter what it does to avoid it.) Even if an overwhelming majority vote for a nice-fascist society, and their representatives agree and implement it, two stubborn facts remain: The minority is coerced by the new policies (QED). And the majority also no longer have their liberty. Should any liberal decide to go back to have individual lives of liberty, he will be prevented from doing so by the obstacles he helped vote into place. Now it will take a majority vote to dismantle the big-state policies (if even that will work.) Until he gets a majority to agree with him to return to liberty, our regretful liberal will be coerced by the big state, his individual rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness no longer being protected by the state (another QED). Sure, we all decide to bend our will into alignment with the General Will. The problem is once you start, you can't have just one. You try to kick the habit and the General Will doesn't allow it. In other words, the General Will is totalitarian. Non-coercive big-statism is General Will-ish. Therefore, non-coercive big-statism is totalitarian. But totalitarianism is coercive. So the whole thing is oxymoronic.
So, what does it look like to have a non-coercive liberal state? It doesn't look like anything. No such thing.
Just saying,
Jim
05/02 12:43 PM London Calling Good news! It looks like Liberal Fascism will be published in the UK. That means I'll be crossing the pond at some point to promote the book. Hopefully, I can line up some speaking gigs while I'm out there. Interested parties should drop me a line. 05/02 11:07 AM All Aboard! In Michael Tomasky's sophomoric review of my book, some may recall that he insisted that whenever governmental pursuit of good stuff “crosses the line into coercion, well, that is where liberals — I mean liberals who know something about liberalism — get off the train, and do their noncoercive best to derail it.” As I noted in my somewhat groin-kicking response: "What is this magical, wonderful 'something' that lurks in 'real' liberals? What is the secret gnosis that empowers these people to know instinctively when they’ve gone too far? Tomasky never says, he just knows on faith that this is true. It sure sounds like Tomasky is a votary to the political religion I argue liberalism has become." So I do wonder how Tomasky would explain the Tuskegee experiment? After all, this was good government progressivism hard at work. And no one got off the train to do their noncoercive best to derail it for 40 years. According to Tomasky, the answer must be that the whistleblowers were the real liberals, because real liberals are always the good guys and the good guys are always real liberals. 05/02 10:16 AM Wednesday, April 30, 2008 Heading Out To Cali Just a reminder: I will be speaking at Pasadena City College on May 13 in the afternoon. Details tk. I will be the keynoter at a boffo Heritage event at UCLA on May 20. This event is much better, but it will also cost ya. Details here. 04/30 06:50 PM Tuesday, April 29, 2008 Romanticism From a reader: Dear Mr. Goldberg, Having just finished reading your book, Liberal Fascism, I wanted to congratulate your historical overview provided for all of us to appreciate. You teach well. We purchased two copies, so as to have one to share. My own research was on Liszt and early Romanticism. As your text referenced Romanticism negatively, please allow me a few words. Inspired by the metaphysical listening experience with Classical symphonies, authors including E.T.A. Hoffmann vaulted instrumental music to the apex of the fine arts, ABOVE text. As a group, the young Romantics (Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann) studied the Classical Epics in order to appreciate the inner strivings of established heros whose accomplishments were already designated and well defined. The inner longings of man's creative identity with nature provided inspiration for their masterpieces. As a culture, following 1850, the public interests in metaphysics were eventually politically bashed by the unsuccessful 1848 revolutions and rise of empirical thought, transforming the earlier concept of experimental science into the outer limits or "twilight zone" as only materialism bore value to those LATER "Romantics" whom we musicians now refer to as Neo-Classical, having deemed Haydn and Mozart as "Classical", and the aesthetic thrust after 1850 reverting to formality vs. organicism. This WAR OF THE ROMANTICS destroyed the vision that Franz Liszt never relinquished, though Liszt was the ultimate victorious genius having amalgamated organicism and classical structure (Sonata) and having tonally predicted the direction of 20th Century musical composition. I mention this in defense of Liszt, the Romantic Hero whose motto was Caritas and who espoused that "idea determines form". Liszt was the true Romantic idealist, devoted Catholic yet imbued by the late French utopian revolutionaries to regard EDUCATING the public, his own responsibilities to be a cultural prophet holding fast to traditions while simultaneously expressing individualism and unity of spirit, in contrast to those whom you might call "Neo-Romantic" and whom musicians call the neo-Classicists: Joachim, Brahms and Hanslick (form is spirit, spirit is form; the beautiful in music). Now we come to Wagner, the brutish user and abuser who composed monumental operas. Liszt was Wagner's friend, just as Liszt was everyone's friend. However, Wagner was truly no friend of Liszt's or anyone but himself. You are very correct in aligning Wagner politically. There is only one matter that you may want to correct in your outstanding book on page 386: "Hitler often claimed his vegetarianism was inspired by Richard Wagner, who, in an 1891 essay, argued that meat eating and race mixing were the twin causes of man's alienation from the natural world." Perhaps in 1891, someone was quoting Wagner in an article. However, Richard Wagner died in 1883. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Music, Wagner published his literary works while yet alive, not posthumously. I have the deepest admiration for your outstanding literary contribution, and look forward to using the information you shared in dialogue with my ardently ultra-liberal oldest brother, and in general life today. Bravo, and ENCORE!
04/29 03:14 PM Monday, April 28, 2008 Wilson v. Harding One criticism, from Oshinsky I think, is that I didn't spend enough time on the 1920s. I generally disagree, but I do think I should have spent a bit more time on Harding's unraveling of Wilson's war state. Ilya Somin has a good post on Harding (I found via Ross) here. 04/28 03:47 PM LF & Dawson From a reader: Dear Jonah,
I haven't finished your book, but I've read enough to note how it
resonates with the work of great cultural historian Christopher
Dawson. I'm reading Bradley Birzer's book on him now: "Sanctifying
the World".
On p.124, Birzer discusses Dawson's book, "Religion and the Modern
State" (1936):
Dawson "described the rise of fascism while labeling the rise of the
New Deal in America as a benign form of dictatorship. 'It is in fact
a constitutional dictatorship,' Dawson wrote bluntly. Further, he
noted, to abandon the free market, as the Americans had done, would
lead to the abandonment of other American liberties. 'We shall also
have to abandon political individualism and the right to criticize and
oppose the Government,' Dawson wrote. Rooted in the Burkean
tradition of organic common law and constitutional medievalism, Dawson
believed that all liberties were wrapped together, inseparable from
one another....mass democracies more often than not allow bureaucracies and selfish
interests to assume control, forcing all things to become political
and politicized..."
Check out this quote especially, which might have come from your own
pen:
"It may be harder to resist a Totalitarian state which relies on free
milk and birth control clinics than one which relies on castor oil and
concentration camps."
04/28 11:18 AM |
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