More Goldberg

After listening to the interview with Glenn and Helen Reynolds, I'd have to say that the Sadly, No gang's fisking is not illuminating (the Crooked Timber takes are even less useful, since they are literally judging the book by its cover). Take this exchange, keeping in mind that one of Goldberg's themes is that the proto-fascist socialists were pro-military:

JG: There is confusion over Nazi attitudes about homosexuality.
S,N: No there isn't. They wanted to kill them.
JG: Some Nazis were gay.
S,N: Duh, of course; good help is hard to find. [EH: What happened to wanting to kill them?]
JG: They killed Rohm not because he was gay but rather because he was more radical, desiring a second revolution.
S,N: Aha! By radical, you mean more socialist! [EH: Perhaps homosexuality is not the only reason the Nazis killed?]

Sadly, No then goes on to provide a link which yielded the following quote:

The SA, led by Ernst Rohm, included control of the Reichswehr (the army) in the program of the second revolution.

The more radical/socialist members of the NSDAP wanted to control the military? It's hard to see how this doesn't support Goldberg's thesis. Instead, we get lots of side track comments from the Sadly, No author that are self-contradictory.

This next tidbit is a common problem in any analysis of the Nazi relationship to socialism, broadly understood. The standard reaction to any mention of Hitler's obsession with health is that Goldberg -- or anyone else pointing this out -- is using this syllogism:

Hitler was a vegetarian.
Vegetarians are leftists.
Therefore, Hitler was a leftist.

Since they have dropped almost all of the context, it's hard to say where Goldberg was going with his discussion, but it seems much more likely that he's developing a line of argument that has to do with connecting certain lifestyles with morality, and morality with the state, and thus the idea that the state can and should strictly regulate diet, exercise, and other habits (smoking). As Russell Wardlow and others point out on Steve Sailer's site (excellent comments), some people are unable to refrain from going to that simple strawman syllogism and therefore overlook the bigger point. The bigger point is that the Nazis wanted to regulate health habits because they thought it was every citizen's duty to provide the state with fit workers. [1]

Then we have this line from another post:

Starting wars simply to demonstrate national strength is about a billion times more fascist than some namby-pamby bureaucrat telling you not to super-size your fries.

By comparing nanny-state bureaucracy to something that arguably more fascist [2] and declaring that it pales in comparison, the author concludes that it can't be fascist. I'm sure that's a named fallacy. But even if I can't be bothered to look up the name of that fallacy, I recognize the attitude: it's the Banality of Evil.

Speaking of Hannah Arendt, the same post contains a floating quotation (no context again) about the relationship of Wilson and FDR to the French Revolution, which Goldberg identifies as fascist. The commenters are mystified, but they wouldn't be had they ever pulled themselves through a copy of Arendt's On Revolution. It's actually quite funny, since the commenters point out that the Jacobins were radicals, i.e. proto-progressives. Indeed they were. And the result? The Committee on Public Safety, under the leadership of Robespierre, commenced the Reign of Terror. I'd like to know in what way they find that significantly different from fascism.

In another post, they attempt this argument, which the uncritical commenters accept:

In fact, we must stare in awe as Jonah accuses Margaret Sanger of "nasty racism" for her era-appropriate belief in eugenics

I asked, in response,

I wonder if you'd also characterize the antisemitism of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named as "era-appropriate"? Surely, if such ideas are bad, they are bad in any era, regardless of the identity of the person who thinks those thoughts?

Nobody has answered. If those ideas were so era-appropriate, how does one explain people like G. K. Chesterton who were opposed to eugenics? Could it be that the era-appropriateness hinged on the acceptance of the idea among H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Woodrow Wilson, and other progressives?

It is surely funny that the Sadly, No writer lampoons some of Goldberg's sources but then relies on The History Channel's National Socialism archives. Still, I wonder if he would consider it fair game if portions of that worked against him?

The roots of National Socialism, however, were peculiarly German, grounded, for example, in the Prussian tradition of military authoritarianism and expansion; in the German romantic tradition of hostility to rationalism, liberalism, and democracy; in various racist doctrines according to which the Nordic peoples, as so-called pure Aryans, were not only physically superior to other races, but were the carriers of a superior morality and culture; and in certain philosophical traditions that idealized the state or exalted the superior individual and exempted such a person from conventional restraints.

The Prussian thing, the Romantic thing, and the Aryan thing are tied together in Fichte, Herder, and several others who also influenced Hegel and through him, Marx. Stir in some Plenge, Spengler, and Chamberlain, add a dash of George Bernard Shaw's Nietzche's Superman, and you have the National Socialist German Worker's Party philosophical stew made almost exclusively from the same philosophers who influenced the era's leading progressives, Fabians, and socialists.

Consider what Richard Pipes has to say:

Was the Fascist Party a "right-wing" party?
Mussolini's party was a right-wing party but only to some extent, just as the Nazi party. These were not conservative parties. They were radical, radical nationalist parties, which in the programs very much maintained the socialist ideals [emphasis added]. For example, Mussolini's corporate state workers participated in the decision making in the business enterprises. They had as much say in some respects, as did the owners of factories.

Mussolini did shift to the right gradually because I think he was afraid of the power of the communist and the socialists, and since he was a dictator and wanted dictatorial power he felt that one has to suppress these parties and they were suppressed.

...

Are Communism and Fascism totally different things, completely opposed to one another?
Well, the notion that Communism and fascism are diametrically opposed is something that was fostered by the Communist party, by the Communist International. In the 1920s, basically the International defined fascism as any anti-communist movement. If you were anti-communist, it doesn't matter what platform, you were automatically fascist. So that even the western democracies were called fascist. This is a meaningless term. I use the term Fascism concretely, to apply only to the Italian fascist party and the Nazi to the Nazi party.

The idea that fascism as a far-right ideology was a creation of the Comintern is something Goldberg makes reference to in the interview linked above. And if you doubt the extent to which the Comintern would go to paint their fellow-traveller rivals as reactionary, I'd recommend that you pick up a copy of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

In the interview, Goldberg says something to the effect of, "I bet that if you were to remove the war and antisemitism from the Nazi program, most of these modern progressives would endorse their policies." That does seem to occur among the commenters in the form of "if free education was all that nazism did, I would be in favor of it," as if you could separate things so easily -- what part of "totalitarian" don't they understand? Via Matt Zeitlin, I did come across something that approached a thoughtful critique at Spencer Ackerman's TooHotforTNR (worth reading), in which he asserts that "a government that makes a lot of poor and invidious policy choices, many of dubious constitutionality, but still leaves power following a democratic election isn't fascist." Does that mean that the NSDAP was not fascist until the Reichstag fire? Or that they wouldn't have been fascist had Hitler counterfactually stepped down in elections in 1940? Does it mean that Lenin and Stalin were fascist?

This debate hinges on the definition of fascism. Most common definitions start from the standpoint informed by the post-WWII propaganda effort that painted Nazis, Italian fascists, and other groups into the right by way of contrasting them to the Communists, socialists, and Democrats. [3] As usual, I'm no fan of the overly simple, one-dimensional, left-right model of politics. Anything that pretends to pit Hitler and Stalin as polar opposites is nearly useless. If I find the time, perhaps I may make an attempt at developing a definition of fascism.

Most critics of Goldberg's book seem to think that he is making the definition so broad that it would encompass every country and political movement in history. Possibly: I don't have the book and the Amazon version isn't searchable, so I don't have Goldberg's definition. It seems likely, based on the little I have seen, that they are being intentionally obtuse. They are preferring to argue on the differences in degree in the components and refusing to see the difference in kind in the system taken as a whole. Take Ackerman's response to one passage in the book:

JG: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve that common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy.

SA: Fascist regimes do not impose their wills by force "or" through regulation and social pressure. They systematize violence.

Is this a deliberate misrepresentation of both Goldberg's claim and of fascism? He skips past the "religion of the state" part and the definition of totalitarian, going right for a minor point about regulation and social pressure. And on that point, he is wrong. Fascist states famously used social pressure as leverage to get people to report their neighbors. It is so well known that it has entered our language in the form of phrases like "little Eichmans" and "Good Germans"; it has been famously studied in the Milgram, Stanford prison, and Asch conformity experiments.


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[1] Today, the primary argument for state intervention in these matters has not been our own health or the state's right to our labor, but rather the cost which unhealthy citizens are placing on state healthcare programs. Which is absurd when you think about it - the state creates a program to shield people from risk and then is shocked to find people using it? The rejoinder to this from the left is most likely to be a moral argument, i.e., individuals should sacrifice their personal pleasure (smoke, consumption of transfats) for the common good. Sounds like ... ?

[2] First, Nazi Germany did not start a war to demonstrate their national power, they started it because they felt they had an obligation to look after the welfare of "ethnic Germans". Thus, they reclaimed the Rhineland, pulled the Austrian and Sudetenland Germans back into the fold, and then started expanding east (Poland) in order to start realizing his goals of autarky, a closed economic system which could provide its own food , manufactured goods, and markets for both. They did this because they perceived the lesson of WWI was that imperialism did not work. Hitler went to war with France and England as a pre-emptive measure, and against Russia because he felt he also needed some of the land which the Soviets had grabbed for farm production.

Another reason for qualifying war as only "arguably" more fascist is that England, France, and Kaiser-era Germany were all basically fighting over their imperialist aspirations in WWI, and the Soviet Union and China also started a few wars. Were they fascist? Using this aspect of the Sadly, No author's definition of fascism, it might be difficult to find a country which would not qualify. Can anyone state the significance of the United States, Mexico, and 1848 in this context? Anyone? Bueller?

[3] These are over-represented in the Wiki articles thanks to the efforts of Chip Berlet and a few self-identified Marxist editors. I found that if I attempted to mitigate some of their more eggregious errors, my edits were promptly removed without explanation. When I started a wholly new section, they moved it to someplace completely unrelated and then watered it down. They view their sources as unassailable while claiming that the Austrian school of economics is too marginalized to be taken seriously. Wikipedia is like politics: a small special interest group or a majority can introduce and enforce errors.

Liberal Fascism? Never heard of it, can't be true

Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has drawn the ire of both the Crooked Timber and the Sadly, No gangs, as well as many other left-leaning reviewers. Their refutations consist mainly of calling Goldberg a stupid fascist; the general approach is to assume he's obviously wrong, beneath answer, and therefore only to be mocked. I have yet to find one who takes on Goldberg's actual arguments, much less his strongest arguments.

No matter the quality of Jonah's book, the bottom line is that there is no meaningful separation between fascism, broadly understood, and historical progressivism, broadly understood [1]. Both are rooted in the desire to use the state as the primary if not sole institution for improving the common good. How many assumptions are rolled into that worldview? A common understanding of and agreement to "the common good"; the agreement that "rugged individualists" (classical or neoclassical liberalism) are the enemy; that it is both possible and desirable to standardize production, employment, organization, goals, means, thought, and culture (a return to the security and surety of the Middle Ages, when the Church provided the centralization); a belief that the state, no matter how intrusive, is either benign or decidedly beneficial, but only when it is in the proper hands (and those are easily identified by party affiliation); that progress only comes as a result of intentional design, forcefully implemented (e.g. you don't use incentives to reduce pollution to acceptable levels, you simply ban it and introduce very harsh sentences for transgressors). There are also the non-assumptions: the means by which the state achieves these goals are non-controversial, never to be mentioned, "police state" is a term reserved for the means only when the opposition is in control.

I haven't read Goldberg's book, but I still find it remarkable that the Progressives can not reflect on their own views of how governments -- such as the present Bush Administration -- try to frame their policies and consider how the early to mid 20th century was no different. Yes, Iraq was our ally while we were fighting a proxy war against the Iranians, and likewise the Talibani and al Qaeda troops in a proxy war against the Soviet Union. When the focus of those efforts shifted, so did the rhetoric of the executive branch.

Likewise, Germany was the most socialist state in all of Europe when the Nazis started winning elections [1]. They didn't run on a "Repeal Socialism" platform because it never would have gotten off the starting line. They ran on a "Get the foreigners off our backs" platform, but retained every bit of the socialist central planning tendency that by that time was ingrained in every German. One need only look at the 1920 platform, which includes elements of land redistribution, social welfare, abolition of rent and usury, nationalization of trusts, pension expansion, and free education along with all of the anti-semitic and racist nonsense. Hitler liked to think of his theory as a third way, charting a course between English liberalism (which he called "international finance" or "Manchesterism") and bolshevik communism; he considered both to be of Jewish origin.

Prior to Hitler's ascension, Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini had come to power. The dominant view in the US at that time was not that these were evil regimes, but that they were experimenting with new forms. The real watershed moment in the 20th century came not in the Depression or WWII, but during World War I. The socialists approved war funding in Germany, causing Lenin and Mussolini to declare the International to be dead. The US started experimenting with industrial planning boards, Mussolini (one of if not the leading socialist in Italy) began to question whether the internationalist plank in the socialist platform was worth keeping, and Lenin took advantage of the chaos in Russia to assume power. A few years later, Mussolini took advantage of chaos in Italy (much of which he created) to seize power and build his variant of socialism; he and Lenin were mutual admirers. Fascism is named for the fascio, a symbol of both power and unity; in this case, unity of Italian workers, who Mussolini would lead through the necessary capitalist stage that was required to precede the socialist stage. Soon thereafter, in the wake of the post-war, reparation-fueled inflation and in the midst of the world-wide depression, Hitler came to power with promises of restoring pay and prestige to artisans and small farmers. Both of these models - Italian corporatives and German autarky - were the new way forward, along with the experience with industrial planning, which Roosevelt drew on to create the National Recovery Administration. Free markets -- "Manchesterism" -- were out, and state cartelization was in.

The exchange between the Europeans and Americans was not one way, nor was it limited to the corporative. The dominant theme in American politics at that time was Progressivism, underpinned by Taylor's Scientific Management. This was a direct offshoot of both large, finance capitalist enterprises, and the scientism of Comte. It came to infect America at large when Louis Brandeis brought Harrington Emerson to the stand in the 1910 Eastern Rate Cases. They argued that rate increases were not necessary, that more scientific planning could improve the efficiency and therefore profitability of the railroads. It touched off the Efficiency and Technocracy movements. The intellectual leaders of these movements -- Taylor, Emerson, Gilbreth, Brandeis, Croly -- became cultural as well as political icons. Gilbreth's biography even led to a popular movie, Cheaper By The Dozen. Lenin, thrashing around for an organizing principle, adopted Scientific Management as the basis for Soviet planning and control. Yes Virginia, the organizing principle behind GM was the same as the organizing principle behind the Soviet Union.

It was only in the dynamics of World War II that Italy and Germany became the enemy -- and then only after they broke the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact! It is only in the undynamic, one-dimensional model of left-right politics that they an be viewed as anti-progressivist. Yes, Hitler was against liberalism, but he was against liberalism in its classical meaning. Yes, Mussolini's Black Shirts fought against the socialists, but only because he wanted to accelerate the revolution and take their power, not to deny their ideas. It is naive to reason that since Americans were fighting against Hitler, his ideas were opposite Roosevelt's; that since Hitler was fighting Stalin, then their theories were polar opposites; that since Mussolini joined Hitler, their theories were identical and diametrically opposed to socialism. Even the Progressives today draw parallels between Bush and Husseini policies, yet they fail to recognize that political opponents in the present might not have been ideological opponents in the past [3]. The world is much more complex than that: it is said that special hatred is reserved for the heretic, not the pagan, and this is no less true for the political alignments and propaganda campaigns of World War II than it was in pre-Renaissance Europe.

But no, it's easier to say "Hitler started a war and killed Jews and is generally regarded as evil, and Hitler fought against the communists, and communists are leftists, therefore Hitler was a right-winger, and laissez faire capitalists also are against communists, therefore the more capitalist you are, the more right-wing you are, and therefore the more like Hitler you are." It's a neat syllogism that simultaneously affirms your morality and confirms the immorality of anyone who doesn't embrace your assumptions of state benevolence and planner omniscience. And it threatens the use of this syllogism to call into question its premises.

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[1] By "broadly understood", I mean that it doesn't enlighten anyone to define fascism as, "an ideology opposed to progressivism," and vice-versa. The conclusions are assumed by such a definition.

[2] I doubt anyone wants to argue that the Soviet Union was more socialist, but I will concede that point if made and would include the qualifier, "democratic", to "state".

[3] Incidentally, Saddam is popularly considered to be right wing and fascist. However, Saddam was a member of the Baathist party. Baathists are socialists who are against foreign intervention. It stems from pan-Arabism. What party had its roots in pan-Germanism, stood against foreign intervention, broadly adopted socialist principles, but fought against Marxist-bolshevist socialists?

Shorter Ezra Klein

Everyone who disagrees with me is immoral, stupid, or insane.

Perhaps he might try a pledge?

I don't feel tardy

I think the exchange below reveals a problem with the blogging form. People were quick to respond, so quick in fact that I think they forgot to stop and think about what they were reacting to (I'm frequently guilty of it myself [1]). Writing is better than conversing for developing complex ideas. Blogging is better than print media because it's interactive. But sometimes, blogging comes awfully close to being like conversation: so interactive that complex ideas get distilled to pablum.

Godwin's Law, anyone?

This is my paraphrase of an exchange between Brad Delong (BD), Daniel Davies (DD), and Tyler Cowen (TC). MF is Milton Friedman, DA is David Asman (an interviewer).

DA: What say you about the Patriot Act?
MF: The sooner we can get rid of it and out of it, the better.

BD: MF is against the Un-Patriot Act.

DD: MF is lying. Liberal economists aren't intellectually honest. Don't ask how I know, I just do.

TC: No, I'd like to know how you know. For example, did you talk to them about it?
DD [from the MR comments]: TC didn't talk to me about my post. I might have meant something different than what I wrote.

DD's comment is right, his words might differ from his thoughts. Unlikely as it seems, he might have been joking, signaling, countersignaling, acting strategically, etc. In which case he affirms TC's point: we should state the basis for our claims when we claim to know what other people "really" mean, especially if those claims are opposed to what they themselves say they mean. But if TC is right and DD agrees with him on this point, it seriously undermines the other part of the exchange:

MF: Kerry's plan is bad.

DD: MF is pro-Republican. I know because he signed the statement.

How does DD know that MF is not joking, acting strategically, or acting on some other motive in this case? Because people always mean what they say? Interesting Ouroboros.

While Delong and Davies were locked in a debate about debating, Cowen's proposal stimulated a heated exchange between Davies and a swarm of Friedman defenders. [2] The resulting comment exchange (as you may have read by now) lacked reflection. It even included this curious statement:

MH: TC [but not DD!] is claiming to have mindreading abilities.

Now, since it was clearly the case that DD was making claims to know what MF "really" meant, and TC who was asking for evidence, the accusation is aimed at the wrong target. Huben is smarter than that; in fact, he himself has rightly called for Tyler to produce evidence in this exchange. I attribute Mike's misfire in the MF/DD debate to an overdeveloped desire not only to combine his trademark rhetoric and site-promotion, but also and perhaps mainly to get in a point in the debate while it was still going.

I too was at first tempted to accuse Tyler of invoking the "Nuh-uh, prove it" gambit, but after going through the linked articles and trying to understand what he was getting at, I realized that he was saying that it would be good if people provided actual evidence when they made claims of intent which were divergent from their public statements ("really want"). By "personal anthropological evidence", he meant that anything would do, even a casual conversation.

I'd like to propose a new research convention. Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I'd like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration.

Rather than engaging in the Friedman debate, Mike's comment is an adult version of the mid-schooler's playground "Nuh-uh, #$%" [3] retort. And my claim is not so much that this is Hubenesque as it is blogesque. The quick exchange, the desire to participate in the game, the pressure to avoid being "late to the party" (as I'm sure you must have surmised about this post) drive blogging to be more like conversing (or, in this case, yelling) than like a modern Battle of the Books.

Take a look through the comments on some of the popular blogs and note how most of them appear within a day or two of the original posting. That's understandable for a posting that covers some current and fleeting event. But very rarely does anyone comment after that even when the original posting is of a timeless nature. I find that unfortunate.

The only exception of which I know is my wife's site. Her site is educational rather than polemical, so perhaps it is a special characteristic of that type of blog. Also, she intentionally cultivates the practice not only with the recent comments listing, but also by posting weekly summaries of the archives from one and two years ago. Why does nobody else do this? The lack of backward reflection makes blogging like the Mission Impossible assignment tapes that self-destruct after one playing.

And yes, I hate the fact that the Haloscan comments on this site do not link to the original post. I only put them up there for the backward reflectiveness, but it turns out to have been completely pointless because you can't see what they link to. Maybe one day I'll grow up and make a real website out of what started out to be a personal experiment.


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[1] See how Brad Delong rightly dressed me down in this exchange. Ah, if only I had read the linked article instead of the post title.

[2] In the end, I had to admire Davies for sticking it out, but the lists of Friedman's criticisms of the GOP (Ben and Patrick Sullivan, IIRC) were never explained away, and DD never provided the requested evidence of obfuscation. Personally, I'm not familiar enough with MF to know whether DD was correct, but by the psuedo-syllogism offered above, I'd say that even if the facts were on his side, he hasn't produced them. Barkley Rosser gets the prize for only person actually engaged in substantive, civil debate.

[3] By "#$%", I am mean the classic, quick, thoughtless, playground insult of my generation, used by me here for brevity of example/paraphrase. I suspect that the modern invocation is "bitch" or worse. Mike's actual name-calling and rhetorical loading in this instance included the following names or insinuations: hoot (interpret how you will), pretension, fraud, pomposity, arrogance, elitism, clairvoyance, sycophancy, ineptitude, and dogmatism. Getting all of that within two paragraphs is impressively efficient, but comes at the expense of actual substance.