(Except Goldberg hopes for greater 'civility'!) So I can report with a clear conscience that Liberal Fascism is one of the most tedious and inane-and ultimately self-negating-books that I have ever read. And by the time I made it to the final pages, I was wishing that I had been invited instead to review a multi-volume history of farm subsidies.īut I made it all the way to the end-and to the atypically succinct coda, in which Goldberg expresses the hope that his efforts will serve the same noble, lonely cause that William Buckley aided on national television in 1968 when, after Gore Vidal called him a 'crypto-Nazi,' he flung the word 'queer' at Vidal.

By page 300, I was bored out of my skull. By page 200-there are 405 pages of actual text-offense was beside the point, and I was mentally imploring the author to get it over with. I'm mildly curious about the logic by which a writer who insists that Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were fascists thought that the original subtitle violated some canon of judgment or taste.) For about fifty or sixty pages, I confess, I took the bait, and did my best to work myself into a lather. (For all his supposed fearlessness, though, he pulled one haymaker of a punch: the original subtitle of the book was The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. Goldberg no doubt believes that he has written something that will provoke, traduce, and infuriate liberals everywhere. What would our vast assortment, our infinite variety, of locks tell them about what our society was like?

I suppose he might as well have invoked ball bearings or pulleys, but he used the example of locks: he asked us to imagine our civilization in ashes, and its ruins being combed over by white-coated researchers, like something out of a Twilight Zone episode. He was, of course, a historical materialist, and so he was trying to get us-his jejune and perhaps incurably indoctrinated charges who took capitalist existence at face value-to understand that ordinary things, everyday objects, were actually particular products in the great chain of production of a society, and signified something about the organization and the needs of that society. In graduate school I had a professor, a famous Marxist, who devoted a significant portion of a lecture to the subject of artifacts.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg