I’ve never met Jonah Goldberg, the conservative writer for the National Review and the LA Times. I rarely highlight his work, and in those rare instances in which he mentions mine, he dismissively refers to me as “this guy.” We’re not, in other words, close, and I’ve never been the target of one of his unpleasant diatribes.
There is, however, something of a parlor game surrounding Goldberg, in which we, the progressive audience, take a degree of delight mocking him for his odd, often incoherent, political commentary. I’ve reveled in the parlor game myself, from time to time. This game intensified, of course, once people learned that he was hard at work on a book called, “Liberal Fascism,” featuring a smiley face with a Hitler mustache.
After years of anticipation, the book is now on bookstore shelves. Salon’s Alex Koppelman chatted with Goldberg about the book and the worldview that shaped it, and published the interview today. It’s a fascinating read, which is difficult to excerpt, but there were a few exchanges of note. This is probably the most important:
AK: Related to your definition, at least as I read the book, was something that’s been controversial about it. Especially because of one of the earlier iterations of the subtitle, [”Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods”] there’s a perception that your argument comes down to things like both Nazis and liberals being proponents of organic food. Is that how it works? Because the Nazis liked dogs and I like dogs, I’m a Nazi?
JG: No, no. I mean, I try to reject that kind of thing … I don’t believe that liberals are Nazis; I believe that if Nazism came to the United States it is entirely possible that liberals would be at the forefront of the battle to stop it. So would conservatives. I’m not trying to do any argument ad Hitlerum in this book.
But what I am trying to do, at least in the chapter that you’re talking about, is show how — [take] Robert Proctor, who wrote an award-winning, widely esteemed book called “The Nazi War on Cancer.” He points out that this organic food movement, the whole-grain bread operation, the war on cancer, the war on smoking, that these things were as fascist as death camps and yellow stars. They were as central to the ideology of Nazism as the extermination of the Jews. Now, that is not the same thing. And I want to be really clear about this: That is not the same thing as saying that banning smoking is as morally disgusting and reprehensible as trying to wipe out the Jewish people. You can say that something is as much part and parcel of an ideology and not say that it is as evil.
I read this a few times, trying to better understand the point Goldberg hoped to make. I’m afraid I’m at a bit of a loss.
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