Conservative non-fascism

 Well, Jonah Goldberg has written this grotesque Prussian Blue of a book Liberal Fascism. The left blogosphere has spent a fair amount of time showing just how stupid a book it is; most notably Dave Neiwert has rolled over its arguments with a garden weasel until thoroughly aerated. His stuff is really wonderful: not only is it a magisterial takedown and 10-count pin, but you'll come away knowing a lot more about the actual history of American and world fascism. But then, Dave is an experienced Journalist who has actually covered American Fascism face-to-face from its Idaho compounds. Jonah works for National Review, which is close: he may have even shared a conference room or a restaurant booth with them, but Dave has seen them with their woad and cartridge belts, slapping their faces to prove they have a blush reflex. Orcinus is on my blog shortlist.

Still and all, in a certain way it's weirdly beside the point. Jonah's argument--that fascism is really a thing of the left and not of the right--makes you wonder just what he's after. ""Gosh, Artemisia! That book really has convinced me! Fascism is a phenomenon of the left! From now on, I'll"

1) Ignore it when A Republican tries to destroy the Bill of Rights, because Republican just can't be fascists?

2) Not support aid to the poor or multiculturalism or programs against global warming even if I believe they're good, because liberals are for them and liberals are descended from Hitler?

3) Suddenly convert to laissez-faire capitalism because Hitler didn't like it?

4) say 'Jonah Goldberg is a genius!" at every conceivable opportunity?"

Jonah Goldberg's book, I submit, would not last 15 minutes at a table in Jimmy's (ground zero for dialectic at the University of Chicago). The obvious answer to his argument is "that depends on what you mean by 'liberal', 'fascism', and 'conservatism.'" Schluss, ende and everyone goes back to lamenting their love life. 

It's not just a bad argument, but a bad kind of argument. 

In a world steeped in scientific argument, it's pre-Newtonian, scholastic in the worst way. While Dave cites pages of evidence about how fascists behave, Jonah fixates on what they are. And what they are, is liberals and leftists. FDR, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin: all fascists, and all leftists. There are no conservatives or rightists in the fascist list. 

The core of his argument is simple: the right believes in Freedom, the Rights of Property, and no social infringement on the rights of property. And since Fascism entails control by the State, the Race, or the Leader of property, Fascism can't be conservative, and must be liberal. Right?

Yes, Jonah falls back on libertarianism, equating it with conservatism--which is understandable, because it's the only component in the modern congeries that is the Right that can rise to the level of political philosophy. But there are two big problems with that approach: The first is that libertarianism is all hypothesis and no praxis, it having never been tried. An operational argument with a libertarian always entails more and more theoretical constructs, without a single case history. It makes calling someone like that a 'conservative' hard to credit-. 

But the second problem is that that is simply not what modern conservatism, or the modern Right, is. The current Right, with its Christian-derived homophobia, opposition to evolution, and overall cultural reaction--as well as the corporatism and nativism that mixes self-contradictorially in the current movement--if this is based on laissez-faire capitalism, it resembles a spinning plate on a thin spine rather than a city on a hill. There are, as I've said before, three principal blocs to the modern Right: patrimony Republicans, who view the purpose of the Republican Party and the conservative movement as the preservation of their status and privileges; the Christian Right, who believe its purpose is to enforce revealed doctrine; and (as I call them) the crazies, who dissatisfied with American government and American society and want to remake it on a more philosophically pure basis. 

The first group essentially wants all of what they've got--not just the parts that are honored by libertarianism. They want the absolute security of their property, but they also want the soupçons of aristocracy, ,immunity from the law of the commoners, everything that they can get their hands on--and all the pleasant consequences of a nation with a prosperous middle class. (All without paying for it.) The second group organizes the nation on entirely different lines that combine the theological and the tribal, where the rewards of goods, of respect and of authority have nothing to do with the free market, but only the worship of the true god of their people and the adherence to the laws of the tribe handed down from the TV set atop Mt. Sinai.

And yet these parts are immune from fascism because of the blessed adherence that the radical purists nestled in the chain-smoking bosom of Ayn Rand, possess. Why is that? 

And despite the vast array of theories that involve government or social hegemony over Property, every system that is not absolutely pure zero is mutualist socialism. Even if it is perpetrated as a mater of course by people bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Right's present constituents. 

It's an easy position to take, as long as you're keeping to theory. Anything other than 0 is infinity: there's no difference between somebody saying take 1%, or (the Christian) 10% and the total communistic confiscation of all private property. And it doesn't matter that that purity has made it so that it has never been used in a political unit as large as a city (unless you count that colony on the Moon run by Mike the Computer), because that is not what it's for. It's there to confer that mystic essence on a movement so that, no matter how it acts, it 'is' not fascist.

This begins and ends with definitions. By concentrating on essence, he can ignore what people do--which eliminates the whole actual disciplines of history and political and social science, replacing it with delightful arguments from first principles--whatever they are. Thus David spins his wheels demonstrating how fascism acts--and therefore how to identify it in that murky place called the real world--while Jonah archly, with the superiority of a schoolman responds about what fascism is--and how you can't tell without the proper catechization by holy Mother Galt. Jonah has pulled a card out of his hand, and with liquid paper and nail polish laboriously changed the diamonds on it to hearts, and then triumphantly displays his flush. The fact that we've seen him do it is irrelevant: See? Flush! All the same suit! I win!" *does victory dance, mercifully, while still in chair.* 

Clearly the intent (as a commenter whose name, dammit, I have forgotten over at Orcinus pointed out) that the purpose is to devalue the word, to destroy its power. In that holy cause, bad definitions may actually be of more use than good ones. 

There's only one problem: you can't de-power it.

Let us go then, you and I, down into the street where we can smell the cordite, the oiled boot leather and the burning wallpaper, Jonah wants to pull us away from the rising stench of burning history and the hecatombs of the 20th Century, from the reality that people can still smell on their hands and which makes them want to vomit--or to change the world. Fascism has a reek about it. Like in Eisenstein, calling the maggots writhing in bad meat dead flies' eggs won't do it: your physiology won't let you. It will not be defined away. The smoke rises up forever. 

And if fascism really is Of The Left, then the bow of burning gold and the arrows of desire are to be thrust into Jonah Goldberg's Nacho Libre-like hands. It will be thus the business of the National Review to see that a list of minorities are not demonized to excuse the arrogation of power; civil rights never be abridged even on  the most reasonable of grounds; that concentration of power be dashed from the hands that desire it. It's not a fun job. 

AAnd when we're in the realm of what people do, people will ask, when the War against (Liberal) fascism rent a hole in the center of the last century, where were the Armies of Right? Where were the 35th Libertarian Fusiliers, and the armies of Aynrandistan, and the Howard Roark Escadrille? According to Jonah, only the liberal socialist fascist mutualist hordes rose up to shut the ovens down and clothe the mouth of Hell

Well, it might be that they didn't fight because they don't exist. 

And that may be because what you have to do, if you're going to oppose fascism, is to distinguish among you those who say they agree with your basic tenets, like social justice, and use it to justify--just temporarily, you understand--suspending democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties in order to create a better society. You have to slap the mouths of your friends who start talking about an abstraction as a living body and real people as disease bacilli or spirochetes or something other than human beings. You have to betray your loyalty to those you hang out with, publicly admit you were wrong, and live for the rest of your life looking at old photographs in which you were happy, but smelling that whiff that takes all the joy out of everything.

You have to admit that the great experiment over there that embodies your principles is not a success, that the show trials are monstrosities, that the misery is unending and that the dead were murdered. you have to grow up a bit, then, ignore the blithe theoreticians who devalue human life and truth. You have to see that even the best dreams can be used to get power, if you think that anything other than the human face is the most important thing. Then you can defendagainst fascism.

Jonah's at a disadvantage, because instead of a movement of multitudes and generations to give power to working people, women, black people, Jews, immigrants, homosexuals, and everybody else, he has this really neat idea. And this really neat idea doesn't have the human maturity to break out of purity and abstraction and take the cudgel from the hand of your friend and stand between him and the wretch on the ground.

Because, you know, even if Jonah is right (and he isn't), even if Fascism is Of Te Left, that may just mean that the people best suited to guard against fascism are the people who have sat at table with it, drank his kvass, listened to his jokes and his black stories told with a laugh, and got up with a real good whiff in their nostrils. Maybe it takes the people who saw what their ideologies could be turned into and learned from it--maybe those are the sentinels you want.

If--as is far more likely--fascism is a thing of both the right and the left, maybe we'd better not trust the side who has not learned that the enemy of my enemy can still have empty eye sockets crawling with maggots and a cudgel dripping with human misery. Maybe the Right will get up out of the booth it shard with its Stalin and its Soviet Union and repudiate him, and maybe  we will build Jerusalem in America's green and pleasant land. It would be nice.

In the meantime, I encourage Jonah Goldberg to take his hands from the keyboard and press them to his face and take a good, long smell.