The Corner on National Review Online
Praise for Liberal Fascism [Jack Fowler]
Charles Murray declares: “‘It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion,’ Jonah Goldberg writes near the beginning of Liberal Fascism. My first reaction was that he is engaging in partisan hyperbole. That turned out to be wrong. Liberal Fascism is nothing less than a portrait of 20th-century political history as seen through a new prism. It will affect the way I think about that history—and about the trajectory of today’s politics—forever after.”
One of the biggest problems with the “moderate” mindset is that it automatically rejects any conclusion that, by its standards, seems immoderate. This is a particularly stupid and dangerous mindset, given that history is little more than a record of the victories and defeats of one sort of extremism or another.
I’m not wowed by Jonah’s title, by the way, because it opens the door far too wide to discussion of the definition of fascism, which is far slipperier a question than most realize. Liberal Tyranny would have been at least as accurate, and far less amenable to debate on terms.
As for Fowler, “I started out stupid but Jonah opened my eyes” may seem pleasingly openhanded, but if that is the case, why has anybody been paying attention to a stupid man for that part of Fowler’s life leading up to his ocular expansion?
And why do some folks make a virtue of the style of thinking that creates such stupidity?
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