I have just had the good fortune to have run across the set of ideas that are going to help me in properly contextualizing that thing which Nulan has accused GWBush of, which is 'war socialism'. It comes from Jonah Goldberg of the LA Times and National Review. His new book, Liberal Fascism, contains the thread of context. I think that it is likely to be the third and last intellectual history I read.
The first was Paul Johnson's Intellectuals which didn't help me a whole lot other than heat up my interest on the subject and set me up for the second which was Cornel West's American Evasion of Philosophy. Since then, and without any assistance from much more than at long last disgust with the kind of bohemian The Nation was turning me into and a realization that I had babies to feed, I have saved myself from Leftist foolishness. And with the small regret that I have yet to get any decent material into me on the philosopher with hiking boots,
What I believe that I will find in parsing Goldberg's history is some clue as why black nationalists have largely turned progressive and embraced identity politics instead of embracing patriotism and embraced the conservative idea of the republic and the mainstream. That is because of affiliations between their intellectual heroes, duBois in particular and his affinity for William James who is back through Rousseau one of those who believes that we can do what we want to. Of course I'm not stating this properly - I have yet to read the book and Hewitt's interview with Goldberg is flooding me with associations.
American liberalism is a totalitarian, political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying, but it is definitely totalitarian, or holistic, if you prefer, and that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and your outer appearances all have political salience for liberal fascists.
Yes, yes, yes.
What I've always been talking about is liberal overproduction, but when it becomes clear of the ambit of power of the will to power of the Left, it puts everything in clear perspective. I heard it in Michelle Obama's UCLA speech, I heard it in the arguments of activists for the cause of Gay Marriage, I hear it in the ambitions of the Greens for planetary planning and I hear it in identity politics. It is the urge towards a holism, it is the totalitarian temptation, it is the attempt to soaking politics through and through with 'solutions' for every aspect of life.
Who is the war socialist? That's easy. The socialist at war, and that was FDR who wisely moderated his ambition, but Walter Lippman wanted him to go further, and his descendants and a number of others desire highly to create a new statist religion which makes the citizen a new man in a new well-wrapped universe. Goldberg shows the ways in which FDR was like Hitler as well as the way GWBush's compassionate conservatism was.
If there is a discussion to be kicked off here which is of particular interest to me among the many things that will flow from this is the extent to which my neoconservative bent towards nation-building following in the tradition of Wilson, apparently a liberal fascist of the first order, should find its theoretical limits. This will force me to reconsider the differences between neoconservatism and paleoconservatism in foreign policy and upon which principles I should guide intervention yet stay away from protectionism and isolationism.
Goldberg's Liberal Fascism also will get us closer to a workable definition of American Fascism that we really never resolved in this old debate. But it is a sterling warning against what Americans buy into for the sake of unity, and few topics can be as contemporarily pressing as that.
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