Let’s start with the title of “Liberal Fascism.” You derived it from H.G. Wells, who you point out was not only a science fiction author but also an important public intellectual responsible for coining the term. When you look at science fiction, there’s often an underlying assumption that mankind will be unified in the future. Is this fascist aspect of science fiction also an inheritance from H.G. Wells?
I think what makes the best science fiction, what distinguishes good science fiction from bad science fiction, is that the technology and the futuristic setting are mechanisms by which we highlight certain eternal truths … There is a fundamental human desire to recreate the feeling of the tribe. In fact, that informs my total view about fascism, communism and all of the other forms of totalitarianism, as they are fundamentally reactionary in their desire to recreate with the state that sense of belonging and meaning that in primordial times we got from the tribe. It’s essentially modern tribalism. In a lot of science fiction, you get this desire to imagine a future where there is this Parliament of Man, and we are all one human tribe amidst a lot of alien tribes scattered throughout the universe. There is a fascistic impulse in that desire; there’s a utopian desire to recreate that sense of belonging to a Brotherhood of Man that comes out in a lot of science fiction.
You drew an important connection between fascism and the social gospel of the American progressives, as well as Hillary Clinton’s “politics of meaning.” That leaped out at me, since after quoting Gentile about “the sacralization of politics,” Giordano Bruno Guerri wrote in “Fascisti” that “Fascism was the first experiment in institutionalizing this new secular religion since the time of the French Revolution.” Isn’t this Italian perspective on Italian Fascism practically identical to what you’re saying about the broader fascism and its connection to Clinton and the progressives?
Yeah, I wanted to get into a lot of Eric Voegelin and all that in the book, but my publisher kept saying this is highbrow enough; we don’t want to scare away readers. I’m very much in the Voegelin camp about how what unites what we call modern liberalism, progressivism, socialism, all of these isms, is the desire to immanentize the eschaton, the desire to sacralize life through politics, technology and the state’s manipulation of technology. That was explicit in a lot of the Fascist intellectuals around Mussolini, and it was explicit in a lot of the ideologues around Hitler as well.
Some of your critics focus on the fact that you’re not an academic, so should the fact that no book like this has been written in the 60 years since the end of the Fascist regime be taken as evidence that you’re just smoking crack, or is it an indictment of the academy?
Since I’m currently not smoking crack, I personally take it as an indictment of the academy. I plead absolutely guilty that I’m not an academic. I mean, how am I going to deny that? I think there’s a certain guild mentality that comes into play where a lot of academics try to shoot the messenger and say the substance of what I have to say doesn’t matter because I don’t carry the right guild card in my wallet … As Tom Wolfe said in the blurb for the book, it’s the greatest hoax in modern history that we were convinced that Fascism and National Socialism were phenomena of the right.
If libertarianism is the opposite of communism, and fascism is founded on a cult of action, can’t we then conclude that inactivism is the polar opposite of fascism?
Yes! I think that the fundamentally unfascistic insight that conservatism and libertarianism share is the idea that their political philosophies are only partial philosophies of life … That is the unfascistic thing, we see politics as only one small sphere of life.
You mentioned that writing “Liberal Fascism” has made you more libertarian. How did that come about?
One of the things I’ve really come to appreciate is the importance of dogma. There need to be some taboos, some fundamental dogmatic roadblocks. One of the things that writing this book has reinforced in me is that it is always safe to bet that government involvement is a bad idea.
You talk about the temptation of conservatives towards the end of the book. Is it imperial neoconservatism, heroic strong-government conservatism or compassionate conservatism that represents the greatest fascistic temptation to conservatives?
I would say that it is both heroic conservatism and compassionate conservatism, which are essentially the same thing. Heroic conservatism is compassionate conservatism 2.0. Or maybe heroic is 1.5, and Huckabee’s conservatism is version 2.0.
This column is an excerpt; the complete interview with Jonah Goldberg can be read at Vox Popoli.
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