Liberal Fascism: the review

Another year, another byline: The Post's Sunday books section published my review of Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" yesterday. As you can tell, I liked the book a lot. Goldberg has a brief and appreciative response on his new book-blog.

As I wrote, my central quibble with the book is in its lack of foreign-policy nuance. An explanation: Goldberg talks a lot about the Progressive echoes of fascist militarism, with various "crises" serving as convenient sparks for charismatic leaders to rally the country to some higher national purpose (and bigger government). But unfortunately missing is any discussion of how aspiring non-fascists should respond to real crises -- moments that may often require bold leadership and/or national unity.

It's a question both deeply philosophical and immediately pressing that Goldberg could have really given some ink to. Goldberg certainly has a sense of the difference between genuine statesmanship and neo-fascist blustering, but he gives precious little account for it.

As I wrote, an unfortunate ommission. Then again, as my brief forrays into professional idea-communication have already taught me, there's never room for everything.

Osama bin Laden, Uomo Fascista

Christopher Hitchens sounds off in today's (Wednesday's) Post on why "Islamo-Fascism" is an apt and descriptive moniker for fundamentalist Muslim jihadism.

It's a fairly good list of how the jihadism and fascism are bad in similar ways, but he completely misses the strongest case for the term out there. To wit: Osama bin Laden says so.

I refer to OBL's latest audio message to his al Qaeda underlings in Iraq, in which he scolds them for pursuing their own factional interests instead of uniting to chase out the infidels and blasphemers. This, apparently, is his explanation for why al Qaeda is getting it's ass kicked at the moment.

Unity, he says, is the answer: "O people, observe obedience and the group, for it is the rope of Allah to which He ordered us to cling."

And then there's this doozy: "Sticks refuse to break when banded together but if they come apart they break one by one."

It's a telling metaphor. Turns out, a bundle of sticks tied together is an ancient image dating back to Roman times. It's name? The fascis. As in, fascism.

There's no coincidence here. The fascis symbolizes "strength through unity," which is the slogan Benito Mussolini picked up early on to define his new political regime. He even used the fascis on his ministerial flag.

Nor, I would suggest, is bin Laden simply picking up on a helpful but isolated metaphor completely detached from his underlying ideology. Fascism has its intellectual roots, broadly speaking in German philosophical romanticism (Hegel, etc.), which postulated a unity of all things completely freed from the confines of Aristotelian logic. That "Unity" -- also called the "Ideal," the "Oversoul," etc -- was considered synonymous with "God."

The God of Islam, of course, is a much more concrete, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. Kind of. Still, as I argue here (and Pope Benedict argues here), radical Islam retains a fairly troubled relationship with good, old-fashioned philosophical reason of the type that Hegel and his successors passionately reject. And that has troubling implications for the standing of the individual in both cases.

Note that I distinguish here between the jihadist, let's-blow-stuff-up strains of Islam and Islam broadly defined. Whether the clear philosophical problems with the former remain problems with Islam qua Islam, I'll leave up to them to decide.

Some might offer that in either case, the God of Islam isn't nearly as down-to-earth as he should be. But perhaps I digress.