No, 'm not Goldberg, but I do read read National Review Online.  I've refrained from offering any substantive comments about the book because I haven't read it yet.  However,  I don't think Goldberg's basic thesis that fascism, which like communism is a bastardized form of socialism, belgongs on the left as opposed to the right is untenable.

I also thought Bramwell's review was long on invenctive and short on substance.  Bramwell's arguement that 20th century liberalism effectively destroyed the progressive movement is completely wrong.  Progressive Democrats like FDR simply began calling themselves liberals during the 20's
after being destroyed by Harding and Coolidge in landslide elections.  It was a rebranding similar to what Krugman and others are trying to do today, calling themselves progressives instead of liberals because of the precieved negative associations with the word.

Of all the possible problems with Goldberg's arguement cocerning the intellectual
ancestry of the current american left, detailing a link between progressives of the first twenty years of the twentieth century with FDR and the New Deal is not one of them. The overlap between personell and idealogy between the two eras is too overwhelming be overcome by simply relying on a cherry picked quote by the mercurial Lippman, who as Goldberg pointed out, was a liberal who wanted FDR to assume a dictatorship.      

" I don't think Goldberg's basic thesis that fascism, which like communism is a bastardized form of socialism, belgongs on the left as opposed to the right is untenable."

There are, of course, leftist elements in fascism, as people who JG uses as sources have explained intelligently.

"Of all the possible problems with Goldberg's arguement cocerning the intellectual
ancestry of the current american left"

Goldberg only needs to do this because of the amount of liberalism he himself agrees with.

I find Nietzsche ponderous, usually unpleasantly so. I don't think of tragedy as particularly life-affirming, I find his rejection of 19th century Christianity unconvincing, and I find his interest in eternal recurrence (idea that our universe repeats itself over and over) and his writings on Ubermensch so much meaningless science fiction. His rejection of Platonic "universals" made sense to me as broader rejection of polytheism, and it arguably dovetailed well with his criticisms of Christianity. Overall, he seems like very bright man with some interesting things to say, but as much fun to read as Thorstein Veblen. Making him into anti-Christian villain ("God is dead") or anti-moralist requires oversimplification of his work, which defies oversimplification. His invocation by Goldberg was laughable.  

In what little I've read, amongst a lot craziness he was astonishingly perceptive about certain things.

People capable of flashes of brilliance and insight have much to offer even when they espouse fundamentally unsound ideas because they force you to think about things that you would otherwise ignore and make you come up with brilliant thoughts of your own to counter theirs. Any thoughtful person would be thrilled to have friends like Nietzsche.

US Civil War was fought between industrial society and agricultural society. Defeat of agricultural society set off intense anger and even outright hate that has never gone away, simply changed in various ways. Given that US Constitution gives rural states more power than urban states in electing presidents and in electing Senate, and given that much of midwest has joined south to become agricultural in primary orientation, that hate of urban and industrial society and trends within it has become fashionable. Confederates and their sympathisers used to say that "South will rise again!" and it has, and their fury at urban and industrial society never went away, only deepened. "Flyover country" now runs your country, and they haven't stopped resenting industrial (and now post-industrial) segments of your country for 150 years.  

In rural society, children helped with farming and looked after parents when they got old, while in urban industrial and post-industrial society, government provides pensions. So in rural society, abortion has always been evil, while in overcrowded urban societies, abortion makes sense. In rural society, people go hunting to bond with children and even to get fresh food, while in urban society, guns get used to commit crimes. So in rural society, gun rights seem more important than any others, while in urban society, gun rights seem undesirable. In rural society, homogeneity rules, so having one state religion would seem desirable and constitutional bans on establishment of religion seem ungodly, while in urban society, diversity (and associated tolerance of differences) rules, and so choosing one religion seems like path to social disorder. So it goes in issue after issue, and since notion of "states' rights" has been killed by both sides of political spectrum, rural and urban societies cannot simply coexist, one has to dominate.

When one side was firmly in control, other side could only complain. But now that US has become closely divided between urban and rural domination, both sides have learned to hate one another and to fight without quarter for domination. "Partisanship" won't really go away because true basis of partisanship can be tied to demographics. Franken-style hate by urbanites of rural dwellers has only begun, inspired by takeover of country by rural America, but traditional "conservative" hate of "liberals" won't be going away any time soon. No one generation has to die off for this to stop, but one side has to win decisively. That won't happen any time soon.

I've read all of Al Franken's books, and I have never seen any hate from him on rural people, or even people who vote Republican.  He makes fun of the pied pipers who lie to them and lead them on, but even then, he's angry at them, he doesn't hate them.

I keep seeing this, as if somehow Franken and Michael Moore are comparable to people like Ann Coulter, and it just ain't so.

sierra tango foxtrot uniform

You have important point. Maybe Franken and Moore only feel anger at rural folks and their political leaders rather than hate. True hatemonger must be me.

No, have you ever even read books like "The Truth, With Jokes"?  Find me one passage, one line, where his rhetoric is directed at rural people, or even the people that voted the Republicans in.

You won't find it, and don't take it personally that I disagree with you.

sierra tango foxtrot uniform

I was being serious. Maybe I hate rural people and misinterpret anger of others on that account. I do not take it personally that you disagree with me, or even that you may be right.

I intend no sarcasm in this post or in my previous post to you.

каждый дрочит как он хочет...

sierra tango foxtrot uniform

Although you impress me with your ability to write in cyrillic letters (how did you do that?), there was no need to be rude. Self-reflection doesn't always amount to masturbation.

But if you prefer, I will suggest that main difference between left-wing hate for righties and right-wing hate for lefties has always been that left-wingers like to think of themselves as civilised while right-wingers don't bother. Franken and Moore wouldn't stoop to hate because that would be beneath them, so intolerant, so morally incorrect. Instead they make jokes about low intelligence and moral infirmities of their victims, because that strikes left-wingers as more high-minded and righteous. But when lefties ruled under Clinton, they were just as willing to kill "enemies" (Waco, Ruby Ridge), just as willing to compile lists of people to sic IRS on, just as willing to bomb foreign countries without any need for airtight intelligence (Sudanese pharmaceutical factories anyone?), just as willing to suspend constitutional rights, and just as willing to wage war on drugs. And now that Hillary Clinton looks like she might have problem beating Barack Obama fair and square, she proves herself just as willing to place race card.

How dare I suggest Franken hates anyone! He wouldn't stoop that low! Anger, just righteous anger! And then you point finger at me.    

But when lefties ruled under Clinton, they were just as willing to kill "enemies" (Waco, Ruby Ridge)

Ruby Ridge occurred in 1992 when Bush was in office.  Waco happened just weeks into the Clinton administration, and was run by lower-level law enforcement officials.  Claiming that they emanated from higher-level policies of the Clinton administration is ridiculous.

I do fault the Clinton administration for giving the law enforcement officials who committed crimes in those cases a pass, particularly Lon Horiuchi, the sniper who killed Lori Weaver.

just as willing to bomb foreign countries without any need for airtight intelligence (Sudanese pharmaceutical factories anyone?)

How many Sudanese factories?  Perhaps you haven't mastered the use of the English plural yet.  I find it pretty hard to equate one bombing, however ill-advised, with the invasion of a non-hostile country.  And note the grief that the Clinton administration took, after they were out of office, for not using wholesale cruise-missiles against bin Laden.

...note the grief that the Clinton administration took, after they were out of office, for not using wholesale cruise-missiles against bin Laden

* Other than fantasizing about how it would be cool to "scare the shit out of al Qaeda" by sending in ninjas. No joke.

Yes, they took grief at the time, and rightly so, for using cruise missiles as assassination tools.  But they took grief "after they were out of office" for being too careful, and not simply flattening  anyplace where a tall man in a turban was observed.

But they took grief "after they were out of office" for being too careful, and not simply flattening  anyplace where a tall man in a turban was observed

Clinton's mistake was to launch a few cruise missiles at bin Laden and, even after it became clear that the attack was completely ineffectual, not doing anything else. (Not, it seems, because he was especially reticent about "simply flattening anyplace" when the mood struck him. He had no problem, for example, dropping every bridge over the Danube in Belgrade for no good reason.)

He had no problem, for example, dropping every bridge over the Danube in Belgrade for no good reason.

He did it because the Republican congress wouldn't allow him to support NATO any other way.

He did it because the Republican congress wouldn't allow him to support NATO any other way

Under Clinton, US didn't invade Serbia, you just bombed them into submission, and Europe approved so it was all right. Was Serbia "hostile" to US? Did atrocities claimed against Serbia turn out to be real?

How many cruise missiles did Clinton fire at Afghanistan on day he attacked Sudan? He did use cruise missiles wholesale against bin Laden and anyone who says otherwise slept through those years or hated Clintons so much they can't see straight.

Waco was personally approved by Attorney General Reno, and she wouldn't have done it without approval from higher up. Do you remember how many children died? Ruby Ridge may have happened on Bush 41's watch, but cover-ups happened on Clinton's watch.

At Ruby Ridge?  I dunno, two or three?

What is the big fucking deal about Ruby Ridge?  Other than a bad situation gone wrong, I never quite got why people got in such a twist about it.

People simultaneously criticize Clinton for not being perfect, and yet loathed him because everything he did was wrong.  

sierra tango foxtrot uniform

OK, so I grew up in Northern Idaho ("North Idaho" to the locals), not far from the area that became known as Ruby Ridge. My dad met Randy Weaver in a bar when the guy was running for sheriff of our county, passing out "get out of jail free" cards as part of his campaign. From what I remember, much of the attention that got focused on the Ruby Ridge and Waco raids was framed in the context of a larger narrative about Government vs. Individuals (who were variously described as True Patriots, Eccentric Hermits, or Dangerous Nutcases depending on who was holding the microphone). It seemed like this was a bona fide media meme in the early 90s, at least in the coverage that made it up to our little hamlet. Stories about the Michigan Militia, the Aryan Nations and the Freemen (not those guys, these guys) were getting pretty regular play, and there was a consistent hum of New World Order conspiracy discussions among those who seemed otherwise pretty level-headed (I'm speaking in a relative sense here, since many of the locals could have been characters drawn straight out of Vineland).

A large part of the reason that the Ruby Ridge fiasco got stuck in the collective craw of the libertarian right was simply the timing. The militia movement in the West was gaining speed around that time, largely due (I think) to a kind of paranoia "power vacuum" that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union. All those who had grown up fearful of the great external enemy began to focus their mistrust on their own government. Of course, many of those people had always hated their government, but without the mitigating factor of the Red Menace, they became able to dedicate all their energy to resenting The Man. The fact that globalization was also picking up speed at that time played right into the fears of a New World Order destroying American sovereignty and freedom. Obviously, not everybody viewed the events through this lens, but I think that the overall zeitgeist helps explain why Ruby Ridge became such a poster child/lightning rod for those who were, shall we say, "concerned" about government oppression.

Another reason that Ruby Ridge is such a consistent talking point in discussions like these is that it's probably the best-documented example of the U.S. government laying siege to a family household, which is kind of a classic image of totalitarian oppression. Sure, the Feds had reason to arrest Weaver, but their heavy-handed tactics and mismanagement turned what could have just been a serious fuck-up (shooting a kid who shot an agent) into a tremendous over-reach of Federal power (changing the rules of engagement and shooting whoever the hell they wanted). The siege validates the black helicopter fantasies of the chronically paranoid, but it also has the potential to make regular Joes a little uneasy about government power. And so it gets used as an example when people want to point out that the U.S. government isn't exactly an unequivocal friend of the little guy. Ruby Ridge - It could happen to you!

-secretpath

Everything that needs to be said has already been said, but since no one was listening, we must begin again. -Andre Gide

Secretpath answered your question better than I would have. Ruby Ridge was about right-wingers feeling like left-wing government would hunt them down and kill them, rather like left-wingers seem certain that right-wing governments will do that to them.

So now, again, where did you find cyrillic letters for your previous post?

I just hit left-alt-right-shift and I rotate between latin, Български, и Русский...  I recommend this site to start also, Windows Vista has vastly improved the internationalization features so shockingly absent in XP.

My biggest gripe is that it does not have the 'lambda' character commonly used for 'Л'.

sierra tango foxtrot uniform

Thank you. Obviously I should get Vista already.

Ruby Ridge was about right-wingers feeling like left-wing government would hunt them down and kill them

There are people who were so right-wing that the Bush administration looked left-wing to them.

True enough, just as there are people who were so left-wing that Dennis Kucinich looked right-wing to them. Funny thing, when you go far enough to right or left, some paths lead around to other side, and people can be so right-wing that they can seem left-wing and vice versa.

Really? After reading about Buckley's critique of Bush I thought he was at odds with the editorial slant of his magazine. I wouldn't have expected that if most of them were hand-picked by him. I believe you, it's just not something that I really followed. I gave up on NR about five or six years ago, and haven't really paid any attention since.

Now he is, but obviously not at the time. I'm not an expert on the inner workings of that magazine, but over time Buckley moved left and became more and more enamored with aligning NR with the Republican/neocon establishment. So he got rid of the immigration restrictionist O'Sullivan and replaced them with the group you see now.

The difference between communitarians and liberals lies in their differing attitude toward individuals.  Liberals are more focused on the rights of the individual, and feel that the good of the community will come out of respect for them, whereas communitarians are more focused on the good of the community and will sacrifice individual rights for its sake.  Where communitarians and liberals share common ground is in their view of what the good of society involves.

While conservatives make much ado about individualism, they are just as willing as communitarians to sacrifice individual rights to what they consider to be the good of the community.  The place where they differ from communitarians is in their attitude toward political power: conservatives believe in power for power's sake, whereas communitarians believe in it for what it can accomplish.

Liberals are willing to make common cause with communitarians so long as the communitarians can be restrained from their potential excesses against human rights.

You're slightly misconstruing communitarianism. What Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel (these are the most prominent communitarian philosophers - though none of them like the label) argue is not that the rights of the community should necessarily be placed above that of the individual - individual rights, individual pursuits and so on are all basically good things to them. Their problem with liberal philosophy, and especially with libertarianism, is that none of the liberal goods (choice, self-determination, etc) make much sense when they are defended solely in terms of the lone individual. It doesn't make much sense to talk about being free unless you also address the way people are formed and relate to each other, and the liberal ideals don't make much sense outside of the Western society that has learned over the last couple millenia to prize the volition and development of the individual. It's not a matter of individualism being bad and community being good; it's that you can't have one without the other.

What it amounts to politically is hardly even illiberal, much less "excesses against human rights." Charles Taylor ran as a social democrat a few times in Canada, and Sandel (and I'd guess the same is true of MacIntyre since he's big on Aristotle) is a republican in the ancient Greek sense. Any of that still entails a market economy and a hefty dose of individualism. On a public policy level, all you're going to get is social democratic measures, for reasons not all too different from the reasons provided by social democrats.

Here's a good (albeit lengthy and a little bit jargon-y) article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Communitariansim

"Liberals are more focused on the rights of the individual"

Which rights, exactly? Certainly not speech, association, property, or bearing arms.

No true Scotsman would ban speech, association, property, or gun rights.

Speech?  Not if you think money equals speech.

Association?  Not if you think institutionalized racism is free association.

Property?  Not if you think taxation is theft.

Bearing arms?  Not if you think you have the right to nuclear weapons.

Otherwise, liberals do a lot better job of maintaining individual rights than conservatives do.

Exactly, liberalism claims to be in a favor of individual rights, but in reality it's the imposition of a particular set of values, the primary one being equality, administered by the state. So your 'right' to political speech is subject to buearacratic oversight for the sake of some abstract liberal notion of 'fairness'; you have the 'right' to associate, as long as you don't associate in ways liberals object to, etc.

What you're claiming to be unique about liberal rights to free speech is no different than the right to property.

Small government conservatives and libertarians are fond of the idea that besides enforcing property rights, the government should stay out of the economy. But property rights, far from just saying "this is my house" and "this is my money" are actually heinously complex things. In the business world, you can say that property rights are rules that define who has claims on the profits of firms. This general claim leaves open the issue of different legal forms of property rights (e.g., corporations vs. partnerships), the relationships between shareholders and employees, businesses and local communities, etc. The specifics of property rights is furthermore, a continuous process, not something to be decided and left alone -  organized groups from business, labor, government agencies, and political parties try to affect the constitution of property rights. Groups of workers can win the right to certify new workers, effectively determining who gets to profit from what skills, intellectual property laws determine what parts of software can be patented and used proprietarily, etc. So it doesn't mean anything that social rights have a bias towards equality; all property rights have a bias towards some ideal distribution of wealth or some ideal conception of how people should behave (you could say property rights in the US try to encourage people to act in entrepreneurial ways). There is no such thing as a neutral state or a set of neutral rights/laws.

(you could say property rights in the US try to encourage people to act in entrepreneurial ways)

...but you'd be wrong.

Your what kind of "right" to free speech do you have if you aren't allowed to shout fire in a crowded theater?  It's a hypocritical travesty!

In middle of Reagan administration, evil liberals were redefining words and rewriting history just to make you look bad?

Not me, per se, but otherwise yes. Howard Zinn published The People's History of the United States in 1980 (I read it a few years later), which marked the start of popular revisionist history accounts. That's about when complaints about "dead white males" became part of the lexicon, and when it became fashionable to elevate personal failings of the Founding Fathers over their obvious achievements.

The word "fascism" as commonly used nowadays is an epithet used for favoring the excessive abuse of government power, and has little to do with what the fascists actually stood for.  

As for what the Nazis wanted, remember that the word Nazi is a contraction of the National Socialist German Workers Party.  The words "Nationalist" and "German" refer to a party which places the interests of Germans ahead of others and contrast sharply with the Communist Party of Germany which was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union.  Naziism was left-wing in its desire to overthrow the established powers, but profoundly conservative in its desire to remove international influence on Germany, including the government of the Weimar Republic, and return to something more like the prewar period.  As a conservative movement opposed to both the established leadership and the available left-wing alternative, it is probably best described as populist.

Other Nazi polices platform were not random.  The Nazis were against Christianity because it was controlled by the Italians, not Germans.  They favored health food because they wanted Germans to be better than other races.  They favored territorial expansion because Germany had been shrunk in WWI, leaving it much smaller than the state they wanted restored, and leaving quite a lot of Germans no longer living in Germany.

The Communists of the Soviet Union, despite being a movement of the left, shared a lot in common with the Nazis, and ended with a result which looked somewhat similar.  They also advocated Socialism for the benefit of the workers, and their internationalism was always an internationalism with the Soviet Union the first amongst equals.

Where Goldberg's scattershot attacks seem to me to hit their mark is when he attacks Political Correctness.  In consigning political thought to a graph, many dimensions are circular.  Feminism and Mulitculturalism have become so extreme in being intolerant of intolerance that this has made them models of intolerance themselves.  Yet Goldberg can't seem to tell his hits from his misses, and imputes their failings to liberalism as a whole.   As Bramwell points out, for each characteristic of Naziism, if any liberal anywhere anytime has ever had that characteristic, he believes this to be sufficient proof that liberalism as a whole is fascist.  Neiwert wins his debate with Goldberg about whether Liberalism or Conservatism is closer to Eco's excellent characterization of Fascism, but only because Conservatism really is a little bit closer.  It's clear neither of them has the least idea what Eco was talking about.

Goldberg is at core a pseudo-intellectual version of Ann Coulter.  Having had the fascist epithet applied to him as a Conservative, he is motivated by nothing more than the desire to throw the same epithet back at the liberals.    The Paganism of Naziism which Goldberg spends so much time trying to tie Liberalism to is not a core value of Naziism, but was arrived at as corollary of Nazi nationalism. Had the Vatican been in Germany,  instead of being pagan, Naziism would have been strongly pro-Catholic.

US Conservatives are also socialists in practice, but they hate themselves for it.  The core ideological principles of Conservatism are a Christian religious conservatism, nationalism which is externally aggressive, anti-socialism, support for the established power structure, and a belief that democracy and capitalism together solve all problems.  The core principles of Naziism were nationalism which was aggressive both internally and externally, and Socialism and opposition to the established power structure.

There was nothing particularly wrong with the Fascist ideology.  Indeed, it was correct in that much of the problems of Germany at the time were due to the reparations imposed on it after WWI, and the willingness of the German establishment at the time to go along with them.  The problem lay with the extremism of Fascism, and the failed state nature of the Weimar Republic which provided a vacuum of police power which had the likely result of most extreme faction gaining power.

I really think you've hit the nail on the head by mentioning Lou Dobbs.  The fascist ideology has been so conflated with the common definition of being prone to the abuse of excessive government power that to speak of a "moderate fascist" seems an oxymoron.  Yet were it possible to speak of such a thing without a near guarantee of being misunderstood, Lou Dobbs could reasonably be called a "moderate fascist".  His nationalism is isolationist, but otherwise he departs the political center in a direction which if followed very, very much farther past where he is results in something very close to Naziism.  Certainly he departs the political center in a direction which points much closer to Nazism than US Conservatism in general does.

a belief that democracy and capitalism together solve all problems.

Leave out the part about democracy and you're right.  Maybe you don't remember all the triumphal talk about "this is a republic, not a democracy" after W stole that election in 2000.  Conservatives are essentially authoritarian, and it shows in their favor for dynasties.

Lou Dobbs could reasonably be called a "moderate fascist".

His corporatism has been overshadowed by his jingoism recently, but it puts him squarely into Mussolinist fascist territory.  Hating W isn't quite enough to make you a leftist.

Conservatives are essentially authoritarian, and it shows in their favor for dynasties.

That's a real intresting position to take at a time when the Democrats are likely  to nominate someone simply because of her last name.  Hillary's whole current strategy seems to be  to hide behind her husband while he does her dirty work for her.  Do you really think someone with her skeletons and personaility would of stood a prayer of being elected as a Senator from New York if her last name was
plain Rodham?

And that doesn't even mention the Kennedys, who are apparently assured liftime
seats in Congress no matter how many people they kill nor how many times they are arrested.    

That's a real intresting position to take at a time when the Democrats are likely  to nominate someone simply because of her last name.

If Democrats were as dynastic as Republicans, she wouldn't be facing the tough haul she's having against Obama.  Contrast it with the cakewalk that the scion of the failed first Bush presidency had against McCain.