Jonah Goldberg: Bolshevik Conservative
Reader comment on item: Fascism's Legacy: Liberalism

Submitted by Elilhu Davison (United States), Jan 11, 2008 at 07:32

Jonah Goldberg's representation of twentieth century American liberalism as rooted in fascism is a remarkably artful misrepresentation that willfully ignoring intellectual history. Goldberg is talented rhetorician and polemicist but a poor historian of philosophy. Moreover, it begs credulity to ignore, for example, the history of the enlightenment or Wilson's and FDR's anti-colonialism. For that matter, such unappologetic conservatives as William Safire and George W. Bush have self-identified their "democracy campaign" as nothing less than a later-day Wilsonianism.

To say that liberalism is rooted in fascism because Mussolini had once been a socialist says that Goldberg's ...neo-conservatism must be rooted in Communism. Look at the roots of prominent neocons: Irving Kristol is a former Trotskyist and Josh Muravchik is a YPSL alum. ...Jonah Goldberg ...therefore Bolshevik Conservatives? ...

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