In other words, he came to his understanding of fascism by following bands of racist white losers in the Idaho woods while using some Marxist tract or other as a field guide to identify the various species he encountered. He's made his career hyping the terrible threat from the Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations and American Nazi Party and so like the bureaucrats in Office Space who think TPS reports are the most important thing in the world, he can’t seem to grasp that they’re pretty trivial. What you might miss from Jonah's link, though, is the the way Goldberg abruptly ended the discussion by dismissing me as no longer worth his time: Well, it's true that I previously had a brief running exchange with Goldberg, largely in response to my review for The American Prospect. I’ve dealt with Neiwert’s arguments before, so I won’t waste more time on him here. Heaven forbid I adopt a Marxist mode of analysis, but it’s fair to say that for them to treat Liberal Fascism respectfully would be like a Luddite welcoming the cotton mill. In nearly every respect they are both caricature and embodiment of precisely the mindset I attack in my book (a mindset Professor Paxton claims doesn’t exist). Neiwert and Bertlet are deeply invested in their cottage industry of spotting fascism and Nazism in the Republican Party, talk radio and elsewhere. So forgive me if I take all of this gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth over the polemical – as opposed to scholarly – nature of Liberal Fascism with a grain of salt. I would like to think that HNN didn’t know what it was getting into when it started this project. The slanderous and absurd bile in some of these initial responses – comparing my book to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and me to a Nazi propagandist – runs completely counter to the spirit of open debate. Let me say up front that selecting David Neiwert to “introduce” the discussion – without telling me in advance – is pretty strong evidence that this symposium was intended a priori to discredit the book rather than honestly discuss it (usually, introducers at least pretend to be evenhanded).
Indeed, according to Goldberg, the entire enterprise was tainted by the fact of my participation: Paxton speak for himself in his own response, except that, as I'll explain, Goldberg's evasive reply is largely in line with the kind of exchange I've previously had with Goldberg. Goldberg really only deigns to respond in any depth to one of his critics - Robert Paxton, whose essay on Goldberg's scholarly flaws is damning indeed.
When we first published that series of historians' critiques of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism at HNN last week, we awaited Goldberg's response.
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