Liberal Fascists!?!?!?

Speaking of popular and well done blogs, Tom Devine is a local blogging icon. One site (Mary Cary's called AboutAmherst) indicated that Devine "was blogging before the word was invented." I bet he's pissed he didn't think if it. Anyway, he is a devotee of a worldview/ philosophy called "objectivism." It's not a view I share, but it’s interesting enough.

Devine's blog (tommydevine.blogspot.com) caught my eye, not because he was running down W.E.B. Debois (that's an artifact of his "objectivism," which was championed by thinker Ann Rand - or was it Rant? he, he, he). It was Tom’s reference to a column by Tom Sowell, a Hoover Institute fellow whose columns are printed in the Springfield paper.

Sowell was flacking for an author that had written a book about what he called "liberal fascism." Obviously it’s a great title because its target market will gleefully snap it up if only for the title. In fact, it is a classic example of what philosophers call “vicious intellectualism.”

Sowell, and the book’s author are in this effort at least, political rhetoric entrepreneurs, not serious thinkers. I assume each is annoyed that conservatives get called fascists all the time and they don’t like it. Despite the fact that they both have called liberals commies, they seem eager to be able to call them “fellow travelers” of both extremes on the ideological spectrum.

Here’s the thing, though. Neither liberals nor conservatives in American politics can actually be called commies or fascists with a straight face. Both extreme ideologies deny and defame a fundamental principle that American libs and cons share and hold dear; the principle of individual rights and the fundamental sovereignty of the individual in society. Communism and Fascism are radical communitarian ideologies. They deny individual autonomy as both a social and political concept.

Therefore, Sowell and the book’s author appear to be counting on the fact that most Americans are not aware that both of our major political parties are ideologically liberal, which is to say, proponents of the notion that the best society is one in which individuals have maximum individual freedom, but limit themselves at the point where such freedom would hurt others or contribute to excessive disorder. We’re all liberals; we just have an intra-ideological disagreement about how best to achieve the goals of a liberal society.

So, calling American leftists fascists is stupid, and quite dismissive of the intelligence of one's audience. However, there may have been a valid ulterior motive for these authors. If it is an intellectual non starter for folks to call liberals fascists, it’s just as foolish to call conservatives fascists, or either of them, communists. So, while lefties like me take pleasure in revealing a weak conservative effort to further denigrate the philosophy of the American left, the logical result of this debunking is that we have equally condemned all the libs who love calling American conservatives fascists.

Son of a gun, Sowell made a positive contribution to thought today.