Seriousness

The guy who wrote this book complains that liberals haven't taken his work "seriously." Let that sink in for a few minutes.

David Neiwert begs to differ. Now, David acknowledges what many of us felt as an initial reaction to Jonah's book, including the good folks over at Sadly, No!:

Then there's the larger point of the effect of taking a book like this seriously: It's such a ludicrous premise, it deserves not serious examination but scornful ridicule. Treating it as anything but a joke gives it a patina of seriousness it shouldn't get, and just gives Goldberg's meme that much more air.

But David raises an interesting response to that reaction:

So let me be clear about where I'm coming from regarding Goldberg's book. My chief credential for reviewing it is that I understand fascism from the ground up: I was a reporter and newspaper editor for some years in northern Idaho and western Montana and covered the racist right folks who set up camp in our neck of the woods in the 1970s, particularly the Aryan Nations and Posse Comitatus; that work extended into the 1990s, covering groups like the Montana Freemen. These people were all, by any definition of the word, fascists, and not only did I cover their rallies and their crimes (I used to get phone calls from Robert Matthews, the leader of The Order), I also interviewed many, many of their followers. I also became familiar with the academic study of fascism and its permutations at that time. (Secondarily, I'm not a historian, but I'm more than familiar with the milieu; my last book was a piece of history, written journalistically, that nonetheless underwent rigorous peer review from historians in the process of being published.)

Fascism isn't just a theory for me, and it's certainly not ancient history. But it's clear that for Goldberg, this is largely a semantical exercise, a chance to bend definitions, to play rhetorical tit-for-tat with liberals who bandy the term about too freely (and they do exist). In other words, for the most frivolous reasons, he's purposefully muddying the public discourse when it comes to the very real problems posed by the existence of very real fascists.

It needs to be pointed out that there are a number of groups -- not just well-known organizations like the ADL and the SPLC, but church-based groups like the Center for New Community and community-organizing efforts like Not In Our Town -- whose primary mission entails helping the public deal with the very real issues created by the ongoing presence and activities of these groups. The key to their efforts entails educating the public, and having a clear understanding of the nature of the beast is an essential predicate of that.

What Goldberg's book means to them is that, when they try to identify real fascist organizations (particularly skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Klan) as operating within their communities, the mainstream conservatives who constitute Goldberg's audience -- only a fraction of whom will have actually read the book (Jonah insists therein, you see, that he's not claiming that all liberals are fascists, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn't being serious), while the rest will mostly have absorbed its title -- will more than likely just dismiss them: "Nah, it's you liberals who are the real fascists!"

In all seriousness, I urge you to read David Neiwert's post in its entirety.