Liberals attack! (Sort of. Not.)

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Dec 17, 2007 at 18:03:57 PM MST

Check it out, Sadly No! has screen shots of Jonah Goldberg's new book, which basically calls modern liberalism a form of fascism. Now we've seen this, er, line of "thought" in these parts, too, and boy! don't you think our local wingnut wished he had thought of this line?

The quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

What's funnier yet, as Goldberg desperately paints himself the victim of a totalitarian movement of grade-school teachers, his brethren found a story about a conservative Princeton student receiving death threats, and eventually getting beaten, for his political views. Glenn Reynolds:

I guess it's part of the growing climate of fear in America.

Oops! The whole thing was a hoax! The damn student sent his own hate mail, then beat himself up!

Is there a better synecdoche for the fantastic and paranoid plot Goldberg, Reynolds, Budge et al. are cooking up to make it seem that conservatives are an oppressed minority, despite the fact that they control our government and our economic system?

Dave Budge is an Idiot

by: Matt Singer

Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 14:03:02 PM MST

And Dave Budge compares progressives to Nazis and suddenly it's a matter of context.

Let's go to the tape:

Jay Stevens highlights this quotation:

Ever since David Sirota attempted to define the difference between a liberal and a progressive I have made the assertion that modern progressivism is little less than both National Socialism and Fascism.

So, yeah, let's check the context, which is a post introducing a review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. Now, with a name like that, it's hard to know how we misplaced the context (probably similar to how we failed to notice the nuance of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods.

But here's another problem -- by all indications, Schievelbusch is making a far more reserved argument than Budge. Schievelbusch does two notable things.

First, he starts by noting that, "To compare is not to equate." Budge does equate -- he says that progressivism is "little less" than fascism. In other words, it is nearly the same.

Second, Schievelbusch notes that during the reign of Roosevelt there were "no secret police; the Constitution remained in force, and there were no concentration camps; the New Deal preserved the institutions of the liberal-democratic system that National Socialism abolished." In comparison, Budge flat-out argues that he sees "Roosevelt as the single biggest destroyer of The Constitution in the history of the country. What Roosevelt did to basic protected rights makes G.W. Bush look like a piker in comparison."

In other words, Dave Budge, supposed reasonable man of the right, is calling a man who typically is looked up as one of the five greatest Presidents in American history an atrocity. And he's classifying anywhere between one in three Americans and one in five as being "little less" than Nazis.

Dave Budge wasn't taken out of context. He flat-out equated Nazism and progressivism. If he didn't mean to, he ought to apologize. If he meant to, he's an idiot and a scoundrel.