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Jonah, Where Art Thou?Is the author of Liberal Fascism caught in a conservative paradigm shift?

By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, March 20, 2007, at 6:29 PM ET

Is Liberal Fascism a casualty of The Enemy at Home?

This past September, I shared with readers Doubleday's catalog copy for two spring books whose titles and descriptions suggested to me that mainstream conservatives were starting to mimic the right-wing minstrelsy of Ann Coulter—a hypothesis I was later able to confirm with respect to one of the books, Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home, which blames 9/11 on liberalism. My review, which described the D'Souza book as "loopy," was, as best I can make out, one of its more favorable notices. Conservatives, perhaps because they fear being associated with D'Souza's arguments, have been at least as dismissive of his book as my fellow liberals; in National Review, for instance, Stanley Kurtz called it "badly wrong" and "seriously misconceived," and in the New Criterion, Scott W. Johnson said it was "crude and sophomoric." (D'Souza answers his conservative critics here.) I take the right's evisceration as evidence that, despite D'Souza's walk on the wild side, the majority of mainstream conservatives continue to regard Coulterism as anathema. D'Souza probably isn't helped by the conservative movement's growing sense that George W. Bush's presidency is not turning out to be its finest hour. This is a moment to reflect and regroup, not to indulge outrageous arguments.

In other words, it's a dreadful time to publish the other Coulterish-sounding book that graced Doubleday's spring list: Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.

Even before the post-election Zeitgeist shift, Liberal Fascism was looking like what in Hollywood they call a "troubled production." Liberal blogger Roger Ailes (not to be confused with his conservative doppelgänger at Fox News), who has been tracking the release of Goldberg's book like a bloodhound, reports that its publication has been delayed at least four times. First it was to appear in 2005, then March 20, 2007, then Sept. 18, 2007, and now Dec. 26, 2007, which eliminates the possibility that Santa will tuck it into your Christmas stocking. (According to conservative blogger Ed Driscoll, the book was also once scheduled to be published in April 2006 and then August 2006, which would bring the delay count up to six.) Goldberg first announced that he would write Liberal Fascism ("my plan is to discuss how many aspects of modern Left-liberalism actually resemble aspects of authentic fascism") in March 2003 and said he was looking for a researcher. In November 2006, Goldberg was once again looking for a researcher, this time "to help get my copious footnotes and the like in order" and to perform "some serious research-related stuff to do as we head into galley mode." Now it's March 2007, and Goldberg's editor, Adam Bellow, tells me the book has been delayed until late December because "it's extensively footnoted and it's sensitive material and we want to thoroughly vet it." You think it's easy documenting that Hillary Clinton baked Toll House cookies for the Wannsee conference?

Bellow edited D'Souza's book in addition to Goldberg's. Is the harsh reception to D'Souza a factor in delaying Goldberg? Bellow says not. Indeed, he says he's rather pleased with the response to The Enemy at Home. "The fact that Dinesh got attacked as bitterly from the right as from the left was thrilling," he explains. "He challenged an important and hardened dogma on the right that there's no distinction between radical Muslims and moderate Muslims." Maybe so—most of the conservative criticism strikes me as more sophisticated than that—but D'Souza has replaced it with an important and hardened dogma that the United States should get over its hang-ups about becoming a theocracy. This is progress?

Although Bellow says politics was not a factor in delaying publication of Goldberg's book, he concedes that releasing Liberal Fascism on the eve of the primary season has its advantages, because by then the political environment will be more partisan:

Although the ground of the culture war is shifting somewhat due to political setbacks on the right, and it's not exactly clear what the emerging themes are going to be, what mix of domestic and foreign policy issues is going to be uppermost … I think it can be assumed that at least some of the tried and true themes, the traditional themes in both domestic and foreign policy, will be reenergized.

Translation: By January, the mud will be flying! Surely somebody seeking the Republican nomination will be saying something comparably stupid to Goldberg's notion that contemporary American liberalism owes a debt to Il Duce. And if the candidates won't, there's always Rush Limbaugh.

[Update, Mar. 22: Goldberg responds here. Money quote:

My book isn't like Dinesh's latest book. It isn't like any Ann Coulter book. It isn't what the Amazon description says or what the Economist claims it is. Or what Frank Rich imagines it is. It is a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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