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

(Continued from page 1)

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Since Goldberg passes up the opportunity to deny that his book is what he, Goldberg, once said it is, presumably that description remains accurate:

The working title is Liberal Fascism. It's a two-part argument. In the first part, I plan to trace the authentic intellectual and political history of fascism, starting from the reality that Mussolini's fascism was conceived as an improvement upon socialism, not a departure from it. Also I'll explore the liberals' longstanding distortion of fascism's actual nature in order to delegitimize the Right. In the second — and much larger — part, my plan is to discuss how many aspects of modern Left-liberalism actually resemble aspects of authentic fascism.

Of course, it's always possible that by now the book has become the touching memoir of a deaf-mute missionary and his pet wildebeest in the African Serengeti of the 1920s. We'll just have to wait and see.

Trivia note: Goldberg alludes to once branding me a "hall monitor." The memory of that seven-year-old insult would appear to burn hotter in Goldberg's breast than in my own. The occasion was a column I wrote pointing out that Goldberg had recycled without attribution an error-ridden essay about the founding fathers' sacrifices that had been floating around at least since 1956, when Paul Harvey read it on the radio. (Nobody knows who wrote it.) Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe who also recycled the material, was punished with a four-month suspension. You can read my column dinging Goldberg and (if you scroll down) the response in which Goldberg branded me a "hall monitor" by clicking here.]

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

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