IN THE FASCIST SPIN ROOM

A couple of days ago, in a post about Jonah Goldberg's intellectually bankrupt but disturbingly influential Liberal Fascism, Jesse Taylor made a good point about what's going on in politics now:

... what Goldberg has done is provide intellectual cover for a growing meme: Obama is the leader of a new fascist revolution....

The Goldbergian view of fascism ... is that the marriage of any measurable popularity whatsoever to any state action whatsoever outside the boundaries of Reaganite conservatism is de facto fascist. The point was ... to ... provide a way to brand any popular Democrat or liberal as the handmaiden of evil....

The term has been neutered, left to describe nothing and everything at once and to turn even the most basic of campaign traditions - rallies, fundraising, sloganeering - into the drumbeat of tyranny....

That's absolutely right -- after two straight presidential elections in which the GOP argument could be boiled down to Look at the freak! Everybody hates him!, Republicans are now facing a candidate who -- horrors! -- inspires genuine enthusiasm, and their response is a unified cry of "FASCISM!!!" And there's nothing more to their warning cry than that. No one's liberties need to be curbed. No new instruments of power need to be created. Fascism is just nonconservatism (i.e., any amount of government intervention Ayn Rand wouldn't approve of) plus popularity. That's it. That's the full right-wing definition of the term in 2008.

The only question I have is which approach the Republicans would have used if Hillary Clinton had been this year's Democratic nominee. I think if she'd won easily by February or March, they'd be going with Look at the (hippie lezbo) freak (with fat ankles)! On the other hand, if she'd managed to win after that long primary fight, having become a hero to blue-collar whites, Republicans would now be saying that it's typical fascist behavior for a would-be dictator to whip up frenzied crowds of angry workers.

And all those PUMA women -- they wouldn't be right-wing heroines, courted by John McCain's female surrogates; Goldberg himself would be telling us that they, like Hillary, are fascists because they're feminists, "people who want to reduce the independence and sovereignty and influence of the family," people who are obsessed with "breaking into the bunker of the nuclear family, cracking its shell and getting the state in there." Republicans would be mining their life stories for evidence of fascist feminism (e.g., living in a commune forty years ago) and brandishing it on Fox News on a daily basis. And Goldberg would probably reissue his book with its original Hillary-baiting subtitle.

(Cross-posted at the Carpetbagger Report.)