With all the Nazi talk clouding the health-care debate these days, you might be interested in the reaction of the man who wrote Liberal Fascism (with its cover featuring a Hitler-mustachioed smiley face).
In a brief article for the latest print version of National Review, Jonah Goldberg tackles the reductio ad Hitlerum this way:
The simple truth is that I do not think it is in the cards for America to go down a Nazi path. I never said otherwise in Liberal Fascism, either.
It’s important to keep in mind that, as bad as various other avowedly fascist regimes were, only the Nazis did what they did.
But Goldberg does more than dismiss the Hitler hyperbole:
As I make clear in Liberal Fascism, the obvious and pressing threat is not from a Hitlerite-Orwellian dictatorship but from a Huxleyan namby-pamby mommy state. That sort of system could seduce Americans into becoming chestless subjects of the State in exchange for bottomless sefl-gratification and liberation from the necessity of adult decision-making. Yes, there’s a danger that such a society could then be susceptible to some darker vision that lionizes the lost manhood of a half-forgotten past. But, by that point, this would be America in name only, if even that (“U.N. District 12” has a nice ring to it).
