Well, luckily I dodged that particular bullet with The End of Secularism by Hunter Baker. I have never met the good Dr. Baker (not to confuse you with his wife who is an actual doctor) but have become friends with him over the years through our participation at Red State and other conservative venues.

So I was quite happy to find that Hunter’s book was enjoyable and very well done (I expect nothing less from Crossway). It is in fact a book I am likely to recommend to friends and family.

Baker’s slim volume is an intelligent brief against the popular “modern” conception of secularism that seeks to keep the religious out of public life. Readable, and useful, for non-academics but interesting for those with a greater depth on the subject as well.

He uses straightforward arguments and language to lay out both the history and the debates surrounding the issue before making his own – in my opinion persuasive – case against what might be called hard line secularism.

Here is a section of the publisher’s blurb that sums it up nicely:

The result of Baker’s analysis is The End of Secularism. He reveals that secularism fails as an instrument designed to create superior social harmony and political rationality to that which is available with theistic alternatives. Baker also demonstrates that secularism is far from the best or only way to enjoy modernity’s fruits of religious liberty, free speech, and democracy. The End of Secularism declares the demise of secularism as a useful social construct and upholds the value of a public square that welcomes all comers, religious and otherwise, into the discussion. The message of The End of Secularism is that the marketplace of ideas depends on open and honest discussion rather than on religious content or the lack thereof.

Two things that are laudatory about this book:

1. It is written in an easy and enjoyable style. More academics should learn to write this clearly and succinctly. It is neither “dumbed down” nor unnecessarily verbose. Understandable for the average reader but deep enough for the academic.
2. It is a great length. Too many books seem padded or are overly dense. Baker introduces the subject well, provides the background, makes his argument and wraps it up. Again, more authors should strive for this sort of presentation. Not everyone has the time or energy to dive into long complex tomes, but we don’t need fluff either. This length is perfect for me anyways.

If you are interested in the subject of secularism or the interaction of faith in the public square you will want to read this book. It can serve as a useful introduction or an interesting argument/debate kickoff for those with more of a background in the subject.

I had the pleasure of speaking recently with Paul Rahe, who is the author of Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocquville and the Modern Prospect (Yale University Press: 2009).

Professor Rahe’s book is the first of three that I will be recommending for summer reading in preparation for the RedState get-together in Atlanta on August 1st. Judging from the covers, this trio might not seem the lightest of reading but fortunately all three authors prove in their own styles that substantive reading doesn’t have to be a long, hard slog. And all three of them have important lessons for us in this lazy, off-election-cycle summer.

Over the months since the 2008 election, conservatives of all stripes have searched their souls and wrung their hands and gnashed their teeth over the apparent demise of our movement. Various proposals to reinvent, repackage and/or rebrand conservatism have been widely offered. My thought is that we might productively, with the assistance of these three excellent books, strive for another “r” word—renaissance.The word renaissance carries a number of meanings. Literally, it means “rebirth.” It is generally associated with the intense interest in classical antiquity that emerged in Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century. But as Erwin Panofsky pointed out in his Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, what we think of as the Italian Renaissance is just one in a long series of encounters with the classical past that continue to this day.

In our current quest, we might find Professor Panofsky’s work instructive. I think we are right to recognize that the contemporary version of conservatism has, at least judging from the results of the last two election cycles, become exhausted and sterile. But it does not necessarily follow that conservatism is dead. It seems to me that what we might do is revisit the past to forge our own vision of the future, one that is suited to the twenty-first century. To return to Panofsky’s example, just because he didn’t paint like Raphael doesn’t mean Cezanne didn’t understand antiquity in his own right. He just responded to it differently.

And so we come to Professor Rahe’s new book. His premise is that in the work of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Swiss and French philosophers Montesquieu, Rousseau and Tocqueville we find the origins of classical modern political theory designed to ensure the liberty and rights of the individual—a movement which is, as Rahe notes, itself yet another reinterpretation of the lessons of classical antiquity.

For those of us not blessed with the kind of rigorous education offered by Rahe and his colleagues at Hillsdale College, the opening section of Soft Despotism provides a thorough grounding in their political philosophy. Through this section I was struck by the aspects of their thought that seems to have particular resonance for our situation today—resonance that for me was most profound in the sections on Tocqueville.

It may seem curious that a Frenchman who was born 204 years ago would have much to tell us about twenty-first century America, but I find Alexis de Tocqueville eerily prophetic in his identification of the cult of equality that characterizes the American approach to democracy. I find him more appealing than Montesquieu and Rousseau—although that may stem from too little exposure to Montesquieu and too much to Rousseau in another context. In any event, Tocqueville has something to say to us, notably:

Without fear, he trusts in his own strength, which to him appears sufficient for all. An individual conceives the thought of some enterprise; this enterprise has in itself a relation with the well-being of society; the idea that he should address himself to the public authority for the purpose of obtaining its help does not even occur to him. He makes his plan known; he offers to execute it; he summons the strength of other individuals to the aid of his own strength; and he engages in hand-to-hand combat against all the obstacles. Often, without a doubt, he succeeds less well than if the State was to take his place. But in the long run, the general result of all these individual enterprises greatly exceeds that which the government would be able to accomplish. (I.i.5, p. 78)

It’s a passage to make you think a bit—it might seem to go against the grain to admit that the State could do some things better, given its enormous resources. But the point is that the greater good is actually better served by the sum of individual rather than collective activity. It requires, however, self-generated effort by the individual.

Soft Despotism is more than historical analysis of long-departed white European males. In the conclusion of the book, Rahe bravely makes a leap that few historians are willing to take these days, and applies the lessons of the past to the present day. For him, these are not dead texts isolated in their own time; they are living documents that we can revisit in order to confront our own dilemmas.

The thing about “soft” despotism as opposed to other kinds of despotism is that it is not necessarily inevitable. It is not created by natural or man-made disaster. It is rather self-inflicted by societies that have come to a point of exhausted surrender to the naturally-expansionist tendencies of the state. In Professor Rahe’s analysis, the United States has arrived at the brink of this abyss. We had thought that the fall of the Soviet Union had created a world in which the trend towards liberty and democracy would naturally evolve, but we were perhaps wrong. Rather than march on towards freedom, the victorious west has drifted in the opposite direction. Complacency has replaced urgency.

Rahe here makes what may be his most powerful contribution. We have on our library shelves tomes that foretold this unfortunate trend, and that contain the seeds of ideas that can help us combat it if we have the will. True, it is a tall order, but not an impossible one. We have an opportunity now that is uniquely our own to revisit the origins of what we understand as conservatism and take our own lessons—not the lessons that resonated in 1952 or 1980 but those that speak to 2009—to heart. We can look at the menace of encroaching government control that manifests itself in ways big and small and seriously consider how this is stifling the spirit Tocqueville so admired.

It is greatly to Professor Rahe’s credit that he has taken this material off the dusty shelves and put it freshly into our hands—and that he has done so with such vigor and passion as well as scholarly rigor.

In the course of our conversation, Rahe emphasized the need for “vigorous local government”—in other words the form of government best suited to respond to the needs of the individual rather than the collective, and so foster prosperity. He pointed out that the social democratic state is an entity that “eats its own seed corn”—it has nothing to plant that will grow in the future. He proposed that two events that have occurred since President Obama’s inauguration illustrate both his thesis of a drift towards soft despotism, and his proposed means to combat it. They are the infamous DHS report identifying potentially dangerous domestic terrorists, and the April 15th “tea party” protests against excessive taxation and government race.

In the first case, Rahe pointed out that the rights and privacy of individuals were being targeted in the name of the collective good. After all, everyone hates terrorists, right? But the people in this report aren’t actually terrorists. They are people who are likely to feel strongly against the policies that result in the social democratic state and so they are “softly” blacklisted not by overt attack, but by the suggestion that such people are dangerous and need to be controlled for all of our good.

Professor Rahe did, however, find “hope” in the tea party protests, which speak to the Revolutionary sprit that forged this country. They were relatively small, local affairs that expressed the needs and opinions of the few rather than the many—needs and opinions that would most effectively be handled by a knowledgeable and responsive local authority rather than a distant, once size fits all central government. They suggested that parts of the populace are still willing to take action and stand up for themselves, rather than surrender to the state. As he concludes, “Let our motto be, as once it was, ‘Don’t tread on me!’ And let our virtue be individual responsibility.” (p. 280)

So, people, Memorial Day has passed. The summer reading season is here. Get cracking, and let’s discuss in August.

When I was a graduate student at George Washington’s Graduate School of Political Management the following exchange happened in one of my classes:

Professor: Does everyone know who Robert Bork is?

Student: Yes, he is a fascist!

Why do I bring this up? It came to mind while watching Jonah Goldberg discuss his book Liberal Fascism at Denison University. This sort of exchange has been witnessed by nearly every conservative in America. If they haven’t been called a fascist of some sort they have had one of their intellectual heroes (Reagan, William F. Buckley, etc.) called one.

Tired of constantly hearing about how the threat of fascism, if not its actual existence, was from conservatism Jonah decided to write a book to correct this glaring popular misconception. And Denison he outlined his arguments for a gathering of college students and what seemed to me like a number of adult Goldberg fans (they actually ran out of books to be signed).

Long time readers will be aware that I am not exactly an unbiased observer in the controversies that have erupted surrounding Jonah’s book. Jonah helped me get my start in online Journalism at National Review Online and I had the opportunity to read Liberal Fascism in galley form.

So feel free to take my opinion with whatever grains of salt you feel are appropriate, but I think Liberal Fascism (LF) is a fascinating, timely, and important book. I meant to write about the book, the controversy surrounding its publication, and even interview Jonah but a variety of factors led to that not happening. Hearing Jonah’s talk Monday night made me feel a little guilty for not having put my thoughts down on paper when the book came out.

So I am belatedly attempting to remedy that today.

What Jonah tries to do in LF is set aside for a moment the overwhelming association of fascism with the Nazi Holocaust and instead explore the actual philosophical and political underpinnings of fascism as a political movement. Goldberg makes the argument that if you really look at fascism it is clear that it was a left wing movement antithetical to what is labeled as conservatism or the Right in the Anglo-American context. Fascism was socialist and statist and opposed to the very things that define conservatives today: free markets, limited government, individual responsibility, a respect for religious faith and tradition, etc.

In this context, communism and fascism were not polar opposites that are somehow connected because of their extremism, or totalitarian excesses, but because they are both heresies, or offshoots, of socialism. Communism was international socialism and fascism was national socialism. The bloody battles between these two movements was for control of the same political space. Mussolini, for example, was kicked out of the socialist party in Italy because of his support for the war not because he was a conservative in the twentieth century Anglo-American sense.

The reason we have come to associate fascism with the Right is because the Marxist view of things gained a decisive foothold in the intelligentsia and thus influenced popular cultural and political views. Because fascism was seen by Marxists as a dangerous rival for the hearts and minds of workers, they set out to marginalize and demonize it. Stalin began to call anyone not loyal to Moscow a fascist. Someone as integral to the Russian Revolution as Trotsky was soon a fascist.

The Marxists in essence were the winners who wrote the history. Thus was born the seed of the idea that fascism is a right-wing problem. This is very convenient because it is in fact progressives who have fascism as an intellectual heritage. Jonah notes how American progressives embraced fascism and saw it as a role model up until the holocaust became the dominant association with the term. This made sense as they shared similar aims and assumptions. And politicians from Woodrow Wilson to FDR and JFK used these ideas and assumptions in creating and implementing policies.

Jonah then connects the leftist history of fascism and progressivism by arguing that the modern American liberals unwillingness to explore and digest this history lead them on a dangerous path toward what might be called soft fascism or the liberal fascism of the title.

This danger grows out of the Utopian belief in the power of the state to mold society and mankind and the call for whatever tactics are necessary to make this heaven on earth a reality. Goldberg grants that the goal isn’t genocide or terror but notes that a kinder gentler oppression is still oppression. The nanny state may not want to kill you but it wants to control your life in a myriad of ways.

The book lays all of this out in much more detail and precision that this rambling synopsis of mine. And from my perspective Goldberg makes a compelling case that we have turned history on its head when it comes both the underpinnings of fascism and the threat of its resurrection in our time. As Goldberg pointed out in his talk, the totalitarian future we face is not Orwell’s 1984 by Huxley’s A Brave New World.

I don’t really have the energy or time to take on the book’s critics (even the few more serious ones). But let me just note a few things about some of the responses:

• The response to the title (that it is somehow out of bounds or over-the-top) is a stupid distraction. As the book explains, the title comes from a talk by HG Wells. It is not some made up slur but a term coined by a liberal/progressive who had a great deal of influence at the time and who thus makes a clear connection to the ideas Jonah is outlining. Far too many people refused to take the book seriously for this manufactured reason and a great many did it with colossal hypocrisy.
• The book doesn’t argue or imply that modern day liberals are the equivalent of Hitler or Mussolini. In fact, it goes out of its way to assume the good will and intentions of liberals. What Goldberg is decrying is the bad history; the refusal of many liberals to acknowledge their intellectual heritage despite attempts to connect any and all sins of the past to conservatives no matter how tenuous the connection or relevance; and the continued labeling of conservatives as fascists even today. Goldberg does argue, however, that liberalism’s Utopian tendencies present a danger, but that danger is of a different sort entirely and this is repeated ad nauseum. More people than I care to count simply refused to admit this.
• It also needs to be emphasized that this is a work of popular history and to a certain degree of polemics. Far too many seemed to decry the fact that LF wasn’t written or marketed as a dry and tightly worded academic work. This too is silly. How dare Goldberg mention liberalism and fascism in the same book! How dare he put a Hitler smiley face on the cover! Ann Coulter!!!! Sheesh.
• The book contains a lot of documentation and patient outlining of his argument and the facts that back them up, but this is not a work of academic history nor does it seek to be one. The point is that popular culture has soaked up a lot of nonsense and the book attempts to counter that with its own popular culture argument. Just because the author and publisher attempt to sell books doesn’t invalidate it as a serious work. You can combine polemics with scholarship and serious argument. Far too many approached the book as a chance to take potshots at someone they didn’t like rather than engaging with the arguments.
• There is no reason the book has to be an all or nothing proposition; and the initial polarization of reactions to the book are unfortunate. One can appreciate the history and enjoy its perspective without having to agree with all or any of the book’s arguments in their totality. You can agree that fascism is of the left and yet not find the later chapters on more modern liberalism convincing, etc. Potential readers shouldn’t be left with the impression that it is simply a partisan attempt to use history to smear liberals, but a book that attempts to dethrone some major shibboleths connected to our view of history and politics.

To wrap this meandering post up, let me say that I think the book succeeds on a coupe of levels:

- One it makes a strong historical, yet approachable, case for fascism as a phenomenon of the left. It came to be in a time of liberal attendance and embraced the very ideas and concepts that in many ways still motivate the left today. The connection of the term to the right is clearly of Marxist origin and ahistorical. Minus the holocaust fascism would be recognized today as a messianic socialism it was not some right-wing counterpart to communism.

-Two, it further highlights the refusal of progressives to deal with their history in any meaningful way. The response of the angry vulgar online left made this point abundantly clear. They either pretended it doesn’t exist or dismissed Goldberg’s argument as old news; something everyone already knew. This last is particularly laughable. And of course most did this without having even read the book. In this world while conservatives are always the heirs of racism and hate the left never has to answer for its racist imperialism, destruction of civil liberties, eugenics, etc. Progressivism is simply taken to mean good and healthy no matter the evidence to the contrary.

- Lastly, whether you agree with all of the arguments or not, I found Liberal Fascism to be an interesting read and one that forces you to understand and wrestle with many of the fundamental political issues of the twentieth century and their implications for today. If you are in any way a history of political buff then I think this book would be a must read.

So if you haven’t yet read Liberal Fascism I highly recommend it. Read it and judge it for yourself. And if Jonah comes to a college or town near you, be sure to attend. I think you will find it as entertaining and intellectually stimulating as the book.

There is a certain bittersweet aspect to reading Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater. It is the last book William F. Buckley wrote, or at least that was ready for publication – he was working on a book on Reagan when he passed, and at the same time to it looks back to what was in many ways the the political dawn of the conservative movement. Those seem like heady days compared the troubles of today.

The fact that it is a very personal account, and a sort of novelization, ads to this feeling. This isn’t straight history but rather a remembrance: Buckley attempting to capture his friend not just the historical figure. As such it tells the reader about both Goldwater and Buckley and their relationship. That doesn’t mean there isn’t history involved just that it is a particular perspective and description of the history they both witnessed and participated in.

As such it is a quick and enjoyable read with the typical WFB style and wit. With a few flash forwards interspersed, Buckley basically tells the story of how Goldwater came to be seen as the candidate which would allow the conservative wing of the GOP to take control of the party and offer a full-throated conservative as the party’s candidate. He details how the conservatives centered around his magazine, National Review, played a critical role in bringing this about and how they were eventually cut out of the campaign by Goldwater’s top advisers. Along the way Buckley attempts to give readers insight into the Goldwater he came to know and how their relationship developed and survived the stress and strains of the campaign and its aftermath.

This is not an ideal volume for students seeking to get the basic facts but rather an enjoyable look back for fans of either man; or those acquainted with the larger history of conservatism and American politics. And that is only appropriate as Buckley was not a historian but rather a unique combination of prose stylist, conservative polemicist (and populiser), and larger-than-life personality. All of these characteristics are present in Flying High.

This volume is an obvious must have for Buckley and Goldwater fans, but it is also an interesting look at the intersection of the conservative movement and American politics. Anyone with an interest in either topic will enjoy this short but unique read.