Fascist Fascism

Spencer Ackerman's noted that somehow in the course of composing his tome You're a Fascist: Nanny-nanny boo-boo, Jonah Goldberg managed to become a pretty serious apologist for Mussolini. And now here on his brand new "liberal fascism" blog we see the same thing. He means to argue that Mussolini, Hitler, and Vladimir Putin all admirered FDR and that therefore FDR was a fascist, but he can't help but get himself tied up with the idea "that Mussolini was the first world leader to stand-up to Nazi aggression" and some bemoaning of the fact that many of the pro-Mussolini segments of his book got left on the cutting room floor.

Now we shouldn't find this surprising since, as Jeet Heer has observed, National Review were Goldberg works has a long history of admiration for fascist political movements. But of course this is why people associate fascism with the political right. Jonah Goldberg, American conservative, thinks Mussolini, fascist, gets a bad rap just as his predecessors at NR used to pen paens to Franco.