Palmer is surely smart enough to know that fascism is a more complicated subject than he makes it sound. “I know John Mackey, John Mackey is a friend of mine, and he’s no fascist,” is a pretty vapid argument, to the extent it’s an argument at all. It’s even dumber as a retort to a book Palmer’s never read. Indeed, one gets the sense reading his post or some of my libertarian-reader email, that because Mackey is a libertarian, and perhaps because he’s a libertarian sugar daddy, anything having to do with him, Whole Foods or the organic food fetish is beyond criticism. Palmer might want to read, for starters, the writings of Ludwig Klages, Hitler’s Table Talk, The Nazi War on Cancer or How Green Were the Nazis before he flies off the handle like that. ~Jonah Goldberg
The Goldberg syllogism: 1) Fascists were concerned about conservation; 2) modern conservationists are concerned about conservation; 3) Therefore, there is a meaningful substantive connection between fascism and modern conservationists that goes beyond this incidental agreement. Sam Brownback is against cancer and wants to “eliminate” it in ten years–is he a liberal fascist too? Shouldn’t it be significant that everyone who knows anything about John Mackey says that he is definitely a libertarian and not a fascist? That doesn’t seem to be an “argument,” but a statement of easily-checked fact. If it is not really disputable, Palmer doesn’t need an “argument” to prove that Mackey isn’t a fascist–he needs only take seriously the meaning of words and recognise that the terms libertarian and fascist are not equivalent. Wouldn’t that settle this apparently puzzling riddle of Mackey’s potential fascism?
Of course, Goldberg is right about one thing: no one has any idea what he has written in his book. (At the rate he’s going, no one will ever know what he has written, because people will be so annoyed by the stupid subtitle that they won’t even buy it.) All that we do know about it is the title, the subtitle and the blurb from the publisher. There is wisdom in the saying that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and likewise we shouldn’t judge it (and consequently simply dismiss it) by its title alone. That’s a fair objection.
When the new subtitle was proposed, didn’t someone point out that mentioning Whole Foods in the context of fascism sounded crazy? Did Goldberg think that he had actually improved the book with such a goofy title?
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June 29th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Grumpy Old Man
The mechanic’s liens can wait. This is a good subject.
Nazism emerged in an era that had its own enthusiasms and fads, and borrowed some of them. It’s rather inane to conclude from this that any iteration of a trend or notion the Nazis borrowed is therefore proto-fascist. I think of the shot in Cabaret of the young boy singing a very lovely song, and the camera panning up, after several seconds, to his swastika armband. Hardly a reason to think less of lieder or boy singers.
Closer to the Whole Foods meme are the nature cultism of the ’20s and Hitler’s reputed vegetarianism. It’s odd and illogical to make hiking or vegetarianism out as intrinsically fascist, although the LaRouchites, with their Eisensteinian fetishism of science and industry, have tried for years to paint all environmentalism as quasi-fascist in just this way, as discussed here.
If you turn this type of argument into a syllogism, of course, it fails. For that matter, demons know that God exists, but if you’re not Christopher Hitchens, a belief in God is not therefore necessarily demonic.
I’m starting work on Leftist Madness, from the Jacobins to Jamba Juice. That Bolshie protein powder will getcha every time.
June 30th, 2007 at 6:28 am
scriblerus
Sure the title is rather silly and some sort of reference to his ongoing pissing match with Rod Dreher’s crunchy con stuff but 496 PAGES?! How could anybody pump out 496 pages of that rubbish, let alone expect readers to wade through it?!
July 1st, 2007 at 4:58 pm
steve burton
Presumably, Mr. Goldberg’s subtitle is aimed at the Whole Foods *phenomenon* - and not at John Mackey personally.
Tom Palmer is a great guy, but I think he went a little off the handle here.
July 1st, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Daniel Larison
That seems right, Steve. It still seems like an awfully big reach to link the phenomenon as such with fascist anything. National highway systems were also pioneered by the Nazis. Whatever I think about the problems introduced by the highway system, it would be absurd if I were to associate the Interstate Highway Act and Eisenhower with some hint of fascism. You could argue that the highway system is a nationalist attack on regional and local distinctiveness, and you would be right, but even nationalist policies are not necessarily fascist.
Also, I think who runs Whole Foods should offer some insight into the nature of the “Whole Foods phenomenon.” If, for the sake of argument, there is something collectivist or totalitarian about Whole Foods, the collectivist mentality of Whole Foods customers would have to be cultivated at least partly from the top, wouldn’t it? One of the features of any totalitarian mindset is taking cues from a Leader, and if the top man in Whole Foods could reasonably be confused with a libertarian that makes him and his organisation poor candidates for contemporary totalitarians. There are so many more plausible targets on the left (eco-terrorists, militant animal rights activists, radical enviros, multicultis, activists against “hate speech” and for “hate-crimes” laws, or indeed any “anarchist” protest group of the New New Left would reflect the strains of “direct action,” glorification of violence and contempt for middle-class America) that I simply don’t understand the choice of tying a grocery store to totalitarianism.
Goldberg may well talk about these other groups in the book, and this would make sense, but the entire Whole Foods business is a real diversion from what he apparently wants to argue. It also helps make what might otherwise be a perfectly serious argument into a joke that no one will bother to consider. Palmer and all of us may have made more of the title than we should have, but it landed with a thud and a crash for a good reason. Part of the reason is that the association of Whole Foods with “liberal fascism” will naturally strike people as odd. Are juice bars and co-ops also outposts for the liberal greenshirts? I think it is understandable that Palmer went off the handle because he didn’t like seeing someone he knows labeled, however indirectly, either a liberal or a fascist or a liberal fascist.
In its post-WWII meaning (which is an abuse of its original meaning), totalitarianism refers to the government and totalitarian impulses are related to what people wish to do through government. The totalitarian impulse is to say that everything is ultimately the business of the state, that there is no such thing as private life and everything is at least theoretically the business of government. In these schemes, the state supposedly embodies whichever ideological idol a given group of totalitarians worships, be it the nation, the revolution, the “people,” and so forth. To borrow a word from Oakeshott, teleocratic political movements have a tendency towards totalitarianism. That is, those movements that think the government exists to advance “ideas” and achieve some perfection or end are likely to grant the state extensive powers to reach the goal and they are going to see opposition to this supposedly self-evidently good goal as a betrayal of the nation, people, revolution, etc. To speak of people who are interested in organic produce and a certain set of eco-friendly consumer habits as totalitarians is to make the word totalitarian less meaningful; it has the effect of emptying the word of content and making it, like the word fascist has already become, into something that you use to label things you don’t like. It contributes to the very sort of abuse of language that the book, if I understand its thesis from the publisher’s description, is being written to combat.