Scratch a liberal, and you’ll often find a fascist underneath. ~Jack Kelly

Since we’re engaging in hyperbole, shouldn’t that be Islamofascist?  This is an old line, and I know what Kelly means, but it seems to me that the far more damning criticism of liberals is not that they are crypto-fascists, but that they are liberals.  This is something that has never made sense to me about the desire to conjure images of fascism as a way of discrediting your opponents.  Oh, yes, calling someone a fascist is a very nasty insult, and it is a good way to express real contempt for someone, but it isn’t an argument.  It also doesn’t really say anything, except that you strongly disapprove of this other fellow’s views. 

Presumably, you regard the ideas of your opponents as sufficiently terrible as they are that there is no need to impute, usually through exaggeration or tendentious argument, fascist tendencies to them.  There are certain general similarities between some assumptions of left-liberalism and fascism, as I have said before, but for the most part the problem with liberals is not that they are fascistic (though they may be sympathetic to similar state capitalist arrangements and the aesthetics and rhetoric of revolutionary modernism).  The problem with liberals is that they tend to think and have thought that human beings are autonomous creatures with “rights”; they tend to think that all people are inherently free and rational and are only being prevented from enjoying an enlightened existence–as defined by them–because of the burdens and constraints of tradition, history and religion; they tend to believe in the therapeutic use of the state for the purposes of social improvement and regard human nature as malleable and perfectible through the reordering of social norms and institutions.  Part of this reordering involves getting everyone to think and believe the ‘right’ things, as defined by them, which means that discourse must be artificially narrowed and confined to a permissible range of expression of a range of different kinds of liberal ideas.    Fascism for the most part is just a lot of nationalist hysteria and rhetoric about renewal through conflict, which is in many ways more manageable and less corrupting than this liberalism.  Fascism imposes its restrictions on speech through the law and through threats of violence; liberalism imposes them more subtly and pervasively through a dogma of “social tolerance” that inculcates loathing for anyone who fails to be sufficiently “tolerant.”  The latter is much more effective as a means of social and thought control, which is why liberals use it, why those in power tend to prefer liberalism as a reigning ideology and why nominal conservatives who acquire power in our day and age adopt all of the tropes of “social tolerance” as a way of policing, with varying degrees of success, their opponents and their own constituents (“if you don’t like Harriet Miers, you must be a sexist!”).  The point is that what Kelly calls fascism is simply normal liberalism.  There’s no need to bring fascism into it at all.  Doing so indicates a certain intellectual laziness and a proclivity to adopt the very same habits of enforcing conformity and “social tolerance” that liberals use against you.  Flinging the label fascist at someone, without having a fairly good argument for using that label, is the mark of an ideologue who wants to limit and shut down speech.  It is particularly ironic that it should come at the end of a column protesting impositions on conservative speech. 

Kelly’s remark comes at the end of a column complaining, I think rightly, about PBS’ decision to pull a documentary, “Islam vs. Islamist.”  No one would mistake me for a fan of anything associated with the Frank Gaffneys of the world, but PBS’ move is heavy-handed and stupid.  If PBS pulled the documentary for political reasons, which seems probable, they are pretty clearly making a mistake–it is in the interest of their “side,” broadly defined, to emphasise the distinctions within the Islamic world, thus highlighting the impressive ignorance of the people prattling on about the unified Islamofascist threat and the nonsense uttered by Mitt “It’s About Shia And Sunni” Romney.  A documentary that purports to show the opinions of anti-Islamist Muslims, while potentially misleading in entirely different ways, would drive home just how counterproductive and misguided, say, Bush administration policies and Republican rhetoric about “Islamic fascists” are, since these have had the effect of deeply alienating the so-called “moderate Muslims” and turning Muslims against those who push these policies and this rhetoric and against the U.S. in general.  Many Muslims have come to view all of this as a generic attack on Islam as such; when they hear “Islamic fascist,” they do not think of it as a phrase that distinguishes jihadis from “moderate Muslims” but as a wholesale assault on Islam as being fascistic.  Whatever else you might want to say about this point, it is exceedingly poor PR if the goal is not to drive these people into the arms of jihadi groups.  If I wanted to cynically sabotage the agenda of people allied with someone like Frank Gaffney, I would encourage and broadcast every project that actually undermines the more general Republican arguments about “Islamic fascism” and the like, which is ironically what this documentary seems to have been capable of doing. 

The discovery that PBS has a built-in liberal bias will not come as news to anyone who has, well, ever watched PBS.  This is the network of the NewsHour where the conservative “balance” against Mark Shields for many years was Paul Gigot.  It’s come to this because a vicious cycle in viewing and donation patterns: PBS programming has always tended to attract a more left-wing audience (for some reason opera is not a big draw for the NASCAR and 24 set!), and consequently PBS’ supporters tend to be disproportionately favourable to documentaries and news coverage that match their presuppositions.  This is then reflected in donations from these people, which encourages PBS to air programs that these people like. 

Additionally, like NPR, the management at PBS is itself fairly far to the left, and no wonder.  Why?  For the same kinds of reasons that liberals predominate in the non-public newsroom, the academy, the arts and the studios.  For starters, there is a cultural prejudice against those professions among conservatives and, as a result, there is a prejudice against conservatives in those professions because most of the people in them have no great sympathy for a conservative outlook and feel no need to acquire such sympathy.  As elite professions, especially those that involve education or news reporting, there is a natural tendency to look down on the rest of the country as ignorant, uninformed and confused (that there is more than a little truth to all of these things doesn’t help).  As I have argued before, these jobs are deemed impractical and not all together family-friendly by conservatives, and conservative parents tend to encourage their children towards practical careers in business, medicine, law or different technical professions, because these are the career paths that promise some stability and a means to provide for a family, or culturally conservative people will go into the military. 

So there would already be fewer people with conservative inclinations going into these professions in journalism, education, etc., to begin with, and as fewer go into these professions the wider the gap between those professions and culturally conservative people becomes until there is almost no incentive for the latter to entertain the idea of going into these professions.  In all of journalism, working for public broadcasting is just about as culturally far removed from a conservative background as one can get.  Let’s just say that it is not something to which a lot of young conservatives aspire.  Meanwhile, the military still tends to have more socially and, to some extent, politically conservative members (even if it possesses certain leveling and homogenising elements as an institution), which can be explained in a similar way from the other side. 

There are also certain assumptions that people who work in a given institution will tend to share that may be inherently at odds with some political views.  For instance, journalism, when it is actually doing what it is supposed to be doing, ought to be challenging government authority and undermining official explanations when these are false; there are certain types of conservatives who regard this as wrong, especially during wartime.  Journalists ideally think that the public interest is typically served by more transparency and accountability, while certain conservatives, especially in wartime, seem to believe the opposite.  Academics are predisposed to take an interest in complex and nuanced arguments, while for a certain kind of conservative “nuance” is a dirty word.  On the other hand, academics can tend to be dogmatic about certain bits of received wisdom about politics, religion, cultural values and so on, and tend to float along in a stream of unreflective political correctness pushed by the administration, which blinds them to the surprisingly simplistic views they may hold of their fellow citizens.  This tends to create disconnections of members of these institutions from the general public, and attaches to these institutions a reputation (sometimes well deserved) for alienation from the rest of the country.