As some of you may know, conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg recently released “Liberal Fascism,” a book which argues that the Nazis were really left-wingers, and that modern American liberals are the Nazis of today.

Then we have talk-radio right-winger Neal Boortz announcing recently that Sen. Clinton is a fascist: “The left, however, has managed to take the ‘fascist’ word and turn it into an epithet against right-wingers. Nazis were fascists, right? Perhaps you might be one of the few to learn that ‘Nazi,’ in German, is ‘Nationalsozialismus.’ The true name of the Nazi Party in Germany was the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. German Nazis weren’t at all fond of capitalism .. and neither is Hillary Clinton. When it comes to the free market Hillary has quite a lot in common with these folks … not that you’ll ever read that in the mainstream media.”

Mmm, possibly that’s because what Boortz and Goldberg are saying is a heaping pile of manure (though the “Nazis were socialists!” idea predates both of them).

In the first place, Nazis were not socialists, despite the name: They killed socialists and communists, rounding them up along with other left-wingers even before they began rounding up German Jews (some years back I remember an argument with a man who claimed the Holocaust was justified because Hitler was trying to save Germany from the Communists). And as far as being anti-capitalist, they were pro-business and anti-labor — as David Brinkley has pointed out (in his delightful book “Washington Goes to War”) some Americans saw Hitler’s economic policies as making more sense that Roosevelt’s.

In the second place, wouldn’t it be logical that the modern-day heirs of Nazis would be, well, modern Nazis? It’s not as if Nazis and fascists went undercover and Goldberg and Boortz can’t find any (”What happened to those monsters—oh my god, they must have hidden themselves in the left-wing! Give warning to the world!”). American Nazis and fasicsts have been out in the open for decades: The American Nazi Party, Aryan Nations, Silver Shirts, Posse Comitatus, the National Alliance, plus other groups that don’t actually embrace the fascist label (the Ku Klux Klan arguably fits the definition of a fascist organization).

The trouble with Goldberg or Boortz bringing this up, of course, is that real fascists fall on the far-right side of the spectrum, not the far left (neo-Nazi and Klansman David Duke didn’t run as a left-winger), which doesn’t fit with their efforts to demonize liberals, and might possibly offend a lot of their conservative readers (my apologies to all conservatives who don’t think this way). Much better to lie and distort to come up with a conclusion that will have their readers going “Yeah, I knew liberals were bad!”

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