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In 1787, while arguing in "The Anti-Federalist Papers" for the establishment of a weaker executive branch under the U.S. Constitution, the author Cato warned that "great power connected with ambition, luxury, and flattery, will as regularly produce a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America, as the same causes did in the Roman empire."

Less than 200 years later, Cato's fears were justified by events in Europe, where among the 20th century's socialists, communists, and fascists, the ideology of collectivism cultivated an atmosphere that would produce the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

Yet, instead of fiercely defending the Constitution as a bulwark against such an episode taking place in the United States, argues Jonah Goldberg, American Jews remain overwhelmingly wedded to the leftist movements that gave rise to the Nazi genocide.

"The Jewish community is self-sufficient, it takes care of its own, it is prosperous, it benefits from freedom more than any other ethnic group you can think of," Goldberg, author of the bestselling "Liberal Fascism" now surging in paperback sales, told The Jewish State in a phone interview Oct. 30. "America has been this amazing gift to the Jewish people because it allows them to pursue their skills and their gifts without hindrance and to great reward. Yet the lesson the Jews take from the Holocaust is 'Gosh, we need to make the government stronger.' And it is a very weird sort of lesson by my lights."

Goldberg said that European fascist leaders were not carried to power on promises of pure evil, but rather by pledging the establishment of left-wing collectivism and secular zealotry that appealed to the populace at large.

"Nazism rose, Italian fascism rose, because they were popular -- because they sold their people in their countries on the idea that the state could beneficently take over people's lives and take over society and move in a progressive direction," Goldberg said. "And there is a perfectly rational argument that the lesson from the Holocaust for Jews should be radical libertarianism."

Studying the left and getting it right

Goldberg's book, subtitled "The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning," traces the routes of fascism back to the French Revolution, which tenets inspired leftist movements both abroad and in the U.S. The American movement, Goldberg notes, would become progressivism under Woodrow Wilson, who quashed dissent, censored the press, and supported eugenics. The American eugenics movement was notoriously anti-minority and anti-immigrant, and Jews were prominent targets of its forced sterilization advocacy.

The American eugenics movement would inspire -- and be "perfected" by -- the Nazis. According to Goldberg, it is this strain of progressivism, later rebranded as liberalism, that urges the near-total consolidation of power behind a head of state. That consolidation, Goldberg argues, is what creates the conditions for a dictatorial regime to carry out its mission. Fascism itself -- as shown by Mussolini's Italian fascism -- isn't inherently anti-Semitic.

"And the glib and easy assumption that Jewish Americans, particularly Jewish liberals -- to the extent I'm not repeating myself -- make in saying that fascism equals anti-Semitism, is incredibly distorting of your complete understanding of politics," Goldberg, who grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side and attended Rodeph Sholom Day school, said. "So much of post-World War II American liberalism and American Judaism is centered on this idea of 'never again,' which is a perfectly healthy and responsible lesson to take away from the Holocaust. But the problem is the way they understand fascism, the way they understand the threat of this stuff, has them looking in a lot of the wrong places."

Goldberg said the Jewish community tends to look to the Christian right for signs of danger, while the enemies to their left -- such as Islamic terrorists, who are the heirs of Nazism -- get stronger.

"The abject fear of evangelical Christians in the Jewish community is baffling to me," Goldberg said. "Evangelical Christians are the most philo-Semitic group in American politics, and yet you have this skewed understanding of the political landscape that I think comes directly from the WWII generation that has Jews completely turned around on where their priorities should be."

Could it happen here?

Goldberg has also said that Nazism grew out of the specific German experience, and doesn't expect its doppelganger to seize the reins of power in America. That puts Goldberg in the position of saying something akin to "it can't happen here" while also warning about the dangers of creeping statism. But Goldberg pointed out that behaving like Hitler shouldn't be the condicio sine qua non of destructive behavior.

"It's a weird thing that has happened in the political culture that if you're saying someone isn't Hitler, then therefore you're not criticizing him," Goldberg said. "It used to be that Hitler and Nazism were the maximum insult you could apply to somebody; you can't be worse than Hitler. And now, if you don't reach the threshold of Hitler, you're somehow not criticizing them."

Goldberg's belief that Hitler couldn't rise to power in America also comes with a caveat: if the fundamental nature of the United States is altered, its natural defenses must be re-examined. Goldberg pointed out that the Constitution would stand in the way of a would-be fascistic dictator, and yet the American left has -- both before and after the Holocaust -- sought to treat the Constitution as a malleable "living document," not an ironclad keystone of first principles.

"If you look at the cultural project of the left, to render the Constitution no longer relevant in daily life, to get institutions to give themselves over to the progressive agenda, to get people to look to the federal government rather than the local government as the only real political authority -- those are all the things that you would want and need to do if you wanted to have a totalitarian movement in this country," Goldberg said.

Wanted: A serious debate

Both the title of the book and its cover -- a deep red background titivated by a classic yellow smiley-face sporting a Hitler mustache -- are provocative, and admittedly so, according to Goldberg. He said he could have written a plain-looking book called "Elements of Statism in Liberal Public Policy Making 1914-2000".

That book, however, would have sold far fewer copies and thus betray an essential element of the book's raison d'etre -- to inspire a conversation that would ultimately do to the term "fascism" what removing the scent glands of a skunk would do to the little animal: take an otherwise basic entity and defang the outsize threat it poses so it can be studied up close.

In fact, Goldberg said, the left uses the term fascism in a fascistic way: as an attempt to delegitimize without debate.

"I think the best working definition of a fascist in American life today is simply a conservative who's winning an argument," Goldberg quipped. "Because what the left likes to do is use the word fascist like they use the word neocon, like they use the word racist, as a way to say: These people don't need to be listened to; these people need to be anathematized, they are heretics."

The reaction to Goldberg's book from the left was, to Goldberg, very nearly the book's own vindication. Most of the criticism, according to Goldberg, consisted of ad hominem attacks instead of scholarly debate or at least an intellectually serious disputation of the book's core arguments. That, he said, was disappointing.

"It was kind of like going through one of those Pirates of the Caribbean flume rides at Disney World, or haunted house rides," Goldberg said of the left's initial response. "These ridiculous creatures leap out at you, and they startle you for a second, but then you realize that they're just playing their part and they can't really do anything to you."

Goldberg said he was also surprised that the few reviewers who were willing to challenge him in cerebral combat essentially conceded his thesis. He cited, for example, David Oshinsky in the New York Times Book Review. Oshinsky's review follows the chronological trajectory of the book, and first challenges Goldberg when he moves from Wilson's transient police state to Franklin Roosevelt.

"Though partly dismantled after the war, this model, we are told, became the blueprint for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal," Oshinsky writes, referring to Wilson's "fascist" behavior. "Goldberg is less convincing here because he can't get a handle on Roosevelt's admittedly elusive personality."

But, Goldberg pointed out, he doesn't get to FDR until page 121 (of the paperback edition).

"The rest of it is just commentary by that point," Goldberg said. "I've argued that fascism was a phenomenon of the left, that Woodrow Wilson was a would-be fascist dictator, that Mussolini was a man of the left, that Hitler and Nazism were left-wing phenomena, that Italian fascism wasn't anti-Semitic, and not a word of objection to any of that stuff [from Oshinsky]."

In fact, as Goldberg prepares to transition between Wilson and FDR in the book, he writes: "perhaps the greatest irony is that according to most of the criteria we use to locate people and policies on the ideological spectrum in the American context -- social bases, demographics, economic policies, social welfare provisions -- Adolf Hitler was indisputably to Wilson's left." (Emphasis in the original.)

This is not challenged by Oshinsky either, nor is any of this challenged by one demographic from which Goldberg expected a barrage of criticism: the Jewish left.

Instead of substantively engaging any of the accusations Goldberg levies on the American left in the 20th century, liberal Jewish commentators responded by tut-tutting Goldberg's use of the term fascism, or, he said, by offering retorts that amounted to "Goldberg's an idiot. But calling Goldberg an idiot -- it may be true, but it doesn't rebut any of my arguments."

I do not think it means what you think it means

Goldberg said he wrote the book foremost because its "time had come." He said he has received many responses from readers who told him that this is the book they've always wanted to write, as well as comments from libertarian and conservative readers who are tired of being called a fascist, if for no other reason than the accusation's historical speciousness.

"[There were] so many guys," Goldberg said, "who sat around the coffee shop with their buddies saying: Look, the Nazis were socialists and all the rest. Why am I -- as a champion of free markets, and limited government, and individualism, and home schooling, and tax cuts, and all these things that define what it means to be a conservative in America -- why am I the one being called a fascist, while these guys want to indoctrinate kids, they have political correctness, they want to get rid of traditional religion, they want to expand the size and scope of government to an amazing degree, and they're somehow not the fascist?"

Goldberg, who has a reputation as a humorous writer, wanted his first book to be a serious work on a serious subject, and this was an argument he had wanted to make for a long time.

"And also, I went to Rodeph Sholom day school, and I'm not particularly interested in making a lot of jokes while talking about the Holocaust and fascism and Nazism," he said.

Book sales soared, carrying "Liberal Fascism" to No. 1 on the N.Y. Times bestseller list, despite the hostile initial response. Goldberg said the book's success in that environment created a samizdat-like market niche, referencing the Soviet-era practice of passing along censored material by hand, when mass-producing it was forbidden.

But the book's sales soon watered down the threat of reader stigmatization -- at deadline the paperback edition was No. 26 on the N.Y. Times bestseller list -- and Goldberg is confident the book is already entering a new phase, having survived its most vulnerable period.

"Basically, its enemy has failed to put a stake in its heart, and that's very satisfying to me," he said.