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People on the Left who have not yet been rhetorically housebroken, or who have simply forgotten their manners, have a habit of referring to conservatives as fascists. The insult is at once so over the top and yet so devoid of meaning that most of its targets tend to shrug it off as unworthy of notice. As long ago as 1946, George Orwell concluded that the epithet was an item of political juvenilia, with no substantive reference beyond “something not desirable.” But to the columnist Jonah Goldberg, a contributing editor of National Review, the term deserves to be taken very seriously indeed. In this book he not only repudiates its identification with conservatism but, as his title indicates, enthusiastically turns the accusation back on those who make it. It is modern American liberalism, he argues, both in its early-20th-century origins and in its subsequent manifestations, that actually betrays close family resemblances to European fascism.

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