Chuck,

I am almost finished reading Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” and it is THE book that has Leftist “intellectuals” buzzing. They just don’t know HOW to take apart his thesis, because Mussolini, Hitler, and “progressive” Democrats in 20th century U.S. were all men of the Left (statists, socialists, etc.). Goldberg does so much research and it’s documented, foot-noted.

I used to be a neo-Marxist. My angle and project years ago was the intersection of Liberation Theology and Marxist analysis, and trying to get around Novak’s and Buckley’s critiques of it. I was focusing in on he human attitudinal/behavioral end – to see if “human nature” is a fixed thing or can be modified. Or even if there is such a thing as human nature. I left the Left around 1987 because I discovered that socialist experiments did not make a new moral human being and that there are a lot of reasons why socialism fails, has failed, and always will fail. It has primarily to do with the fact that utopian thought is not based on anything scientifically rigorous. I was trying to explore in philosophy and science any ways in which the case could be made that socialism was not counter to human nature. The historical record weighed heavily on me. My forays into Marxism began in college and continued during my Jesuit seminary days. I was motivated by humanitarian and moral concerns, not by some unconscious need for political power or meaning. And because I also cared about the truth, the arguments against my beliefs MATTERED. Unlike most Leftists, I did not dismiss them. They had weight. Their arguments defined where I think I needed to go in order to arrive at a new synthesis. When I saw how certain factors were lining up, I saw the handwriting on the wall and abandoned this ideology.

I felt liberated afterwards, since there were other issues in the Left’s culture that disturbed me, which I did not identify with. Anytime you follow the truth it is a liberating experience, no matter where it leads.