If you plan to follow Sowell's advice this summer and tackle Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, I would suggest incorporating a little of the rich criticism the book has received into your reading list.

Goldberg is not a political philosopher, so it may seem odd that he has released a book about political philosophy. Odd, perhaps, but not--as some commentators from the left have suggested--proof that he's wrong. Be wary of his conclusions, though, because they don't survive reasonable criticism. Check out, for example, this interview/review by philosophy grad student Terrence Watson (a friend and former Koch Fellow) in the Western Standard:

Goldberg agreed that Canada was an example of liberal fascism--the fascism that comes with a friendly face. Presumably, he would say that Iran and Nazi Germany are just examples of fascism without the friendly face; call it “fascism with a mean face,” if you like. Goldberg would call both Canada and Nazi Germany fascist because both do all the things I listed in the previous paragraph, even though one is friendly and the other is mean. But nastiness (to some scapegoat minority, whether gays or Jews) is arguably constitutive of fascism. You can’t have “fascism with a smiley face” any more than you can have something like married bachelorhood.

Even if what I’ve called nastiness is not constitutive of fascism, it seems like a mistake to try to describe liberalism as a kind of fascism on the basis of a comparison between Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village and the policies of the German Nazi Party. Draw up two lists and you might find a 90 per cent match between them. But this doesn’t make Clinton’s ideology an example of fascism any more than the 97 per cent match between Warren Kinsella’s DNA and the DNA of a chimp makes Kinsella a chimp. Some differences make all the difference.

The key to establishing meaningful links between political philosophies is searching for what Watson calls "essential similarities": similarities that go to the root of what a particular political philosophy stands for and strives for. That is, the 3% of DNA that Warren Kinsella and the average chimp do not have in common, which makes Kinsella Kinsella and the chimp a chimp. Goldberg may be correct in arguing that both fascism and modern left-liberalism seek to perfect the world," but the differences between their various definitions of "worldly perfection" (say, a world cleansed of Judaism as opposed to a world of rough economic equality) is vital and neglected. Hillary Clinton, for all her faults, is no more a Hitler than Bush.