Amazon.com: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods: Books: Jonah Goldberg Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that “political correctnessâ€? on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic process when it yields results they dislike, insist on the centralization of economic decision-making, and seek to insert the authority of the state in our private lives–from bans on smoking to gun control. Covering such hot issues as morality, anti-Semitism, science versus religion, health care, and cultural values, he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.

D. A. Schön's concept of "generative metaphor" (or the productive 'displacement of concepts') describes the conscious (if not deliberately algorithmic) elaboration of local metaphorical mappings between two concepts with the express intention of discovery (his example is 'paint brushes are really pumps') of new properties of one of the domains. It is generally implicitly assumed that the changes of understanding will mostly concern the target domain (e.g. the brush example will reveal much about brushes but nothing about pumps). However, particularly in more global contexts, the changes in conceptualization happen in both domains. This is sort of a special case of blending where the resulting blended spaces contains almost the entire input spaces separately but with changed properties -- this needs to be investigated in some depth. The "Liberal Fascism" blend is a great example of this. It is global - i.e. it covers almost every aspect of the uses of both word; extensive - i.e. it is elaborated over a significant stretch of discourse with great intertextual potential; it is deliberate and most importantly it seeks to alter the conceptualization of both input spaces. The new 'blended space' has very interesting properties.

However, on the other hand, even though the argument is made in a book-length volume, the title and a brief blurb alone are enough to make most of the point. As the end of the Amazon blurb suggests:

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment–and rousing cheers from the Right.

Here's an example of one of the liberal "howls of indignation":

tomgpalmer.com: This is Nuts! I know that authors don’t always come up with the titles or covers of their books, but they do get to veto them. This one is so utterly stupid that I hope that Goldberg is ashamed to show his face in public.

Of course, as this comment assumes, there is something ridiculous about the "liberal fascism" analogy given our current understanding. So the interesting question here is, what of the truth? Where does the concept of truth play a role in this discussion? In fact, it is mostly replaced by plausibility and credibility (or "aptness"). Here are some of the comments on the the critical blog post cited above that illustrate how plausibility and credibility are negotiated. First, defensive elaboration of the mapping:

Jonah doesn't mean Whole Foods shoppers and people in the industry are sympathetic to national socialism. He's pointing out how Nazis were at the forefront of modernity's urge to go back to the land.

The point is that National Socialism (which did self-describe as 'socialism,' after all) was originally conceived as a leftist movement, and forgotten aspects of fascism are still current in today's left. He would surely admit that well known aspects (such as nationalism) are current in the right.

Second, offensive - questioning the very credibility of the mapping approach.

Goldberg's response is at http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/ ?q=ZjBmYmNmN2Q0NjkyYTNmOWQzNjU4YWJiOGRiZmM4NTk=

It's pretty lame. The Nazis were into organic food, so if you're into organic food, you're a Nazi. Fish can swim. Jonah can swim. Jonah is a fish. That is pretty stupid.

Anyway, it says "the totalitarian temptation," but were the Communists into organic food? Not that I recall.

Here's a whole exchange regarding the appropriateness of mapping and some folk theory about the nature of meaning:

So the idea of aptness (both procedural, rhetorical and social) is intensively debated but the idea of truth simply doesn't come up. It will certainly be applied to the book's treatment of both domains once it comes out (almost six months from now) but ultimately the judgments will focus on all the kinds of appropriateness of the analogical mappings contained and implied.