Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
By Jonah Goldberg
Doubleday $27.95, 496 pages

Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don’t)
By Michael J. Gerson
Harper One $26.95, 320 pages

Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again
By David Frum
Doubleday $24.95, 224 pages

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Doubleday $26, 336 pages

Ever since the “Reagan revolution”, conservative intellectuals have dominated the battle of ideas in American politics. But the success of Jonah Goldberg’s silly book, Liberal Fascism, suggests that American conservatism may now be in some intellectual trouble. The book has done well in the United States. It reached number three on The New York Times bestseller list. Yet it is dedicated to an absurd proposition – that American liberals are the direct ideological heirs of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. This is the kind of ya-boo politics that has deformed American talk radio for years. But it is depressing that you can get a bestseller out of such nonsense.

Goldberg is not a stupid man. A pundit and commentator, he writes fluently and occasionally amusingly – and he has read lots of books about fascism. The opening pages of his own work are a quasi-learned dissection of the central tenets of fascism. But the purpose of the book is not to understand fascism. It is to discredit American liberals. Goldberg piles example upon example, to draw harebrained comparisons between American liberals and fascists. Liberals buy organic food. But did you know that “Dachau hosted the world’s largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey”? Well, I never.

Over the course of almost 500 pages, Liberal Fascism pursues a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead us to an overwhelmingly stupid question: “Was Bill Clinton a fascist president?” Surprisingly, the answer to this question is No. Clinton, it seems, wasn’t even good enough to deserve the label fascist: “To say that he was a fascist himself is to credit him with more ideology and principle than justified.”

If you want to find the real fascist in the Clinton family, apparently, it is Hillary you should be worrying about. Goldberg points at her bestselling book, It Takes a Village, and assures the reader that: “All the hallmarks of the fascist enterprise reside within its pages”. True, he swiftly admits, Hillary’s book “isn’t hostile, nationalistic, racist or aggressive”. The book’s fascism resides – allegedly – in its communitarianism and corporatism. In so far as Goldberg has an argument, this is it. He thinks American liberals’ fascination with the community, state intervention and even healthy living all have their origins in the fascist movements of the early 20th century.

The large amount of attention devoted to Hillary Clinton in the pages of the Goldberg book marks it out as an intellectual hit-job, written with the 2008 presidential election in mind. It would be unfortunate for the author if Clinton does not actually get the Democratic party nomination: Barack Obama gets just two mentions in Goldberg’s exhausting work. But, never fear, it’s pretty clear that Obama’s work as a community organiser also marks him out as a fascist.

What – aside from the pursuit of political advantage – persuaded Goldberg to waste so much time on this nonsense? It seems that a large part of his motivation is a deep irritation that some liberals have sometimes attempted to pin the “F” word on American conservatives. Again and again, Goldberg dwells on his anger at this unfair slur. His response is magisterial: “Fascist yourself.”

At the end of his book, Goldberg encapsulates his anger at the unfairness of American liberals by recalling with approval an exchange between Gore Vidal, the leftwing novelist, and the late William F. Buckley, who founded the conservative National Review (a publication that now boasts Goldberg as a contributing editor): “In 1968, in a televised debate, Gore Vidal continually goaded William F. Buckley, eventually calling him a ‘crypto-Nazi’. Vidal himself is an open homosexual, a pagan, a statist and a conspiracy theorist. Buckley, a patriotic, free-market, anti-totalitarian gentleman of impeccably good manners, could take it no more and responded: ‘Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the Goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.’”

Buckley himself swiftly regretted his outburst. Goldberg has taken it as the inspiration to write an entire book.

If Goldberg’s book were the best that American conservatism had to offer, the outlook for the American right would be extremely gloomy. Fortunately, two former speechwriters for George W. Bush have produced separate books that demonstrate that some Republicans are still thinking intelligently. Michael Gerson was the president’s chief speechwriter and a close confidant for most of his presidency. David Frum’s stay in the White House was much briefer, but he gained some fame – and notoriety – by helping to coin the phrase “the axis of evil”. Both men have now taken refuge in Washington think-tanks.

The Gerson and Frum prescriptions for the future of conservatism and the Republican party have some striking similarities. Both men are “big-government conservatives” in the style of George W. Bush. Both argue that it would be a fatal mistake for Republicans to return to the libertarian, minimalist, government-shrinking agenda associated with Ronald Reagan and – in a more intense form – with Newt Gingrich and the Republicans who won big victories in Congressional elections in the mid-1990s.

Gerson is scathing about Gingrich and his allies, such as Congressman Tom DeLay and Senator Phil Gramm: “Their stewardship was not a pretty sight … Phil Gramm proposed to eliminate all federal education programs.” According to Gerson: “A justified critique of government excess became an unbalanced hostility to government itself.” It took Gerson’s boss, President Bush, to turn the page on “shut-government-down Republicanism”.

Frum makes similar points. He argues that Reagan responded to the needs of his age – a time of over-mighty unions and suffocating government regulation. But times have moved on, and it’s a mistake for conservatives to remain locked into an anti-government agenda that derives from the struggles of the 1970s.

The debate will be familiar to British readers. David Cameron, the current leader of the Conservative party, has adopted a similar approach to the legacy of Thatcherism. He pays tribute to the achievements of the Thatcher years. But he is now attempting to convince voters that the Conservative party can be trusted to run public services; he has even used Bush’s phrase, “compassionate conservatism”.

Cameron’s declaration that Britain’s National Health Service lies at the centre of his political philosophy has left many baffled supporters wondering whether he is a conservative at all. The same question could be asked of writers such as Michael Gerson and David Frum. Gerson is a passionate advocate of programmes more usually associated with free-spending liberalism. He opens his book with a long and proud account of Bush’s decision to spend billions of dollars on Aids-treatment programmes in Africa, a decision that Gerson calls “a humanitarian conspiracy”. He wants to spend more on education and health programmes for the poor. He wants poor children to be given the equivalent of the British “baby bond” – a sum of government money to start them off in life.

Frum is also keen on ideas that are more usually associated with the left. He wants the government to ensure that all Americans are covered by private-health insurance. He wants: “A genuinely compassionate conservatism, including a conservative campaign for prison reform and government action against the public health disaster of obesity.” He calls for “a new conservative environmentalism”.

So what is it that makes Frum and Gerson “conservatives”? In Gerson’s case, the answer seems to be a deep, evangelical religious faith. He recounts how, as a young man, he voted for Jimmy Carter, a born-again Democratic president. But by the mid-1980s, in his view, “attacks on religious conservatives became a surefire applause line in Democratic speeches”. As a result, “The Democratic party had set out actively to alienate people like me, and it succeeded.”

It is social issues, ultimately, that place Gerson firmly in the conservative camp. His horror of abortion and his stress on traditional moral values are a constant theme. They are a reminder that religious and social conservatives remain a critical part of the Republican coalition – but that their alliance with anti-government libertarians cannot be taken for granted.

By contrast, it is national security that ensures that Frum is still in the Republican and conservative family. If anything, he seems to regard Bush as a naive softie when it comes to the “war on terror”. He writes of Bush that: “He sought to defeat radical Islam with the support of radical Islam’s principal backers: the Saudi monarchy and the Pakistani military. He ended up running two contradictory foreign policies, and unsurprisingly, both ended badly.”

Frum thinks that the problem with the Bush administration is that it has not been neocon enough. It was not serious enough about democracy promotion around the world, or about committing the military forces required to “win” in Iraq. Many foreign readers and American liberals will groan at this prescription. But it seems that John McCain, the Republican candidate for the presidency, will run on a Frum-style pledge to a stronger military, a more determined effort in the war on terror and a renewed commitment to democracy-promotion as a defining feature of American foreign policy.

The Republican coalition in the US has relied on three pillars: anti-government tax cutters, social conservatives and national-security hawks. Bush has tried to give something to all parts of his coalition. But it was the national security hawks and neo-conservatives who most influenced him to take the most fateful decision of his administration: invading Iraq.

The fact that the Iraq war has gone so badly has done more than anything else to destroy the credibility of the Bush administration. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the Republicans have come up with a candidate in John McCain who is closely associated with the neo-conservative wing of the party. McCain does not seem to be particularly motivated by the Republicans’ social or economic agenda. It is foreign policy and national security that really moves him.

In They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn attempts to explain the intellectual origins, energy and success of the neocons. His book is sceptical without being scathing. He is clearly impressed by the intellectual energy and political shrewdness of the neocons. But he is alarmed by what he sees as their hubristic over-confidence.

Heilbrunn paints a portrait of an intellectual and political movement with great resilience and deep roots. At the end of his book, he writes that: “These reckless minds … aren’t going away. Quite the contrary.” With John McCain poised to carry the Republican standard in 2008, those are prescient words.

Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist