Jonah Goldberg’s latest novel, Liberal Fascism, does the impossible: It is both funny and humorous at the same time!
The “mistaken identity comedy” is at least as old as Plautus’ Menaechmi and as American as Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. But Goldberg gives it a new twist. Set loosely in the period between the Boer War and the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, Liberal Fascism recounts the misadventures of the hapless president Woodrow Wilson who is sent by a bureaucratic snafu to Germany where he has been ordered to asssassinate rising Nazi star, Adolph Hitler. The plan begins to go awry when the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels notices Woodrow’s uncanny resemblance to “der Führer” and coerces him to act as Hitler’s “double” as a ploy to frustrate would-be assassins. Hoo-boy! Will Woody have to assassinate himself?
Things really go wrong when both Woodrow/Adolph and a young aparatchik, Nikita Krushchev, fall for the same Dietrich-like chanteuse. Love may be in the air, but so is the Luftwaffe — and it’s no Bliss-krieg for poor Woody!
Some critics have carped about the novel’s being too “derivative.” Well, what of it? Does Liberal Fascism owe something to the immortal Danny Kaye farce On the Double? Certainly! But what post-1961 comic novel does not?
