When people disagree, they should at least explain where they are coming from. The philosopher Montesquieu wrote that the Tartars used to sign their arrows, “that the arm may be known which shoots them.” And so it was that when Philip of Macedon plucked a javelin from his severed limb, it read, “Aster has given this mortal wound to Philip.” Imagine the chaos Philip’s wrath would have wrought if Aster had forged the signature of, say, King Ding from China.

Conservatives today are King Dings. Liberals often shoot arrows at Individual Liberty, only after forging Conservatives’ signatures on the tips. Soaked in the venom of racism and fascism, the arrows claim to be property of Conservatives. But a more devastating projectile has whizzed to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List and jugulated this liberal calumny, and its signature is “Jonah Goldberg.”

Goldberg will come to Luther March 11 to speak on his new book, “Liberal Fascism.” Fascism, he argues, was soldered in the armories of the left — not the right. What Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Hillary Clinton and even John McCain call “progressivism” is all too often “a totalitarian political religion” (but not, he emphasizes, bullying Hitlerism). Ronald Reagan said government was the problem. Liberals, however, want government to love us like parents — and this too is a problem, insists Goldberg.

Much of the liberal activism that descends from fascism is familiar to Luther students. The “New Age crusades” that Goldberg warns of include “the war on smoking” (next week’s Student Senate forum is on Luther’s smoking policy) and “the sanctification of organic foods” (local and organic foods cost the college $50,000 last year). But perhaps most compelling is his claim that Liberals’ ear-bleeding mantra of racial diversity and multiculturalism is sung in the ugly key of F.

“There is no issue on which modern liberals consider themselves more thoroughly enlightened than that of race,” claims Goldberg. Exhibit A: December’s anti-Bush art in the library, where we learned that Bush is a Nazi who “hates blacks.” But it turns out that “progressivism” has a racist past. Liberalism’s high priests like economist John Maynard Keynes, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and President Woodrow Wilson hailed eugenics. Black-rights champion W.E.B. DuBois was a fierce anti-Semite. Concessions to unions have long come at the expense of blacks — the Great Society liberals of the 1960s instigated black crime for their own political gain. And today, I’d add, “green” housing standards disproportionately force blacks out of cities like San Francisco.

Goldberg is quick to spot nonsense and hypocrisy, which abound in multiculturalism. A college policy that recruits black students for diversity “assumes that blacks come to school not as Tom Smith or Joe Jones but as interchangeable Black-Perspective Students,” which is “condescending and counterproductive.”

Luther wants to increase the proportion of “students of color” by 2012. But which color? Will they measure that with a color wheel? The Black History Month wall in the Union boasts the names of Colin Powell and Tiger Woods. I reckon, though, that Colin Powell’s pigment is whiter than mine, and that Tiger Woods is as reddish-yellow as he is black. My Paideia reader defined race as a social construction, and now I see who constructs it. Justice Antonin Scalia, in contrast, once corrected a reporter that called him an “Italian jurist.”

“I am, by the way, an American jurist,” he said. No need for a Sienna-Beige History Month.

Liberal multiculturalism may not be fascist, but it tends to excuse the fascist tendencies in other cultures. White supremacy is bad, but the Radical Hispanic group MEChA’s motto, “Everything for the race, nothing outside the race,” slides, notes Goldberg. White dictators like Milosovic are Hitler-esque and need to be removed, but who are we to judge African dictators like Robert Mugabe?

I’d add a few puzzles. Luther’s Diversity Center promotes Kwanzaa. Yet this “celebration” was founded by a radical black nationalist, vehemently intolerant of diversity. And while Lutheran College Washington Semester’s field trip to the Saudi Embassy is supposedly a diverse experience, students learn that women are too emotional to be trusted as legal witnesses or to ride bicycles in public roads (though they might one day earn the privilege to drive cars). When the students get so excited about Saudi diversity that they ask about studying abroad in Mecca, the embassy guide admits that Mecca frowns on diversity: Muslims only.

Whether you agree with Liberals, thanks to Goldberg you’ll know where they’re coming from.