The Final Insult.
Ezra writes about Jonah’s weepy breakdowns over the endless ridicule Liberal Fascism has endured:
I don’t really understand why Jonah’s so touchy about his book. I mean, I do, on one level. I don’t like having mean things said about my work, and I presume Jonah doesn’t either. It must hurt to have your book relentlessly mocked for months before the publishing date, then relentlessly mocked some more once it comes out in stores.
Quite so. And not to pile on, but I’m about to pile on.
The folks at AlterNet were kind enough to publish my review of Jonah’s book. Here’s an excerpt:
In a lot of ways, this kind of nonsense shouldn’t be surprising coming from Goldberg, since it’s the same lazy brand of inherited thinking that defines today’s conservative movement. For like his contemporaries William Kristol and John Podheretz, Goldberg was raised by prominent figures within the right-wing movement and was trained from the start to be an influential public “intellectual.” And just as Kristol and Podheretz’s writings closely mirror the neoconservative views espoused by their parents, Goldberg’s penchant for attacking liberals in the most shameless and slimy ways imaginable is unsurprisingly similar to the style of his mother Lucianne, a right-wing literary agent who first came to national prominence when she helped Linda Tripp break the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the press. Indeed, I imagine Lucianne training young Jonah to hate Democrats by repeatedly bopping him over the head with a frozen bratwurst meant to represent Bill Clinton’s penis.
“Woof! Clenis bad! Clenis bring pain!” I picture the beleaguered pundit-in-training yelping as his mother’s stern hand reared back and prepared to deliver another hit.
Now, to address a few sure-to-be-common concern-troll objections to my review:
- Objection #1: You didn’t thoughtfully try to refute this very serious argument!
Me: I sure didn’t. But I can assure you that no one has ever made a frozen bratwurst joke about Clinton’s penis with such detail or such care.
- Objection #2: But it’s a Very Serious work that demands a serious response!
Me: They often say you can’t judge a book by its cover, and that holds true for Liberal Fascism’s cover…
…which is infinitely cleverer than anything contained within.
Besides, if you want to see this “work” treated seriously, then I can’t recommend highly enough this fine review in the American Prospect by our buddy David Neiwert.
- Objection #3: But your review is filled with childish insults!
Me: Keenly observed, my friend. The entire point of ridiculing someone isn’t to be nice to them.
Now look: Jonah’s really trying to have it both ways here. He could have written a smart and serious work about authoritarian tendencies within American politics, but he knows that’s not what sells these days. What does sell, you ask? Cheap and lazy polemics, that’s what! But not wanting to be lumped in with the Coulter/Hannity crowd, Jonah decided he’d pen a cheap and lazy polemic and then claim that it was actually a very serious work! That way he could retain his cred as a real-deal Bill Buckley-caliber intellectual AND keep the Hitler smiley on the cover! Boo-yah!
In short, this book really does deserve the hilarious amounts of scorn heaped upon it. Civility and thoughtfulness don’t do it justice.
You are just mad because God did not give us really simple clear definitions of fascism from like some chemical test or something so you get all mad just because Joberg Goldbutt writes 400 pages on something he says is real hard to figure out but he’s pretty sure is something that applies to a whole lotta people he don’t like.
If you’re so smart you should have designed a simple machine to detect when something is fascist or not and it should cost about $9.95 and have a cool handle and it should have an orange, a blue, and a green light on it and make the sound “woo-woo-woop” when it detects something that is fascist.
“Woof! Clenis bad! Clenis bring pain!” I picture the beleaguered pundit-in-training yelping as his mother’s stern hand reared back and prepared to deliver another hit.
Just as I suspected. Jonah writes stupid books, among other things, to recreate the power imbalance he experienced in early childhood with his abusive mother. When the proverbial smackdowns start, he’s once again reliving the bratwurst-on-the-noggin bullying by his mother.
Doughboy needs to put his Bic down and visit a good therapist.
I’m sure that what Brad meant to say was
because I don’t think the replaced terms are actually substitutes for each other.
Awesome lolKitler, Brad.
Fuck the concern trolls, fuck being “nice.” In fRightWingar World, nice means Shaddup, Siddown, Don’t Ask Questions. (Which is totally NOT a fascist attitude.)
If J-LOad is such a fragile flower that he can’t take snark he would have keeled over years ago. But the thing is, these idiots loooove feeling persecuted. I’m sure he would have been very disappointed if no one pointed and laughed at his 400+ page coloring book.
So actually, you’re being very nice to Johan when you point and laugh.
DP, in his years long attempt to make the case that the right wing politics of many countries throughout history are not in any way facist, but instead the socialist tendencies of the left wing politics is truly facist is brilliant! In it’s stupidity, of course.
Nice try DoughPant! If you can get an idea into the publics minds, right or wrong, and repeat it often enough, it is still stupid.
I’m not sure that giving him a Mommy Dearest upbringing is helpful. He pretty much recanted the whole theme of the book in the Salon interview and using those statements against him would be the way to go until the introduction “WOO-WOO-WOOP” machine.
The interview is full of such equivocations.
We should never forget that it is a central game for right wing ideologues closely connected with concentrated power to garner sympathy and public hearing by portraying themselves as isolated and helpless victims of some invisible, impossibly powerful liberal ‘elites’.
So, you know, you have right wing pundits flacking some argument in favor of multi-billion dollar corporations larger than most countries or for billionaires themselves, and they declaim the vicious ‘liberal media’ and academic elites and crazy fringe hippie Stalinist liberal organizations as trying to shut them up.
They are the world’s most cowardly revolutionaries, ever proclaiming their individualist bravery from between the legs of their benefactors.
Nice review Brad but the tags on it over at Alternet are pretty boring. Did you not have any editorial control over the tags?
I think there are some pretty good ones laying around here somewhere.
The interview is full of such equivocations.
That interview is what I’m going to think of from now on when Goldberg complains about the lack of seriousness in treatments of his “work”. Salon’s interviewer took him seriously (much more than he deserves) and Jonah’s response was to slap himself on the forehead and spin around on the floor.
What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization … That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They’re not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they’re still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it’s all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that’s what I’m getting at.
So, point A: militarism without actually killing people is fascist.
Point B: Unity without militarism is fascist, too.
Point C: Anyone who calls for people to unite for the common good, to solve the country’s problems, is a fascist.
Hmmm…I never pegged Abraham Lincoln as a fascist, but he fits Jonah’s bill to a T, what with all that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” common purpose and unity claptrap. Jonah just can’t see that he’s called Lincoln a fascist, because Lincoln actually went to war and people got killed to enforce the unity that Jonah claims is the real fascism.
Astonishing pretzel logic here: setting aside differences and uniting around common purposes is fascistic. The alternative, which Jonah clearly prefers since he’s already delineated the fascism inherent in the model of rational adults cooperating for the common good, is for unceasing internecine conflict between opposing ideological factions, in which the entire notion of a “common good” becomes extinct.
Der Pantsenloden has created a ripple in the universal space-time continuum of stoopid, and in doing so, has actually accomplished the opposite of what he set out to do, i.e., smear liberals as fascists, by defining fascism as a preferable state to the one he envisions as the ideal.
Exactly. Writing the next installment of the RightWing Preaching To The Choir Series is one thing, but being unable to defend it in a serious interview is Exhibit A in the deconstruction of the entire book. DoughBob LoadPants should be beaten about the head and shoulders with his inability to defend his own theses.
Last night I watched “Idiocracy” for the first time–late to the fair, I know–and Jonah is now completely explained. At the end of the film the lead character tries to go back in time in a “time masheen” to save humanity from its disasterous Jonah Goldberg like future and discovers that the “time masheen” is really a ride in a museum of absurdly stupid historical tropes like that hitler was really charlie chaplin and that he fought the dinosaurs. I realized at once that I was seeing a dramatization of the entire Goldbergian reasoning process—its like watching continental drift in action. Pieces of actual thought fall off an original land mass and are only recognizable, thousands of years later, in the missing bits and pieces of the coastline. Reading that interview with Jonah you can see where things sort of like thought, or like a scholarly reading of something, had been meant to take place but hadn’t. Like in a teenager’s first paper where he writes “put in some stuff about how energy works” in brackets and then forgets to get back to it.
aimai
Point C(1): Unless the call to unity involves Patriotic Shopping; supporting an unjustified invasion; abandoning our Constitutional rights because They Want 2 Kill Us &c; &c.
Point C(1)(a): Unless we decide Bush is a librul because even we sometimes suspect he’s the wurst president evar therefore he couldn’t possibly be a conservative.
Point C(1)(a)(i): Please note, we’ve changed the definition of conservative too.
Der Pantsenloden has created a ripple in the universal space-time continuum of stoopid
Ah. So that’s what woke me up at three a.m.
My dog was whimpering under the bed and all the cups in the kitchen were rattling. I peered out the window and saw rays of cosmic stupid spreading out like a glowing curtain across the horizon. It was the Goldberg Event.
Jennifer:
It may not exactly be pretzel logic with the example of Lincoln. You see, he was a fascist for starting a war to end slavery and unite the country over the basic concept that slavery was wrong. And those abolitionists were just as fascist as modern liberals, what with their “slavery is wrong” thinking and forcing a war upon those who cherished “state’s rights”.
I mean, the whole idea that “white men are Jews of liberal fascism” is twisted, but starting from that awful premise, everything else makes sense in its own sick way.
Honestly, though: mocking? Too good for that asshole. Does he really want people to take his crap work seriously? Because if we did, it’s seriously stupid…not to mention that if he truly means it to be a serious work, then it reflects even worse upon him – if it’s just half-assed, then he’s just plain incompetent and a hack. If we take it seriously, then he’s close to being a holocaust denier, minimizing the seriousness of fascism and the impact of the Nazis, and should be interviewing with Neonazi thugs instead of news outlets. But then, if it’s a serious work, he’s just shined a light in a dark corner of the Conservative movement, exposing themselves as the fascists, taking oppression of everyone else to new, dizzying heights.
What about if people unite to support Joberg Goldbutt?
You know, like, pay his salary, by kicking a real journalist out of the L. A. Times (Robert Scheer) to hire the hack Jobeak Goldbuzzard? Or, you know, getting a major publisher to back your huge and laughingly inadequate book with cash advances for like your entire adult lifetime?
What if he suddenly convinced us somehow with his laser beam sharp arguments and we were all suddenly screaming about how we too should all help Joknife Goldfork, would we be liberal fascists?
“white men are Jews of liberal fascism”
Hunh, I thought the Jews were the Jews of Nazi fascism.
The hits keep on coming. From the Liberal Fascism blog’s FAQ page, on why the blog:
From the blog, in this morning’s post on why he didn’t discuss A. James Gregor and others more thoroughly in the book:
Yes, because when one writes a book that addresses the topic of fascism in such detail and with such care, it’s so, so hard to put together a list of sources read and add a sentence or two about each one. See, for example, the complicated case of Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism.
So by Goldbergian logic Calvin Coolidge was the greatest President?
Dude…I mean, dude…duuuuude.
Arky: So actually, you’re being very nice to Johan when you point and laugh.
Bingo. As much as the laughter hurts, the pointing proves you noticed.
That Salon interview was the death stroke. Not only does Li’l Grunty reveal that he never read any of the primary sources to sufficient depth to actually form a lasting opinion about them, his whole “sure, Mussolini publicly repudiated socialism and had the socialists in his country rounded up, but I betcha I could find some quotes from later on when he said nice things about it” unequivocally proves that he worked backwards from his bullshit conclusion.
What a sad little asshole.
For a French comic book rendition of Lucianne clubbing the young Pantload with a bratwurst, see here. It’s the second entry on the page. Though you may want to read the others as well, because they’re funny as hell.
Girl, I don’t even want to know how you found that…
So by Goldbergian logic Calvin Coolidge was the greatest President?
Probably. The Prophet — known to mortals as Ronald Reagan — thought Coolidge was the greatest. Constantly quoted him, had his portrait placed in a prominent position in the Oval Office, etc. etc.
Not surprising. He was an ardent believer in tax cuts for the rich and limited government (aside from helping big business wherever he could). And given the deep thinking on the conservative side, he did wonders for the country. I mean, look at how high the stock market was soaring when he left office in March 1929!
Jonah’s plan is working and stuff, sort of. He knew his book was a crapload of failed logic and revisionist bullshit. He knew it would be met with derision and scorn from rational thinkers. He knew it would enable him to play the victim card. He knew the right wing would slurp it down and spew forth it’s contents. Maybe he also knew he could get away with it and noone would notice his intent.
Indeed, fuck being nice, that is central to my point.
I’m just glad to find out Jonah knows what his nickname is.
Girl, I don’t even want to know how you found that…
I am multi-talented…
Woo-Woo…
I got nothin’.
Thanks, Jennifer.
It’s every man’s dream to have a penis so large that he must hire a small boy to carry it.
That’s so true it hurts.
My review of Jonah’s book, which was 2-stars and centered on the fact that a parallel book, _Conservative Fascism_, could readily be concocted using Goldberg’s rules of inference (Mussolini cut taxes; conservatives cut taxes; therefore conservatives “share” Mussolini’s belief in tax-cutting. Mussolini said, “Religion is a formidable force which must be respected and defended,” called Italy a “Christian nation,” and sought to protect religion in the “public sphere;” conservatives do the same; therefore, conservatives “share” fascism’s goal of eliminating the separation of church and state). It generated 3 pages of comments and then — poof — disappeared, presumably because every counter-argument was ridiculously easy to dispose of.
I’ve conducted an experiment — I now have a 5-star review of the book loaded with affirmative non-sequiturs. We’ll see how it fares.
Goldberg is like that clever graduate student — in fact, probably WAS that clever graduate student — who has figured out that you can write a seminar paper in a political theory survey by skimming the intro/conclusion and first paragraph of every section of a paper, stringing together cherry-picked quotations, and then connecting them with some putatively “wry” observations. Because grades don’t matter in graduate school, the professor doesn’t care because s/he did the same thing. It looks erudite but it’s not even as deep as the high school paper you wrote on “The Iliad” using Cliff’s Notes. I had a good friend in graduate school who was that clever student. Not surprisingly, he went on to law school.
That Salon interview was the death stroke. Not only does Li’l Grunty reveal that he never read any of the primary sources to sufficient depth to actually form a lasting opinion about them
I thought that was obvious when he was asking for experts on a certain author to talk to him, because he couldn’t be bothered to read enough of the author on his own. I think it was Edmund Burke?
“But not wanting to be lumped in with the Coulter/Hannity crowd, Jonah decided he’d pen a cheap and lazy polemic and then claim that it was actually a very serious work! That way he could retain his cred as a real-deal Bill Buckley-caliber intellectual AND keep the Hitler smiley on the cover! Boo-yah!”
That’s it in a nutshell. He seems to want to be taken seriously as an intellectual rather than be banished into the wingnut ghetto with the likes of Coulter. But real intellectuals, who are mostly liberal, won’t be fooled by such nonsense. Only the Fox News crowd will: you know, the ones who still think Saddam was behind 9-11. Liberals, who protest threats against civil liberties at every turn, are really fascists? It’s idiotic on the face of it, and I don’t need to read his book to know that. Life’s too short.
So by Goldbergian logic Calvin Coolidge was the greatest President?
It would appear so.
From Goldberg’s “Nazis Vs. Conservatives” (January 12, 2001), which contains many of the contentions repeated in his Big Book.
I thought that was obvious when he was asking for experts on a certain author to talk to him, because he couldn’t be bothered to read enough of the author on his own. I think it was Edmund Burke?
Spencer.
What Jennifer found:
SNET! I used to be able to embed images. *sniff*
At least I can still embed with Wonkette.
From Balloon Juice – “The Goldberg Principle”
You can prove any thesis to be true if you make up your own definitions of words.
I haven’t laughed so hard at a walking fallacy since Bill O’Reilly placed the Baby Jesus in the ever-polite, protective custody of his mouth.
Now where my m%$*&#ing loofah at?
El Cid said,
“If you’re so smart you should have designed a simple machine to detect when something is fascist or not and it should cost about $9.95 and have a cool handle and it should have an orange, a blue, and a green light on it and make the sound “woo-woo-woop” when it detects something that is fascist.”
We’ve got Fascist Siiiiiiiign!!!
Thanks for the link to the Niewert review. Unfortunately, Goldypants will use it as a evidence of his Ascension to Intellectual Seriousitude — “Look, Mommy, a real review!” — and ignore, mischaracterize, and dance around Niewert’s points. (I can imagine: “I didn’t address conservative fascism because my goal was to show the connections between liberalism and fascism. Links between fascism and the right have been done to death by others.”)
Dear Lord. I made the Coolidge crack off the cuff. I had no idea these blithering idiots actually believed that.
Truly, satire is dead.
“A mysterious bag holds the secret.”
Mwahahaaa!
I remember “The Punishment of Superboy,” comic (more likely the premise ran several times, ahem) but of course it meant nothing at the time other than “Ha, ha, neat! Superboy can’t be spanked!”
Looking back I understand the old objections to comics (see also rock n’ roll, cheap novels). The parents did see the subtext but couldn’t tell their kids why they objected. “You … he … that … Well, you’re not bringing that trash in my house young man!”
It generated 3 pages of comments and then — poof — disappeared, presumably because every counter-argument was ridiculously easy to dispose of.
Hemlock, that’s discouraging, because your review was actually quite good, and I thought, fit Amazon’s so-called qualifications rather well.
Fuck Amazon. I got my Borders frequent buyer card; I’ll no longer patronize Amazon. Doesn’t me I won’t continue to post reviews, but my money will go to Borders.
LittlePig: This morning I stumbled upon that 2001 article while looking for something other than Calvin Coolidge. After reading it, I remembered I had seen your comment earlier and said to myself, “Wow, music of the spheres!”
aimai: “Idiotcracy” aptly explains many seemingly inexplicable current sociopolitical phenomena (i.e., Doughy and his friends). It’s truly frightening.
(Warning: Lengthy, pedantic, and moderation-bound comment below. Blame El Cid, who opened up a Can of Bourdieu a few days back, and you can’t eat just one.)
Goldberg speaks, from the Salon interview:
Goldberg speaks again, from his interview with the California Literary Review (what the hell is this?):
Bush, Ashcroft, Nixon, Edwards, Huckabee, and Dobbs—for Goldberg, they are all contemporary fascists, or at least the grandnieces of fascism. This is the argumentative corner into which he has painted himself. Following his line of reasoning, if any and all advocacy of the state’s active intervention in the domestic economy or social dynamics is fascist or tends towards fascism,[1] then only a radically anti-statist posture is securely non-fascist.[2]
Neoliberal ideologues, whether dressed up as classical liberals, libertarians, or ideology-free technocrats, insist they stand in opposition to and struggle to counter the powerful secular religion of statism. As Bérubé reminded us shortly before Liberal Fascism’s release, when a right-wing hack and free-market fetishist like Goldberg produces a tome attacking the Left for its totalitarian tendency, check and see what his benefactors are currently up to. In other words, behind Goldberg’s insistence about the Left’s romantic utopianism, look for his own. Liberal Fascism intends to contribute to the aggressive right-wing assault on the collective institutions—including but not limited to the state—that stand in the way or slow the expansion of commercialism as the exclusive mode of social interaction and valorization.[3] The utopianism that drives Goldberg’s denunciation of liberal fascism and other similar attacks on the welfare state yearns to reestablish a capitalist paradise lost, one of unfettered, anthropomorphized markets and shriveled states; at the same time it masks this reactionary, restorative impulse in neoliberalism’s language of modernization, rationalization, and individual freedom.[4] Goldberg represents the radical right-wing of this hegemonic project,[5] and with his book he seeks to facilitate its advance through the simplistic, sweeping, and pejorative classification of its impediments as he perceives them.
___________________
1. Totalitarian would be a more apt label for what he is trying to get at, but we’ll go with his terminological slop for now.
2. Although see Goldberg’s discussion of U.S. international actions in the California Literary Review interview. His position could be aphoristically summarized as “Welfare state at home, fascist; imperial intervention abroad, something wonderful.”
Daniel Pipes, in his review of Goldberg’s book, gives a succinct statement of this false dichotomy: “A statist ideology, fascism uses politics as the tool to transform society from atomized individuals into an organic whole. It does so by exalting the state over the individual, expert knowledge over democracy, enforced consensus over debate, and socialism over capitalism.…
In contrast, conservatism calls for limited government, individualism, democratic debate, and capitalism. Its appeal is liberty and leaving citizens alone.”
3. “And yet, the world is there, with the immediately visible effects of the implementation of the great neo-liberal utopia; not only the poverty and suffering of a growing proportion of the population of the economically most advanced societies, the extraordinary growth in disparities in incomes, the progressive disappearance of the autonomous worlds of cultural production, cinema, publishing, etc., and therefore, ultimately, of cultural products themselves, because of the growing intrusion of commercial considerations, but also and above all the destruction of all the collective institutions capable of standing up to the effects of the infernal machine—in the forefront of which is the state, the repository of all the universal ideas associated with the idea of the public—and the imposition, everywhere, at the highest levels of the economy and the state, or in corporations, of that kind of moral Darwinism which, with the cult of the “winner,” establishes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all practices.…
Is it reasonable to expect that the extraordinary mass of suffering produced by such a political and economic regime could one day give rise to a movement capable of stopping the rush into the abyss? In fact, we see here an extraordinary paradox: on the one hand, the obstacles encountered on the route to the new order, that of the individual who is solitary, but free, are now seen as attributable to rigidities or archaisms, and any direct or conscious intervention, at least when it comes from the state, through whatever channel, is discredited in advance on the grounds that it is inspired by civil servants pursuing their own interests and oblivious to the interests of the economic agents and it is therefore suggested that that intervention be withdrawn in favour of a pure, anonymous mechanism, the market (which people forget is also the realm of the exercise of interests); yet on the other hand, it is in reality the permanence or the survival of institutions and agents of the old order, now being dismantled, and all the work of the different kinds of “social workers,” and also all social, familial and other solidarities, which prevent the social order from collapsing into chaos in spite of the growing volume of the population cast into insecurity.” Pierre Bourdieu, “Neo-liberalism, the Utopia (Becoming a Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation,” in his Acts of Resistance Against the Tyranny of the Market (1999), pp. 102-103.
4. “In a general way, neo-liberalism is a very smart and very modern repackaging of the oldest ideas of the oldest capitalists.…It is characteristic of conservative revolutions, that in Germany in the 1930s, those of Thatcher, Reagan and others, that they present restorations as revolutions. The present conservative revolution takes an unprecedented form: in contrast to earlier ones, it does not invoke an idealized past, through exaltation of soil and blood, the archaic themes of old agrarian mythologies. This new kind of conservative revolution appeals to progress, reason and science (economics in this case) to justify the restoration and so tries to write off progressive thought and action as archaic. It sets up as the norm of all practices, and therefore as ideal rules, the real regularities of the economic world abandoned to its own logic, the so-called law of the market. It ratifies and glorifies the reign of what are called the financial markets, in other words the return of a kind of radical capitalism, with no other law than that of maximum profit, an unfettered capitalism without any disguise, but rationalized, pushed to the limit of its economic efficacy by the introduction of modern forms of domination, such as ‘business administration,’ and techniques of manipulation, such as market research and advertising.
If this conservative revolution can deceive people, this is because it seems to retain nothing of the old Black Forest pastoral of the conservative revolutionaries of the 1930s; it is dressed up in all the signs of modernity. After all, it comes from Chicago.” Pierre Bourdieu, “The Myth of ‘Globalization’ and the European Welfare State,” in his Acts of Resistance, pp. 34-35.
5. In the Gramscian sense of the term.
If Jonah wants us to stop calling him a pantload, he should stop acting like one.
you should have designed a simple machine to detect when something is fascist or not and it should cost about $9.95 and have a cool handle and it should have an orange, a blue, and a green light on it and make the sound “woo-woo-woop” when it detects something that is fascist.
And you could sell them to teenagers at $57.95 each.
A big shot out for Brad!
Awesome! And Jonah quoted something about how you only catch flak when you’re over the target, ’cause he’s been in so many war battles that it’s an appropriate analogy!
Poor Jo’berg! He must have the shell-shock somethin’ awful from the Panzy Battalions.
“Civility and thoughtfulness don’t do it justice.”
Agreed. In fact, in a weird sort of upside down inside out way, reviewing anything by DoughBoy with “civility and thoughtfulness” would constitute sinking to his level.
Ich Wanten Das Kat.
Ich wünsche den Kitten.
Shhhh….hush little Jonah…….the bad liberals will get their due.
-Mama Lucie
For like his contemporaries William Kristol and John Podheretz, Goldberg was raised by prominent figures within the right-wing movement and was trained from the start to be an influential public “intellectual.”
The Manchurian Candi-Putz.
J— said,
Richard Hofstadter painted a picture of progressivism as quasi-fascistic
What are the current odds on Johan having actually read The Age of Reform or Anti-Intellectualism?
Flying Rodent said,
Ich Wanten Das Kat.
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said,
Ich wünsche den Kitten.
Actually, it would be “Ich kann das Kätzchen” in LOLGerman.
Smut Clyde: Cherry picked from The Age of Reform I imagine, although he may not have even needed to do that. “Status anxiety” is one of Hofstadter’s famous phrases, no?—now easily accesible through the magic of the Great Gazoogle.
I can cherry pick, too. Not from The Age of Reform—I don’t have it here at home—but from the Anti-Intellectualism book, specifically Hofstadter’s discussion of the Progressive in the chapter “The Rise of the Expert” (pp. 197, 205).
One argument Jonah “Calvin Coolidge, Best President Ever” Goldberg cannot or would refuse to consider is that broadly speaking, both the developoment of the state’s regulatory power in the Progressive era and its more profound transformation during the New Deal embody steps to safeguard and ultimately strengthen capitalism against its own self-destructive tendencies, not undermine it.
El Cid –
It’s called a dictionary, dipshit.
Is “it”? I was under the impression that you were simply called f***stick.
But I will gladly call you “Dictionary” if it continues to convince you that therefore you have something approaching a fraction of a brain.
In the end, Jonah wrote a book that managed to suck and blow.
It comes down to this: Jonah — you published. It was a bad book, man; it was just fucking awful. Old Oswald Spengler did it before, and his little tome sucked just as badly, in addition to providing an intellectual veneer to European fascism.
There is an intellectual tradition; I don’t care what Bill Kristol and Ayn Rand said. You had an alleged thesis (Liberal = Fascist, nazi, evil), a publisher who cut you slack for almost two years and gave you solid advances; an online sales outlet which plugged your book all that time and deleted criticizism from their site after it was released for sale because it upset you (Man; all of us out here want that gig).
But, you had to follow a few rules: It isn’t Drudge’s world when you seek to make an allegedly intellectual argument in an allegedly researched book written over several years of “intense” effort. This isn’t a post that took 20 seconds to wite and post at RedState or LGF.
You were supposed to support that thesis of yours (Liberal = Fascist, nazi, evil) with a progression of supporting arguments that could be compared against objective fact. This was a tough uphill fight from the beginning — and the fact that your premise was potentially doing real harm by obscuring a definition of fascism based on actual events and the death of millions of human beings. Essentially, you made the definition of fascism into Anyone Liberal, anyone on the Left, because I hate them and they’re just wrong and bad and they dont like me.
Jonah, the best kind of intellectual inquiry relies on honesty, and it’s hard-won — it’s what made Bertrand Russell say that facts should lead us to conclusions, not the other way around.
When you did not do any of this — what were you expecting would happen? That you’d be lionized as a great, conservative mind? Get offered a column in the NYT? An appointed professorship at an ivy league institution? That everyone would like you? That Ann Coulter and the 2nd SS Panzer Division Reunion’s “Panzer-Maedchen of 2007” would do you? What?
Stop whining about the criticism of the book. In the real world, if you claim that you a thoughtful and intellectual person whose work will contribute to the sum of human knowledge — and end up offering a stew of nonsensical, false claims, unsupported by facts or human experience… Well, people are gonna call you out over them.
Write a book that isn’t like that, and you can be expected to be taken more seriously. Make arguments based in truth, like a mensch — add something to the sum of human knowledge, and in the larger world of ideas you’ll be respected. Otherwise, forget it.