heh. I know. Best not to talk and let them go at it. But keeping my mouth shut has never been one of my finer qualities.

Tom, I could go round again but how about this. I DO admit that in the current climate what Jonah says isn’t weird. What that goes to show is that, since what Jonah says IS weird, our current climate has the same chemical composition as the atmosphere on Bizarro’s home planet.

As to the bloodletting, indeed I am just sitting back to watch the Corner fight with Hugh Hewitt. It’s the opposite of Alien v. Predator. No matter who loses, we win! (That’s what I’m hoping.)

Can you imagine what they’d do to a coke-head deserter?
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And massively capitalized, yes. Oh, and don’t forget a near-absolute media monopoly. It all means sfa if you don’t have that.

“Fools and millionaires,” I believe, was the formulation.
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I’m not so sure I want to see a blood-letting among the Republicans. I’d be entirely happy to see it if there were a left-of-center opposition capable of taking advantage, but there isn’t, and seeing these guys falling out scares me even more…

But Goldberg’s post wasn’t about SOCIAL elites; it was about INTELLECTUAL elites. That’s why, in my first post, I replaced his “elites” with “intellectuals”; it’s what he’s talking about. His populists don’t like the ACLU, NYT, and Harvard; they have nothing against GM and GE. (Populists in the early 20th century did dislike big corporations, and some do now, but they’re not who Goldberg’s talking about.) And do you think he calls Fox News anti-elitist because he thinks it’s against the corporate elite?

In the current political climate, what he says isn’t weird. He’s noting that for a long time the anti-intellectual strand in American politics has worked against the intellectual left, and he’s saying it may now start to work against the intellectual right. Neo-conservative intellectuals have tended to assume that they could count on the “heartland” for political support; he’s telling them that assumption, which has probably held good since Reagan, may not do so from now on.

And hey, isn’t a bloodletting on the American right a good think to look forward to?

You write: “He’s addressing his fellow-conservatives, and saying something they might well find a surprise.” Namely, that not all anti-elitists are conservative. Now that I look again, I can’t say I’m entirely clear what he is saying. But even if he is saying what you say, which I’ll grant makes some sense: isn’t it (per my post) weird? I mean: that it could ever FAIL to be obvious that since conservatism and social elitism tend to go together, therefore at least SOME anti-elitists can be expected to be anti-conservative, ergo not conservative?

Ok, I gotcha. Good line.

Daniel: I bow before your elite knowledge of the Book of Judges. I’m more a New Testament man, myself.

…The pseudoconservative dogma is a grab-bag of popular delusions which seem almost anarchic in their contradictoriness. Anti-state rhetoric sits adjacent to authoritarian ukase, free market dogma jostles with corporate state plutocracy, and so on: religious devotion with militarist fervor, rugged individualism with leader worship, “family values” with plutocratic decadence, America first with global messianism.

Your original post was short, but wasn’t that part of the problem? You quoted two sentences of Goldberg’s entirely out of context, when the context made them not weird at all. Or is all fair in love and dumping on conservatives?

Your last post and Dan’s still seem to me to misrepresent Goldberg’s point. He’s not saying “Not all conservatives are anti-elitists,” as if that would be some kind of surprise. He’s saying “Not all anti-elitists are conservatives,” i.e., the anti-elitists who now rail against the ACLU, NY Times, etc. may just as easily rail against the WSJ, AEI, etc. He’s addressing his fellow-conservatives, and saying something they might well find a surprise.

My uninformed take on Goldberg’s tract can be found here.