It’s the Little Things

Well, of course! And similarly, you cannot in fact be a “liberal fascist.” So Jonah’s sentence is precisely right.

Really? We’re going to go after Goldberg because you can’t, in fact, have a ed degree from Swarthmore? I have this image of you pushing past the burning house with screaming people in it, the car crash bodies strewn all over the place, to point with shaking finger at the misused apostrophe on the bakery sign across the street.

3:Just the perfect description of the “reality-based community”, total, and liberal intellectual politics for at least the last decade.

Joel Grey mocking the moustache. It’s all so funny at the Cabaret.

Any bets as to when the list of factual errors in this serious, serious book outnumbers its page count?

I have this image of you pushing past the burning house with screaming people in it, the car crash bodies strewn all over the place, to point with shaking finger at the misused apostrophe on the bakery sign across the street.

So the car crashed into the house, then?

One can have an education degree from Swarthmore in the same way that a national socialist can be a socialist.

A slightly weird intervention here, but my PhD is in Quaker history, and I’d suggest that it isn’t as daft a lable as it sounds (even if the author doesn’t mean what I’m about to mean).

The Quakers use a corporatist model of allegiance. Well into the 1960s they regarded unions as “divisive”. While I was researching my thesis in the 1990s I came across several documents from the 1930s whose model of workplace organisation was about internal loyalty to employment heirarchies and the perniciousness of class based organisations. At least one of them discussed “what we can learn from labour relations in Germany”. It was of course rather niaive, but that some Quakers were even looking in that direction was a it disturbing.

9:Hilarious books from my youth:Witness, God & Man at Yale, None Dare Call It Treason, Six Crises, Joe McCarthy & His Enemies, Conscience of a Conservative

And here we are 40-50 years later, with Baghdad & Bear Stearns & Alito & I just can’t laugh at the right anymore. I don’t think they’re funny.

But the Zeitgeist has changed. Whew. What a relief.

I’m terribly confused, obviously due to my liberal facist ways. Does being amused at your making the facts get in the way of the essential truths of our facism make me a pedantofacist or a reality-based-communofacist?

shaking finger at the misused apostrophe on the bakery sign across the street.

The misused apostrophe will affect many more people than the fire will.

And then there was the Professor of a small methodist college(a wife of a fundamentalist preacher) who was infuriated my daughter chose to spend time in the Ancient (Egyptian and Greco-Roman) Galleries of the Louvre, instead of hearing her talk on the Religious content of Renaissance painting…

There used to be a Chinese restaurant on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles called Chao’s Chop Suey. Except Chao’s was spelled out vertically and without an apostrophe, so that you read the sign as “Chop Suey Chaos.”

I remember being so fixated on that missing apostrophe that I could not hear the cries of those poor souls burning across the street. Goldberg would have DONE SOMETHING.

I really really really hate to defend him, but since in a better world it would be impossible to get a teacher certification without a major in some academic subject, and since one can realise the ideal at Swarthmore (major in English, secondary certification) I think that saying one can have an Education degree from Swarthmore is fine, colloquially.

I just really, really want to read the Hillary Clinton chapter. The whole book is going to be crackpot history and perverse reasoning at best, of course, but it’s when Jonah goes after the facist/lesbian/sign-of-the-Apocalypse Hillary that you know the whole thing is going to descend into scary, frothing-at-the-mouth, nonsensical madness. That’s what I want to see.

Does anyone want to make a bet that the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime are conveniently glossed over in Goldberg’s book?

But is the quintessential conservative fascist an SS storm trooper?

Can we all play the great Mussolini-admirer game?

1) Pick a group: political, ethnic, national
2) Search through the public utterances of every member of that group between 1915 and 1944, until you find one of them expressing admiration for something that Mussolini has said or done.
3) Declare group x ‘fascist’. Say it in the manner of Jane Horrocks in “Life is Sweet” [fahschEEEST!] for extra points.

It works for everyone. Including Jews!

This book is shaping up to be the literary equivalent of the musical “Springtime For Hitler.”

“Does being amused at your making the facts get in the way of the essential truths of our facism make me a pedantofacist or a reality-based-communofacist?”
Posted by Ciarán ·

Obviously you’re a reality-based-communo-pedanto-fascistic-eco-feminazi!
(the last two are for free, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh)

We think individualism and diversity are valuable, so he calls us fascists. Hmmm.

I suggest we start calling for the siezure and redistribution of all income and property by a unitary executive, and he’ll start calling us libertarian capitalists, and then have nothing left to complain about.

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There used to be a Chinese restaurant on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles called Chao’s Chop Suey. Except Chao’s was spelled out vertically and without an apostrophe, so that you read the sign as “Chop Suey Chaos.”

In Amsterdam there used to be a snack bar in the Plantage Kerklaan that had a sign that said “Pata’tes frites”. It really puzzled me, and I ignored several disasters wondering about it, until I realized that the foreign owner had probably looked it up in a dictionary and put the apostrophe that indicated word stress on the sign. (Word stress in Dutch that is, French has no word stress.)

Except Chao’s was spelled out vertically and without an apostrophe, so that you read the sign as “Chop Suey Chaos.”

During the previous Republican recession, there was a brief vogue of super-low-overhead grocery stores, where I remember buying 10-lb. boxes of cereal anent the rats at a place called “Warehouse Grocery.”

At night, however, the W, the A, the H, and the O were burnt out in the first word, which left the place with a more appropriate name.
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Rubbernecking the car-wreck was what the previous post was for, total.

How about helping out with the car wreck (rather than rubber-necking) and ignoring the apostrophe altogether?

I have an image of you looking for something that isn’t here.

I have an image of you reading Goldberg’s book to check for misspellings. Focus on what’s important here.

So the car crashed into the house, then?

After the driver swerved to avoid the apostrophe, yes.

There’s not much point in going after the major/program distinction when the idea that students studying education at Swarthmore are “liberal fascists” is on tap.

Exactly right.

Yeah, let’s keep our eye on the ball here.

Let’s try to see if we can’t improve American public life by making this book a universal and bipartisan laughingstock.

Goldberg’s manifold weaknesses make defending him an impossible task, but there is a way of making his claims plausible from a little-government constitutionalist, libertarian, or traditionalist conservative point of view.

First would be to define American liberalism as a form of socialism (akin to democratic socialism). Next would be to point out that socialism and fascism both advocate a strong, innovative, interventionist state which does not honor or follow past tradition. Next would be to point out that both socialism and fascism tend to be dominated by “new men” and tend to scorn the traditional elites and shove them aside.

What’s missing is the gangs of hoodlums, the death camps, the secret police, the arbitrary imprisonments and executions, and so on. (It reminds me of the free-marketer’s claim that Sweden was worse than the USSR, since the state share of the Swedish economy was actually larger than the state share in the USSR).

And then, you do have the fact that Fascist Roosevelt did bring the US into the war against Fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan.

There are many cases of individuals who switched from the left to Fascism, Mussolini being a famous case. I believe that Scott E. Kaufman finds Jack London’s political position ambiguous and shifting in this sense (Hi, Scott, correct me if I’m wrong).

In the U.S. the populist Democrats often opposed WWII, and some seemed to have fascist / nativist sympathies. I’l repeat the example I’ve posted here before. In Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party (the US’s most successful left party ever) elected a Communist Congressman in 1936 or so (John Bernard of the Duluth area), but in 1942 FL Senator Ledeen was implicated in German propaganda activities, dying shortly thereafter in a mysterious plane crash — the first but not the last Minnesota Senator to do so.)

In other news, Turturro’s Jesus Quintana in “The Big Lebowski” is the best supporting part ever.

Special Major is like a common Colonel.

How many Swarthmore or Brown grads teach elementary school? Less than 1%?

We’ve got a recruiting problem.

I’ve heard there are these things called “blogs”, where anyone who wants to opine on any topic can do so with great ease

I hear there are these things called “comments” on “blogs” where people can point out that the “blogger” has missed not only the forest, but the trees, the bushes, and the shrubs (not to mention the Knights of Ni), because he’s fixated on an acorn.

In the U.S. the populist Democrats often opposed WWII…..

You seem to be making (one of) the mistake(s) Goldberg does, conflating “Democrat” with “liberal”. Even today the two are hardly completely overlapping sets. No sane person could call Hillary a “liberal”. Before the 60s there were many, many more conservative Democrats than there are now.

The “populist” part of your sentence is far more important than the “Democrats”part.

There actually are serious books that draw parallels between the New Deal, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, e.g. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939.

It’s actually a pretty interesting book.

However, Schivelbusch does not argue that these regimes were equivalent, let alone that the New Deal was fascist or Nazism left-wing.

“Left Minnesota as the most liberal state in the union”.

MikeJ,

Not only that, Mike, but there’s that whole party realignment thing that began to occur AFTER World War II, in which [conservative] Southern Democrats white flighted their butts to the GOP over civil rights. How many of them were isolationist, and against US entry into the War? That’s another important consideration to, well, consider.

re #51–

John Emerson–

Another thing that fascism needs is a cult of personality. I can only hope that Mr. Goldberg has determined that the great leader is Noam Chomsky (although I suppose Jimmy Carter would also do).

I can only hope that Mr. Goldberg has determined that the great leader is Noam Chomsky (although I suppose Jimmy Carter would also do).

It’s got to be teh Clenis! (Actually, Hillary was in one of the first iterations of the subtitle.)

Let’s just scrap both fascism and socialism from our vocabulary – decades of misuse have drained these terms of all explanatory power. I’ll make an exception for serious social scientists and historians trying to delineate certain movements in the past with descriptive rather than polemical intent and willing and able to spend a few pages on semantics.

total’s claim has a noble history, of course:

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'”