A Goldberg conjecture

It’s interesting to read this profile (from several years ago) of the editor of the Son of Lucianne’s book: the Son of Saul. Note his perspective that the fact the liberals attack these books — all the way back to the provocatively titled (for its day) The Closing of the American Mind proves both the worth of the book and the worth of him for helping publish it. He does complain about the rise of “abrasive personalities” on the right, but the hatred of Zabar’s seems to blind him to its current manifestation.

Bellow: “A new generation is rising, and while they may eschew the conservative label, they will undoubtedly challenge the stridency and dogmatism of their liberal parents and teachers.”

Please. He doesn’t see stridency and dogmatism on the right?

For the record, not only did Goldberg want someone else to do his research for him, but when I responded to his request I was told my expertise wasn’t the kind of expertise he wanted. Seems Goldberg wanted Spencer to say something Spencer never said, but which some post-Hofstadter historian said he did. That may be his point—New Dealers tarred Spencer, when he was really a swell person!—but he plays into the consensus misunderstanding of the influence of Darwin on Spencer. Anyone who reads Spencer (instead of about him) realizes he was Darwinian in rhetoric alone—his true commitment was to the form of neo-Lamarckism he championed in his various 1890s kerfuffles with Darwinians. Apparently the truth didn’t sit well with him (as I document in the aforelinked post).

A few points:

1. The cover came three years before the book.
2. This is the same ‘controversialist faux-history’ attempt to move an author beyond the limited audience of Regnery hackjobs: see Malkin’s In Defense of Internment.
3. Bruce Bartlett was told explicitly that anti-Cheney editorials were costing his wingnut welfare foundation money.
4. The internet troll exists in print publishing.

When was the last time you saw Stupid White Men treated as a serious contribution to debate?

I’d take a Goldberg variation over a Goldberg conjecture any time!

Goldberg’s book is currently ranked #1 on Amazon. If left-wing college professors dismiss the book without reading it they will do no harm to Goldberg, but will be making themselves even more irrelevant to the intellectual world outside of college campuses.

Hmmm. Seems to me that the simpler explantion is the best: He’s both incompetent and completely unaware that he’s incompetent.

This phenomena is quite well documented. This paper, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, spells this out quite clearly: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Here’s the abstract:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Thus, Goldberg is simply a boob on a scale that boggles the imagination. Worse, his complete incompetence in this area gifts him with the inability to accurately assess his competence; such an assessment would clearly have led him to run – not walk – away from writing such a stunningly silly book based on what amounts to a Monty Python sketch about the class of dead people and their relationship with Al McCogan. He simply doesn’t have the facilities to see what a complete ass he’s made of himself and so continues to up the ante on national TV in a never ending train wreck.

Personally, I don’t think it could have happened to a nicer guy.

Regarding “intellectual contribution and partisan hackery have become indistinguishable from each other thanks to the substantial profits and low reputational costs of writing rightwing partisan trash” – take a look at David Brock’s memoir Blinded By The Right. It covers how that process evolved in detail, from a former insider’s view.

To quote myself:

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a daycare worker giving a toddler a sugarfree bran muffin — forever.”

If left-wing college professors dismiss the book without reading it they will do no harm to Goldberg, but will be making themselves even more irrelevant to the intellectual world outside of college campuses.

This is hogwash. Goldberg has a track-record at NRO, and so one can conclude that if his arguments are stupid in general, then one is unlikely to make the time to read hiswhole book. The sub-title “secret history” makes me skeptical. What’s secret about it?

er…close the italics after “…Ask Me”

I find it interesting to look at the recent (last 15-20 years) history of these kinds of books with what I regard to be one of the fathers of them all from the 19060s – None Dare Call It Treason (closet commies everywhere in the government). The latter was much more ‘underground’, but ultimately sold millions. I wonder if it is that last bit which helped to spawn the cottage industry in these books.

If left-wing college professors dismiss the book without reading it they will do no harm to Goldberg, but will be making themselves even more irrelevant to the intellectual world outside of college campuses.

I’d quibble that reading the book actually a sign of relevance, with collapsing mortgate markets and oil prices at an all-time high.

Oh, James D. Miller, brave truth-teller. Let me guess, you don’t know that Mussolini was the leader of a party self-named the Fascists either.

I think that Goldberg, D’Souza, Coulter, Malkin, et all should be thought of as the political equivalent of Martin Gardner’s hermit scientists, and treated as such. There approach to reality and politics is equivalent, epistemologically, to that of creationists to biology and science.

The best review of Goldberg along these lines that I’ve seen is this one

http://bouphonia.blogspot.com/2008/01/parallels-correspondents-and-relations.html

All the same, there’s something to be said for recognizing that while Goldberg’s logic may be different from ours, it “works”…at least within that shadow world from which he launches incursions against our own. Indeed – and this is the main point – it works much better in that world than our logic would. If you free yourself, for a moment, from your bias towards accuracy and honesty, and focus strictly on what gets personal and professional results, you can see that asking Goldberg to use commonly accepted standards of evidence and proof is like asking a tailor to use a railroad spike as a needle. You’d place him at a disadvantage, to say the least.

This, I think, is why it’s almost pointless to criticize him for inaccuracy, and why we can take him somewhat seriously when he insists that he made his argument as carefully and thoroughly as he could; given the tools he couldn’t allow himself to use, and the facts he was obliged to ignore in order to begin his project, let alone to complete it, it’s probably true.

Like the baraminologists, he’s forced to look for evidence of lineage where it must be, rather than where it is; to view fascism as a right-wing ideology would be to conjoin things that stand “at distance in the intellect of God.” And like the baraminologists, he’s caught between envying the power of a respected academic discipline, and being unable to meet its standards. Therefore, like so many other cranks, his tactic is to gather up an assortment of pleasing facts like some ideological bowerbird, arrange them in a pattern for which a “logical” explanation can be offered (as though the pattern were a natural phenomenon, instead of an invention), and peddle that explanation to people who want to enjoy the authority of Science without any of the responsibilities it imposes.

he came of age in a movement where intellectual contribution and partisan hackery have become indistinguishable from each other

I would be surprised if the two were ever distinguishable (in the sense of receiving different treatment in respected circles) in any society. Whenever there exists a need by powerful people of an argument, that argument will be made, and it will receive respectful treatment.

If you think Goldberg et al. are in any way unique in their ability to command serious attention to patently absurd arguments, you have not been reading the New York Times op-ed page.

James D. Miller: Your list of people addressing the subtance of Jonah’s arguments is woefully incomplete. For starters, it doesn’t include David Niewert, who presented not just a footnoted dissection of flaws in the book but an actual bibliography of better work.

CW, you keep commenting on the hard work and much research Jonah must have done, but there’s literally no evidence for either. We have an example in this very thread of him turning away good scholarship, and many examples of him coasting entirely on other people’s volunteered labor. The book as published is badly written and edited, and while it’s long, that only means it took time, not that it required creative effort; any professional writer can explain the difference between churning out verbiage and writing carefully. It’s a big book, but it’s a bad big book.

Emerson said:

Taking Goldberg seriously lends him credibility, while allowing him to play rope-a-dope with whatever we say—his patrons and his target readers just don’t care about the things we care about.

But if we ridicule him, mushy-headed centrists will sympathize with him. And ignoring him does nothing one way or the other.

I argue on my own blog that what needs to be done is to 1) educate about true fascism without directly engaging Jonah’s book and 2) drag the sheer stupidity of saying that “the quintessential Liberal Fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore” into the spotlight.

The appropriate approach is to note that Doughy Pantload has at length produced a book, and leave it at that. Specialists in fecal products may don face masks and tease apart its constituent components, but the rest of us can consider ourselves fortunate not to have stepped on it.

Well, ironically Social Democracy and Fascism were presented as cousins german on this blog by Henry – a juxtaposition that I find simply absurd no matter what the source and level of discussion.

The default position for any book is to be ignored. Any suggestion by an author that their book is worthy of more than this requires a hell of a lot of substance before anyone has any duty to do anything with it. To be honest, I don’t know why you folks are giving this one the space you are.

Dan Miller (#9) asks “when was Stupid White Men” (and other Moore books) taken as a serious contribution to debate? Well my teenage son at the time and other 17-or-so-year-olds sure as hell took it seriously. And so did a lot of other people.

But I guess that’s not what you mean by “debate”? That sounds a little elitist to me.

I know this is an academic blog, so caveat emptor and all that, but I’m afraid this thread smacks, unfortunately, of chummy disagreements among the chattering classes.

I can’t speak for anyone else, Hidari, but I talk about Liberal Fascism because I find it and the “intellectual” contortions Jonah has to do to defend it so funny. What’s not to like about Jonah admitting he has no idea what Mussolini says in The Doctrine of Fascism, and that anyway it doesn’t really matter what he said, he was still a lefty?

I think that a punchy list of 100 gross factual errors and illogical arguments from the book and the TV appearances might be effective.

They’d have to be either substantive errors or else simply too ridiculous to believe — e.g., Jonah’s unawareness that Mussolini is called a fascist because he called himself a fascist.

The text should be punchy and easy to read, but there should be careful footnoting available somewhere.

The ludicrousness of some of the smears can be highlighted, e.g. the Brown or Swarthmore grade school teacher Fascist.

100 errors standing alone might be enough, or maybe there should be a brief sketch of what Goldberg is trying to do. The pure viciousness of the accusation (which he has been fudging already) should be underlined by informing the audience of what the Fascists were like and what they actually did.

So I did a bloggingheads a few days ago with Dan Drezner, where we discussed the Jonah Goldberg liberofascism book, and whether or not it was fair to dismiss it without having read it.

When someone purports to write a book about fascism and makes but two tangential references to Francisco Franco, completely ignoring Mussolini´s and Hitler´s aid to Franco (hardly a leftist) and makes zero mention of the volunteers that Franco sent to help the Nazis fight the Soviets, it ought to be acceptable to dismiss it without reading it.

Is it okay not to read Alex Tabarrok’s book because “people who aren’t convinced by my crayon drawings about human motivation shouldn’t be allowed to vote” is a bad argument?

I think you mean Bryan Caplan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter. It sounds like it’s on a much higher level than Goldberg’s, which I do not mean as much of a compliment.

The reason we talk about Goldberg, despite the batshit crazy nature of his “ideas,” is that yesterday’s batshit crazy nonsense becomes, if not thoroughly discredited in public debate, tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

There’s also the “Overton Window” effect. Eventually people will be able to say “Yes, Goldberg overstated his case, but…….” In other words, he doesn’t have to sell his whole argument. If he can just slip a few nuggets into the conventional wisdom, he wins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

The key word is “outside college campuses”, Engels, not “intellectual world”. I do agree that the “Liberal Fascism” phenomenon has to be taken seriously, even though its ideas don’t.

I also think that dealing with Goldberg is tricky, as I said above. One problem is that his TV and radio publicity will be almost all favorable or at least respectful, for reasons outside our control. There’s a whole world of discourse out there where right-wing truism are dominant and basic principles of argument and evidence are ignored, and it’s hard ro figure out how tobreak into that world.

Engels, are you serious? I am fully aware that the U.S. is not the world. I would be happy to be in a better nation than the one I happen to be in right now. I’m happy that you’re happy, but if you have nothing to offer in this particular argument, couldn’t you just shut the fuck up?

No problems where you are? Good! Wonderful! We have problems over here.

O-kay…

I didn’t see the Stewart. I have no idea how effective it would be for a semi-informed, uncommitted viewer. Unfortunately, Stewart mostly reaches high-information voters. (But maybe I’m wrong).

“NPR talk” isn’t content. It’s just seeming reasonable, speaking in a certain tone of voice, nodding in a certain way, adopting certain professorial mannerisms, etc. Your words could be advocating a war of extermination against Islam, and as long as your presentation was mild-mannered and professorial, it would fly on NPR.

No sound on one computer, no internet on the other.

I’m not disagreeing with you. Baiting Goldberg until he starts sputtering and saying moron shit is absolutely the best strategy, but probably only Stewart can do it. Keeping his composure and keeping a straight face while lying and talking nonsense is Goldberg’s stock in trade.

If you want to know the wrong way to attack Goldberg, go to my link. Goldberg linked to it with this message:

Jonah Goldberg: Baaaaaaaad

So argues this guy.

01/19 05:06 PM

He knows that my kind of argument rolls of his audience’s back. (His audience: moderates and centrists who don’t pay attention but like nice people (of whom I am not one), plus Bush’s 30% — the neo-Confederate Armageddonist anti-tax authoritarian married, pregnant, and in the kitchen hard-core.

“Most Americans, however, are wholly unaware of these historical/ideological parallels, which is why this discussion is welcome in my mind. You can go on and on about how the welfare state is warranted anyhow, even given this history. But the history is still well worth reciting, for the same reasons, say, Jeet Heer is interested in exposing the ties between National Review and Franco, Pinochet, etc.”

See, this is precisely the sort of reasoning that I think Goldberg wants to encourage. Most of us uneducated slobs think fascism is bad because fascists were torturers and murderers. But apparently what we don’t realize is that fascists also favored a welfare state. Ah ha, so that means social security is one step along the path that leads to concentration camps.

So for all I know there could be an historical connection between liberal progressive ideas on the welfare state and what fascists favor. So what? Well, I know the answer to that. It means that if you favor the welfare state you favor Auschwitz.

I’m actually sympathetic to people (usually leftists) who get a little overwrought and describe liberal American Presidents as fascists because they bombed villages in Southeast Asia, or because they put antiwar dissidents in jail. “Fascist” may be inaccurate and exaggerated, but I can understand the reaction. The person is condemning the imprisonment of people for their political views or condemning the slaughter of innocent people in war, the sorts of things we condemn fascists for doing. But if Jonah mentions these sorts of things, he should also mention the Republican Presidents who supported mass murderers and overthrew democratic governments in order to install dictators.

Now as for National Review and Pinochet, I used to read National Review and they were the sort that would usually downplay or deny the atrocities of rightwing dictators. I’m tempted to call them fascist, but I haven’t read Jonah’s book, so I’ll refrain.

Say what you will — I’m not saying that he was perfect or that he never did anything wrong — but Pinochet did NOT force toddlers to eat sugarfree bran muffins. Priorities, folks! Priorities!

Apparently I was wrong. Goldberg was not hired because the LA Times wanted a stupider, more right wing columnist. They just hired him because they were cutting costs and he charges a bargain rate.

Soon the think tanks will be providing the newspapers with all of their editorialist, FREE!!!!!

OK, could one of Goldberg’s fans explain something to me? I always got the impression that Nazis and other fascists were bad because

1. They started aggressive wars that killed millions of people.

2. They rounded up millions more people into concentration camps and either worked them to death or simply killed them outright.

3. They were racist and anti-semitic, attempting to kill off the Jews.

4. They ran secret police and showed a contempt for civil liberties.

Call me frivolous, but this seems a little more important than whether they liked organic foods or opposed smoking. So if you wanted to determine who their modern heirs are you would want to identify which political movement:

1. Supports starting wars. Bonus points if there’s an obsession with manliness.

2. Likes rounding up people into prisons without due process.

3. Makes racist and anti-semitic appeals in their politics. These might be coded – for example, industries with a high percentage of Jews (media, academia, etc.) may come in for criticism.

4. Shows contempt for civil liberties.

So if you can show a political faction in America that has these characteristics, you’ve got your heirs to fascism. Just trying to help here.

I could scarcely believe the “organic” bit until I heard it for myself. Clearly one of the greatest pseudo-intellectual debunking moments in web history.

Please . . . if any Goldberg defenders/rationalizers are still reading this thread see that then respond.

Organic State = Organic food . . . . . . . ROFL

Soon the think tanks will be providing the newspapers with all of their editorialist, FREE!!

Consistent with the observation that the one bit of the Wall Street Journal that they always gave away was a few choice cuts from the opinion page, and now they’ve made the whole thing free.

Z, you’re talking about a book where the author skips over every single republican president when looking for examples of authoritarianism – while reaching desperately for parallels in every democratic president. Passage after passage in excerpts look like middle school history essays. And we’re supposed to take it seriously? This is a book with working titles linking Mussolini, Hillary Clinton, and Whole Foods. I’m surprised he left out Mr. Rogers and Big Bird. The entire exercise amounts to “cats have tails, dogs have tails, thus cats are dogs.”

It does, however, provide a virtually endless source of entertainment. In the “Plan 9 from Outer Space” sense.

Marc,
First off, the thrust of what I’m getting at here is that even if Jonah’s book itself is a load of crap, many of the scholarly arguments and ideas he’s popularizing are both serious and serve as useful correctives to the public discourse on Fascism and contemporary American politics at large. Secondly, I don’t agree with your characterization of the book. Sure, it’s partisan as all hell, and Jonah fails to really acknowledge how much the American right has come to accept, even exploit, the progressives’ gift of a corporatist political economy (his “tempting of conservatism” chapter notwithstanding). But, despite what SadlyNo, et al. would have you believe, Jonah’s book does not follow the obvious strawman logic that says: A involved B, C also involved B, therefore A = C. Rather, for anyone who gives the book an honest reading will admit, all the talk about organic foods, the war on cancer and smoking, vegetarianism, animal rights, anti-department store campaign, etc. is simply there to argue Fascism out of its popularly-understood “genocidal racism/nationalism and nothing much else” box. He’s making the point, one that Sheri Berman and a host of consensus historians of Fascism have already made (but the public at large has failed to absorb), that Fascism was, at its conception, a well-intentioned, socially-conscious mass reaction to modernity’s discontents.

Look, for most CT readers, popular books written by non-academics, much less conservative pundits, much less conservative pundits already carrying a boat load of partisan baggage, are to be ridiculed as a point of departure. Fine. I get it. Have a ball! But just because you refuse to take Jonah or his book seriously, doesn’t mean the discussion his book is already raising should be ignored, or more accurately, left for the morons. John Emerson’s self-parody of the paranoid, conspiratorial, huffy, secluded, product-of-the-left-wing-echo-chamber mind doesn’t help much either (well, it might help therapeautically, in the most immediate sense).

For instance, I look forward to watching Sweden, et al. go to war once they lose their ability to export national defense concerns to Pax Americana.

Oh, rest assured, should Sweden ever finds itself in a war, it will manage honorably. More seriously

IN SUM, war, civil liberties deficits seems to be much more a problem of the modern nation-state, perse, than any one faction within it.

Yes, and more precisely, the more the state is democratic and tolerant of counter-power (political oppositions, free press, voluntary associations, unions…), the least these problems seem to occur, and this is why today’s american liberal cherish those values to the point that no one would be called a liberal if he did not defend them. When the state on the other hand actively fights against democracy and these counter-powers, when it suppresses elections and political oppositions, when it restricts free press, forbids unions and free associations-something done by each and every fascist governments during the XX° century-these abuses seem to happen more often than not. Troubling isn’t it? Oh, and by the way, here you have it, in words that should be plain for an eleven years old, it is absurd to call liberal fascists, thus Jonah Goldberg’s book is absurd and can be dismissed straight away, and no amount of organic food or pertinent arguments from Sheri Berman can change this.

Zinaida, where were you back a few days ago when I put out the call for idiots? That was a terrible thread. Lemuel Pitkin now hates me because of it. But there were no idiots defending Goldberg — what could I do?

Communists, in practice, have been just as bloody, racist, nationalist as their fascist brethren, yet we do not equate Communism with its mere bloody/nationalist excesses.

For most people, a pretty high degree of oppressiveness and vilence is part of the definition of”Communist” and “fascist”. We don’t “equate” Communism and fascism with their most negative aspects, but these negative aspects are a necessary part of the definition.

Both enterprises are meaningless when discussing the contours of modern American political discourse, where racism/antisemitism hardly plays a role.

There are many reasons why you are wrong. “Southern strategy” might be a place to look. Or the CCC. Or the paleocons. Or Neiwert’s actual research. When you equate neiwert and Horowitz that’s just an assertion.

Even if Jonah’s book itself is a load of crap, many of the scholarly arguments and ideas he’s popularizing are both serious and serve as useful correctives to the public discourse on Fascism and contemporary American politics at large.

He isn’t popularizing these books, he’s tendentiously misrepresenting them. Sheri Berman has been discussed here, and on that thread I even supported her thesis to a degree.

Rather, for anyone who gives the book an honest reading will admit, all the talk about organic foods, the war on cancer and smoking, vegetarianism, animal rights, anti-department store campaign, etc. is simply there to argue Fascism out of its popularly-understood “genocidal racism/nationalism and nothing much else” box.

No what he’s doing is using a definition of fascism which has been so entirely emptied of meaning that it applies to every political group anywhere except for the most doctrinaire Hayekians and Miseians. With that definition it’s easy to prove that American liberals are fascist — so are social democracy, Christian democracy, and most traditional conservative parties (there have been conservative nanny states too, you know).

But for most people, the negative aspects of fascism are quite reasonably essential to the definition, so that the “fascist” label still has a strong stigma (as it indeed should). Goldberg wouldn’t have used the “fascist” word at all without that stigma; smearing liberals was his goal.

And on top of that, he is writing these things while on the staff of a magazine which within recent memory (until 1975) enthusiastically praised the world’s only remaining actual fascist.

And thank you for what you said of me personally! Coming from you, I feel fine about it. Some of us are giving Goldberg a serious critique, and some of us are ridiculing him. The serious critique alone wouldn’t be enough, because neither Goldberg’s true believers (Bush dead-enders) nor his target audience (thoughtless moderates) care about details. Goldberg deserves to be laughed off the stage, and maybe my bran muffin joke will help.

But just because you refuse to take Jonah or his book seriously, doesn’t mean the discussion his book is already raising should be ignored, or more accurately, left for the morons.

Let me correct that for you.

How about:

“But just because Jonah’s book is dishonest, clownish, inaccurate, and worthless, it doesn’t mean that the discussions in the books he’s misrepresenting should be ignored”

Most here would agree, and there’s already been at least one post on this topic. I might also mention Scott Eric Kaufman (an occasional commentator here and friend of many of us, who has a blog called “Acephalous”) who — as we speak — is writing his PhD thesis about, among other things, racism in the works of such early XXc Socialist authors as Jack London.

If you want to know the motivation behind my contempt for Goldberg, it’s that the political movement he belongs to, Movement Republicanism, is by any reasonable definition far closer to fascism than American liberalism is. For that reason, I cannot treat Goldberg as anything but despicable and clownish, and I have to question the motives of the people giving him so much media space. You have said nothing whatsoever to change my mind.

:-)

Maybe Goldberg:Berman::Fascism:Social Democracy?

Zinadia, I’d pay more attention to your argument (such as it is: we shouldn’t discuss the book Goldberg has written, but rather the books others have written, which Goldberg might have written if (a) he were smarter, and (b) if they weren’t already written) but I can’t shake the image of teh Scandoliberalfascist menace you conjure.

I look forward to watching Sweden, et al. go to war once they lose their ability to export national defense concerns to Pax Americana.

If you want to imagine the future, picture a Volvo circling an Ikea parking lot — forever.

“Communists, in practice, have been just as bloody, racist, nationalist as their fascist brethren, yet we do not equate Communism with its mere bloody/nationalist excesses. We study its ideological roots, its philisophical heritage, its fears, its hatreds (in the words of John Lukacs), its hopes, its ideals and its stated programs.”

Well, given that when I teach “Mass Violence and Genocide”, I assign The Black Book of Communism, I have no idea what you’re talking about here. I seem to recall most political theory courses that I have been involved with also discuss the practice of Marxist-Leninism.

I believe, also, that the fascism course irregularly offered by my department also studies both the ideology and practice of fascism.

Regardless, if your argument is that the practice of Marxist-Leninism was as bad, if not worse, than fascism, you’ll find no disagreement here.

So I wonder what the point of this exercise is, other than to take us back to point I made above: if Goldberg wants to retread Hayek, that’s fine; he can argue about how statism is the root problem, but that’s a different set of claims than to reduce statism to fascism, which is where talk of things like “organicism” (in ideological roots, a conservative rather than liberal view of state-society relations, in matter of fact) takes him off the rails.

You dismiss, moreover, my argument as “facile” but provide no actual rejoinder to it, rather than to retread the genealogical connection between democratic socialism and fascism. This is, moreover, doubly irrelevant to the American context, where contemporary liberals defend welfare-state policies on liberal rather than socialist grounds.

Righteous bubba and John Protevi make excellent points that merit repeating. Goldberg’s book–and its merits–are the subject of criticism. A defense of Goldberg cannot be that there are other books by people that argue for similar things. The claim is that Goldberg’s arguments stink. Whether other people have made better arguments is immaterial to criticism of Goldberg’s work. I would further suggest that attempts to say “but Goldberg has a point” even though his arguments and facts are wrong is just a sophistical change of subject.

What Goldberg does is a variation of what George Will has made a career out of doing–setting up straw men liberal positions and then comparing them to fascism and communism (at the same time). It’s crap when Will does it; and it’s crap when Goldberg does it. No amount of “they have a point about well-meaning social policy” will rescue them.

SEK — no disrespect, but I’ve seen enough academics among different fields to know that they often vigorously disagree amongst themselves — even as to medical, genetic, and other scientific issues, but certainly as to eminently contestable issues such as political thought or intellectual history.

Even looking at your entirely one-sided summary of an email conversation, Goldberg apparently thought that he had some academic authorities in support of whatever view he was taking of Spencer; you seem to have disagreed, but that doesn’t remotely prove that you are so thoroughly and indisputably correct that no one else is allowed a different interpretation.

Bottom line: As with Henry, it’s not fair to accuse Goldberg of wrongdoing simply because he did something that academics do all the freaking time — here, taking one side of an issue where academic authorities can be found on both sides.

Bottom line: As with Henry, it’s not fair to accuse Goldberg of wrongdoing simply because he did something that academics do all the freaking time—here, taking one side of an issue where academic authorities can be found on both sides.

“Taking one side” may differ from an intentionally produced smear.

functional-

Goldberg isn’t merely disagreeing with the mainstream academic opinion on fascism: he’s attempting to overthrow the entire edifice, and replace scholar’s definition of fascism with his own.

He makes claims that no serious scholar, that I know of, supports (“The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism”, “Hitler was a man of the left”, and the only reason people think Mussolini was a fascist was because of his support in World War I). These are ridiculous claims.

Moreover, on the stuff that Goldberg is right on, he is not presenting anything new. How much chutzpah does one have to claim that one is doing a work of revisionist history, without including any new information derived from primary sources?

Jonah: I’m working on a chapter of the book which requires me to read a lot about and by Herbert Spencer. There’s simply no way I can read all of it, nor do I really need to.

I do not think that normal academics work that way. He wanted to plug Spencer into his argument without knowing anything about Spencer. He wasn’t asking for help with the subtleties of a difficult question.

This looks like the standard-average frat-boy scam, one or two notches less contemptible than hiring someone to write your paper for you. His whole attitude toward scholarship is fratboyish, figuring out how to fake it with minimum effort.

RB and rickm—you’re posting mindlessly.

Entirely possible on my part, but the exchange between SEK and Goldberg indicates to me that Goldberg isn’t interested in finding stuff out – you know, doing research.

It’s not that he has to take the side advocated by some stranger, but considering it is nice if he wants to do work that involves detail and care. It was a bleg in the first place, so the quality control in place is likely low.

Pointless parsing, rickm. 1) The book doesn’t have an entire chapter on Herbert Spencer. If I were writing a book on political deception throughout all of history that included a chapter on the Bush administration, it would be quite natural to say, “I’m working on a chapter that requires me to analyze the Iraq War,” rather than saying, “I’m working on 1.42 pages about the Iraq War.”

2) The key word is “ALL.” Goldberg was saying that he didn’t need to read “ALL” of the stuff that has ever been written “about” Spencer.

So what’s the intellectual standard now — if I write a book that mentions Spencer on a page or so, I’m required to read a shelf-full of books on Spencer? Again, no one could ever write a broad-ranging book if that were really the standard (as opposed to a criticism cooked up just to apply to Goldberg).

It’s hilarious and ironic that those who support Goldberg’s position (or his scholarly method) insist on the principle of charity. If this principle were held by them with any seriousness, they couldn’t read any three word string of Goldberg’s very charitable “Liberal Fascism.” Besides, functional’s interpretation (that Goldberg had read a lot of and about Spencer) is just wrong–he says he needs to.

zinaida @ 81,

You write,

Social democracy, after all, is the liberal/democratic refinement of socialist doctrine.

This analogy doesn’t work. If item A comes before item B that doesn’t mean A is its root or cause; both could as well be manifestations of a more fundamental pheonomenon or cause, item C.

Fascism and liberalism are different in their fundamental, defining characteristics. The things that make fascism problematic — say, the hostility to freedom, autonomy, and privacy that are virtually its raison d’être — are not present in liberalism. (Even if certain of liberalism’s features, such as its embrace of some state economic activism, offends a libertarian sensibility, conservatism is no more purist in its attitude to freedom.) This is not to say that liberalism can never intrude upon people’s freedom to an objectionable extent, but that modest and careful claim, which would be persuasive to many on the left as well as the right, is not the one Goldberg chooses to make. Instead he talks about commonalities of roots and about fascism’s actually manifesting itself within liberalism at times and about how fascism itself was leftist.

I think that what liberalism and fascism have in common is simply their status as examples of collectivism, a broader term with more positive and negative connotations and applications than fascism has, and therefore a less useful rhetorical shorthand device for someone seeking to render liberialism inherently insupportable. But it’s, you know, a more accurate claim, one that does not obscure the differences between these two ideologies — differences which are fundamental, not superficial. This process of obscuring, and the polemical use to which it’s being put, I think are a large part of what so exercises us on the left when we consider Goldberg’s book.

Point, Kaufman!

Emerson—you like others are wilfully interpreting Goldberg in the worst possible light.

This is to the Internet comments of mere mortals what Naples is to Italian cities — its terrible beauty, its singular audacity, its amazing combination of corruption and bravura all threaten to bring the viewer to the point of mortal collapse.

why are my comments being eaten?

The word soc*alism includes the word c*alis and is suppressed. Also, The Man is attacking liberating discourse.

So what’s the intellectual standard now—if I write a book that mentions Spencer on a page or so, I’m required to read a shelf-full of books on Spencer?

How about “yes”? At least, “yes” for the sort of book you apparently would like Liberal Fascism to be. That’s the rule-of-thumb for the kind of research that’s distilled into a doctoral thesis. If you want to call that a false comparison, then I’ll have to note that Goldberg announced his plan to write this book in 2003, the cover and listing appeared on Amazon in 2005, and the book itself was finished in mid-2007. Doctoral degrees are completed in the same time-frame by graduate students with teaching responsibilities.

John Emerson is right: that Corner post was the equivalent of requesting a Cliff’s Notes version of Spencer’s work, just as a lazy undergraduate would troll in search of an essay argument for a novel he hasn’t read.

This is why the best description of the O.M.P. is travesty, in the literary sense. He knows that the kind of book he’s aping requires actual research, but he also knows that a) doing the reading is hard work; b) it might spoil his potted argument; c) he can pull it off with a spoonfed précis.

Picking up on SEK, I think it’s fair to say that if this book could have been written, with the same broad thesis, in a scholarly fashion, it would have already been done so by a precocious historian with an eye on climbing the greasy pole.

It’s certainly possible to offer interpretations that radically challenge established historiography — J.C.D. Clark comes to mind — but there’s a difference between that kind of informed dissent, to borrow SEK’s phrase, and a ‘secret history’ from a controversialist dabbler.

oh ok, thanks, that’s certainly quite hilarious

Are you aware of the political proclivities of most historians? What on earth makes you think they would receive such a book kindly, no matter how well substantiated?

Those fascists! Case closed!

Most of these posts are non-responsive insofar as Goldberg’s thesis is concerned. It simply won’t do to preemptively assail an author on the grounds that his taxonomy is unconventional or that he is engaged in word-games when said author has penned a 496-page book principally arguing that, 1) The conventional taxonomy errs, and 2) The error is more than semantic. Goldberg’s critics unwittingly affirm the necessity of his book.

So functional, basically you’re going to reject all criticism that comes from professional historians or other scholars, because they’re all liberals?

There’s a bit more to scholarship than “a bibliography long enough”. Some well-received books have rather short bibliographies.

Popular books can condense and summarize, but they can’t say things that scholarly works have shown to be wrong.

And so: who is the populist anti-intellectual (perhaps fascist) here? Me or you?

So functional, basically you’re going to reject all criticism that comes from professional historians or other scholars, because they’re all liberals?

You mean, actual criticism by experts who have read the book or who at least show any sign of knowing what it says (rather than relying on patently false caricatures)? I’m happy to consider such criticism.

I was talking about actual experts, not someone who non-ironically cites Umberto Eco as having proved that “fascism” means modern right-wingers.

Functional,

A professional philosopher as hostile to the Continental/multicultural/feminist/&c. traditions as Goldberg is finds Eco’s list penetrating. Care to explain how fascist (in Goldberg’s sense) Leiter is?

(And for the record, I read a pre-publication galley of the book, so I’m not shooting from the hip here. It is as tendentious and poorly researched as advertised.)

I think Functional–and Goldberg–has completely misunderstood Neiwart’s point with Eco’s (and others’) definitions of fascism. The point isn’t to call righties like Goldberg “fascists.” No one seriously does that. The point is twofold. First, to object to the claim that lefties think fascism means anything bad and therefore right wing. No one believes that. Second, fascism, as Neiwart means to point out, has a fairly specific historical definition as a right wing movement. As Neiwart stresses, however, its being a phenomenon of the right–read Mussolini if you doubt this–does not mean righties are actual fascists any more than lefties are communists. This just means Goldberg’s thesis is factually groundless–i.e., false.

Saying it’s false, by the way, is not the same as calling Goldberg a liar.

Whoops, square brackets should have been blockquoted as they’re Neiwert’s…and other tag issues as well.

Anyway Jonah mistakes “the cult of tradition” as equating to calling whatever the cult uses as its totem for the cult itself.

I saw Goldberg, forget where,

Okay, you read Jonah Goldberg. We get it. In case you haven’t noticed he’s written a recent book with a Hitler smiley on the cover. He’s a fool.

What I’m really interested in is a defense of this sentence: “The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.”

Come on functional: defend that sentence and convince me that it wouldn’t be better jabbered from under some rags in an alley by a bum off his meds.

My God, you people have time on your hands!

How are you ever going to get the trains running on time, take Madrid or make it to Lake Como before the partisans get there, if you spend so much time wittering about whether fascism is liberal, liberalism is fascist, or whether Jonah Goldberg ought to be painfully euthanised as a subhuman whose genes should not be allowed to pollute the pool?

“I saw Goldberg, forget where, making the obvious and undeniable point that if John Ashcroft (for example) had taken to calling himself a “Confederate,” people would rightly ask what the hell he was up to. But when modern liberals (like Hillary) relabel themselves as “progressives,” no one bats an eye—and it’s because they’ve bought into this rose-colored view of history in which “progressives” did nothing except bring us antitrust law and safety regulations (whereas, in reality, they also supported eugenics, threw political dissidents in jail, made gooey-eyes at fascism, etc.).”

See my answer to this at #65. Somehow Goldberg and his friends call themselves “conservatives” without worrying too much about their predecessors’ own support for absolute monarchy, slavery, racism, and, interestingly enough, fascism. The valence of “conservative” is different in the contemporary period than it once was, just as the valence of “progressivism” is different now.

Admiration of Wilson’s internationalism does not require admiration for his virulent racism. Admiration for many elements T.R.’s new nationalism doesn’t require admiration for his part in the anti-hyphenation campaign.

PS: although I’d generally be less concerned about what The New Republic thought about Mussolini in the 1920s than what writers at the National Review thought over the last few decades about him and other fascists.

Which, while I’m at it, takes us back to the question of why Jonah’s taking this moment in time to instruct us about the dark side of progressivism on issues such as suspension of civil liberties. I think there was a rather illuminating thread on this very blog about that subject….

I´ll repeat this for functional´s sake:

When someone purports to write a book about fascism and makes but two tangential references to Francisco Franco, completely ignoring Mussolini´s and Hitler´s aid to Franco (hardly a leftist) and makes zero mention of the volunteers that Franco sent to help the Nazis fight the Soviets, it ought to be acceptable to dismiss it without reading it.

Not to mention the fact that the magazine for which he blogs/writes lavished praise on Franco.

functional:

Really, what’s your fracking point? That the politics of the 1930s across Europe and the US show a fracturing of the laissez-faire model of consensus that took the Great Powers over the precipice in 1914? Because that’s really not controversial. (Others have linked to Thomas Laqueur’s lecture on this period from his History 5 class entitled ‘The Failure of Politics Between The Wars’. Listen to it.)

John Emerson is correct to say that the Goldberg Uncertainty Principle, in which a definition changes every time you look at it, seems to re-establish fascism as ‘anti-laissez-faire’, which is both absurd and dishonest.

As for the ‘political proclivities’ of historians, Niall Ferguson isn’t doing too badly for himself, and one of the linchpins of his reputation is a revisionist analysis of whether Britain should have entered the Great War.

Zinaida, with friends like you, does Goldberg really need enemies? Kling writes:

Reviewing Goldberg’s book is difficult. I would argue that it is many books, written by an author with Multiple Personality Disorder. There is Goldberg the revisionist historian, Goldberg the outraged conservative child, and Goldberg the troll.

Yowza!

Zinaida, with friends like you, does Goldberg really need enemies?

Indeed. More Kling:

In my view, Goldberg should have written his revisionist history without dropping the f-bomb.

Enjoy Jonah misquoting his own book. That’s white male not white man.

Yes, it’s picky and petty, but hey, I’m a fascist.

zinaida, you’re busted. randy paul posted at 2:56, before your 5:18 which provided us with such merriment. but when you come back you don’t deal with the way you’ve been shown to be a tiresome hack whose idea of a “serious” review is one that calls Goldberg a child and a troll, and whose idea of an enlightening link is to bog-standard libertarian critiques of statism. the conclusion: you’re a wimp who can’t take the heat and has to look for nits to pick in posts before you’ve made a fool of yourself.

John Protevi,
I am well aware that CT enjoys many readers/writers well-versed in the libertarian/classically liberal critique of contemporary politics. The reason I began posting here in the first place was in the hopes of engaging these people. Dan Nexon’s posts were interesting (yet I still don’t understand why the idea of a liberal/democratic socialism — social democracy — is just fine, while the idea of a liberal/democratic fascism is nonsense*; was H.G. Wells really that much of a moron?). It was especially fascinating watching John Emerson grandstand about how everything marginally truthful in Jonah’s book is already known by everybody, while a flood of rabid commentators, on this blog and across the blogosphere, simultaneously displayed shock at the very suggestion that socialism, progressivism, modern liberalism and fascism would actually have anything whatsoever to do with one another.

Anway, with regards to left critiques of statism, I have yet to read one which is both consistent and sincere. If you have a recommendation, please, divulge. (Reading Chomsky or Guerin on ‘anarchism’ is very entertaining, in a vaudeville kind of a way.)

*See #81

…a flood of rabid commentators, on this blog and across the blogosphere, simultaneously displayed shock at the very suggestion that socialism, progressivism, modern liberalism and fascism would actually have anything whatsoever to do with one another.

At a minimum, I agree that they are all in sentences written by people such as yourself.

My understanding is that Wells’ concept of liberal fascism was about having a revolutionary, autocratic elite create his vision of a liberal utopia. I’m not sure what relevance this has to the substantive objection I made: that what distinguishes fascism from democratic soc1alism and contemporary liberalism is that the former rejects political liberalism while the latter two movements embrace it.

Now, one could construct a political system ruled by autocrats but forwarding certain liberal principles. This world has some experience with dictators implementing liberal economic programs. And one could, I suppose, speculate about a benign autocrat presiding over a system with otherwise extensive civil liberties. But this would hardly amount to a “liberal fascism” unless we redefine fascism as any form of autocracy[*].

Which, I suppose, amounts to a long-winded way of saying that just because Wells’ uses the term doesn’t render it coherent or meaningful.

I really enjoyed the Kling essay, by the way. He makes the same point, but more eloquently, that I’ve made here and on Niewart’s blog: that Goldberg’s basically taken Hayek, redefined his category of “statism” and “fascism,” and then stirred in some dirty laundry from the annals of progressivism and the American left. But it doesn’t work, because if we adopt a Hayekian position, fascism is a manifestation of statism, not the master category.

Anway, with regards to left critiques of statism, I have yet to read one which is both consistent and sincere. If you have a recommendation, please, divulge.

It’s been talked about here often enough before, but see Seeing Like a State by James Scott.

Dan Nexon,
I fear we’re talking past each other. I mentioned Wells as an aside, only to reinforce the fact that at one point in time, not long ago, fascism and progressive politics were not framed so as to be opposites. But that is only an aside. My main point was this: if one accepts the idea that mussolini’s fascism was a nationalist, corporatist “heresy” of marxism, much like bolshevism was an unscientific “heresy,” and later on, virtually identical to fascism in its nationalism (as most developing world socialisms have become), it doesn’t make much sense to allow for the idea of a liberalized/democratized socialism — social democracy — while finding the notion of a liberal fascism hokum. The kind of “liberal fascism” Jonah sees in American politics differs from Mussolini/Hitler fascism about as much as social democracy differs from Lenninist/Stalinist (and for that matter, Titoist or Castroist) socialism. This is because socialism/communism and fascism, taught to the greater public as opposites, are not at all opposites, but various strains of the same collectivist seed. It’s about time this fact, well-accepted among academics, becomes well-accepted among the public at large.

John Emerson,
I agree that there is much “value-subtracted” in Jonah’s book. I wouldn’t have posted Kling’s review if I hadn’t. However, I do see the book as a net gain; one, because I don’t see see its “vulgarization” of serious, academic works being as vulgar as you and others contend, two, because (unlike Kling, but in his own words), I believe Jonah’s book DOES succeed in exposing, to a wider public, the liberals’ and/or left’s “faith in unproven scientific fads, faith in technocratic elites, and faith that those who share progressive ideology have superior wisdom and moral standing that justifies ruling over others. I believe that the best way to insulate oneself against romanticizing the state is to recognize these faiths and their dangers.” Clearly, our differences here derive from differences in political temperament or preference.

Mrs. Tilton,
Thank you. I’ve actually skimmed a little Scott here or there at various bookstores. He offers a very interesting critique of the state (although, as Delong notes, still a very Hayekian one). What I’m really looking for, though, and have yet to find, is a left-anarchist, left-libertarian offering a vision for the future that does not blatantly contradict his/her own anti-hierarchy, anti-authority stated goals. The localist, kibbutz-like formula comes closest to this ideal, but since it still disallows individuals from associating, trading as they see fit, it is a far cry from the kind of freedom left-anarchists/left-libertarians purport to represent. I always wonder, “if it is localism you seek, why not call for voluntary communes insulated within a greater free-market framework?”

Engels-
If you know of writers who address the above sufficiently in your mind, please direct me.

Zinaida writes:

I agree that there is much “value-subtracted” in Jonah’s book. I wouldn’t have posted Kling’s review if I hadn’t. However, I do see the book as a net gain; one, because I don’t see see its “vulgarization” of serious, academic works being as vulgar as you and others contend, two, because (unlike Kling, but in his own words), I believe Jonah’s book DOES succeed in exposing, to a wider public, the liberals’ and/or left’s “faith in unproven scientific fads, faith in technocratic elites, and faith that those who share progressive ideology have superior wisdom and moral standing that justifies ruling over others. I believe that the best way to insulate oneself against romanticizing the state is to recognize these faiths and their dangers.” Clearly, our differences here derive from differences in political temperament or preference.

Let’s not equivocate on the faith-based party here. “Faith” in scientific “fads” (weasel word) ain’t the same thing as religious “faith”. To assert as much amounts to the fallacy of equivocation. I have well-founded faith in the authority of the scientific community; I don’t have well-founded faith in the clarity or authority of the sum total of competing religious traditions.

One more point. Every time you seal yourself in the voting cubicle, you attempt to choose how others will be governed–whether they can have private consensual gay sex, abortions, drugs, or whether they can have private phone conversations, a right to a speedy trial, etc. Of course the lefty thinks his ideology is superior. To point that out is to say absolutely nothing meaningful. Goldberg, and you his sophistical defender, think your ideology is superior. That’s why you bother to make these arguments.

Goldberg’s defenders are beginning to outstrip him in sophistry.

“This is because socialism/communism and fascism, taught to the greater public as opposites, are not at all opposites, but various strains of the same collectivist seed.”

I don’t think we’re talking past one another. I agree that this line of argument, unlike Goldberg’s, has some intellectual coherence. But I think it is, ultimately, wrong.

National Socialism isn’t properly understood as a heresy of Marxism.

The primary contradiction of modern history (if there was one, which there isn’t) is not individualism against collectivism/statism.

And fascism is simply incompatible with political liberalism. Indeed, Well’s own confused attempt to stipulate a “liberal fascism” and how that project fared in the face of actual fascists undermines, rather than supports, the possibility of such a fusion.

stuart, you are being much too kind (or you are being disingenuous) by saying that these are “errors” by Goldberg:

(1) using the “fascist” label instead “statist” or “collectivist” and (2) not recognizing that there are strands of statism in modern conservative thought as well.

The whole point of the book (see the title) is to use the fascist “label”!

You’re like Kling: it would have been better if Goldberg had not used the central rhetorical strategy (it really doesn’t deserve the term “thesis” as far as I can tell from the reviews I’ve read [in addition to Kling, see e.g., Neiwert]) of his book: in other words it would have been better if Goldberg had not written the book he did, but another, better one, which unfortunately, has already been written.

As far as hollering and screaming and flinging poo, I think Goldberg has that market just about cornered. Unless you think “the white male is the Jew of liberal fascism” isn’t poo-flinging.

Someone,
Of course. As a libertarianish observer, I happen to find the “middle way” proposals equally unconvincing, both for their presumptuousness (as to what is right or wrong for everyone) and their proven incompetence and/or boomerang effects (I’m thinking mostly Public Choice Theory). Although I understand where reasonable people can disagree here, and my original assertion was indeed confined to the more extreme left-libertarian proposals.

jcasey,
When Kling refers to “faith in scientific fads,” he is thinking of nefarious examples in history (particurly those touched on in Jonah’s book) when questionable science has been employed on behalf of coercive politics. In any case, of all the complaints you bring forth — concerning “faith-based” politics, sex, abortion, drugs and “national security” excesses — there is little a standard libertarian, even many libertarian conservatives would disagree with (Kling himself is a libertarian). In other words, none of these complaints make you a liberal or leftist. The problem, in Kling’s view and mine, is that most liberals/leftists seem to believe as long as the government isn’t intruding with regards to sex, drugs or national security, intrusion is allowable, if not preferable. (We could go on and about Jonah’s own inherent inconsistencies, given the fact he’s not a libertarian. I’d agree with you.)

The problem, in Kling’s view and mine, is that most liberals/leftists seem to believe as long as the government isn’t intruding with regards to sex, drugs or national security, intrusion is allowable, if not preferable.

What distinguishes a libertarian world where a government won’t intrude on various things from practical examples of governments that can’t intrude on things?

Mr Protevi, the number of times people in this thread called Goldberg “stupid” is to me evidence of reflexive defensiveness about the labels. Goldberg may be many things, but stupid isn’t one of them (at least not according to my dictionary’s definition of stupid). As I said, I haven’t read the book and don’t know whether I will. But as someone who admires Hayek a great deal, I don’t find objectionable the idea that a liberalism based on governmental intervention and control of various aspects of life shares philosophical roots with a fascism that likewise supports governmental intervention and control of various aspects of life. That doesn’t mean liberals are fascists, but it could well mean that way back in the day, people would have seen the points of commonality more than they do now. Of course, by now we have several decades of events behind us that have changed our perspective.

I still maintain it’s just arguments over labelling. And that Goldberg now has a best-seller because people are shrieking about him.

jcasey,

1. I’m not quite sure how to respond to your belief that “the only people who have standing to question scientific fads are scientists.” For one, I disagree. I believe anyone has standing to question whatever they damn well please. And anyone has standing to question such questioning. Secondly, you write as if “scientists” exist as one block.

2. “Politics is by its nature coercive. That’s what you do with your vote. You decide how you think others should live.” Precisely. It is for this reason many theorists have proposed political (anti-political) dispensations, mostly involving free-market, federalist and localist mechanisms, so as to maximize the diversity and optimize the opportunity of various living. Given the fact democracy is fundamentally majoritian, it is a very unflexible thing. The market is far more responsive to the needs/desires of everyone, not just the 51 percent of the 10-40 percent of the nation’s populace that shows up on election days (and this doesn’t even touch on the unresponsive relationship between what the voters decide in the voting booth and what is actually implemented by the politicians once elected). To return to Kling: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=101007A

Zinaida–

I would return to my original point that “fads” is a weasel term. No one wants to believe in faddish science. The tendency to do so is no more a product of liberalism than any other political theory. While you’re busy being really charitable to the very very uncharitable Goldberg, try it just a little bit on liberals.

And of course science and scientists isn’t just one block. It just seems pointless to whine about science fads when one doesn’t have the intellectual basis for determining which ones are fads and which ones are not.

Zinaida–

You first said:

I believe Jonah’s book DOES succeed in exposing, to a wider public, the liberals’ and/or left’s “faith in unproven scientific fads, faith in technocratic elites, and faith that those who share progressive ideology have superior wisdom and moral standing that justifies ruling over others. I believe that the best way to insulate oneself against romanticizing the state is to recognize these faiths and their dangers.”

Now you say:

It is not, per se, about a supposed link between modern liberalism and bad science as it is between the historic tendency of government to use bad science so as to further social control.

Those seem to be rather different positions. The first seems to allege Goldberg has uncovered some fundamental truth about “the left”; the second makes the generalized claim about coercive government in general.

Functional,

Well?

“From where I’m standing fascism, liberalism, communism – it’s all the same thing”.

This is indeed OK, if “OK” means “ignorant, silly, and obnoxious”.

There are reasons why fascists, like Communists, are hated, and Wilkinson isn’t aware of any of them. Liberalism is not pristine and without flaws, but it isn’t fascist.

We’re falling off the bottom of the page, so goodbye, all!