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 (my answer was emphatically yes: when the dude stops pretending to do research perhaps I’ll start pretending to take him seriously; then again, given his past form, my limited time resources etc, perhaps not). But in retrospect, maybe this was the wrong question to debate. I’m intrigued by the question of precisely why Goldberg apparently expects this book to be given sober consideration as an important intellectual contribution to debate between the left and the right etc.
Matt Yglesias attributes this to slow wittedness on Goldberg’s part. That Goldberg, after wandering into the center ring wearing his red rubber nose, baggy pantaloons and big floppy shoes, is asking in all sincerity why nobody takes him seriously, only adds to the hilarity. But while I understand (and have in the past partially succumbed to) Matt’s temptation to give a swift kick to aforementioned pantaloons, I can’t help wonder whether there’s something more general happening here. Not only does it seem a bit weird that anyone could think that a book along these lines was a serious intellectual enterprise, but other conservatives who clearly aren’t stupid such as Ramesh Ponnuru and David Frum have written books either with similarly dimwitted titles (Ponnuru’s The Party of Death anyone?) or similarly stupid arguments (David Frum’s truly awesome double-header with Richard Perle, An End to Evil, a book which I recommend unreservedly to CT readers ).
My working theory – open to modification, revision etc as people with better factual knowledge poke holes in it, is that this has to do with the vagaries of the culture wars and the conservative publishing industry. It’s been clear since at least the 1960s and the success of Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative that there is a big potential market for conservative books that make grossly over-the-top arguments. Hence the success of Richard Viguerie, Judith Regan when she wasn’t suing Rupert Murdoch and others in getting various nutty bestsellers out there (and no, I don’t think that this is all cross-subsidization to conservative book clubs etc etc). This pre-existing market and set of publishers then began to intersect with the world of soi-disant conservative intellectuals in the 1990s thanks to the culture wars, which made it both profitable and respectable (in the sense that you still got reviews in the NYTBR, cushy slots in the Hoover Institution etc) to publish bottom-feeder harangues about Teh Evils of Teh Left. The Venn diagram for the left was, I think, a little different – there never was the same kind of systematic crossover between so-called public intellectuals and muckraking bestsellers about the depraved personal habits, plots for world domination etc of conservatives. Not, of course, that there weren’t books written by lefties about conservatives’ depraved personal habits, but they didn’t tend to sell as well, and they certainly didn’t get treated by the cognoscenti as serious contributions to debate etc.
Hence, my conjecture about Jonah Goldberg’s reactions: he came of age in a movement where 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. Hence also his genuine incomprehension of why his book doesn’t get the respect it deserves. After all, people took Dinesh di Souza seriously in his time. But since I haven’t done any proper research on this myself (something which I’m happy to admit; I’ve no intention of doing the whole never has a blogpost been written with such seriousness and such care routine), I’m happy to hear corrections, elucidations, vigorous criticisms, alternative hypotheses etc.
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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.
I don’t think this is a mystery.
He’s put a lot of effort into the book. He thinks he has pieced together something important. He gets a lot of daily affirmation from a variety of VERY SMART, VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE. Getting lots of praise from the talk-radio right goes with the territory—and therefore counts for little, in the end—so why wouldn’t he want affirmation as a serious intellectual?
I don’t think there’s any indication that he’s stupid or dumb, or not, in fact, intellectually capable. He’s just, as Henry suggests, not in an environment where he’s ever been forced to make a really rigorous argument. And so he can’t seem to quite distinguish between, on the one hand, what he’s done and, on the other, what he’d need to do to write a serious book rather than one that many rightfully see as little more than a mishmash of stuff we already knew—about how many progressives were racists and about how fascism was an offshoot of democratic socialism—cooked in a broth of Hayek to produce an argument that doesn’t really add up.
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?
He expects his book to be considered because it has right-wing propaganda pushing it, and because his handlers appear to have chosen to tell him to go for publicity through Coulteresque overstatement.
And whenever someone writes yet another one of these “Isn’t Goldberg stupid? Watch me not consider his book!” pieces, he’s proved a little more correct. There is no such thing as bad publicity. The total number of words written about Goldberg’s book probably adds up to the sum of all other words written about political books on blogs for the last year. And for what? His stupidity isn’t even really all that funny.
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).
It’s very hard to tell what JG is really thinking with this book. The book has been super successful in the sense that lots of people are buying, in the sense that it gives his side another catch phrase to bash liberals with, and in the sense that it’s generated a ton of noteriety. From this perspective, Goldber looks smart and cynical and the desire for his thesis to be taken seriously is just a pose.
On the other hand, that’s a 500 page book. He did a lot of research (though he didn’t draw any rational conclusions from it). It took three or four years. He could have achived the success mentioned above with the same title and cover and 200 pages of drunken theorizing. Inother words, he did a lot of unnecessary work, if he only wnated the cynical success.
So judging by all that work he’s put in and stuff he’s written to critics, I think that he means the book to be serious, and the cynical success is just the work of his publisher and luck.
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.
“Not, of course, that there weren’t books written by lefties about conservatives’ depraved personal habits, but they didn’t tend to sell as well, and they certainly didn’t get treated by the cognoscenti as serious contributions to debate etc.”
In all fairness, surely Michael Moore has sold a book or two? Stupid White Men perhaps?
When was the last time you saw Stupid White Men treated as a serious contribution to debate?
His stupidity isn’t even really all that funny.
I dunno, the Liberal Fascism blog has lots of howlers. This is my favourite, which should appeal to diligent researchers everywhere.
I’d take a Goldberg variation over a Goldberg conjecture any time!
Eh—that may be stupidity, or it may just be the Big Lie technique. It’s sort of hard to tell whether statements like that are one or the other. But it doesn’t really matter, because if someone keeps saying over and over that e.g. Iraq attacked us on 9/11, it doesn’t matter whether they are stupid or lying, it’s equally effective either way.
Maybe I should just say that my personal sense of humor doesn’t find yet more Republican stupidity funny and leave it at that, but I’m tempted to generalize it into a principle. Isn’t humor supposed to be witty or well-crafted or something? Can one really laugh again and again at the same person taking the same unscripted slip-and-fall?
Here’s an argument from humor authority: the Poor Man has evidently had enough of Goldberg, because The Editors haven’t bothered with him since they came back. If the Poor Man thinks it’s over…
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.
I have covered Goldberg (at my link).
Goldberg has even linked to me! Which presumably means that he doesn’t find me threatening (in terms of the people he needs to please).
My thesis is that Goldberg’s importance derives from the media turf he’s been granted by the owners of the media turf, and that as long as he keeps them happy he needn’t care what we think.
I think that we’re in a harder position than we realize. 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.
My theory is that we’ve all become helots and crofters—people of no account on the national political level. Even though many of us have PhDs and shit.
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:
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.
I think these books reflect an ongoing effort to change the terms of American political debate by shifting social norms and redefining terms.
Goldberg’s book looks to me like an attempt to frame what he sees as political correctness and nanny-statism as totalitarian by calling it fascism.
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.
Okay. You guys represent the premiere blogospheric voice of the academic liberal left… something like that. Jonah’s book, at its heart, is geared toward popularizing the arguments of smart intellectuals/academics, from John Patrick Diggins to A.J. Gregor to Hayek to Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Jonah offers more names here:
http://liberalfascism.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDUzZTBiNTM3ODllODRjYzhhODdkZjM3MzRlMmUxMjc=
Yet of all the critical commentary, the only efforts that confronted the substantive core of the book were Fred Siegal’s review in the Wall Street Journal (Jonah responds here: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODRhZWIyOTcwMWZlNDgyZjMwOWIyNGRjOTZmMWIxZDQ=) and Michael Ledeen’s review, which while a worthy critique, still leaves a lot of Jonah’s history and arguments standing: http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/michaelledeen/2008/01/14/fascism_liberal_and_otherwise.php
If treating Lucianne’s son seriously is beneath you, so be it. But can this whole brouhaha at least instigate some discussion concerning the respective thinkers Jonah is popularizing? Maybe in the context of Sheri Berman’s new book? As a fairly open-minded, libertarianish observer, I think this could be a really fun, interesting, perhaps even civil, conversation.
(I presently await the avalanche of snide remarks, but have faith someone here will take up the offer. Holbo?)
James – by the logic of your (not very good) argument, you should be out there combing the NYT bestseller list every week, and vigorously engaging with the arguments to be found there for USG UFO cover-up conspiracies, secret clauses in the constitution that mean you don’t have to pay taxes, Celestine prophecies &c &c. After all, I’m sure that you would hate to demonstrate your irrelevance to the public debate as an elitist college professor. And if you do want to do that, more power to you; it’s thankless but useful work.
As for myself, I’ll stick to the unabashedly elitist position that there are good arguments and bad arguments, and only the good arguments are worth debating seriously. The bad arguments, if they become sufficiently widespread and pernicious, may require some intellectual garbage pick-up, but that is a different process entirely. If there are any good arguments in Goldberg’s magnum opus, I have yet to be acquainted with them – if you care to provide them, I’ll promise to give them due consideration.
John – I think that things have gotten better since the 1990s – there’s less automatic deference to nonsense than there used to be (albeit we are still a long ways away from where we should be).
Seth – I haven’t read this book, although I know I need to at some stage …
Err, how do we take this statement:
As not equivalent to this statement:
Does anyone writing about Marx have to attest to reading both volumes of Das Kapital? Does anyone writing on Weber have to have read every work by Weber?
This does not mean that Goldberg should be taken seriously, but the rationale for doing so won’t stand as presented here.
To quote myself:
…we discussed the Jonah Goldberg liberofascism book, and whether or not it was fair to dismiss it without having read it…
The cover of the book compares Liberals to [Benito] Mussolini and [Adolf] Hitler (yes, that Hitler). Hmm…is it OK to dismiss without reading? Hmm…
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?
I think these books reflect an ongoing effort to change the terms of American political debate by shifting social norms and redefining terms.
Intellectually, Liberal Fascism: More Like Hitlery Clinton If You Ask Me, does for the academic study of fascism what Creation Science does for the academic study of biology: creates out of whole cloth some foothold for the true believers.
Practically it’s a ruse a la the classics of Big Tobacco and Big Oil to cloud the waters just enough to allow Big Media to engage in another big game of on-one-handism (e.g., views of Earth’s shape differ, film at 11).
er…close the italics after “…Ask Me”
Henry,
You don’t have to take on all the NYT bestsellers, just the ones that directly compete with you in the marketplace of ideas. Many economists consider it their obligation to argue in the popular press against ideas we feel are silly.
Think of how your willingness to mock Goldberg’s book without having read it looks to the many people who have read Liberal Fascism. It strengthens his thesis that his evidence is overwhelming and so liberals will fear to seriously engage him.
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.
The sub-title “secret history” makes me skeptical. What’s secret about it?
Yeah, I haven’t seen anyone call bullshit on that yet. It’s right there on the cover right next to the serious and thoughtful Hitler smiley face.
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.
“I’d quibble
thatwhether…” Otherwise, as I said.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.
Seconding Stormcrow’s nod to the Stormer book, None Dare Call it Treason. Robert Welch’s “The Politician” was first by a good ten years, but was (if I recall correctly) self-published and didn’t have nearly the commercial success that Stormer had. I have some hackwork that predates Stormer— Masters of Deceit, published under the name of J Edgar Hoover but presumably written by someone else, and whichever book of Welch’s Regnery published (which I haven’t read) are the ones that immediately come to mind—but I think Stormer is really the grandfather of this strain of publishing.
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
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.
For clarity’s sake, everything below the link should have been in the blockquote
smaug – the difference is that this is a blogpost which self announces itself to be a tentative stab at the issue, rather than a book length “never has this issue been debated with such seriousness and such care” (or whatever the exact phrase that Goldberg used to pat himself on the back in such an ostentatiously silly fashion) magnum opus that pronounces itself the last and best word on the subject.
James D. Miller – if you don’t want to go after the Celestine prophecies, fair enough. But you could devote yourself instead to refuting the economic ideas of, say, Lyndon LaRouche. Despite the popularity of LaRouche with generations of gullible undergraduates, few, if any, economists to my knowledge have deigned to address LaRouche’s manifold economic insights head-on. They thus exposed themselves to the scorn of LaRouchies whose conviction that the economics professoriate Just Couldn’t Handle the Truth would seem to be not entirely unreasonable on your argument.
I imagine that the reason that economists didn’t get stuck into a back-and-forth with LaRouche was a combination of (a) they had better things to do with their time, and (b) they didn’t want to provide him with undeserved legitimacy by suggesting that there might be a serious debate to be had with him on the issues. Hence too my disinclination to engage in a detailed exegesis of Mr. Goldberg’s views on intellectual history (not that he is anywhere near as malign or pernicious as LaRouche, who is a deeply nasty character, but life is too short and his understanding of the issues, on the basis of interview, blogposts etc, doesn’t appear worth taking seriously, or devoting serious effort to refuting). Doubtless the many Goldberg readers out there who are waiting for my rebuttal will be disappointed, but so it goes.
Michael Ledeen’s review, which while a worthy critique, still leaves a lot of Jonah’s history and arguments standing:
Uh huh. Some readers of that review think Ledeen is annoyed that Jonah is demeaning Italian fascism by comparison to modern American liberalism. I think that’s a bit harsh. Ledeen does have a certain amount of integrity remaining from his academic past, and, most of all, doesn’t want to be considered the intellectual progenitor of Liberal Fascism. That was as blatant a hand-washing as you’ll get from fellow-travellers among the American right.
And picking up on what Henry said, the academic disdain for The Secret—other than as indicative of a socio-cultural phenomenon—apparently hasn’t rendered philosophy departments ‘irrelevant to the intellectual world outside of college campuses.’
You may claim that the comparison is faulty, but you’d be wrong: the Opus Magnum Pantloadae is not operating in the same marketplace of ideas: it’s the guy on the street selling knockoffs before the cops arrive.
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.
Smaug—I hate to bring up the rather painful and horribly elitist concept of “research,” but yes, most serious writers on Marx have read all three volumes of Capital; indeed, they’ve also read hundreds and hundreds of pages of essays and book projects that Marx never published.
As for Weber, I’ve seen a syllabus for an undergraduate seminar which assigned practically everything that he wrote, so yes, I would say that someone who is writing about Weber should be expected to, you know, read what Weber actually wrote rather than skimming a few Wikipedia articles.
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.
I always enjoy seeing conservative arguments like James D. Miller’s, that liberal professors are irrelevant in the outside world. Of course other conservatives (and sometimes the very same ones!) lament how liberal professors are brainwashing the leaders of tomorrow. You can’t be both irrelevant and all-powerful at the same time, except in the conservative imagination.
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.
May I ask a question, as a non-American. This man Goldberg is clearly clinically stupid, and his book is, equally clearly, worthless. So why are you all discussing it (instead of, say, something important like the collected works of Lyndon LaRouche, or David Icke’s latest book on the real story of the British royal family)?
I know you’re just teaching (so to speak) the controversy. But this man and his lunatic book have been discussed in the ‘liberal’ media just as much as the conservative. The tone is different, but as Andy Warhol once pointed out: don’t read your reviews, weigh them. The fact is, this imbecile gets just as much publicity from liberals as from ‘conservatives’ (there are, of course, no longer any real conservatives left in the US but still).
However, Goldberg is clearly onto a winner. I look forward to his follow up books ‘Why American Conservatism is really Communism in disguise’, and then the trilogy ‘Why up is down’, ‘Why black is white’ and ‘What the fact that a complete fucking moron like me can make a million from the increasingly deranged American Right says about contemporary America’.
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.
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? Cause that book seems to have been taken seriously by lots of people.
Underneath the obvious point that Goldberg’s book is stupid and worthless, is the endlessly fascinating world of how we determine authority. I just don’t know how to get down there from here. It’s very hard to penetrate the stupid.
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.
I have supported the argument here that there’s some kind of historical relationship between Social Democracy and Fascism—Keynesianism of a sort, a social safety net buffering the harshness of capitalism, and some sort of continuation of the old communitarian social contract, which required the rejection of “classical liberalism” in its Austrian or British forms.
But Goldberg’s argument is something quite different, shabby cherry-picking and fugue associational logic customized to let him say any stupid thing he wants.
Someone should write a punchy little piece explaining that classical liberalism is dead as a doornail except for rightwing nostalgia geeks, and also explaining why it was a very good thing that it died. It should include a chapter explaining that the Europe has been standing at the beginning of the road to serfdom for 50-70 years now, and that that train doesn’t seem like it will ever leave the station.
Of course, our Hayek bots are capable of arguing that immiserized contemporary Sweden is the very face of slavery, with the horrible bran muffin of fascism ground into everyone’s face daily and even hourly—worse than the U.S.S.R., since the Swedish public sector is bigger than the Soviet public sector was! But this kind of argument is relatively easy to oppose.
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.
As I argued (at the link), Goldberg’s book is of no interest, but the Goldberg phenomenon is important. He’s an effective part of the Movement Republican propaganda machine. He controls media turf at the LA Times.
There are pitfalls in all three approaches: refuting him seriously gives him credibility and allows him to play rope-a-dope, never conceding anything, which ha can do because the media judges (publishers, etc.) are on his side.
If we ridicule him, we risk being caricatured as unserious elitists.
If we ignore him, he shows up on TV over and over again being taken seriously, and Republicans and thoughtless moderates end up being confirmed in rightwing views.
It’s not hopeless, but it’s very tricky. Goldberg (unlike Coulter, Savage, Beck, and Limbaugh) is able to seem scholarly, reasonable and intelligent; he can talk NPR talk.
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?
Up here in Canada, Goldberg’s book is #27, it’s #3 in the US. That means people who aren’t partisan conservatives are probably buying it. I think that means that Goldberg’s arguments should be debunked in detail. And it should be done in a very prominent way. Otherwise his arguments could leech their way into our public discourse such that when the topic of fascism comes up liberals could have to spend a certain amount of time showing why they are crap.
I actually think it should be something like a CT Book Event, or anti-Book event in this case. I know your utterly opposed to this Henry, and if Goldberg was 3000 or even 300 on the bestseller list, I’d agree. Instead of just dismissing him, his newfound popularity should be ‘Coulterised’.
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.
Hidari: It’s as John Emerson says. Jonah is a highly connected, very prominent writer and editor within the modern conservative movement. He’s been given very important platforms and is treated within the movement as someone who is articulate, informed, and insightful. If he didn’t have his connections, he’d matter no more than any fifth-tier blogger, but since he does, his work is a thrust within the overall conservative campaign and therefore needs some attention. It’s entirely about how others are using his work, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.
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.
So the presumption here is that Jonah’s book has no substance and merely marks a continuation of the vast right-wing noise machine (Coulter, Malkin, etc.), or, in a more interesting framework, the paranoid, conspiratorial style of Stormer, et al. Having read the book, though, I don’t see how this is the case. Again, Jonah is popularizing the work/research of respectable academics/intellectuals. If engaging with Jonah or his book is too plebian, so be it. But I’m still waiting for a sustained critique of the ideas and arguments he’s popularizing (reading Niewart on this matter is like watching a kid at a carnival throw a thousand balls anywhere but in the whole while still demanding the prize a thousand times over):
http://www.amazon.com/Mussolini-Fascism-John-Patrick-Diggins/dp/0691005818/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200846291&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Three-New-Deals-Reflections-Roosevelts/dp/0312427433/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200846911&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Faces-Janus-Marxism-Fascism-Twentieth/dp/0300106025/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200847036&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/Russia-Under-Bolshevik-Regime-Richard/dp/0679761845/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200847436&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Beneficiaries-Plunder-Racial-Welfare/dp/0805079262/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200847556&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Seduction-Unreason-Intellectual-Nietzsche-Postmodernism/dp/0691125996/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200847669&sr=1-1
These links just skim the surface. It should also be noted Jonah cites the consensus historians repeatedly (Payne, etc.). As he put it elsewhere, the consensus history argues fascism was both anti-liberal and anti-conservative, but the “liberal” refers to the classical liberalism of the free market/rule of law and the “conservative” refers to traditionalism/social conservatism; incidentally, these are the two pillars of the “fusionist” modern American Right. Jonah will be posting a full bibliographic essay shortly.
Re. John Emerson: Isn’t modern American liberalism, in any of its pure senses, “dead as a doornail” as well? Isn’t this the nature of our political system, one marked by disappointing compromise? I am glad you concede a social democracy-fascism link (as does Sheri Berman). 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.
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.
Among other things, Goldberg has minimized the harm that fascists and the KKK did. Neiwert at Orcinus has some stuff up on that.
It’s as if Goldberg sees sowing confusion as his main job. His book is enough of a mess that I can just barely see it being denounced by some of the surviving rational elements within the Republican Party. Ledeen pulled his punches, but he did seem to have some awareness that that it’s a good idea to use a little restraint and some discretion when spreading misinformation, if only for fear of blowback.
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.
Really? I can’t dismiss a book without reading it and “seriously” considering its “arguments”? Man, have I got a lot of reading to do.
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
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
How’s Goldberg’s book selling in Sweden, James? In Egypt? China? I think that most of “the intellectual world outside of college campuses” would agree that you are full of shit.
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.
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.
Well, it doesn’t seem like that where I live. I fear that somebody is confusing the “world outside college campuses” with the US of A…
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.
“As he put it elsewhere, the consensus history argues fascism was both anti-liberal and anti-conservative, but the “liberal” refers to the classical liberalism of the free market/rule of law”
Jonah’s simply wrong about this, as his repeated refrain about “Manchester liberals” showcases. Fascism opposed, simultaneously, economic liberalism and political liberalism, whether conjoined or apart.
I think you seriously misunderstand what’s going on here. As I noted above (#2), the problem is that Jonah’s produced “little more than a mishmash of stuff we already knew—about how many progressives were racists and about how fascism was an offshoot of democratic socialism—cooked in a broth of Hayek to produce an argument that doesn’t really add up.” Jonah isn’t so much popularizing the work of respected academics and intellectuals, he’s written an incoherent screed derivative of their work yet less than the sum of its parts.
In brief, his argument would be defensible—if a waste of additional dead trees—if it was nothing more than a retread of Hayek’s claim that social democracy, communism, and fascism are all manifestations of “statism” and thus all points on the road to serfdom.
But that’s not his argument; rather, he replaces the phrase “statism” with “fasicsm” and then makes us slog through page after page of false syllogisms, dissemblings, selective evidence, and the like to reach the conclusion that contemporary political liberalism is fascistic. What Niewert’s been doing well, and you don’t see to get, is to show two things:
(1) that the key factors that define fascism simultaneously distinguish it from democratic socialism & political liberalism on precisely on the grounds of its opposition to representative democracy, respect for basic human and political rights, and so forth;
(2) that Goldberg’s book requires us to ignore genuine fascists in the United States, almost all of whom tend to live on the right-hand side of the spectrum.
I just spent some time listening to Goldberg complain about how many progressives were racists and eugenicists, so why would people want to call themselves “progressives” (the fact that this still doesn’t make progressivism fascism I note only in passing).
All I could think was: for the same reason Goldberh and his compatriots call themselves “conservatives” even though many conservatives not that long ago were racists and in favor of eugenics—or things equally bad. Because they rightfully recognize that the core ideological propositions you embrace can be shorn of these particular elements and come out better.
But this cannot be done with fascism, because what makes fascism fascistic is not Keynsian economics, but a total rejection of political liberalism. You cannot be a “liberal fascist” or even a “social-democratic fascist,” for reasons that Berman explains rather well in her very good book on the connections between fascism and democratic socialism (for the record, Sheri Berman does not “concede” a fascism-social democracy link; it is a central part of her argument about the ideological shifts created by the crisis of the 19th century European order).
O-kay…
John Emerson wrote that one of Jonah’s assets which has led to him getting any cred is that, “he can talk NPR talk.” Yeah, I guess (this speaks more to the lamitude of NPR than the eruditity of Goldberg), but as we all saw with the Jon Stewart smackdown*, Jonah’s NPRspeak degrades to full blown Newspeak Babble at the slightest challenge.
So let us challenge Mr. Goldberg. Repeatedly.
*truth be told, Stewart pulled some punches himself, yet still easily demolished the jackass Goldberg
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.
“NPR talk” isn’t content…
Either way, I thought Goldberg started losing it after he was exposed/challenged.
How on earth you’ve managed to escape the Stewart video is a mystery, it’s all over the Internets. Here’s a link anyway:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=147884&title=jonah-goldberg
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:
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.
What Jonah said:
“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.
novakant: To ally the “cousins-german” idea (fascism and social democracy were reactions to the same structural problems) with Goldberg’s nonsense (liberalism is fascism) is a genetic fallacy.
re the Daily show interview: Hilarious. The best moment is when Goldberg tries the “very serious argument which has” line, and Stewart says “so how is organic food fascist?” Goldberg tries the “Well, I explain that in my book, haven’t you read my book,” but eventually he explains that… wait for it… the Nazis had an organic conception of the state. So organic food is fascist. (
!!)
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!
I actually think it should be something like a CT Book Event, or anti-Book event in this case.
Maybe just an old fashioned book burning?
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
!!
Jonah Goldberg is essentially a version of Nathan Thurm.
Examples:
JG: Hitler was obsessed with Teh Organic…so are Teh Liberals…ergo…
JS (exasperated): That’s like saying that mustaches are fascist.
JG: No it isn’t
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.
DW: No, the Nazis were bad because they made people eat bran muffins. Yuk. ran muffins.
See, we’re beyond the possibility of parody. What’s said in #78 is obviously true and tells us what was wrong with the Nazis—not why they got that way, or the deep significance of their ideology, but just why they are almost univserally perceived to have been very bad.
But how many people in the American media will come straight out and tell Goldberg that his book is worthless because it ignores these points? Jon Stewart didn’t. The Times didn’t. Krugman probably will, and Olbermann will if he ever does Jonah. But everyone else mainstream will treat it as a “point of view”, a “contribution to the debate”, or a joke.
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
In addition to Dan Nexon’s argument (“EVERYBODY—meaning me, Sheri Berman, and a few other guys—already is aware of the scholarship of John Patrick Diggins, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Richard Pipes, etc. , therefore Jonah isn’t saying anything anyone already doesn’t know”…yah, riiiight), I find dw’s argument equally uncompelling. 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.
Going back to Dan Nexon, your dismissal of a possible democratic and/or liberal fascism strikes me as a wee bit facile. Social democracy, after all, is the liberal/democratic refinement of socialist doctrine. That is, most scholars still consider it a kind of socialism, even though the word is also afforded to all the left-wing dictators as well. If you subscribe to Richard Pipe’s (or A.J. Gregor’s, or perhaps even Sheri Berman’s?) belief (which I do) that fascism, like Bolshevism, marked a heretical break from Marxism , a nationalist, corporatist one, then it seems inconsistent to allow for the idea of a democratized/liberalized socialism without allowing for the idea of a democratized/liberalized fascism.
On Niewart: for every David Niewart cataloging all the racist/antisemitic scumbags who consider themselves on “the right,” there’s a David Horowitz cataloging all the racist/antisemitic scumbags who consider themselves on “the left.” Both enterprises are meaningless when discussing the contours of modern american political discourse, where racism/antisemitism hardly plays a role (I can’t wait for the CT choir to start singing on this one).
On war, civil liberties: It’s always amazing to me how leftists and/or liberals are so quick to assume themselves the guardians of peace. As any good leftist would (rightly) argue, american liberals have just as awful a record in supporting war and clamping down on civil liberties as american conservatives (including our most recent fiasco, I might add). And as any good liberal would (rightly) argue, leftists have just as awful a record in going to war, clamping down on civil liberties (more awful?) than american liberals and conservatives combined. Of course, we don’t have any examples of leftists taking America to war, simply because we’ve never had an actual leftist in power, but leftists seem alright with violence, war, civil liberties crackdowns, etc., elsewhere, as long as such things are being done in the name of anti-imperialism, marxism, socialism. 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. If/when the left gets its way, and America willingly retreats from the world, or unwillingly disintegrates (neither of which, by the way, I automatically presume to be a net loss, although I don’t immediately presume such things to be a net gain either), they’ll still be plenty of war. 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.
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.
(my answer was emphatically yes: when the dude stops pretending to do research perhaps I’ll start pretending to take him seriously; then again, given his past form, my limited time resources etc, perhaps not).
This is bad pool. Academics are constantly circulating drafts of papers or books, the WHOLE POINT of which is to elicit comments from people who may have read things that you haven’t read. This is even more resoundingly true of any academic who takes on the gargantuan task of writing a broad intellectual history of a 100-plus-year period—given that there are literally tens of thousands of books and articles that might be relevant to any of the numerous topics you would discuss in such a book, it would be complete academic malpractice NOT to seek a bit of guidance from more specialized experts. That’s all Goldberg was doing in the linked comment.
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.
Many fine nutshellizings of Goldberg’s ultimate intentions and techniques.
Forgive me if it’s been mentioned—I made it through about half the comments—but here’s what Goldberg is: a standard-issue college Republican who never grew up intellectually and who brilliantly mixes his gifts of gab and narcissism.
His is the sort of narcissism that’s required in order to keep the right-wing movement in power. Narcissists get to do neat stuff we can never do, like drawing conclusions then cherry-picking (and misrepresenting) the evidence to fit.
Goldberg is a propagandist. He considers himself quite the insouciante. He’s “likable”—TV-mass ready fodder who appeals to the hard-of-thinking. He seems likable enough, in fact, so it saddens me that when the Bush-Cheney-Romney era is finally written up, poor Jonah will be a footnote in Chapter 22: Banality of Evil Redux.
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).
All Goldberg’s book is good for in fact is confirming the European stereotype that America is a land of thickies.
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.
Communists, in practice, have been just as bloody, racist, nationalist as their fascist brethren
communists/bolsheviki/stalinists != socialists/social democrats/liberals
duh
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:
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.
:-)
Zinaida @85 argues that Jonah’s book is a vulgarisation of Berman et al. That’s as may be.
In the same way, perhaps, those creationists who argued that punctuated equilibrium meant evolution was wrong could be deemed vulgarisers of Gould and Eldredge. Sometimes vulgarisation is more than mere dumbing down. It’s entirely possible for a vulgarisation to create a new, emergent Stupid.
Maybe Goldberg:Berman::Fascism:Social Democracy?
John Emerson said a punchy list of 100 or so errors in the text would be a step in the right direction. that’s a good idea and I’ve got a few categorized by logical error over at my place. In the meantime, perhaps I could point out (re #85) that the following justification for Goldberg’s opus merely reinforces the straw man objection:
I wonder then what the point is. This justification seems to suggest that any well-intentioned (and grossly misrepresented and caricatured NRO style) public policy initiative invites comparison with fascism. That’s just plain silly. And besides, stoned teenagers aside, people know that fascism extends well beyond (even though it may essentially include them) racism and nationalism. But Goldberg doesn’t really know that or even really care.
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.
Zinaida-
Is your post supposed to be a rebuttal to Dave’ Neiwert’s critique of Goldberg’s book? Have you read what Dave wrote? It is absolutely devastating.
“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.
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
I suggest “poopularizing”.
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.
functional,
Did you read the link I posted above (and here again for your convenience)?* What you think Goldberg was up to doesn’t square with what I know he was up to. He wasn’t engaging in a scholarly dialogue with experts—-he wanted someone to validate his misconceptions of Spencer’s thought. When I refused, he testily questioned my authority, despite the fact that I provided, like, evidence and stuff.
*Lest I be accused of self-promotion, I share a masthead with one of the CT contributors, so I’m not some random fool. (Fool, yes; random, no.)
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.
I have no plans to read the book, but it occurred to me that if I wasn’t going to bother to read it, I probably shouldn’t spend too much time reading about why other people weren’t going to bother to read it either…
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.