My old boss Mike Tomasky has an excellent review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism that does a good job of getting to the book's main salient qualities -- it's tediousness, it's habit of announcing widely-known facts as if they were shocking discoveries, and Goldberg's failure to argue from any identifiably coherent perspective ("Why isn't he an anarchist? And when you get to this point, what isn't fascist?"), etc.
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A Very Serious, Thoughtful, Etc.
25 Feb 2008 02:13 pm
Comments (20)
it's habit of announcing widely-known facts as if they were shocking discoveries
You mean like, that liberals are fascists?
Also, it's its. Et tu, Matthew?
The Grammar Police are out in force today. Must be the end of the month.
Scott, you must not read enough to be aware that correct usage of the word "it's" is hanging by the slenderest of threads these days.
Tomasky does a nice job of highlighting Goldberg's annoying habit of putting a caveat on all of his accusations. "Sure Hillary Clinton is a fascist, but I wouldn't go as far to say that she's a Nazi!" "Yup, government service programs for the poor are a Nazi invention, but I would never go as far to speculate that the liberals in the modern day Democrat party would gas Jews."
He also has a good recap about how Goldberg extensively discusses Woodrow Wilson's effort to change the name of sauerkraut to "liberty cabbage" as some nefarious form of totalitarian mind-control, yet Goldberg doesn't even mention that Congressional Republicans renamed French fries as "Freedom Fries". You would think that it would be hard to ignore such an obvious parallel, especially since it only happened five years ago. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Also, as much as it would be nice to ignore Goldberg's stupid thesis, that is probably the worst response the left could embrace. Liberal Fascism is a lot like creationism: selective use of facts, quoting out of context, the supposed "oppression" from the intellectual elite. Most scientists think that the best response to creationism is to just ignore it. Yet it continues to fester. Right now, creationists are pushing change public school curricula standards in FL and TX to include creationist and/or anti-evolution view points.
Like creationism, there has to be some pushback against all forms of well-funded and highly orchestrated movements to propel ignorance into the mainstream. Goldberg's book hit #3 on the NYT best seller list. We can try to ignore, but unfortunately not enough of America will to make it a viable strategy. Helpful reviews like Tomasky's and the work done at Orcinus that place well-deserved ridicule on Liberal Fascism are necessary, unfortunately.
Jonah is a wannabee author.
The sole purpose of the book is to slam liberals;
and that is (embarrassingly) obvious.
If the book really requires serious rebuttal, we are doomed.
Jonah Goldberg is not what some people think, some blogger who got a editorship. He isn't Ace of Spades. He isn't even the Powerline guys. He's a NATIONALLY SYNDICATED COLUMNIST. Goldberg is a made man. He will be part of the national discourse for the net 30 to 40 years. You can't ignore him. The best you can do is make him a Cal Thomas instead of a George Will.
Some day in the future, when the world is awash in mediocrity...
I think Tomasky addressed this. Liberal Fascism hit #3 on the bestseller list. It wasn't because center-left bloggers talked about him occasionally. It was because there is a massive media apparatus for publishing and publicizing precisely the work that Goldberg does. It's necessary to respond in order to police the border of reasonable discourse that Goldberg is attempting to bring his insanity across.
You can't ignore him.
Yes, we can. Si, se puede!
Tomasky makes the same type of mistake that most high-profile liberal reviewers have made when responding to Goldberg's magnum dopus. He points out that the Nazis banned trade unions and replaced them with a state-sanctioned labor organization that didn't allow strikes, and presents this as evidence for why the Nazis were not Leftists.
I shall hereby summon the spirit realm and bring to you from the future a shorter version of Goldberg's rebuttal to Tomasky's review: "The communists did that, too!"
Someone really needs to put Jonah on the spot and ask him why, by his definitions, there were no right-wing parties whatsoever in Germany, Italy, or Spain between World War One and the rise of Fascism in their respective countries.
The support of contemporary cultural conservative parties for the Fascists, and the bitter opposition from Left-Wing parties, are the only evidence necessary to refute Goldberg. Once you start debating the finer points of distinction between Left-Wing totalitarianism and Right-Wing totalitarianism, you're hopelessly trapped in Goldberg's logical tar pit.
LaFollette is on the right track - every review from the left I've read has missed the bullseye. For all the dismissive huffing and puffing I've read from the left, and all the supposed 'takedowns' of this book, most of the time Goldberg has an easy, logical rebuttal.
I love it, for example, when a lefty says "But Hitler shut down unions!" (and therefore Hitler is a righty). Goldberg then simply says yes, but Catholics also fought Protestants. So - it was just one lefty group rubbing out its competition.
The best criticism I've seen is the one by Spencer Ackerman in December I think, which was repeated here by Tomasky - that Goldberg's definition is preposterously broad. It covers everything from the state worship of violence to forbidding cigarettes in bars. What's the point of the word then? It loses any meaning as a negative, or as a word at all.
Back in December or so, when Ezra Klein was posting about the book, the commenters went apeshit there about even responding to Jonah's book, and they were for dismissal. That didn't work so well, now the book is a best-seller. It probably would've been so anyway, I suppose.
The Grammar Police are out in force today. Must be the end of the month.
Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to respect my grammar authoritah.
People are missing another point of Jonah's book, which is to inoculate the modern Republican party against the obvious facist parallels in the ideology of the unitary executive, etc.
According to Tomasky, Jonah ends the book with the claim:
"the promise of American life will be frittered away for a bag of magic beans called security."
Which party does this sound more like to you?
BTW, loved Tomasky's line:
"Lurking behind all these futile disclaimers may be Goldberg's well-founded fear that intelligent or knowledgeable readers might conclude that he is crazy."
That is indeed the complexity and difficulty in writing these sorts of propaganda books. You're trying to nudge the establishment people a little further toward the crazies. So you have to *express* the crazy, while still not *seeming* crazy. Jonah is good at this in person (keeping a level tone of voice on NPR and so on).
But he's kind of dumb, so in the more intellectually revealing context of print the only way he can do it is to call Hillary a facist and then hastily add a disclaimer, "but I'm aware that she hasn't supported death camps!".
whoops, facist s/b fascist.
But all you spelling and grammar bastards are Nazis, man!
mq, that's a good point. Books like this are just masturbation for confused authoritarian conservatives. You can be in favor of torture, an uncontrolled police state, blood nationalism, xenophobia and warfare just for the purpose of kicking brown ass, but a book like this helps the crazies to feel a little less crazy because they can go "I'm not a fascist, you are! I even read a book I didn't understand and whose arguments I can't summarize that proves it!"
With that said, I'm not completely convinced that Goldberg believes his own bullshit. He is amazingly dumb, but his interviews on the book leave him looking like a defeated snake oil salesman. My favorite response to him still has to be Jon Stewart's "I don't even know what you're saying." Then again, Goldberg just seems to have a grab bag of a brain and "liberal" and "fascist" are two words that just happen to be in there.
Was standing in line at the bank last week, and on the video they have to keep us poor people narcotized during the wait, there he was!
My immediate reaction on seeing his name (I'd never seen him before) was, "That idiot they talk about on Matt's blog"...
So, yeah, he's apparently being taken seriously.
I mean, I take the notion of "liberal fascism" seriously because, as an anarchist, I think everybody who believes in the state is a "fascist" in some sense, even if it's technically or historically incorrect to use the term in that manner.
But outside of that, the notion makes no sense and the book is obvious right wing bullshit.
Which means it will be CW very shortly in this country, of course.
What's the saying? "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
Goldberg's gonna prove that, much to Matt's distress.
The most irritating aspect for me of Goldberg's defense of his book is his outrageous claim that the scores of academics who have worked on the subject and disagree with him are part of left-wing "trade-guild" intent on shutting him out and shutting him up.
To like Goldberg's book you have to be very ignorant of history and not know where to find information on this subject, or you have to be constitutionally wedded to certain mind-darkening theses, like the idea that Hillary Clinton really is a kind of fascist. If you are wedded to this idea, you come away admiring Goldberg's restraint, for agreeing that she is some kind of totalitarian, but not a *Nazi*.
Before I was able to change the channel the other day, I heard Glenn Beck (why is this jerk on national TV?) gushing over Jonah Goldberg and his book. The spectacle of someone actually taking this tripe seriously would have been funny if it weren't frightening.
The Tomasky review was very witty and treats Goldberg's book with the respect which it deserves.
Comments closed March 10, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
I'm done offering the advice, to my mind perfectly sensible, just to ignore Jonah Goldberg, that engaging him only gives him fuel for his bizarre theories that everyone who disagrees with his book simply hasn't read it, or doesn't understand it, and that attention paid to him is a very unfortunate waste. No one ever listens.
But like Cassandra, I'll be proven right. Some day in the future, when the world is awash in mediocrity, I'll be there to tell you all I was right.
Also "its" is possessive; "it's" is the contraction. Scalawag.
And the proper word is "tedium," btw. "Tedious" is already an adjectival form of a noun, so there's no need to re-noun-ify it. (I also maintain "renounify" is a proper word, so grain of salt.)
Posted by Jack Roy | February 25, 2008 2:29 PM