alternative hippopotamus

Jonah Goldberg, aged 10, responds to a reader’s query. The reader asks: “Given the generally desultory reviews of your latest tome by reviewers across a wide spectrum of political thought, is it not possible you simply wrote a bad book? You’d hardly be alone. Most books are bad, but few authors spend as much time fretting about how they’re being reviewed as you.”

Too true, I say to myself, nodding my head in agreement. Liberal Fascism may be the stupidest book ever written. But, there’s no sense crying over spilled right-wing agitprop.

Jonah’s response (emphasis mine): “It’s a book blog about a book. A book I’m proud to have written. A book I think is very good (and quite a few folks agree with me so far) which has often generated some very bad — and I don’t mean critical — reviews. But what an odd complaint. If not here, where? If not me, who?”

That last bit, of course, is a bad paraphrase of that great Hillel quote: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”

Rick Perlstein captures my frustration with the historical revisionists: (The Big Con)

So here’s my question: a supremely absurd regurgitation of these arguments has recently shown up in the conservative magazine Commentary. It gives me a headache to debunk historical solecisms point by point; the futility—the truth won’t change these people’s mind—makes me feel like I’m filling a bathtub with an eye-dropper. But for my loyal reader’s sake, I’ll do it—if you want me to.

So please do vote in the comments: is this a productive use of my time?

Let me put it like this. One of my favorite authors is Plato. Particularly the great allegories of Books 6 and 7 of The Republic where Socrates/Plato talks about the noetic world, an ideal realm that acts as a model for the iconic world. A place where the only thing greater than the truth, is the goodness of the truth.

And then, there’s the Pantload. A man who apparently takes delight in leading his readers astray. He fabricates a history that never existed. Where liberals tried to traduce the state (through universal health care, no doubt) and in a binge of power almost brought the republic down, replacing it with a fascist, totalitarian state. For proof Goldberg has a dingbat science fiction writer, or more accurately a very good science fiction writer who had some dingbat ideas about society.

The most threatening thing to people like Goldberg is that the idealism that him and his cohorts have worked so hard to kill off might have survived the Fear and Loathing of the 1960’s. The left, progressives, liberals, what have you, must either have cynical motives or have been moved by some kind of totemic worship. To whit:

But my favorite example of JFK-driven magical thinking comes from Sidney Blumenthal’s column on Al Gore’s (ill-fated) endorsement of Howard Dean:

Gore’s endorsement of Dean is the most important since grainy film was shown at the 1992 Democratic convention depicting President Kennedy shaking hands with a teenage Bill Clinton.

Either Blumenthal didn’t realize or care that President Kennedy didn’t endorse Bill Clinton. JFK merely shook hands with a teenager from Arkansas whom he no doubt never thought about again. The rules of the space-time continuum apply, even to Clinton sycophants.

There’s no serious way of responding to idiotic cracks like that.

To go back to Rick Perlstein’s question, is debunking the revisionists a good use of time? Here’s the thing. There needs to be a way of setting the record straight. There are real people out there whose livelihood depends on people believing the worst things about the left. There needs to be a way of letting people know that the revisionists are not being honest with their readers. And, I don’t really see an alternative to using this thing we call the blogosphere towards that end.

This commenter at TPMmuckraker captures my frustration with the Dems over caving to Bush on FISA, contempt, etc:

I can’t stand the Democrat Party. I cannot stand a single one of these triangulating bullshit artists. I miss the Democratic Party: what ever happened to them? Did Clintonism really wipe ‘em all out?

When I get discouraged in times like this, I always try to find something to make me laugh. The pantload is usually good for that. This, for instance, was pretty funny: (my emphasis)

The Nazis and affiliated intellectuals firmly believed that the Jew was behind the scenes, pulling strings, manipulating events, rigging the system — even the language — in profound and pernicious ways. Carl Schmitt — quite popular on the left today — was tasked with the job of purging the Jewish spirit from the law.

Who? At first I thought maybe he was the guy who started Schmidt’s brewery, then I noticed his name was spelled wrong. The only blogospheric reference I could find to him was as a bad example:

But where exactly did Yoo come up with the analysis that led to the purported conclusions that the Executive was not restrained by the Geneva Conventions and similar international instruments in its conduct of the war in Iraq? Yoo’s public arguments and statements suggest the strong influence of one thinker: Carl Schmitt.

The Friend/Foe Paradigm
Perhaps the most significant German international law scholar of the era between the wars, Schmitt was obsessed with what he viewed as the inherent weakness of liberal democracy. He considered liberalism, particularly as manifested in the Weimar Constitution, to be inadequate to the task of protecting state and society menaced by the great evil of Communism.

Not that this should stop Goldberg from babbling incoherently, but it’s people like Yoo that convince the left that the right-wingers are a bunch of fascists.

I’m not sure if it’s possible for a “conservative” in the post-modern extremist sense of that word to be “over the top.” If it is, Jonah Golberg’s public reply to criticisms by David Niewert would fit that description. One would think that the public humiliation Goldberg experienced on the Daily Show would be a chastening experience. Instead, arms and legs lying uselessly on the floor, Goldberg continues to taunt Niewert. I guess he can always bite his head off.

An excerpt so you can get the flavor of Goldberg’s barbs:

He also revisits, like a dog returning to his vomit, this idiocy about Bush grandfather funding Hitler. It’s really a tiresome topic. But let’s assume for two seconds it’s true. The most common criticism I get from the left is that I’m playing guilt-by-association. The New Republic crowd liked Fascism and therefore I’m supposedly insinuating that today’s New Republic crowd does too. I take great pains not to make that argument in the book.

Since his argument is that the figurative DNA of the modern progressive movement has more fascist strands than the modern right, yes, I would say that bit of history about Bush’s literal DNA is relevant.

I know that Goldberg tries to sell himself as a more erudite, less caustic kind of right-wing propagandist. The reality is that Goldberg is turning into Ann Coulter without the deep masculine voice.

I was poking around for a clip of last night’s Jonah Goldberg interview, and here I see eRobin already has it up.

I was surprised to see that he used the line about progressivism leading to Clintonism, which as we know is an official department in the Trilateral Service Commission (see New World Order conspiracy if this is confusing). It’s just a particularly stupid arrow in his singularly vapid quiver. It occurred to me as I was getting ready for bed that maybe the whole exercise is a dog whistle for the Birch Society types. Recalling that, as a rule of thumb, deconstructing tiny minds is a sure-fire path to insanity, I decided to knock it off for the evening.

I see David Neiwert has more up on the Pantload, including this howler:

…Moreover, if the Klan was less racist than we’ve been led to believe, academia was staggeringly more so. …

Michael Ledeen, who appears to be taking his meds, joins the party:

So much for the view—the fact—that Hitler was driven, from an early age, by an antisemitism so virulent that he would not rest until he had set in motion the Holocaust. Indeed, in one of “Liberal Fascism“‘s most unfortunate phrases, Jonah trivializes Nazi racism, equating it with some American political rhetoric:

“What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics.” And in case you thought he was kidding, he repeats it a few pages later: “What mattered to (Hitler) was German identity politics.”

Except for the white washing of the Klan and Hitler, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed the play.

Here’s the funny thing. Jonah could have received his right-wing bonafides not by writing a hack fest, which is what he ended up doing, but by following conventional lines. For instance, he could have started with The Road to Serfdom, updated its warnings for the 2008 election, and even have slung some mud at the Clintons- which undoubtedly is part of his purpose.

Alternatively, he could have started with Star Trek, as I understand one of his favorite shows, and shown what the Prime Directive would have implied for the US in the Middle East.

In either case I probably wouldn’t have read his “treatise”, but at least the book would have been kind of interesting, and not the kind of thing that would expose him to universal ridicule, which is the predictable outcome of his little endeavor.

Be careful what you ask for, I guess.

I thought it would be interesting to look at two definitions for the word progressivism.

First, wikipedia:

Progressivism historically advocates the advancement of workers’ rights and social justice. The progressives were early proponents of anti-trust laws and the regulation of large corporations and monopolies, as well as government-funded environmentalism and the creation of National Parks and Wildlife Refuges.

Second, Lord Pantload:

The early progressives saw the world as a contest between ethnocultural groups and Yglesias does too. But we don’t really have to prove any arcane point of ideological resemblance in order to rebut his charge of ahistorical reductionism. My book argues that national socialism in this country, which used to be called progressivism, changed its name to liberalism after World War II. Hillary Clinton herself – the virtual embodiment (according to her supporters) of modern liberalism — rejects the liberal label and proudly proclaims her spiritual kinship with the Progressives. Does she understand what it means to link herself to a nationalistic, socialistic, eugenicist project? Do any of today’s self-proclaimed progressives?

I think someone’s been hitting the Cheetos past their bed time.

More later. I’m off to the Drinking Eugenically happy hour.

Keith Olbermann on his countdown to the “worst person in the world:”

The runner-up: right-wing lunatic fringer Jonah Goldberg who has evidently written a book about fascism without knowing what it is. Insisting in an interview that Italy‘s Benito Mussolini was actually a life-long socialist, unless fascism is a left-wing evil, quote, “the only reason he got dubbed ‘the fascist‘ and, therefore, right-winger,” Goldberg claims, “is because he supported World War I.” You don‘t think he was dubbed a fascist maybe, because on February 23, 1919, he created the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento—the Italian Fighting League? Or, that he was viewed as a right-winger because he created the Black Shirts to attack the socialists and the anarchists? Did you do any research at all?

Some questions answer themselves.

Back when I was doing a comedy show I brought in a recurring character named Pavlov Chien. The basic idea was that he was a parody of a conservative. Partly his language was drawn from Orwell’s essay on political speech, partly from a composite sketch of those who profit from the suffering of others, and partly from Jonah Goldberg. As an example of the latter when Pavlov was confronted with his idiocy he would toss off an ad hominem like: “let me know when you’re through reading poetry to your bonsai plants and we can have a real conversation.”

I was reminded of this reading this bit in Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog. Here, he’s responding to a query from an academic:

Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you’re not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that’s not what you’re doing, then I suppose I don’t really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it’s not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn’t hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

I love this criticism!

Correcting arguably the biggest and most slanderous spin of the 20th century – that fascism and national socialism are somehow related to classical liberalism — strikes me as a pretty worthwhile subject for a book.

How is it that every allegedly racist sin committed by any Republican going back 50 years is relevant to today’s politics (so says Paul Krugman et al), but the eugenic and fascistic foundation of American progressivism – and hence American liberalism – amounts to intellectually unserious and uninteresting “trivia”?

Why is it relevant? One answer might be that because people such as yourself are constantly looking in the wrong direction for the fascist peril, you won’t spot it when it arrives.

Also, you are again condoning the slander of conservatives in this formulation because you have no condemnation for liberals who use the f-word against conservatives and, like so many other liberals, you only now suddenly think it’s unfair – and trivial!!! — when the arrow is more turned in your own (and more accurate) direction.

(Though I grant I’m using you as a stand-in for others, you may have spent your days in Beirut denouncing Namoi Wolf, Christopher Hedges and the legions of other liberals who have accused today’s conservatives of being Nazis and Fascists, including Ezra Klein just last week).

You assert that Fascism is synonymous with bigotry, murder and genocide and yet you don’t offer even the slightest concession that American conservatives aren’t fascists, you just suggest that connection of liberals with fascism is “trivial” so long as I’m not calling liberals Nazis.

Meanwhile, I don’t share your definition of Fascism and never would use it in that way against liberals. But, I’m the slanderer according to so many of my critics.

Your Jeffrey Dahmer metaphor is interesting. Dahmer was a damaged person. He was raised wrong. He learned the wrong lessons. And horrible things resulted. Well, lots of people are damaged, raised wrong and taught the wrong lessons but don’t turn out to be serial killers. They just lead sad lives in one way or another, often causing serious harms that admittedly don’t rise to the level of a cannibalistic serial killer. You suggest my book is pointless because so long as liberals aren’t like Nazis, there’s nothing worth saying about them with regard to progressivism’s “elective affinity,” (historian Peter Vogt’s words) for fascist methods and philosophy. Meanwhile, I’m saying that there are still plenty of bad things that don’t rise nearly to the level of Nazism’s badness which still warrant attention and concern. You and other critics claim that you believe Nazism was the maximum evil of the 20th century, but the argument you employ actually suggests it was more like a minimum. It’s like you’re saying, so long as damaged people don’t become flesh-eating serial killers, why get worked u? As long as the problems with liberalism don’t reach the level of Nazism or the Holocaust, well, then who cares?

I do, that’s who.

It may just be my overactive imagination, but reading the above I can picture Jonah starting to growl, then bark, then saliva dripping from his mouth he reaches the peak of his crescendo: It’s like you’re saying, so long as damaged people don’t become flesh-eating serial killers, why get worked u[p]? As long as the problems with liberalism don’t reach the level of Nazism or the Holocaust, well, then who cares?

It’s this sort of response that makes Goldberg the perfect living caricature of a conservative. A normal person, if asked what the point of writing a book called “Liberal Fascism” is, would say: To make a lot of money, stupid. Or: because it makes me mad when people call me a fascist. Or: I don’t like it when liberals pass laws against stuff that I like. That, and I suppose that at some point in their careers, all wingnuts have to make their bones by writing a screed against liberals.

To add to this, there’s the very funny habit Goldberg has of defining things in such a way that all debate is moot. If we define a fascist as someone who believes in regulation reducing pollution, limiting the use of hand guns, and favoring affirmative action for those classes that have historically been discriminated against, then yes, indeed liberals are fascists.

To be clear, I don’t believe that conservatives are fascists. Though, I do believe the tendency to authoritarianism is primarily a right-wing phenomenon. And, I do find it telling that Goldberg makes such an effort to ignore authoritarianism in this discussion.

Lord Pantload on Ezra Klein:

It’s a pas de deux of phone-it-in hackery. Which is about as much as I’ve come to expect from the whippersnapper, as Mickey says.

On David Neiwert:

Neiwert, what with all of his credentials and seriousness might want to explain how a dogmatic individualist can be a totalitarian, since totalitarian in the academic literature he so esteems defines totalitarianism as anti-individualism. Totalitarianism is about trying to define the lives of others through state power. Individualists might be bad or wrong or selfish, but they aren’t any of those things because, again, they’re frick’n individualists!

Some one word answers to Goldberg’s query: Hitler, Napolean, Cheney. Individualists in that they believed (or believe) they were not bound by the same laws as mere mortals. They were (are) special cases.

I don’t know what it is in these people, meaning Goldberg, that causes them to turn a blind eye to authoritarianism, or to make consent by the governed the same as rule by a tyrant. The New Deal, as far as I can tell, is indistinguishable to him from the reign of Ivan the Terrible.

There are hacks and then there are hacks.

I think most of us can agree that Al “Fredo” Gonzales was a hack. It’s important to note that he was a specific kind of hack. He was a Bud Abbot “Whatevah you say boss” kind of hack. As an example take the following language from a Gonzo Department document (as documented in the WaPostie-Toastie):

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald was ranked among prosecutors who had “not distinguished themselves” on a Justice Department chart sent to the White House in March 2005, when he was in the midst of leading the CIA leak investigation that resulted in the perjury conviction of a vice presidential aide, administration officials said yesterday.

The ranking placed Fitzgerald below “strong U.S. Attorneys . . . who exhibited loyalty” to the administration but above “weak U.S. Attorneys who . . . chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.,” according to Justice documents.

You might say that Alberto VO5 had a specific vision of what a good GS employee should be: he should be like a feudal serf. To the extent that he pleases his feudal overlord, he is a good serf. To the extent that he or she isn’t entirely servile, he is a bad serf.

While this may be extremely hacky, it’s at least clear. Gonzo rarely used language to mislead. He would forget things entirely, much as a German Shepard forgets his soiling the rug, but would not use language to manipulate.

Hackiness of a higher order may be exemplified by the Michael Gersons amongst us (again, documented in the Post-Apocalyptic):

Teachers unions object to standardized tests, preferring more subjective, nonacademic measures of school success. And that, from one perspective, is understandable. Failing corporations do not like accurate financial disclosures. Slow runners resent those pesky stopwatches. The unions want underperforming schools and ineffective teachers to be shielded from objective scrutiny. But testing is the only way to determine when disadvantaged students are being betrayed — and by whom.

It is said that the most dangerous place to be in DC is between Michael Gerson and a strawman. Slow runners, like teacher’s unions, hate to be held to a schedule. Completely unlike Bush, Iraq and timetables, eh Mr. Gerson?

The lowest order of hacks among us is occupied by the Jonah Goldbergs of the world. By all rights, Jonah could have been a perfectly good video store counter person. He just shouldn’t be a writer. Or, not writer exactly, Jonah is more someone who knows how to ape the sound of someone writing. Indeed, it may be true that to the people that Jonah appeals to, a book is really a series of phonemes that mouthed in a particular way produce a rhythm that is much like the rhythm produced by actual authors.

For instance, take this bit of nonsense:

That said, I certainly agree there is an “anti-compulsion” streak in liberalism, but as I try to show, there’s also a compulsion streak in liberalism and that’s a big part of the story that needed to be told. And, even the anti-compulsion streak is often used as a kind of social conformity. “We’re all individuals!” in the Monty Python sense of the word.

Jonah, like any void, can only be observed by the lack of content.