Views of Jonah Goldberg's work

Jon Stewart went through Liberal Fascism last night.

Some weren't happy with it.

With his book Liberal Fascism: From Justin to Kelly*, Jonah Goldberg has let go of one of the biggest intellectual farts of a gassy age. Yet still he manages to get his minions (the man has minions, says it all about modern American doesn't it?) to whine:

What Fresh Hell Was That?! [Mark Hemingway]

I just watched Jonah's interview on The Daily Show and my head is still spinning. What was that? The interview segment began with an apology from Jon Stewart saying that the interview lasted 18 minutes and they had to cut it. What ensued was a choppy mess, largely consisting of Stewart's heated questions and then cutting away from Jonah before he could fully respond. It's bad enough that people reviewing Jonah's book can't be bothered to read it. But inviting him on national TV, attacking the book and then randomly editing the whole thing into incoherence just seems to take things to a whole new level.

You know in television, professionals can manage to make an interview coherent IF they have a coherent subject. But when you have someone who has incoherent ideas apparently formed by watching Gilligan's Island & Star Trek for hours on end and then writes a book claiming Fascists are Liberals you get, well, six minutes of the Doughy Pantload.

I'm willing to bet the full 18 minutes pretty much has the intellectual heft of the Teletubbies without the underlying charm.

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Seems straight enough, especially when you consider the slippery way Goldberg approaches his arguments.

AMERICAblog:

I've been occasionally following the discussions of Jonah Goldberg's book "Liberal Fascism," and Sam Boyd hits on a crucial point in terms of the entire analysis:

Goldberg reminds me of a friend of mine with a taste for arguments about philosophy. His secret was that he cheated. He'd argue some seemingly absurd premise but then retreat to a definition of a key word that was so different from a reasonable one that it was unrecognizable. You'd try and keep in mind his weird vocabulary, but the words maintained the force of their original meaning and it was hard to keep your argument straight. A similar thing is going on with Godlberg.

I don't have much to add to that very solid analysis, except to say that this kind of bait-and-switch, whether about words or concepts, seems to be increasingly prevalent on the right. I think this is mostly because so many conservative ideas have been implemented to such disastrous results that there's an intense period of rationalization going on. In my little area of knowledge, though, I notice it most often with talk of the surge. Since it didn't work as planned, now proponents are retreating to talking about it as focused on something totally different. It's nearly impossible to have an honest discussion about significant ideas when this is the default style of argumentation.

It is truly hard to have a discussion when the goalposts are moved constantly. And this shifting logic seemed to come up in that interview, where Stewart exclaimed he couldn't grasp what Goldberg's point really was.


Of course Goldberg has been complaining for awhile that he isn't being taken seriously enough and challenged.

Jonah Goldberg is disappointed that no "serious" progressive is willing to write what he considers to be a thoughtful review of his new book, Liberal Fascism.

Jonah hopes that

...some other liberal actually reads the book and offers a sustained argument against it. Honestly: I would actually like to read such a review. So far the reaction from Lefty blogs has been simply inane or deranged. I am sincerely interested in a serious liberal's — or leftist's — argument against what I have to say.

I know how he feels. You see, I've been developing this theory for some time now that conservatives are really, really stupid. But, disappointingly, the response on the right has been vapid and intellectually unsatisfying.

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Finally, I discovered Jonah Goldberg's new book contains this on the jacket cover:

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.

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A look back at the shoddy work in Goldberg's book. Crooks and Liars:

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Ah…the Doughy Pantload strikes again. Speaking in front of the Heritage Foundation (because, honestly, who else could sit through this tripe?) to pimp his latest book, Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg tries again to prove Moynihan wrong, not only by coming up with his own facts, but his own definitions as well.

The primary definition that Goldberg ignores for his own version is “Fascism.” In Doughy Pantload World, “fascism” means “something bad”. This is something I’ve suspected for many years about conservatives: They don’t actually know the definitions of the epithets they like to throw out to dismiss and demean the left. They just think it means “something bad.” For example:

To sort of start the story, the reason why we see fascism as a thing of the right is because fascism was originally a form of right-wing socialism. Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist, he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I.

Um, actually, not so much. Mussolini was dubbed a fascist because he founded the Fascist Party, you big, fact-ignoring dope.

Jonah’s hatred of Hillary Clinton knows no rational bounds (the original sub-title was “The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton”–Mussolini as an American politician–who knew?) and he steals liberally from Naomi Klein to dive head first into the Godwin abyss with fantastical allusions to 1984 and some Big Brother bleak bureaucratic scenario of DMVs with Jumbotrons with nanny-state advisories on breastfeeding, based on Hillary Clinton’s It Takes A Village.

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