Over the holiday, the launch effort for Jonah Goldberg's new book switched into something approximating high gear; I say "approximating" because the energy around promoting Liberal Fascism appears mainly to come
from Goldberg and his Mother, the estimable - or perhaps, estimatable - Lucianne.
Book reviews have started to trickle in (pour seems unlikely - the book is long and its audience is narrow), a mixed bag that split largely along predictable party lines, with conservatives hailing the latest addition to a groaning bookshelf of highly similar indictments of liberalism, while liberals dismiss it as at best one sided and at worst, largely unrealistic.
Heck, I think both sides are right. It's a weighty addition of unrealistic one sidedness.
I'd ignore the book entirely - I still debate whether or not to read it, if only to make my understanding of the man more complete - but I'm sort of fascinated... not with Goldberg's bid to be a successful author (it may work, but I doubt it), but with the grasping attempt to add a layer of "seriousness" to his endeavors, to be the Thinking Man's Polemicist.
As I've said, I think Goldberg and seriousness in a sentence is highly humorous.
Like Fox News and its "Fair and Balanced" sloganeering, Goldberg doth protest too much: actual seriousness and deep thought do not require the endless defenses Goldberg musters to make his case for being an author to take seriously. The argument, really, should make itself in a well researched, well thought out tome. Liberal Fascism, it seems clear, isn't that book. But Lord, how Goldberg wants it to be - or at least to be seen that way.
The latest salvo come from the New York Times Book Review of Goldberg - the Times Book Review has itself raised eyebrows (liberal ones, natch) under its most recent editor, a conservative who tried to "broaden" the viewpoints covered (I have no opinion on this; I always find myself wanting to take the Book Review seriously, but never quite getting there). In any case, Matt Yglesias complained that the review was kind, Goldberg complained about Yglesias not understanding the review.
I think they're both wrong. And I'm not alone - Crooked Timber and Spencer Ackerman make a similar point to the one I want to, as well: the Times review is pretty much a flat out pan, should anyone bother to really take in its points, and the problem with Liberal Fascism isn't what it says about liberals, it's what it says about fascism.
Goldberg, as Timber and Spackerman point out, is using a broad brush definition of fascism and then working backwards to fit liberalism into that definition. Fascists wanted government control over reproducing... and so do liberals! That sort of logic is quite backward... indeed, it isn't logic at all; it's a one-definition-fits-all reduction of liberal thought to simplifications that don't really reflect how we get to a stand on an issue, just that we have one.
This really is Godwin's Law run amok, and Goldberg, especially - who bristles at the implication that conservatives always get tarred with comparisons to Hitler - should know better. And, like many of these conservative tomes, Goldberg substitutes extensive documentation for seriousness. Ann Coulter's the most prominent example of this kind of "pseudo-serious" authorship, but one could also point to examples like Michelle Malkin's exhaustive documentation of Japanese internment in this country during World War II as the substitution of numbing detail for seriousness too (Malkin basically says that internment is perfectly valid because even the vague possibility that somebody might be a spy would justify locking everyone in one ethnic group into armed camps).
If there's a reason to ignore this whole debate, it's that Goldberg's book, like those before it, is unlikely to have an audience outside of people who agreed with such conclusions before ever picking it up; it's unlikely to change a mind or illuminate new thought. But this stuff does matter - the endless partisanship and ongoing name-calling across our political divides is a problem, not a solution, and Goldberg, who frankly is smarter than the "this or that" polemics of a Fox news debate show, is usually better about separating the crazy name calling from the frank debate of our differing points of view. The one weak point in Goldberg is that he really has no idea why liberals believe what they believe - why social justice matters to us, what we see when we talk about racial divides or much else. He doesn't see it because - I've come to realize from e-mail exchanges we've had - much of it is simply outside of his realm of personal experiences, and, like many of us, he tends to generalize from his own life and work outward. That's fine in social commentary, less useful in serious, academic discussion. Liberal Fascism will fail, I suspect, because it doesn't know what it is, or what it wants to be; and that's because Goldberg has some notion in his head that "seriousness" is better than glib social commentary. He's right, perhaps; but I say, own who you are, and be good at that. It's the best revenge for so-called dilettantes. Seriously.
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