First off, sorry for the light (i.e. nonexistent) posting - long day, long story, long nap. Blogging in earnest will resume tomorrow.
However, I do have a couple of small items - well, not necessarily small in stature, just small in length.
Let's start with Jonah Goldberg. No, really. I've been following the travails of Liberal Fascism for a while, still refusing to read the book. I can now fall back, comfortably, on my old retort that I tend to avoid items on the New York Times bestseller list - where Liberal Fascism is now #1.
That perhaps shocking (though "relentless sales job" comes to mind) turn of events is supposed, in a Goldbergian view, prove the book's worth, where success (again "relentless sales job") serves as the most recent substitute for actual seriousness. Every couple of days, I stop by Jonah's blog on the book, hoping a) it will finally be interesting and b) provide some of the more amusing snark I've come to appreciate the guy for... sadly, no.
However, today I caught sight of a series of complaining posts about a review by Michael Tomasky, which led me to Tomasky's multi-page takedown of the book. As I consider Tomasky a genius (since before moving to New York, when he was at The Village Voice, muckraking the Giuliani years), I had high hopes going in... and they were amply met: the review is one of the most solid critiques yet:
However much or little Goldberg knows about fascism, he knows next to nothing about liberalism. Anybody familiar with Liberalism 101 grasps that there is something deep within liberalism, from its earliest beginnings, that prevents it from degenerating into fascism, and that is its explicit recognition that the state must serve both common purposes and individual liberty. Liberal theorists from John Locke to Cass Sunstein, with hundreds in between, have addressed this point. It is absolutely central to liberal theory and liberal practice. We do believe in such a thing as the common good, yes we do. We want more of it, and we want a democratic leader who will summon us to believe in it, who will locate for us the intersection of self-interest and common interest at which citizens can be persuaded to participate, together, collectively, in a project larger than their own success. But where that collective urge crosses the line into coercion, well, that is where liberals--I mean liberals who know something about liberalism--get off the train, and do their noncoercive best to derail it.
Goldberg, as is his wont, complains vociferously about being misunderstood and misinterpreted (while not, as is also his wont, providing links to Tomasky, which would help inform the reader's take). Believing, I think, that book selling is politicking of a new sort, he has attacked every bad review and reviewer with a zeal that would be (and is) tetchy and personal but which he drapes in the lofty sentiment of merely wishing to correct terrible errors, arguing (at length) that Tomasky is ignoring just how, er, ignorant liberals are of their own underpinnings:
Although I kind of feel like it's a waste of my time given that there doesn't appear to be a single new point or criticism in it. It feels a bit like he just aggregated the greatest hits of the leftwing blogosphere. But there's one point I think merits a response now. Tomasky (much like Tim Noah and Matt Yglesias) uses a debater's trick of sorts by basically saying there's nothing new in the book and everybody who knows anything about liberalism knew all of this stuff already.
This is, quite simply, untrue. And, moreover, I am tempted to say it borders on a kind of lie. Tim Noah's "there's nothing new here" approach was the sort of hackish dishonesty I expected from him. But I'm more disappointed in Tomasky, whom I respect a lot more. I don't think Tomasky's necessarily being dishonest, but he is being highly selective.
Recall, that not long ago he ticked off the lefty blogosphere for lamenting that John Edwards didn't know very much and he even published a political history quiz, ostensibly because he felt that there are certain minimal things liberals should know — and don't.
More revealing to me — and hence more disappointing — is that Tomasky specifically told me that he agrees with me in my long running critique of liberalism (which amounts to a major theme of my book) that liberals are deracinated from their own intellectual history. This was a bugaboo of mine in the Corner several years ago and Tomasky told me more than once that he found it sufficiently persuasive to prompt him to hire Mark Schmitt to write about liberal intellectual history for The American Prospect, precisely because Tomasky felt that so many liberals don't know jack about liberalism (I even discussed this with Schmitt on Bloggingheads if memory serves).
...I know many serious and important liberals who do not know that Progressivism was steeped in eugenics, that Progressives were imperialist jingoists, that the editors of The New Republic, the muckrakers, and vast swaths of American liberalism were pro-Mussolini, that Woodrow Wilson made Joseph McCarthy look like the Spokesman for the People for the American Way, that the New Deal prolonged the Depression and was crafted by men who admired both Fascism and Bolshevism and sought to restore Woodrow Wilson war socialism, and on an on and on. (Heck, when Ron Radosh says he learned anything new from an intellectual history of the left, it's just plain dumb to say there's nothing new in it).
Of course, the purpose of Goldberg's book isn't to illuminate or explain liberal ideas, it's to show that what he calls "liberal ideas" are, in fact, fascistic. Or not... or sort of - a kind of "it's a floor wax and a dessert topping" notion of liberalism. And Tomasky explains, at length, and in some detail, what's wrong, what's missing, and why, ultimately, Goldberg's book is of little real use:
Throughout Liberal Fascism, he takes pains to say they [liberalism and fascism] are not the same. The book is replete with cautious backtracking. Here is an instance, from his chapter on liberal racism. "If you fall outside the liberal consensus [on race and diversity]," he writes, "you are either evil or an abettor of evil." And he hastens to add: "Now, of course you're not going to get a visit from the Gestapo if you see the world differently; if you don't think the good kind of diversity is skin deep or that the only legitimate community is the one where 'we're all in this together,' you won't be dragged off to reeducation camp. But you very well may be sent off to counseling or sensitivity training." I can't help thinking how much preferable counseling would have been to the Jews in the 1940s and sensitivity training to the Cambodians in the 1970s. And I note, with a modicum of gratitude, that Goldberg is here conceding that "liberal fascism" is a soft fascism, whose enthusiasm for enforcing its decrees is not the equal of fascism at its most classical.
And frankly, it's why, in the end, I have no interest in reading the book, and why, despite Goldberg's insistence that his book makes the left really angry, most lefties seem to say either "not worth it" or "not very good." There's just, despite his insistence and 400+ pages, not much here, and Tomasky's authoritative takedown separates the serious from the fluff. And so, though I meant to say only a little, I've dragged on. All to tell you, read the Tomasky article. It's terrific.
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