Fascists are people;
Liberals are people;
∴ Liberals are fascists.
Yes, another blip about Jonah Goldberg’s very serious, thoughtful lump of horseshit that has never been smeared across the public discourse in such detail or with such care. —Over at Unfogged, Bob McManus thinks Jonah deserves serious consideration, and while my immediate impulse whenever anyone asks why we aren’t taking it seriously is to point to Bérubé (his lunch with Horowitz; more en pointe, his Goldberg variations), let’s, well, take McManus seriously:
“You think Jonah deserves serious consideration”
Yes I do. If I were a progressive blogger, I would look at the book and wonder what was being taken off the table rather than what was being put on the table. I would meta and Strauss the damn thing. He had a purpose. He is getting paid.
And yes, Jonah has a purpose; Jonah did, indeed, depressingly enough, get paid for his fumbling assault on language and critical thought. But his purpose is simple enough to discern: he’s out to degrade any attempt at defining and situating fascism. What’s he’s trying to take off the table are Umberto Eco’s 14 ways of looking at a blackshirt, replacing them with nothing more than a bulge-eyed spittle-flecked bellow of “Fascist!” in a crowded theater. And if you’ve followed the links above, you already know why he’s trying to do this: Bérubé, that prancing jackanapes, told you plainly enough:
So if Jonah Goldberg’s project is to show that liberalism is the new fascism, it probably makes sense to ask whether there’s any old-time fascism running around somewhere while the doughty Mr. Goldberg mans the perimeter.
Over at Sans Everything, Jeet Heer does what little spadework’s necessary to demonstrate that Jonah’s own National Review has been steeping in precisely that old-time fascism for years. —Thus does Jonah’s 496-page argument collapse: no longer a brutally clever attempt at shifting the Overton window, it stands revealed as nothing more than a desperate bleat of “I know you are, but what am I!”
It stands revealed, yes, to those that read; but only those who already know will read. —How do you reach someone who believes what Jonah’s said? Or at least professes to believe?
I’m stuck in the koan. —On the one hand, of course this assiduous furore of taking-unseriously isn’t an attempt at argument per se. Posting clips from A Fish Called Wanda won’t convince anyone who isn’t already in your corner of anything; nor will baldly proclaiming that the new fascist stormtrooper is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. They’re tokens and dogwhistles in a playground slapfest, and the best you can say for us over them is we’re less likely to pretend otherwise. “Taking Jonah seriously” doesn’t work on the playground; all we can hope for is damage control. —To the extent they aren’t spontaneous upwellings of disgust, or hails and hearty laughter shared with weary fellow travelers, or attempts to spit in Jonah’s coffee, our salvos and volleys strive inch by inch to effect our own Overton shift: to achieve some critical mass and attach some small measure of shame to the name of Jonah Goldberg, so this media outlet or that think-tank venue might think twice before inviting his participation, and his opportunities to play his tokens and sound his dogwhistles might thereby be lessened. If only a little.
On the other, we win to the extent we can by increasing the us and decreasing the them. It’s hard to do that when you’ve grabbed them by the lapels and you’re smacking them in the face with their own dam’ book and you’re bellowing “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”
