That heavyweight intellectual, Jonah Goldberg, loves to tell his audiences that no one on the left took his masterpiece, Liberal Fascism, seriously -- they just made fun of it!

So this is how Goldberg responds to an actually serious critique.

Evidently, Goldberg thinks that ignoring a sound argument lets you declare victory over it.

Now, just to be clear: Goldberg has never responded to the core of my critique. He's tossed off side issues, but what I have said about Liberal Fascism from the get-go is that its central thesis -- that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left" -- simply does not have any grounding in, and is indeed refuted by, the actual historical facts about the "political space" which fascism historically occupied.

I laid it all out again not too long ago:

This is, in fact, the argument that Goldberg attempts to make in his book as well: That the fascists occupied the "political space" on the Left, and thus were simply out to compete against their fellow leftists. But this is where Goldberg most deeply portrays a lack of respect for the historical material available to him, because any careful study of the actual details of how the fascists came to power in both Italy and Germany makes abundantly clear that they were occupying the available political space on the right -- and had charged hard in that direction from early on in their drive to power.

I discussed this in some detail, citing particularly Robert O. Paxton's work in The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton, for instance, debunks the fascists' ostensible "anticapitalism":

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Steven Hayward asked a key question this weekend: "Is Conservatism Brain Dead?" The key paragraph was this:

About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book "Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present," it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.

There's one little problem with this: The entire thesis of Goldberg's book is a fraud. Goldberg not only deployed the F-word, he built the entire book on a false, historically untenable, claim: that "fascism, properly understood," is not a right-wing phenomenon but a left-wing one.

Indeed, the spread of Goldberg's thesis into conventional wisdom on the right is one of the main drivers in the transformation of conservatism into a pack of mouth-foaming pseudo-populists:

One of the most persistent components of this is the right's ardent embrace of the fraudulent thesis of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism -- to wit, that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The embrace of this fraud as somehow truthful has produced those teabaggers' signs bearing swastikas (suggesting that health-care reform is fascist) and signs showing Barack Obama as Hitler and, moreover, the claims that Obama is marching the nation down the road to fascism.

It's been particularly embraced by movement conservatives in their efforts to whitewash from public view the existence of right-wing extremists among their ranks.

The impact of this embrace on our national discourse has been deeper than probably anyone suspected when the book was first published last year. Not only is Goldberg's thesis now taken as an article of faith by such right-wing talkers as Rush Limbaugh (who probably helped inspire Goldberg's thesis in any event), Glenn Beck, Michael Savage,, but also among the teabagging protesters whose ranks are increasingly filled by real right-wing extremists.

What's most noteworthy, perhaps, is that Goldberg's thesis is being used to attack anyone who points out the frequently violent and intimidating behavior of these extremists. It's not the right-wing protesters carrying open weapons, Obama=Hitler signs, and openly disrupting the discussion of health-care reform at town-hall sessions who are behaving like Brownshirts, they insist -- it's the liberals who show enough nerve to stand up to them!

You can trace a lot of the popularization of Goldberg's thesis to Beck's open promotion of it, as in the video above from earlier this year. And when you're talking about brain-dead conservatives, Beck is safely Subject No. 1.

Oddly enough, though, Hayward then goes on to suggest that perhaps Beck himself is the chief hope for ending conservatism's intellectual drought. Oy.

If Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck are the leading intellectual lights of this generation of conservatives, there can be no other answer to Hayward's question than an affirmative one.

[H/t to Mitch.]

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One of the hallmarks of the American right's utter descent into complete wingnuttery is the increasing willingness of its footsoldiers to buy into palpably, provably false nonsense and embrace it as fact. This ranges from the Birthers' insistence that Barack Obama hasn't produced a birth certificate to the teabaggers' claims that health-care reform means we'll be euthanizing senior citizens.

One of the most persistent components of this is the right's ardent embrace of the fraudulent thesis of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism -- to wit, that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The embrace of this fraud as somehow truthful has produced those teabaggers' signs bearing swastikas (suggesting that health-care reform is fascist) and signs showing Barack Obama as Hitler and, moreover, the claims that Obama is marching the nation down the road to fascism.

It's been particularly embraced by movement conservatives in their efforts to whitewash from public view the existence of right-wing extremists among their ranks.

The impact of this embrace on our national discourse has been deeper than probably anyone suspected when the book was first published last year. Not only is Goldberg's thesis now taken as an article of faith by such right-wing talkers as Rush Limbaugh (who probably helped inspire Goldberg's thesis in any event), Glenn Beck, Michael Savage,, but also among the teabagging protesters whose ranks are increasingly filled by real right-wing extremists.

What's most noteworthy, perhaps, is that Goldberg's thesis is being used to attack anyone who points out the frequently violent and intimidating behavior of these extremists. It's not the right-wing protesters carrying open weapons, Obama=Hitler signs, and openly disrupting the discussion of health-care reform at town-hall sessions who are behaving like Brownshirts, they insist -- it's the liberals who show enough nerve to stand up to them!

We saw this a couple of weeks ago here in western Washington, where Rep. Brian Baird -- who had decried the ugly nature of the town-hall disruptions by in fact comparing some of these extremists to "Brownshirts," and then appearing on the Rachel Maddow show, where he compared them to Timothy McVeigh -- was attacked at his town-hall meeting on health care by a former Marine named David Hedrick who accused Baird and House Speaker of Nancy Pelosi of being the real Nazis.

Of course, this ensured him a guest slot on Fox News, and so Hedrick shortly thereafter appeared on Sean Hannity's program to explain his thinking. As you can see, he has absorbed and swallowed Goldberg's thesis whole:

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Here we go again. ABC's resident Glenn Beck wannabe, John Stossel, whines in a recent blog entry that all critics of President Obama are labeled racists by his supporters. To prove his point, he cites an article by a right wing pundit who has been consistently wrong about issues of race -- Jonah Goldberg.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s supporters promised that his election would allow America to “transcend race."

But of course that hasn’t happened. Jonah Goldberg writes:

It was Obama’s supporters who hinted, teased, promised, and prophesied that Obama would help America “transcend race.” But now, it is they who shrink from their own promised land…

From Day 1, Obama’s supporters have tirelessly cultivated the idea that anything inconvenient for the first black president just might be terribly, terribly racist.

Without one shred of evidence to back up his assertions, Stossel ends his screed with this:

Come on. Every president eventually is criticized by the media – even one as “transcendent” as Obama. The President’s supporters should engage his critics with facts, not charges of racism. Read on...

Facts? If Mr. Stossel wants facts, he sure picked the wrong person to quote on his blog. The fact is, that racism is driving the heavy resurgence of right wing militias in this country. It is a fact that threats against our newest president have skyrocketed, and his race plays a huge role. The Minuteman movement is based on extreme racism and xenophobia, and all of this is being perpetuated daily by Republican politicians, Fox News and the titular head of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, who gleefully aired a parody about President Obama called "Barack the Magic Negro."

I'm not trying to say that all critics of President Obama are racists, but there's no denying the fact that racism permeates much of the Republican Party, it's punditry and media. Oh and there's this, this, this and this -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Hey Stossel, if you're going to make these broad allegations, you need to come to the table with more than just quotes from Doughy Pantload wetting himself over Janeane Garofalo.

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August 24, 2009 News Corp

From TPM:

Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online, went on Fox News today to fan the flames of the latest fabricated "death panel" controversy.

Goldberg equated a Veterans Affairs pamphlet -- one that's reportedly no longer being used -- with Nazi eugenics, saying "death panels may not be too far off the horizon."

The pamphlet in question is one that, Fox reported this weekend, encourages disabled veterans to decide whether their lives are worth living. Tammy Duckworth, an assistant secretary of the VA, told Fox on Sunday that the department instructed VA doctors to stop using the pamphlet in 2007.

But Fox has ignored that insistence, saying soldiers returning from Iraq are given the pamphlet.

Dave N.: This really points out just how profoundly dishonest Jonah Goldberg is, just as he was with trying to deny that James Von Brunn was a right-wing extremist. These remarks are an outgrowth of his specious "Liberal Fascism" thesis, which since President Obama's election he has framed as the apotheosis of Obama's own fascist tendencies.

But as noted above, Tammy Duckworth has pointed out that the pamphlet in question was commissioned by the Bush administration, and discontinued in 2007. The Obama administration has had nothing to do with this.

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Bill Maher goes after Michelle Malkin for already writing a book trashing Obama's Presidency only six months in, and has a bit of fun with Jonah Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck in the process.

BTW, Malkin is going to be a guest on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Bravo George. At least the Maher's of the world are making a fool of you for giving the likes of Malkin another format to spew her venom.

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Last night, Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg tried an exercise similar to Rush Limbaugh's, in which they tried to construct a plausible argument that James von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum shooter, was actually a "figure of the left."

They ran through the same list: He hated Bush, he hated "neocons," may have targeted the neocon Weekly Standard too, and most of all, he hated Jews.

Somehow omitted: He also hated black people, and he especially hated Obama because he believed he was controlled by Jews. (See the note he left behind.) He also hated the Federal Reserve, taxes, the United Nations, the federal government generically, admired Hitler, urged the reciminalization of miscegenation laws, and promoted The Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion as fact. He worked at one time for Willis Carto's right-wing publishing house, Noontide Press, and used to sell copies of Carto's house organ The Spotlight.

As Mark Potok put it to Keith Olbermann:

You know, the idea, though, that somehow, you know, this shooting at the Holocaust Museum was in any remote way an artifact of the left or Obama's fault somehow, you know—I mean, it's vile beyond words and just has no basis at all in fact of any kind.

Yep. "Vile beyond words" just about covers it. Especially when it comes to Jonah Goldberg.

Here's how he put it at NRO:

Never mind that von Brunn isn’t a member of the far right.

That is, of course, flatly, demonstrably and outrageously false. Or is Goldberg now trying to cast Willis Carto as a "man of the Left"?

Is there anyone more congenitally dishonest than Jonah Goldberg working in the right-wing media? Deeply, appallingly dishonest?

I mean, I really think Glenn Beck believes the amazingly dumb stuff that comes pouring out of his mouth. Bill O'Reilly is no doubt deeply cynical, but I think his ego keeps him from admitting to himself that he is in fact a bullying and manipulative propagandist. The rest of them -- Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin -- at some level actually really believe the garbage they emit.

Goldberg, on the other hand, comes across as someone who at a basic level realizes he's just playing semantics games as a way to manipulate the debate. Deeply cynical, in other words. Because you can't help read his book, Liberal Fascism without recognizing the profound dishonesty of the entire enterprise -- which is, namely, to declare that "fascism is a phenomenon of the Left". It's not as morally appalling as Holocaust denial, but it's close.

Because anyone with any respect for history, and especially the importance of the its details, and who has studied in any serious sense the historical events surrounding the rise of fascism in the 1918-30 period knows just how profoundly wrong, how meaningfully false, Goldberg's claim is.

Goldberg recently published a length self-defense of his book, upon its paperback publication, in National Review. I wrote a long exegesis on it for Orcinus. You can go here to read it. It's titled: "Fascism is not liberal: The profound dishonesty of Jonah Goldberg".

And you can see the same gobsmackingly deep dishonesty on full display in this exchange.

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Jonah Goldberg was part of a panel discussion broadcast on CSPAN this weekend put together by Commentary magazine titled "The Future of Conservatism."

Goldberg, as is his wont, tried to explain the need to humanize conservatives by whining about how tough it's been to get people not to see them as humorless, out-of-touch whiners:

There's a lot to be said for sort of -- David Brooks came up with a great anthology of conservative writing. And a huge chunk of it was just trying to remind people that conservatives are in fact people. You know, that we're nice people, that we are -- with human ambitions and human desires, and compassion and all of the rest. Because we already had the arguments about economics and all of that, and foreign policy pretty well nailed down when this book came out, it was to convince people that you were not a bad person to be a conservative.

Now, I think in some ways that fight has kind of been won, or at least we've made a lot of progress in that fight. The problem is that in the process, we are now going back to New Deal economics and all of the rest, and all of the other issues, on foreign policy we're sending out lovely videos to Iran and that's about it. And so the job for conservatism is again to go back to these arguments that we thought we had won a long time ago, and that's a worthy fight to have.

These sorts of ruminations tell us a great deal about how conservatives see themselves, which (as is usually the case with conservative self-mythology) has the cognitive-dissonance-producing problem of not being particularly well grounded in reality. Indeed, as in Goldberg's peroration here, it's practically an alternative-reality fantasy, a distinctly backward-looking one that refuses to acknowledge current realities on the ground.

Conservatives indeed had economic arguments won for much of the past thirty years -- Reagan's "small government" ethos was present in Bill Clinton's administration as well, embodied by his willing signature on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back in 1998.

What Goldberg and his fellow conservatives are loath to admit is that this approach to economics and fiduciary responsibility has been proven irrevocably to be an unmitigated disaster, and a return to FDR-era regulation is not only warranted but necessary for our economic survival.

This reality on the ground changes the arguments for conservatives in fundamentally profound ways -- which they, in their ongoing state of denial, stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. One of these is that the old, stale argument about whether conservatives are nice people or not is rendered utterly useless.

It is, in fact, quite possible for perfectly nice people to believe things that produce perfectly bad outcomes for the rest of society. That's as true of liberals as it is of conservatives. And what's become clear is that movement conservatism produces all kinds of bad outcomes. Those nice people make for really bad governance.

Indeed, those nice people can even politely applaud while real evil proceeds. Torture, anyone? Katrina? The list of actual evils produced by conservative governance is quite long.

Sure, we can acknowledge that most conservatives are in fact nice people. But they're nice people who have nearly ruined the country. That's an argument conservatives can't really engage, though, without losing -- because they've already lost it.

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Wait! Glenn Beck isn't a populist! He says. Today.

Beck brought on his best Wingnut Super Friends, Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg, to whinge on Beck's Fox News show about the horrible torch-bearing mob that has been unleashed in the direction of those poor AIG executives.

Mind you, it only seems peripherally to have come to their attention that the leading pitchfork-bearers are Republicans. The guy who wanted the execs to commit suppuku? Chuck Grassley, a Republican. Indeed, most of the violent populist rhetoric directed at AIG seems to be coming from the right.

And of course, it's obvious that this is all just a pose, a bit of demagogic opportunism for Beck and Friends. What makes it obvious? That the Friends are Malkin and Goldberg.

The ironies of Michelle Malkin in particular decrying others for targeting individuals and holding them up to public ridicule, exposing them to threats in the process, are so rich you almost have to savor it. As you watch her in action in this clip, recall that this is the woman who:

1. Sent her flying-monkey readers after a pair of student protesters in California.
2. Indulged in a long and phony "investigation" into the supposed "nonexistence" of an Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein who was reporting news she didn't approve of -- in the process endangering Hussein's life.
3. Harrassed a 12-year-old boy and his family for having the audacity to publicly advocate a liberal policy proposal.
4. More recently, she pulled a similar stunt on a poor black woman who had the audacity to ask a liberal question of President Obama.

Indeed, we're wondering when she's just going to start up her own radio station and call it Radio Rmalkin.

Then there's Jonah Goldberg, author of a book whose entire thesis is that liberals are innately totalitarian fascists who inevitably want to enslave us all. He's also previously written that Joe McCarthy was right.

Beck's Super Friends are in fact the people Most Likely to Lead A Right-Wing Lynch Mob in the wingnutosphere. Obviously, they're just put out that this particular mob isn't one they assembled.

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When this aired I promised myself I would go back and figure out what this was all about, because it made no sense at the time. But as I was reviewing this program I began to realize it still made no sense.

It's like we've entered a little Glenn/Jonah Decoder Ring Society where they speak in their own secret language, which evidently involves pictograms. See if you can make heads or tails of it. And hey, I've read and even semi-decoded Liberal Fascism, but I can't figure this one out.

It all begins with a leftover rant from Beck's attack the previous day on Sam Webb of Communist Party USA, at the end of which he blames our current economic mess on Woodrow Wilson and proclaims:

It's the policy of the big banks, and yes, I will agree with you, big business, that no longer look at people as anything other than consumers, with business that looks at countries only as markets. That's the problem sir, and that started with the progressives. Look it up. Do your history.

Ahem, well, for those of us who actually are students of history, the gross objectification of people as mere mass workers and marketing objects well precedes the arrival of progressives, and is much more accurately described as a product of the Industrial Age and capitalism.

In any event, we are shortly off and running with Jonah, but midway along we veer into Glenn doing drawings on a white board that make absolutely No. Sense. At. All. At which point even Goldberg looks like the guy who just wandered into a ward for the criminally insane by accident and is trying to figure out how to talk his way out.

So they get back on track by sharing that Karl Rove Talking Point ("they're talking about Limbaugh to keep people distracted") and gnaw on that for about four minutes.

At some point you'd think someone at Fox will figure out that they're hosting an hour of dementia and pull the plug, but who can argue with those ratings? All the world loves a train wreck in the making, after all.

Oh well. I can hardly wait for the Colbert parody.

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You knew Jonah Goldberg had to be somewhere on the set the other day when Glenn Beck opened his Fox program with this:

If you believe this country is great, but progressive fascists are trying to destroy it, this is your wake-up call!

Before explaining exactly what this means, he offers a bit of emotional instability he'd indulged earlier that day: "This morning I kind of lost my mind on Fox and Friends." And he runs the clip, a shoutfest with Steve Doocy:

Doocy: But Glenn, the foundation of our country is our financial services industry. If that goes kaput, we are all screwed.

Beck: No, no. The backbone of our country is not our financial institutions.

Doocy: Yes it is!

Beck: It is not! It is the American people! I do not believe in the government, I do not believe in the banks! I believe in the people! Let the people fix the problem!

Dang, Beck did a nice Huey Long imitation there, minus the twang. He's already made clear that he's a right-wing populist, and now he's indulging it at will. (For what it's worth, the ascendance of the financial-services sector in the American economy, largely at the expense of the manufacturing sector, is in fact one of the problems Obama needs to fix. But I don't think that's what Beck is on about here; he's just posturing.)

But all this was just an intro to Beck's paranoia about the potential nationalizing of some of the nation's largest banks -- because it all means socialism. Which, evidently, means liberal fascism. Or something.

In any event, putting a patina on this kind of incoherence is what Jonah Goldberg is always handy for. Sure enough.

Beck: When I said, I opened up the show, and I know people were like, 'Oh my gosh, progressive fascism, liberal fascism, what are you talking about?' Blah blah blah blah blah ... It is really what George Carlin was talking about -- that fascism will come to America with a happy face. Is there any way that this ends well in nationalization?

Goldberg: Well, the good news is is that the market selloff yesterday, which was a direct referendum on what was coming out of Washington, scared the bejeezus out of most of Washington today, and you're now seeing the congressional Democrats, Steny Hoyer, people from the White House, Ben Bernanke today saying, 'Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Who said anything about nationalization?' Well, they did.

Beck is a fan of Liberal Fascism. I am not. Indeed, whenever I watch right-wing populists like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin operate, I'm reminded that nearly every far-right organization in America is right-wing populist.

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