More incoherence

Sounds like Jonah Goldberg decided that talking fast and using big words might stun the interviewers into impressed silence...


(stolen from Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors)

Update: Chet Scoville of Vanity Press has a review of Jonah's book by Michael Ledeen. Here's a brief quote:

Jonah, instead, says (pg. 80) “Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state.” That is not fascism; it’s absolute monarchy, it’s the Sun King in France, it’s the great enlightened despots like Frederick the Great. But it’s not Mussolini or his imitators, and certainly not Hitler, whose vision was global, not just national. The issue is “the same goals,” not just the methods of rule, and here’s where Jonah’s eccentric thesis, for all its provocative value, leaves history behind and strides into…vision, I suppose. Just a few lines later, he claims that “Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator,” and that’s just silly.

Just plain silly.

Update 1/18. David Neiwert (of Orcinus) at Firedoglake talks about his attempt to have a conversation with Jonah Goldberg over his 'novel' and Jonah's decision to ignore all leftwing challengers by calling them not serious. Good post and worth reading. Here is one sentence of Neiwert's that explains the existence of Jonah's book:

Fascism isn't just a theory for me, and it's certainly not ancient history. But it's clear that for Goldberg, this is largely a semantical exercise, a chance to bend definitions, to play rhetorical tit-for-tat with liberals who bandy the term about too freely (and they do exist). In other words, for the most frivolous reasons, he's purposefully muddying the public discourse when it comes to the very real problems posed by the existence of very real fascists.

EXACTLY. The old Rovian trick of projecting your own flaws onto your opposition. Taking the definition of a word and remaking it. Framing the question yourself. Attacking the opponent where he thinks he's strongest.

So what does this mean?

Fascism is a right-wing fantasy. The fact that this ridiculous book has been crapped out by the likes of Goldberg means that they want this word to be unusable. In the same article, Neiwert goes on to say:

It needs to be pointed out that there are a number of groups -- not just well-known organizations like the ADL and the SPLC, but church-based groups like the Center for New Community and community-organizing efforts like Not In Our Town -- whose primary mission entails helping the public deal with the very real issues created by the ongoing presence and activities of these groups. The key to their efforts entails educating the public, and having a clear understanding of the nature of the beast is an essential predicate of that.

What Goldberg's book means to them is that, when they try to identify real fascist organizations (particularly skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Klan) as operating within their communities, the mainstream conservatives who constitute Goldberg's audience -- only a fraction of whom will have actually read the book (Jonah insists therein, you see, that he's not claiming that all liberals are fascists, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn't being serious), while the rest will mostly have absorbed its title -- will more than likely just dismiss them: "Nah, it's you liberals who are the real fascists!"

Be prepared.