Mo' Pantload, Mo' Problems

Edroso has a pretty solid fisking of Goldbleg's doorstop, just to add to the pile of circumstantial evidence building on our boy's tendentious (to put it mildly) style of argumentation.

And that's really what this book is about. Throughout Liberal Fascism Goldberg inserts complaints that liberals unfairly call conservatives fascists -- a slur that, in our age of blogospheric intemperance and extraordinary renditions, is even harder to escape than when hippies were yelling it. Well, he'll show them. Having heard the "Why do you think they called it National Socialism?" routine for decades, I have some idea of the depth of Goldberg's well of resentment. Though he has plowed up a lot of source material to stuff his magnum opus, that sense of ancient grievance permeates and dooms his book. Goldberg betrays a palpable need to get all his (and previous generations of American conservatives') grudges in, from Rousseau to John Kerry. And he's got to prove they're all fascists. Even a skilled polemicist would have collapsed under the weight of the task, but a skilled polemicist would have known enough to rein it in a little. Goldberg doesn't. Whenever he does manage to string a few points together, The Quest calls him unto a new absurdity.

That's it right there. It's not a manifesto or even a competent polemic, so much as the usual laundry list hoisted by perpetually aggrieved doofuses. Unencumbered by empirical reality or even ideological coherence, they instead forge ahead on the illusionary strengths of preferential quasi-consistency. As Roy is fond of saying, it's the "Choc-o-mut ice cream is conservative 'cause I like Choc-o-mut ice cream".

Calling Goldberg a village idiot is certainly an earned right, given his toddler-like inability to wage competent responses to his detractors. However, even that epithet, accurate as it is, fails to take into measure what is ultimately as cynical a premise as one could ask for.

The guy calls the book Liberal Fascism, and in nearly 500 pages is apparently unable to consistently or competently define either of those words. Nanny-statism is not "fascism", boyo, regardless of seemingly similar impulses; where nannyism is the sometimes tedious and obnoxious collection of bien pensant suggestions and proposals, real fascism is pure muscle and gall, backed with the blessings of corporations and/or the military. (And as the latter gets more and more subsumed operationally into the former, the distinctions will blur, and redound to the holders of power. Perhaps some future preznit will appoint some future Erik Prince to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.) Violence or the threat of violence or financial ruination, and heaps of empty hortatory rhetoric, are part of the tacit or overt enforcement mechanism in a genuinely fascist regime. None of those things apply to the more socially-oriented programs Goldberg and his ilk constantly decry (as if they are even remotely part of that magickal free market they profess to adore).

Goldberg may even actually think on some level that he's slaying a dragon here, but it's the usual lib-baiting army of strawmen set to the sophist's torch. In a truly capitalist paradise, he and his buddies would be forced to ply an honest trade outside the scope of non-profit sinecures, and in a truly fascist society he would be doing exactly what he is doing -- being a cherry-picking, scrivening factotum for the baser impulses of his political party.