The Shallower Jonah Goldberg
Shorter Verbatim Ann Althouse: “Moody doesn’t entertain the notion that OWS might be fascist. He blithely links Miller and fascism to the conservative side of the political spectrum.”
And Althouse blithely refuses to consider that fascism in fact resides on the complacent center-right! Will she never look in the mirror? Perhaps a 500 page book will be written about this fascinating possibility.
…as the incomparable Self-Styled Siren notes via the Twitter, I shouldn’t neglect Althouse’s assertion that Ang Lee’s beautiful film version of The Ice Storm was “glossy Oscar-bait” about “boring people in the suburbs.” Of course, it was a terrific, non-glossy, remarkably well-acted film about characters that aren’t boring and that generally avoids Alan Ball-style cliches about Dreary Suburbs; perhaps she has it confused with American Beauty or something. Not coincidentally, it also got completely shut out of major Oscar nominations in a year where other best picture nominees included James Cameron’s sinking boat movie and As Good As It Gets. See, now that’s what middlebrow Oscar bait looks like.
“300″ spawned a lot of films with men barking loudly while looking quite like the experts in S&M and S&M fashion, high on their own warped image of themselves.
As much as I like “Sin City” as a work of art, I despised “300,” but not as much as Miller’s open letter to the OWS protestors. Who is sitting in the basement jacking off, here? I don’t think it’s the protestors camping in the parks across the country.
Ann Winebox is a mentally challenged bootlicker of bootlickers. Jonah— liar that he is— must be credited as a master of misinformation who know his (painfully)ignorant audience well.
You give Jonah far too much credit. Hook a monkey to a typewriter, feed it opening lines, publish the subsequent typescript in newspapers from coast to coast, make sure that Serious People compliment the monkey on his insight and originality, and you’ll get a fair approximation of Jonah. Hell, compared to Jonah, Althouse is a self-made woman.
Agree with Doc. Jonah is merely a brook of ignorance flowing in parallel with other creeks, rills and seeps of ignorance down the slippery slopes of the Great Bell Curve.
I don’t really get this kind of thing. Most liberals and other people on the left are willing to admit that Stalinism was a phenomenon of the left. We can do this while also noting that we despise Stalin’s crimes, reject the vast majority of his program, and feel almost no political kinship with him. Except for occasional Trotskyist nonsense, one doesn’t really see significant efforts to demonstrate that Stalin was actually a man of the right.
And yet conservatives seem to all go batshit whenever anyone makes the completely analogous point that Fascism was a political movement of the right. The left is somehow supposed to be saddled with both Stalin and Hitler. Soon they’ll be pinning nineteenth century monarchist reactionaries on us too.
Not being a black and white thinker gives free-thinking a leg up and allows us to see nuance and to tolerate ambiguity— there is no poetry or art without that.
The bleak intellectual landscape of the right is something I was hoping I could stop mourning after the Bush years finally ended. Alas, they are only getting more depraved,reactionary, and frothy.
Fascism is genuinely a bit harder to place. Communism has a fairly simple pedigree: there were socialists, and some of them managed to take over Russia and do some bad things. Fascism had a more complex history that involved all the different ideas that were stewing around at the time, including also socialism. Social conservativism was a very core aspect of fascism so I’d tend to say that conservatism falls on the right, but it’s not as easy to say.
Of course, conservatives also tend to tend to look at the sides of fascism which favor their case in the most simplistic ways: conservatives are “against big government,” fascists were for it, therefore fascism is not conservative. (Ignoring that the parts of government that conservatives do like are the parts which fascists were rather fond of.)
While it’s true that fascism took up some elements of socialism (and Mussolini and some other prominent fascists were, of course, ex-socialists), these were mostly cosmetic, and it’s very hard to place fascism anywhere but the right.
I think the key is to look at who put fascist groups in power. In Italy, it was the king and other conservatives who hope Mussolini would be a bulwark against communist revolution. In Germany, Hitler was put in power by an extreme reactionary camarilla around Hindenburg. And while the organized political left was persecuted and imprisoned under fascist rule, the traditional right was co-opted. And outside Germany and Italy, fascists basically only came to power as accessories of traditional authoritarian nationalist conservatives – e.g. Franco’s Spain, Vichy France, Antonescu’s Romania.
Fascism is certainly more complicated than socialism in terms of its ideological position, but not that much more complicated. Certainly, to claim that fascism was left-wing, you basically have to claim that traditional authoritarian nationalist conservatism was left-wing, because the two were (sometimes uneasy)allies in virtually every country where fascism became a significant force.
The deepest problem here is one you get at in your comment about conservatives claiming to be “against big government.” In any kind of historical context, such a claim is ridiculous. To the extent that we can boil down Conservatism or the Right to its lowest common denominator, it is about religious traditionalism, opposition to social change, and protecting the economic interests of elites. It has nothing to do with small government.
While you cite a lot of so-called “facts” and “historical events”, you have clearly forgotten that the name is National Socialist Workers Party. Also, Hitler was a vegetarian.
There was a legitimately revolutionary-socialist element to the early Nazi Party. They drew up a set of “Unalterable Principles” that includes things like the redistribution of the land of the nobility to poor farmers, and the nationalization of industry and large department stores. The leaders of this faction, like Ernst Roehm, talked about the need for a “second revolution,” one to seize not just political power from the parliamentary state, but economic power.
And we all remember what happened to Ernst Roehm. Not a single one of those “Unalterable Principles” was ever implemented.
It’s not quite true that it has nothing to do with small government. In times and places when the government’s growth happens to be aimed at increasing social equality or decreasing the power of traditionally privileged groups–e.g. the U.S. during Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society–conservatives (tactically) embrace the cause of small government, especially in countries like the U.S. and Britain that have a strong tradition of Classical Liberalism or Jeffersonian Democracy, which can provide conservatives with a rhetoric of convenience that isn’t simply about keeping the powerful in power.
I meant to add: even at these times, conservatives’ commitment to small government tends to be very uneven. Conservatives’ massive resistance to the civil rights revolution in the South in the ’50s and ’60s consisted simultaneously of embracing a small-government rhetoric vis a vis the federal government while encouraging state governments in the South to dramatically beef up their surveillance and police powers.
Correct. This has long been Goldberg’s central error; he thinks that right-wing politics and statism are opposed, but they’re not.
Who knows what Goldberg “thinks” (and I use that term advisedly). All we know is what he *says*. And we know he’s paid well for saying things that are utter bullshit (in the Frankfurtian sense of that term), so I am unable to infer what he actually thinks (or, more likely, bellyfeels) from much that he says.
True enough. To assume that what he writes is a reflection of what he thinks is to assume integrity that may not be there or many not even think of being there. He may be thinking ‘integrity-muhfreggity, what I do PAYS, for all we know.
Even 18th Century monarchs.
GOP POV:
King George III was a notorious Liberal, and and early Fascist, and that’s why our Conservative Founding Fathers had a Tea Party, and a Revolution – to piss off the Liberal King.
And the Constitution they wrote was perfect, like the Bible, until the stupid Liberals started to change it. And the 2nd and 10th Amendments are the only good ones, so they MUST have been written by Conservatives.
Thus ends today’s history lesson.
Time for some boiled ice cream – that’s the way God intended us to eat it, until global cooling changed things.
I’ve actually seen libertarian models of the political spectrum that try to claim that Louis XVI was a leftist.
Which tells one about as much as one needs to know about the intellectual seriousness of libertarianism.
Is there a “like” button? this needs one.
Soon they’ll be pinning nineteenth century monarchist reactionaries on us too.
Too obvious. We are already atheistic jihadist-lovers. Can’t really top that in the cognitive dissonance sweepstakes.
The most critical area that Goldberg conveniently left out of his book is the role that Hitler and Mussolini played in the Spanish Civil War, providing material and air support to Franco’s forces and Franco making available a division of soldiers to fight alongside the Nzi’s against the Soviets.
All this would not square with the fact that the National Review regularly gave punhetas to Franco. If Goldberg believes that Franco was a lefty, then I hope someone help him put on his shoes every day.
Randy Paul,
Jonah’s so stupid, he needs a GPS to find his dick.
And then arm extenders to reach around his fat gut if he does find it.
what a`pity that no historians ever bothered to develop a working definition of ‘fascism’ or to elucidate its basic features, making it necessary to “consider the option” that any social movement “might be fascist” if Althouse finds it annoying.
Complete ignorance of any given topic that she discusses is central to Outhouse’s charm to her readers. Also, too, she doesn’t use a lot of big words that make their lips get tired.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
You know, it is really rather embarrassing when a professor at a major public university cites Jonah Goldberg as an authority on anything. Not to mention a massive literature on fascism in both history and political science, to which I am sure her colleagues in those departments would have pointed her.
Sharing knowledge? Sharing is what socialists want. That’s fascist!
Sharing is what socialists want.
Looters!
To be fair, if she cited Goldberg explicitly, I didn’t (quickly, sloppily) spot it. She just takes it as given that there’s a dispute about whether fascism is of the left or of the right.
And while I’m sure he’d execrate #OWS, I doubt even Goldberg would be dumb enough to claim that #OWS was fascist. There’s just too much of organization, regimentation, and state power about fascism; it’s hard to reconcile with a bunch of unwashed hippies engaging in consensus democracy. If, of course, you have any definition of “fascism” other than “bad thing I don’t like”.
Now I see that I may have misread that. Unfortunately, that is even more damning. That a tenured professor at a first tier public university has a knowledge base and reasoning skills on the level of Jonah Goldberg is even more embarrassing.
Because when I hear “fascism,” I think “promotion of class awareness,” “absence of a recognizable leader,” and “complete absence of military imagery.”
And libraries. Fascists were famous for their love of libraries. This is central to Althouse’s point.
Also passive resistance to police brutality. The SA was famous for it.
And let’s not forget their acceptance of people of all sexes, religions, colors, creeds, and sexual orientations – and their constant struggle for justice and equality for all.
Consensus decision-making.
There was a whole chapter on that in Mein Kampf.
Every voice counts!
This has been fun. It really cheers me up.
This has been fun. It really cheers me up.
Same here. Althouse brings out such joie de vivre in both the hosts and the commenters here as it is, but when you throw His Doughiness into the mix as well you’re going to get something very special indeed.
Operation Barbarossa did block a few sidewalks.
They were evicted, though.
And Robert Paxton takes another slug of bourbon and wonders why he didn’t take that job on the fishing boat.
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion — Robert Paxton
yeah that’s OWS
I find it really strange that so many people talk about the OWS-movement without actually attending the events. I’ve been by ODC numerous times, and the most common viewpoint and attitude of the people there is pacifism, opposition to military action abroad, and opposition to the military-industrial complex. It is hard to image a LESS fascist movement (though, it might be compared to anarchist movements).
I’m also really confused by this: “pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness.” I don’t understand the “rapists” or “thieves” claims; what in the world is Miller talking about? Has there been a single alleged rape arising from the OWS movement?
To add on: I think that many liberal bloggers also fail to see the first part. Everyone talks about OWS as primarily oriented towards income inequality, but at least in the case of ODC, the pacifism streak seems far more dominant among the actual occupiers.
I haven’t been traveling around the country, but from what I’ve been able to gather, the Occupy movements in different cities have very different characters.
Which is unsurprising for a movement that put bodies in the streets before creating a leadership structure or defined message.
“pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness.”
He’s read Watchmen one too many times.
You talking to him? You talking to him?
It is not possible to read Watchmen too many times.
Watchmen? Please. If Alan Moore has ever written a line that bad, I haven’t read it, and I’ve read almost everything he’s ever done. It’s Miller’s pathetic attempt to sound like a tough guy, of a piece with his wearing a fedora at all times.
There have been a few allegations of sexual assaults within Occupy camps.
Not that this really sheds any light on the quote. Unfortunately there are a lot of rapists out there, and I’ve seen no evidence that Occupy has a disproportionate number.
As someone who has spent 150+ hours working at an Occupy camp and been on about 15 marches with them, the “unruly mob” thing is pretty laughable, and the only protesters with obvious Woodstock-era nostalgia are a subset of the relatively few who are old enough to have been politically aware at the time of Woodstock (some protesters’ parents, including mine, are not old enough to have been politically aware at the time of Woodstock).
You know who else held rallies in public squares?
The Hungarians. Heroes Square in Budapest seemed much bigger to me than the Nazi Rally grounds in Nuremberg. Probably because the Rally grounds were grass covered.
Yeah…well…uh…you know who else dragged the Hungarians into a dispute that really had nothing to do with them?
That Victory Box Wine has some serious side effects.
“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.” -George Orwell
A definition that has held up well for over 60 years at least in popular expression. Not bad.
Althouse’s assertion that [...] The Ice Storm was [...] about “boring people in the suburbs.
None of the characters was Althouse. Of course they’re going to bore her.
Damn hippies, always with the “Kinder, Küche, Kirche”…
I love belonging to a blog with an anti-Ball bias. Go team go!