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Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”

Liberal Facism- Jonah Goldberg [1]I had planned on wrting up something about Goldberg’s new book… [2] I’ve been making noises about sitting down and reading the thing for a few weeks now, and finally got to sit down and start the project. I hadn’t planned on writing seomthing on it until next week… but I suppose Billy mentioning it was enough to open my own editor. While not as far along as Billy reports [3] he is, I think I can say I tend to agree with Billy’s read:

“I can recommend Goldberg’s book to the intellectually curious, but I do warn you that it falls between the cracks being neither a strictly scholarly work nor yet a popularization.”

Jonah Goldberg [4] links Jerry Pournelle’s remarks [5] on the former’s “Liberal Fascism”. A bit over half way through it now, and that’s a pretty good one-line take on the thing. I might put it rather differently and say that the… heft of the writing doesn’t match its own reference material.

Yeah…. well, I get the impression he’s targeting an audience that’s not quite up to that depth of reading… and as Billy, I find that Goldberg is attempting a remedial lesson… one in my view that is long overdue. He knows people who have done their homework will know all these facts already.  So, he’s trying to explain this stuff to people who have been starved of basic logic on the thing for so very long, the ideas expressed in his book will (alarmingly) be wholly new. And perhaps that explains the horrified [6] reviews [7] of the thing from the usual suspects [8] on the left.

Recommended… not only for it’s basic premise, but the way it teaches it… and anyway, far as I’m concerned, anything that ticks the left off so, has an innate value at the off.