According to Crooked Timber, Jonah Goldberg’s new book claims to reveal that the typical “liberal fascist” in contemporary America has studied in Swarthmore’s Education Program.
You can’t get angry, exactly, at the shamelessness and silliness of this kind of writing. You can get depressed, however. Soon the Jonah Goldbergs and Ann Coulters will run out of over-the-top words from ordinary English, and be forced to use their own variety of doublespeak.
A look ahead at Goldberg’s writing in a decade: “Billion billion Naziliberal welfare queen chardonnay!! Swarthmore lesbian Marxopomo Muslimoporno taxtaxtax!! Doubleplus badness atheism!”
Ralph, Yes, I would agree, though within that continuity there are changes in the kinds of communitarian vision being critiqued or advocated: the concept of paternalism being one type of critique (though not one that they ever disavowed, at least in its historically or racially specific form) and the embrace of JPII-style Catholicism being another. My point was more that a) individual intellectual biographies are a poor substitute for broader intellectual histories, b) continuities are interesting but so are changes and continuities, whether historical or stuructural, are not equivalence, as Goldberg would have them be.
I could not understand what you guys have been talking about but I did watch Goldberg on TV last Saturday night. He talked about his latest book. The guy is a jackass. He is not worth the time of day.