If you’re interested in stuff like arithmatic series, infinite sums and such… you should check out the Mathologer youtube channel. It’s suprisingly entertaining even if you’re not particularly good at math. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuIIjLr6vUA
Math is racist! (not) 🙂
In theory, it’s counting numbers, or number theory.
I was reading today about the lightning strike that took down the George Floyd mural. The article said that Floyd had been murdered by Chauvin. And people wonder why we don’t trust the media. It may not be the big stories, but the tiny inserted lies.
Apropos of the Floyd mural, the NY Post notes that “A weather radar detected a lightning strike in the area but a city building inspector said the collapse appeared to be from natural deterioration.” Whatever. At least the Post didn’t say that Chauvin “murdered” Floyd. Pictures of the mural before-and-after at the link: https://nypost.com/2021/07/14/george-floyd-mural-collapses-witnesses-blame-lightning/
Meanwhile, “[The artist] said he plans to rebuild the mural at a new location.”
I have a new contender for “Sentence That Perfectly Explains How We Ended Up Here.”
John Ekdhal on Twitter posted a tweet slamming Jonah Goldberg for his indifference to Biden’s door-to-door vaccine-checkers plan. That tweet began “Jonah Goldberg was literally the guy that politically influenced me more than anyone excluding my parents.”
Not Buckley or Limbaugh or VDH or Reagan or Goldwater. Not even George Will or Pat Buchanan or Robert Novak. Jonah Freakin’ Goldberg.
Mike
Sometimes a voice that has influence and points people in the right direction later falls away into error. Jonah Goldberg had a good influence on John Ekdhal it appears but Jonah is no longer such. (understatement!)
I would say the same for George Will and Pat Buchanan.
Not how we ended up here IMO. Save your flames.
MBunge:
Probably Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism. Ever read it?
“Probably Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism. Ever read it?”
If somebody wrote a book titled “Conservative Communism,” would you bother reading it? Or how about any of the actual historians who have spent literally decades researching and writing about fascism and their critiques of Goldberg’s book?
All authoritarian tyrannies have similarities. Fascism is a term meant to distinguish one sort of authoritarian tyranny from others. Goldberg simply bulldozed over all those distinctions to say “We’re not facists! You’re facists!” It was an adolescent effort to state “conservative = good” and “liberal = bad” in a way that made unsuspecting readers less well informed about both subects.
To my knowledge, the biggest movement or group in American history you could accurately call fascist was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was mostly, if not almost entirely, made up of Democrats. THAT DOES NOT MEAN THE KLAN WAS LIBERAL OR LEFTIST.
Mike
Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” is an excellent book. It collected much disparate information in one place and provided a context for understanding it.
I was enriched by that book. I recommended it to an old hippie-commune-mate, who still has that curious old-fashioned liberal idea of being open-minded. He read it and was impressed. Not enough to flip conservative but he better understood that point of view.
I’m not enchanted by Goldberg’s response to Trumpism. But as they say in AA:
________________________________
Take what you want and leave the rest.
________________________________
People don’t have to be perfect for one to learn from them.
Hint: No one is perfect.
MBunge:
I was not telling you it was a fabulous book and that you should read it. I was trying to explain why the person you were discussing might find Goldberg an influential thinker. I was asking you if you’ve read it because I wondered (and still wonder) whether you have. I know that people have criticized the book, and that it has problems. But it was written in early 2008, which is quite a while ago at this point, and I read it (or a great deal of it) at the time and found it interesting, particularly in its point that actual historic fascism was more leftist than right, although not exactly either. And it didn’t gloss over history – it had a lot of history about, say, the Wilson administration.
Goldberg has said in interviews that the title Liberal Fascism was taken from a 1932 speech by science fiction pioneer and socialist H. G. Wells at Oxford. Goldberg quotes Wells as stating that he wanted to “assist in a kind of phoenix rebirth” of liberalism as an “enlightened Nazism”. In the book, Goldberg writes that he “did not get the title of this book from Wells’s speech, but […] was delighted to discover the phrase has such a rich intellectual history”. This apparent contradiction was clarified in a subsequent interview where Golberg states: “The truth is that Liberal Fascism was originally a working title I came up with independently for the proposal. But the idea was always that we might change it for the actual book since it is such a bloody shirt. But then I read up on Wells and his call for ‘Liberal Fascism,’ and I was like, ‘What the hell, this is more apt than I realized.’ So in a way, the title comes from Wells and in a way it doesn’t”…
Ron Radosh of The New York Sun wrote:
“Mr. Goldberg presents a strong and compelling case that the very idea of fascism emanated from the ranks of liberalism. […] He has read widely and thoroughly, not only in the primary sources of fascism, but in the political and intellectual history written by the major historians of the subject. […] Some will rightfully take issue with Mr. Goldberg when he describes the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton as fascist. On this, he strains and pushes his evidence too far to convince the reader that these paragons of liberalism can be called fascist in any sense of the term. Mr. Goldberg makes a stronger case when he accuses the New Left of classic fascist behavior, when its cadre took to the streets and through action discarded its early idealism for what Mr. Goldberg correctly calls ‘fascist thuggery'”
Marvin Olasky of World Magazine wrote:
“Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is a flawed but useful attempt to redraw the political map. Goldberg shows how Woodrow Wilson began and Franklin Roosevelt amplified an almost-fascist concentration of power in Washington. FDR boasted of his ‘wholesome and proper’ buildup of power because he was leading ‘a people’s government.’ Goldberg shows how liberals came to believe that authoritarian government is fine as long as representatives of ‘the people’—themselves—are in charge.”
Economist Thomas Sowell wrote:
“Those who put a high value on words may recoil at the title of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism. As a result, they may refuse to read it, which will be their loss—and a major loss. Those who value substance over words, however, will find in this book a wealth of challenging insights, backed up by thorough research and brilliant analysis. This is the sort of book that challenges the fundamental assumptions of its time—and which, for that reason, is likely to be shunned rather than criticized. It is a book for people who want to think, rather than repeat rhetoric.”
MBunge:
So have you read “Liberal Fascism” — as in the whole book or even most of it?
Someone is smarter than Jonah Goldberg but hasn’t written a book, or read Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism? Reading between lines here, which is always dangerous.
About the concept that people can be a good influence when younger but a bad influence when older (not wiser). Crickets.
Moore poppies? When someone comes to cut down all the poppies who will stand when they come for all the peonies? Dennis Moore?
After some 18 months after the book “Liberal Fascism” (and isn’t the subtitle equally compelling “The Secret History of the American Left”) was out, some 6 months after the paperback came out, Goldberg did a very long and detailed post at NRO answering his critics.
Nothing but details, perhaps, passed muster. Often estimable critics like Princeton historian Robert Paxton (sp?) were found wanting.
Goldberg hewed to primary texts, supported by the standard secondary historical literature on fascism during the 1930s and before.
Thus, he argued, my thesis of widely held fascist envy (eg. New Dealers admired and envied Mussolini), stands unrefuted.
But other critics he didn’t address held that Goldberg’s thesis post-World War account of political fascism became muddled and apologetic in tone, and thus flaccid in substance as it became more contemporary.
These critics wanted of what David Horowitz does — the ex-New Left’s most prolific and awarded writer (even before he became their ex-) — more unflinching and honest reveal that “inside every Liberal [ie, Leftist] there’s a totalitarian” itching to get out!
Had he done so, then the Daryll Cooper thesis would have been notably much less unanticipated.
This failure by Goldberg to be brutally honest with the living and their progeny repeatedly came up as his appearances found him demure at any sequel, even as the Obama years clearly revealled the Dark outlines of emergent Obamunism (eg, spying on reporters; actually doing what Nixon was to be impeached for merely wanting to do, that is, using the IRS against political opponents, which forced Nixon to resign when Rep’s couldn’t stomach such hyperpartisanism or weaponization of the Federal bureaucracy).
It truly was a missed opportunity during a highly teachable moment.
The critics didn’t write the book and have they written the better book? Could have, should have, would have; the hindsight microscope is always clear. And yet the book led some away from the progressive tar pit in spite of all it’s flaws.
Dan Greenfield knocks out another good one:
“In February, Biden signed an executive order which included one of the most blatant efforts to roll out a voter turnout operation across the span of the entire federal government.”
Conservacucks please note: The whole point of power is to get more power and consolidate your power. After you have finally sorted that #^&* out, well *then* you can start Conserving, like, Stuff (if you even remember what the word ‘Conserve’ is supposed to mean). Muh Principles? Dumbasses! Jaysus Wept!
Lincoln Lovers and Aficionados of the Jaffa Jive are going to enjoy this:
“The rewriting of history is best done by people who have a certain historical outlook and a facility for language. It is a unique sort of sociopathy that allows them to create highly complex models of the past that are decorated with well-established facts, but are otherwise filled with distortions and outright fabrications. Erasing a man from a picture and banning any mention of him still leaves a hole. Rewriting the man’s history, weaving it into the story of the opponents solves two problems.
.
.
Forgotten is how this cult of Lincoln was created and who created it. That person is Harry Jaffa, who should go down as history’s greatest fabulist. He is responsible for what is known as the second founding thesis. You see, the real founding the country was not with the Constitution. That is just words on paper to solve practical issues facing the newly independent colonies. The real founding of the country, the moral and spiritual founding, was with the Declaration of Independence.
According to Jaffa, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” is the primal roar of the new people, a new concept of a people. The Founders wanted America to be a land of universal equality. That was the ideal they setup for themselves. The Constitution fell short of that because of the needs of the moment.
The Civil War, however, was not a continuation of a cultural dispute dating back to the English Civil War or even a war over slavery. It was the second founding. The old errors and sins of the first founding were washed away with the blood of millions so America could continue toward that original ideal. Slavery was abolished and the Constitution was modified. Those modifications have been used ever since to alter the country in pursuit of the founding ideal contained in the Declaration.
This is also where we get the proposition nation stuff. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” You see, that original rhetorical flourish was actually a call to create an entirely new type of nation, a proposition nation based on ideas, rather than people. It is not hard to see the mischief that has come from the embrace of this rewriting of history.
In a slightly different context, John Derbyshire noted that some people have an unnatural skill at creating “elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content”. Harry Jaffa and his followers were such men. For that matter, Strauss falls into this camp as well, but that is a topic for another day. Because the second founding idea provided the right-liberals with a fig leaf over the race issue, it has become their creed.
That does not change the fact that this is nonsense, but like Stalin rewriting history, it is powerful nonsense. In fact, the current antiwhite pogroms aimed at extirpating all signs of whiteness are rooted in this. The advocates justify their cultural genocide on the grounds that it is part of this process to reconcile America with its long failure to live up the original idea. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are really just modern day manifestations of the Founders, dreaming of a proposition nation.
At the core, the dissident project is about peeling back the layers of lies and fabrications like second founding theory. History is a story of a people and our story has been rewritten by strangers who see us as enemies. Correcting the record is not just an exercise in trivial exactitude. It is about re-centering a people on the foundation of their past so they can once again reach for the stars. If the folks at the Bulwark want to know “what they hell is happening” there is the answer in a nutshell.”
To my knowledge, the biggest movement or group in American history you could accurately call fascist was the Ku Klux Klan.
You could call it ‘fascist’, but never accurately. The different incarnations of the Klan have been notable for their hostility to various out-groups. To the extent they were purveyors of revanchist politics, it would have been during their 1st incarnation. And, of course, they never promoted any militarist national mobilization, either.
Forgotten is how this cult of Lincoln was created and who created it. That person is Harry Jaffa,
He didn’t. Intellectual history isn’t your strong suit.
Intelligent Refutation isn’t yours.
Moses, Baby…He’s looking pretty mean today. You’d best step back verrryyyy slowly from that Golden Calf…
“I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
—-18 September, 1858, In his debate with Stephen Douglas
OK. What the hell is this?
Dee Gees | You Should Be Dancing
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HAIL SATIN – the vinyl debut of Dee Gees – coming to a local record store & dance party near you July 17th for the next Record Store Day drop!!
Brilliant comment by a retired academic historian in the Lincoln/Jaffa Article comment thread:
“If I might be permitted a very small, very limited defense of my former profession, it’s not so much that professional historians are rabid ideologues, it’s just that they’re incredibly sheltered, incredibly naive, and not nearly as smart as they think they are (I told you this would be a very limited defense).
Assume that you were hired to write “An Introduction to the Japanese” for some reason. But you don’t speak Japanese, have never been to Japan, and your internet is so inconsistent that all you’ve got to work with is a few old anime videos and the collected novels of James Clavell. That’s the situation facing most professional historians, vis-a-vis actual human behavior.
For one thing, academia is a guild profession now — has been for a long time — and so your average professor is quite often the child, and even the grandchild, of professors. They quite literally grew up on campus. For another, real world experience on your resume actually counts against you when you’re applying for grad schools, and if you do manage to get it with some dreaded private sector stuff on there, you can kiss your social life goodbye — you might only be a few years older, chronologically, but you’ll be lifetimes apart from your classmates (I speak from experience here). Finally, here is a comprehensive list of the graduate coursework I was required to take in economics, statistics, agronomy, and things military:
See what I mean? If history is supposed to be an analysis of “what people be like,” as one of my most entertaining former students once put it on the term paper, then you’d think that the three F’s — that’s Farming, Fighting, and Fornication — would feature prominently in the educations of prospective historians… but they don’t. You’d think basic stats would be on there — hell, you’d think basic math would be on there — but I got into a pretty decent grad school without even taking the math portion of the GRE.
All of which is to say that it’s not surprising that eggheads fall for Derb’s “challenging systems of thought that contain no truth.” They don’t know what they don’t know, and their entire lives — starting, in many cases, with their grandparents — is designed to keep them from ever finding out.”
@TommyJay:
I got nothing against Rocking Rabinowitz (Mister Reed, to you). Not yet anyway! 🙂
Cucks: It’s OK to be a hypocrite when we’re doing the kicking. Try to understand that. It’s how you get to not be a Beautiful Loser all the time. Or do you enjoy wearing the Gimp Suit? 🙂
His [Lou Reed’s] family was Jewish and his grandparents were Russian Jews who had fled antisemitism; his father had changed his name from Rabinowitz to Reed. Reed said that although he was Jewish, his real god was rock ‘n’ roll.
“…One only needs to consider, without ideological blinders, the history of the Propositional Nation since 1865, and the rapid onset of egalitarianism that began after World War II and accelerated in the 1960s. Much if not all of this can be laid at the feet of Abraham Lincoln and his devilish “proposition,” and its relentless promotion by Claremont.
As Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland in 1650: I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken?
.
.
Our conservatism is what we learn from the old folks – the old ways and the old stories we pass down to our children, the history that happened to us and the blood we spilled.
We may conclude that this is something Professor Jaffa and the Claremonters do not have. They have abstractions and a philosophical scheme. We have the memories of living breathing men, with our feet rooted in the ground of the land they fought for.
.
.
Anton and Ellers are absolutely correct that a recovery of old things and old traditions is necessary. And of course the founders should be re-considered, but without the lenses of Professor Jaffa. And you should consider that the Southern tradition is completely different from the ideological strawman of Jaffa’s scheme. If you can’t bring yourself to study Calhoun, consider the Agrarians and their critique of financial and industrial capital and of the American notion of Progress. Christopher Lasch and Jacques Ellul can be helpful; so too the heirs of the Agrarians, including Wendell Berry and the brilliant English writer Paul Kingsnorth.
And yes, we do share a common enemy. And yes, we can and should be friends; there is much we agree on. And perhaps we will one day do battle together.
But not under your flag. Under our flag, the Southern flag. And not for your philosophizing, but for our Southern traditions.
And never, ever again for a “proposition,” nor a nation “founded” on one.”
Kind of a follow-up on the Darryl Cooper posts – about why conservatives have good reasons to distrust the government.
I’m sure many of you have already read something about this new power grab, but J. E. Dyer makes the by-now-obligatory observation on gaslighting:
The public is likely to be overwhelmingly freaked out. Consider this point: the White House is indignant that Tucker Carlson believes it when he’s told his emails are being read by a government agency. Yet at the same time, Politico writes as if it would be fine for “Biden-allied groups” to have messages sent over SMS services monitored – and “work with” the SMS carriers to do some undefined thing about that.
“Dan Greenfield knocks out another good one:” – Zaphod
The Interagency Working Group on Promoting Naturalization brought together the heads of agencies to figure out the best way to create as many new Democrat voters as possible. The agencies included the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, and the USDA.
This month, the Interagency Strategy for Promoting Naturalization was released. The Obama administration had its own project for turning aliens into citizens as quickly as possible in order to get them on the voting rolls, but the new strategy goes beyond anything Obama tried to do.
The new strategy begins with using DHS to assemble all the available data on the “potential naturalization-eligible populations” and breaking it down by age, sex, and zip code, as well as other demographic details, to target “outreach”.
By “outreach”, the working group of agencies headed by Biden appointees means converting aliens into citizens.
That data will allow the government and a spectrum of “partners”, most of them Democrat allies, to target resident aliens the way a corporation targets potential customers of its products.
Except that the data is coming from the government and the product is voting for Democrats.
In November of 2020, Joe Biden’s Havana-born nominee for Department of Homeland Security secretary, Ali Mayorkas, promised to “oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.”
Less than a year later, amid a popular uprising in Cuba, Mayorkas made a volte-face, telling those seeking refuge from Haiti and the communist nation, “You will not come to the United States. . . . Again, I repeat, do not risk your life attempting to enter the United States illegally. You will not come to the United States.”
As far as I can tell, there was no performative outrage from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or any of her progressive cohorts over the United States shutting its doors to the downtrodden. There are no overwrought analogies made between U.S. immigration policy and the MS St. Louis by Democrats. There is no grandstanding reading of “The New Colossus” from CNN hosts.
…
It’s impossible to ignore the fact that Cubans are often treated differently. Perhaps it’s because a sizeable number of them — having first- or secondhand experience with socialism — vote Republican, and progressives are interested only in future Democrat voters.
Everything the Democrat machine does is connected.
zman has a point, after all before Henry Jaffa, Lincoln languished in obscurity like Chester Alan Arthur and Millard Fillmore.
Can Do! loves the concept of an America sundered into tribes, for the good of “his” people. An expat “britt” in Hong Kong. Funny, but that concept aligns with the goals of the CCP. A civil war in the USA of course will produce a stronger foe to the CCP you see. Trust him, Can Do! knows. (not)
FOAF:
Yes it is amazing how obscure that Lincoln fellow is, never mentioned in The Hillsdale Dialogs, IIRC. (not) Oh, I forgot, they must be “cucks” up there.
A couple of late comments:
1. Goldberg’s thesis of Liberal Fascism is a rehash of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism. I Goldberg credit for the grindwork of putting together a lot of evidence. And I’ll grant that many critical reviews were less than stellar. But…
a. There’s a bit of special pleading involved. Yes, the kinship between 20th C liberalism and fascism is real. But there’s another side to it, and a serious treatment would have to look at counter examples. He doesn’t. He sidesteps it in the introduction, and then simply ignores those who cannot be put on the left. Franco is barely mentioned; Salazar not at all. (My guess is that if he were to address it, Goldberg would start talking economic policy, and claim they were leftists.)
b. I’m old enough, and started reading early enough, to know that fascism used to be understood as a kind of “third way”, combining elements of right and left. Or a kind of “fusionism”, if you wish.
c. But he’s doing a bit of lumping by even calling Nazi’s “fascist.” That was once a contended point; and after all, the identification starts in Russia. I will grant that Goldberg, at least on the surface (he sometimes seems to forget) recognizes that Mussolini’s fascism wasn’t anti-semitic. (Nor was Dolfuss’s Austria, into which many Jews fled.) Later, the German alliance moved him in that direction, but there’s no reason to think it inevitable. The weaker ally often does that. Churchill agreed to many things reluctantly. Under Mussolini, anyone born in Italy had birthright citizenship. Really. And here’s a sad case (really, two) showing how it happend:
2. I have a certain sympathy for Z-man’s critique. But it’s limited by the fact that he is himself a big league narrative pusher. He too has a highly Procrustean model into which all the fact are to fit. It’s called “lumping”, and is characterized by collecting evidence without recognizing the differences within the collections. And it is very common.
The two best opponents I know are J H Hexter and C S Lewis. Hexter used the terms Lumping and Splitting; Lewis did not. But the distinction runs through his OHEL volume on 16th C English Lit.
The introduction, “The New Learning and the New Ignorance” should be mandatory reading for everyone. Since it’s Lewis, the 60-odd pages go down quite easily.
BTW, the Cromwell quote was a paraphrase from Richard Hooker (“Think ye are men, deem it not impossible for you to err.”) Given that Hooker was the main intellectual opponent of Puritanism, this is another example of how history does not fit in neat packages.
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Yes. 🙂
If you’re interested in stuff like arithmatic series, infinite sums and such… you should check out the Mathologer youtube channel. It’s suprisingly entertaining even if you’re not particularly good at math.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuIIjLr6vUA
Math is racist! (not) 🙂
In theory, it’s counting numbers, or number theory.
I was reading today about the lightning strike that took down the George Floyd mural. The article said that Floyd had been murdered by Chauvin. And people wonder why we don’t trust the media. It may not be the big stories, but the tiny inserted lies.
Apropos of the Floyd mural, the NY Post notes that “A weather radar detected a lightning strike in the area but a city building inspector said the collapse appeared to be from natural deterioration.” Whatever. At least the Post didn’t say that Chauvin “murdered” Floyd. Pictures of the mural before-and-after at the link:
https://nypost.com/2021/07/14/george-floyd-mural-collapses-witnesses-blame-lightning/
Meanwhile, “[The artist] said he plans to rebuild the mural at a new location.”
I have a new contender for “Sentence That Perfectly Explains How We Ended Up Here.”
John Ekdhal on Twitter posted a tweet slamming Jonah Goldberg for his indifference to Biden’s door-to-door vaccine-checkers plan. That tweet began “Jonah Goldberg was literally the guy that politically influenced me more than anyone excluding my parents.”
Not Buckley or Limbaugh or VDH or Reagan or Goldwater. Not even George Will or Pat Buchanan or Robert Novak. Jonah Freakin’ Goldberg.
Mike
Sometimes a voice that has influence and points people in the right direction later falls away into error. Jonah Goldberg had a good influence on John Ekdhal it appears but Jonah is no longer such. (understatement!)
I would say the same for George Will and Pat Buchanan.
Not how we ended up here IMO. Save your flames.
MBunge:
Probably Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism. Ever read it?
“Probably Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism. Ever read it?”
If somebody wrote a book titled “Conservative Communism,” would you bother reading it? Or how about any of the actual historians who have spent literally decades researching and writing about fascism and their critiques of Goldberg’s book?
All authoritarian tyrannies have similarities. Fascism is a term meant to distinguish one sort of authoritarian tyranny from others. Goldberg simply bulldozed over all those distinctions to say “We’re not facists! You’re facists!” It was an adolescent effort to state “conservative = good” and “liberal = bad” in a way that made unsuspecting readers less well informed about both subects.
To my knowledge, the biggest movement or group in American history you could accurately call fascist was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was mostly, if not almost entirely, made up of Democrats. THAT DOES NOT MEAN THE KLAN WAS LIBERAL OR LEFTIST.
Mike
Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” is an excellent book. It collected much disparate information in one place and provided a context for understanding it.
I was enriched by that book. I recommended it to an old hippie-commune-mate, who still has that curious old-fashioned liberal idea of being open-minded. He read it and was impressed. Not enough to flip conservative but he better understood that point of view.
I’m not enchanted by Goldberg’s response to Trumpism. But as they say in AA:
________________________________
Take what you want and leave the rest.
________________________________
People don’t have to be perfect for one to learn from them.
Hint: No one is perfect.
MBunge:
I was not telling you it was a fabulous book and that you should read it. I was trying to explain why the person you were discussing might find Goldberg an influential thinker. I was asking you if you’ve read it because I wondered (and still wonder) whether you have. I know that people have criticized the book, and that it has problems. But it was written in early 2008, which is quite a while ago at this point, and I read it (or a great deal of it) at the time and found it interesting, particularly in its point that actual historic fascism was more leftist than right, although not exactly either. And it didn’t gloss over history – it had a lot of history about, say, the Wilson administration.
From the book’s Wiki page:
MBunge:
So have you read “Liberal Fascism” — as in the whole book or even most of it?
Someone is smarter than Jonah Goldberg but hasn’t written a book, or read Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism? Reading between lines here, which is always dangerous.
About the concept that people can be a good influence when younger but a bad influence when older (not wiser). Crickets.
Moore poppies? When someone comes to cut down all the poppies who will stand when they come for all the peonies? Dennis Moore?
After some 18 months after the book “Liberal Fascism” (and isn’t the subtitle equally compelling “The Secret History of the American Left”) was out, some 6 months after the paperback came out, Goldberg did a very long and detailed post at NRO answering his critics.
Nothing but details, perhaps, passed muster. Often estimable critics like Princeton historian Robert Paxton (sp?) were found wanting.
Goldberg hewed to primary texts, supported by the standard secondary historical literature on fascism during the 1930s and before.
Thus, he argued, my thesis of widely held fascist envy (eg. New Dealers admired and envied Mussolini), stands unrefuted.
But other critics he didn’t address held that Goldberg’s thesis post-World War account of political fascism became muddled and apologetic in tone, and thus flaccid in substance as it became more contemporary.
These critics wanted of what David Horowitz does — the ex-New Left’s most prolific and awarded writer (even before he became their ex-) — more unflinching and honest reveal that “inside every Liberal [ie, Leftist] there’s a totalitarian” itching to get out!
Had he done so, then the Daryll Cooper thesis would have been notably much less unanticipated.
This failure by Goldberg to be brutally honest with the living and their progeny repeatedly came up as his appearances found him demure at any sequel, even as the Obama years clearly revealled the Dark outlines of emergent Obamunism (eg, spying on reporters; actually doing what Nixon was to be impeached for merely wanting to do, that is, using the IRS against political opponents, which forced Nixon to resign when Rep’s couldn’t stomach such hyperpartisanism or weaponization of the Federal bureaucracy).
It truly was a missed opportunity during a highly teachable moment.
The critics didn’t write the book and have they written the better book? Could have, should have, would have; the hindsight microscope is always clear. And yet the book led some away from the progressive tar pit in spite of all it’s flaws.
Dan Greenfield knocks out another good one:
“In February, Biden signed an executive order which included one of the most blatant efforts to roll out a voter turnout operation across the span of the entire federal government.”
http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/07/biden-turns-entire-government-into.html
Conservacucks please note: The whole point of power is to get more power and consolidate your power. After you have finally sorted that #^&* out, well *then* you can start Conserving, like, Stuff (if you even remember what the word ‘Conserve’ is supposed to mean). Muh Principles? Dumbasses! Jaysus Wept!
Lincoln Lovers and Aficionados of the Jaffa Jive are going to enjoy this:
Historical Fiction
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=24378
“The rewriting of history is best done by people who have a certain historical outlook and a facility for language. It is a unique sort of sociopathy that allows them to create highly complex models of the past that are decorated with well-established facts, but are otherwise filled with distortions and outright fabrications. Erasing a man from a picture and banning any mention of him still leaves a hole. Rewriting the man’s history, weaving it into the story of the opponents solves two problems.
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Forgotten is how this cult of Lincoln was created and who created it. That person is Harry Jaffa, who should go down as history’s greatest fabulist. He is responsible for what is known as the second founding thesis. You see, the real founding the country was not with the Constitution. That is just words on paper to solve practical issues facing the newly independent colonies. The real founding of the country, the moral and spiritual founding, was with the Declaration of Independence.
According to Jaffa, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” is the primal roar of the new people, a new concept of a people. The Founders wanted America to be a land of universal equality. That was the ideal they setup for themselves. The Constitution fell short of that because of the needs of the moment.
The Civil War, however, was not a continuation of a cultural dispute dating back to the English Civil War or even a war over slavery. It was the second founding. The old errors and sins of the first founding were washed away with the blood of millions so America could continue toward that original ideal. Slavery was abolished and the Constitution was modified. Those modifications have been used ever since to alter the country in pursuit of the founding ideal contained in the Declaration.
This is also where we get the proposition nation stuff. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” You see, that original rhetorical flourish was actually a call to create an entirely new type of nation, a proposition nation based on ideas, rather than people. It is not hard to see the mischief that has come from the embrace of this rewriting of history.
In a slightly different context, John Derbyshire noted that some people have an unnatural skill at creating “elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content”. Harry Jaffa and his followers were such men. For that matter, Strauss falls into this camp as well, but that is a topic for another day. Because the second founding idea provided the right-liberals with a fig leaf over the race issue, it has become their creed.
That does not change the fact that this is nonsense, but like Stalin rewriting history, it is powerful nonsense. In fact, the current antiwhite pogroms aimed at extirpating all signs of whiteness are rooted in this. The advocates justify their cultural genocide on the grounds that it is part of this process to reconcile America with its long failure to live up the original idea. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are really just modern day manifestations of the Founders, dreaming of a proposition nation.
At the core, the dissident project is about peeling back the layers of lies and fabrications like second founding theory. History is a story of a people and our story has been rewritten by strangers who see us as enemies. Correcting the record is not just an exercise in trivial exactitude. It is about re-centering a people on the foundation of their past so they can once again reach for the stars. If the folks at the Bulwark want to know “what they hell is happening” there is the answer in a nutshell.”
To my knowledge, the biggest movement or group in American history you could accurately call fascist was the Ku Klux Klan.
You could call it ‘fascist’, but never accurately. The different incarnations of the Klan have been notable for their hostility to various out-groups. To the extent they were purveyors of revanchist politics, it would have been during their 1st incarnation. And, of course, they never promoted any militarist national mobilization, either.
Forgotten is how this cult of Lincoln was created and who created it. That person is Harry Jaffa,
He didn’t. Intellectual history isn’t your strong suit.
Intelligent Refutation isn’t yours.
Moses, Baby…He’s looking pretty mean today. You’d best step back verrryyyy slowly from that Golden Calf…
“I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
—-18 September, 1858, In his debate with Stephen Douglas
OK. What the hell is this?
Dee Gees | You Should Be Dancing
1,107,683 viewsJul 11, 2021
Foo Fighters
3.04M subscribers
HAIL SATIN – the vinyl debut of Dee Gees – coming to a local record store & dance party near you July 17th for the next Record Store Day drop!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4DeaXf1FzE
Why not listen to the original which obviously is much better? Hail Satin(sp)???
_____
I’ll blame Zaphod for this. Remember when rock and roll was like this?
Sweet Jane from Rock n Roll Animal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5HfwS6Ey_4
Brilliant comment by a retired academic historian in the Lincoln/Jaffa Article comment thread:
“If I might be permitted a very small, very limited defense of my former profession, it’s not so much that professional historians are rabid ideologues, it’s just that they’re incredibly sheltered, incredibly naive, and not nearly as smart as they think they are (I told you this would be a very limited defense).
Assume that you were hired to write “An Introduction to the Japanese” for some reason. But you don’t speak Japanese, have never been to Japan, and your internet is so inconsistent that all you’ve got to work with is a few old anime videos and the collected novels of James Clavell. That’s the situation facing most professional historians, vis-a-vis actual human behavior.
For one thing, academia is a guild profession now — has been for a long time — and so your average professor is quite often the child, and even the grandchild, of professors. They quite literally grew up on campus. For another, real world experience on your resume actually counts against you when you’re applying for grad schools, and if you do manage to get it with some dreaded private sector stuff on there, you can kiss your social life goodbye — you might only be a few years older, chronologically, but you’ll be lifetimes apart from your classmates (I speak from experience here). Finally, here is a comprehensive list of the graduate coursework I was required to take in economics, statistics, agronomy, and things military:
See what I mean? If history is supposed to be an analysis of “what people be like,” as one of my most entertaining former students once put it on the term paper, then you’d think that the three F’s — that’s Farming, Fighting, and Fornication — would feature prominently in the educations of prospective historians… but they don’t. You’d think basic stats would be on there — hell, you’d think basic math would be on there — but I got into a pretty decent grad school without even taking the math portion of the GRE.
All of which is to say that it’s not surprising that eggheads fall for Derb’s “challenging systems of thought that contain no truth.” They don’t know what they don’t know, and their entire lives — starting, in many cases, with their grandparents — is designed to keep them from ever finding out.”
@TommyJay:
I got nothing against Rocking Rabinowitz (Mister Reed, to you). Not yet anyway! 🙂
MLK as Sexual Predator (Not news to Dissidents):
https://theconversation.com/im-an-mlk-scholar-and-ill-never-be-able-to-view-king-in-the-same-light-118015
How about some of that Cancel Culture?
Cucks: It’s OK to be a hypocrite when we’re doing the kicking. Try to understand that. It’s how you get to not be a Beautiful Loser all the time. Or do you enjoy wearing the Gimp Suit? 🙂
*sings* In the Navyyyyyyyy
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9783807/Navy-disarray-focusing-diversity-training-warfighting-report-says.html
His [Lou Reed’s] family was Jewish and his grandparents were Russian Jews who had fled antisemitism; his father had changed his name from Rabinowitz to Reed. Reed said that although he was Jewish, his real god was rock ‘n’ roll.
For those, like myself, who care and didn’t know.
Something for Southerners:
https://www.reckonin.com/enoch-cade/archives/05-2021
“…One only needs to consider, without ideological blinders, the history of the Propositional Nation since 1865, and the rapid onset of egalitarianism that began after World War II and accelerated in the 1960s. Much if not all of this can be laid at the feet of Abraham Lincoln and his devilish “proposition,” and its relentless promotion by Claremont.
As Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland in 1650: I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken?
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Our conservatism is what we learn from the old folks – the old ways and the old stories we pass down to our children, the history that happened to us and the blood we spilled.
We may conclude that this is something Professor Jaffa and the Claremonters do not have. They have abstractions and a philosophical scheme. We have the memories of living breathing men, with our feet rooted in the ground of the land they fought for.
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Anton and Ellers are absolutely correct that a recovery of old things and old traditions is necessary. And of course the founders should be re-considered, but without the lenses of Professor Jaffa. And you should consider that the Southern tradition is completely different from the ideological strawman of Jaffa’s scheme. If you can’t bring yourself to study Calhoun, consider the Agrarians and their critique of financial and industrial capital and of the American notion of Progress. Christopher Lasch and Jacques Ellul can be helpful; so too the heirs of the Agrarians, including Wendell Berry and the brilliant English writer Paul Kingsnorth.
And yes, we do share a common enemy. And yes, we can and should be friends; there is much we agree on. And perhaps we will one day do battle together.
But not under your flag. Under our flag, the Southern flag. And not for your philosophizing, but for our Southern traditions.
And never, ever again for a “proposition,” nor a nation “founded” on one.”
Kind of a follow-up on the Darryl Cooper posts – about why conservatives have good reasons to distrust the government.
I’m sure many of you have already read something about this new power grab, but J. E. Dyer makes the by-now-obligatory observation on gaslighting:
https://libertyunyielding.com/2021/07/14/biden-allied-groups-to-work-with-sms-carriers-to-dispel-misinformation/
“Dan Greenfield knocks out another good one:” – Zaphod
No wonder the DHS head told Cubans not to come here.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/biden-administration-says-cubans-not-welcome-wheres-the-outrage/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=first
Harsanyi
Everything the Democrat machine does is connected.
zman has a point, after all before Henry Jaffa, Lincoln languished in obscurity like Chester Alan Arthur and Millard Fillmore.
Can Do! loves the concept of an America sundered into tribes, for the good of “his” people. An expat “britt” in Hong Kong. Funny, but that concept aligns with the goals of the CCP. A civil war in the USA of course will produce a stronger foe to the CCP you see. Trust him, Can Do! knows. (not)
FOAF:
Yes it is amazing how obscure that Lincoln fellow is, never mentioned in The Hillsdale Dialogs, IIRC. (not) Oh, I forgot, they must be “cucks” up there.
A couple of late comments:
1. Goldberg’s thesis of Liberal Fascism is a rehash of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism. I Goldberg credit for the grindwork of putting together a lot of evidence. And I’ll grant that many critical reviews were less than stellar. But…
a. There’s a bit of special pleading involved. Yes, the kinship between 20th C liberalism and fascism is real. But there’s another side to it, and a serious treatment would have to look at counter examples. He doesn’t. He sidesteps it in the introduction, and then simply ignores those who cannot be put on the left. Franco is barely mentioned; Salazar not at all. (My guess is that if he were to address it, Goldberg would start talking economic policy, and claim they were leftists.)
b. I’m old enough, and started reading early enough, to know that fascism used to be understood as a kind of “third way”, combining elements of right and left. Or a kind of “fusionism”, if you wish.
c. But he’s doing a bit of lumping by even calling Nazi’s “fascist.” That was once a contended point; and after all, the identification starts in Russia. I will grant that Goldberg, at least on the surface (he sometimes seems to forget) recognizes that Mussolini’s fascism wasn’t anti-semitic. (Nor was Dolfuss’s Austria, into which many Jews fled.) Later, the German alliance moved him in that direction, but there’s no reason to think it inevitable. The weaker ally often does that. Churchill agreed to many things reluctantly. Under Mussolini, anyone born in Italy had birthright citizenship. Really. And here’s a sad case (really, two) showing how it happend:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pugliese-umberto
2. I have a certain sympathy for Z-man’s critique. But it’s limited by the fact that he is himself a big league narrative pusher. He too has a highly Procrustean model into which all the fact are to fit. It’s called “lumping”, and is characterized by collecting evidence without recognizing the differences within the collections. And it is very common.
The two best opponents I know are J H Hexter and C S Lewis. Hexter used the terms Lumping and Splitting; Lewis did not. But the distinction runs through his OHEL volume on 16th C English Lit.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.239254
The introduction, “The New Learning and the New Ignorance” should be mandatory reading for everyone. Since it’s Lewis, the 60-odd pages go down quite easily.
BTW, the Cromwell quote was a paraphrase from Richard Hooker (“Think ye are men, deem it not impossible for you to err.”) Given that Hooker was the main intellectual opponent of Puritanism, this is another example of how history does not fit in neat packages.