James will probably have more to say about this, and I can imagine that one of his first responses to the charge that Obama is a postmodernist would be to shrug and the second would be to laugh.  There are postmodernists on the left who are no doubt attracted to pomo methods and arguments because they want to subvert prevailing narratives and challenge established authorities that they find undesirable.  To one degree or another, conservatives have employed similar methods in attacking prevailing historical narratives and working to deconstruct liberal mythology about their revered heroes.  What is remarkable about Goldberg’s complaint against postmodernism is not just that he oversimplifies what it is, but that he does not seem to appreciate the irony that his defense of “old-fashioned literal truth” is the defense of a perfectly modern, positivist epistemology that assumes that objectivity exists, which is the product of a particular period of history.   

Of course, there is an argument, and a rather good one at that, that some traditional American conservatives either anticipated certain pomo critiques or came to similar conclusions.  This is not to say that Obama is therefore some sort of crypto-Kirkian or anything of the kind, but that traditional conservatives may appreciate the relationships between myth, power and language in ways that a pomo on the left might also find familiar, even though we would come to vastly different conclusions about what to do with this understanding.

In his Reason review of Gerald Russello’s book advancing this claim, my colleague Dan McCarthy writes:

Toward the end of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, the conservative scholar Gerald Russello insists, “The possible connections between…Kirk’s conservatism and postmodernism are more than a simple enemy-of-my-enemy stance toward liberalism.” His book makes a surprisingly strong case for that unlikely claim. But it also reinforces what is likely to be the reader’s first impression: that the lowest and surest common denominator between Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, and pomo theorists such as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard lies in their shared antagonism toward the Enlightenment and liberalism in all its forms.

It is natural, then, that Goldberg, whose conservatism is more or less a warmed-over classical liberalism by his own admission (p. 402-403 in Liberal Fascism), would find postmodernism worrisome just as he has been put out by neo-traditional conservative and old European conservative arguments that challenge the liberal tradition in which he is working.  Of course, this reaction turns into a kind of self-parody when he describes Obama’s claim that words matter as one “sounding like a sorcerer offended by the suggestion that magic incantations are mere sounds.”  Of course, the idea that words and names do not possess significance is similar to the nominalism that exercised Richard Weaver for so much of his career; the understanding that control over the definition of words is a source of power was ancient when Orwell talked about Newspeak, and it is also common sense.  Any student of modern propaganda must understand at some level that the words (and images) people use have real psychological and therefore political power.  In fact, I wager most conservatives today take for granted that “words matter,” if only in a negative way because conservatives are well-acquainted with the power of pejorative labels to dismiss and marginalize an argument and many of them are well-versed in using such labeling against other conservatives.  Even in this complaint against postmodernism, Goldberg himself is making a sort of pomo critique of how liberals have sought to control language and speech and set up their own set of norms, which, as we regularly complain, are designed to empower them and advance their agenda.  As a regular part of his criticism of the left, Goldberg delights in “incredulity toward metanarratives,” the definition of postmodernism Dan cited from Lyotard in his review, but the metanarratives he chooses to question and critique are different from those critiqued by left pomos.  There is nothing at all wrong with this, but it does tend to make it seem much less outrageous that Obama has postmodern tendencies. 

The problem with most of the statements Goldberg critiques is not that they reflect a pomo sensibility, but that they are pretty clearly efforts at deceiving the public.