In spite of his post lambasting me as one full of hate, I remain open to persuasion that I am wrong about Jonah Goldberg.  No, really.  Any day now, someone somewhere will present me with the evidence (of which my posts, I am told, are apparently free).  Though I remain skeptical, I have allowed that Goldberg’s forthcoming book may have something worthwhile to say.  As for “evidence-free table-pounding,” well, this is the Web and evidence often is presented through links, which I provided in the post to which he was responding.  The links and arguments found in those posts would confirm even more strongly what I am saying.  Of course, I would expect Goldberg to challenge my interpretations of the controversies in question, but that would require making an argument rather than engaging in a lot of, well, evidence-free hand-waving and shouting.  

It is curious that someone who claims to know little or nothing about me or my motives would also say that I am “reverting to form,” since that would indicate that he knows what my “form” is.  Certainly when it comes to NR generally, my “form” is one of aggressive criticism and mockery, because most of the contributors there seem to deserve little else.  Those people made it pretty clear some years back that they consider people like me (i.e., conservatives who oppose the war in Iraq and paleoconservatives in particular) to be traitors to our country.  I have no brief for Eric Alterman or most of what he has had to say, but I generally share his low opinion of people who have declared me and mine to be traitors.  If holding something of a grudge for something that happened just four years ago–and for which no one at NR has ever expressed the least regret–is obsessing over “past” battles, I happily plead guilty.   

This post wasn’t especially vitriolic nasty, nor was it long by my standards, it wasn’t even a direct response to anything he had written and half of it wasn’t even about Goldberg.  Nonetheless, that single post is what he chose to respond to, rather than address any of the other posts that I have written in response to precisely the sort of cheap point-scoring tactics that he has used against the “crunchy cons,” Matt Yglesias and Ross and Reihan.  That is to name only those with which I am personally familiar and to which I have some small connection through blog exchanges.  His part-condescension, part-mockery approach to “crunchy conservatism” expressed very well what he thought of traditional conservatives–they probably also do not “deserve” a lot of his time.  He had no interest in people looking backwards when the “backwards”-looking folks were challenging some of the pieties of modern conservatism last year, but he now feigns interest when it suits him.  He seemed perpetually put out that he even had to talk about things as retrograde as farming or localism.  He believed, as he was glad to tell us, in a “partial philosophy of life,” which helped explain where he was coming from a lot better than anything else he said.  If belittling and insulting his interlocutors is Goldberg’s idea of “having fun,” so be it, but he shouldn’t be surprised if the people he insults don’t take it in the good-natured spirit in which it was supposedly offered. 

He went after Yglesias for the same reasons the Smearbund has routinely gone after Pat Buchanan and others critical of U.S. Near East policy, bringing out the big guns with a Lindbergh comparison.  I didn’t know Matt Yglesias, and I have still never met him, but the cheap-shot style of Goldberg’s response reminded me of the “crunchy” debates immediately and I thought it was just as unfair and shabby to employ these methods against a progressive as it was to employ them against other conservatives.  I have recounted often enough his insulting response to Ross and Reihan and why that response was both obnoxious and ignorant.  The last controversy was the one that particularly set me off most recently, not least because of his disrespectful reference to Sam Francis at the end.  Just prior to that, I wrote a critical, skeptical but not entirely hostile post about Goldberg’s book, and his response made me think (for a moment) that there might be something more interesting about this guy than his public displays would lead you to believe, but Goldberg saved me from this bout of goodwill by reverting to his form.  Long before Alterman ever said anything about Goldberg, Yglesias had the goods on him.  I had already been convinced by his treatment of Ross and Reihan that this interpretation was right.  Does it matter that Ross and Reihan have been nothing but cordial and helpful to me?  Probably.  They were being publicly dragged through the mud, however briefly, on account of their supportive comments about me and certain other paleos, which made the insult all the more irritating and personal to me.   

Goldberg probably doesn’t address these other posts because he thinks my objections to his positions in the “crunchy con” debate were simply “whiny,” so presumably he would find most of what I have written in these other posts to be “whiny.”  That might even be true in certain instances–this is blogging we’re talking about, not necessarily the most carefully considered writing on earth–but this point would be made a lot stronger if Goldberg didn’t seem to think everyone who breaks with the movement line as interpreted by Goldberg & Co. was either a whiner, a fool, a closet fascist or a liberal wannabe (or a closet liberal or fascist wannabe). 

For those interested in a couple other examples of things Goldberg doesn’t understand, the good folks at Conservative Times remind me here of another episode in which Goldberg demonstrated just how little he knew about John Lukacs’ understanding of patriotism, which Scott Richert, a great student and interpreter of Lukacs, had some fun with here.  That response reminded me of the post in which I hit Goldberg for his ignorance about the geography of the Habsburg Empire and his offhand reference to Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.  Maybe Goldberg would say, “Well, you can’t know everything.”  That’s true.  But then the wise man would not speak about those things that he doesn’t really understand.  I stand by the content of that Habsburg post, in which I wrote:  

Assuming he was a ghost, Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s spirit would not be talking to Jonah Goldberg under any circumstances, unless it was to scare him out of the National Review offices. It is more likely he is residing in the reflected glory of the Beatific Vision, or so we can hope. Okay, here’s a third point: Kuehnelt-Leddihn would be horrified by the Montenegrin vote because of its democratic and nationalistic character. That is what a real K-L reader would take away from the story immediately. Identitarianism was bad enough for K-L, but identitarianism based on a fairly insubstantial national identity would have to be even worse! The fact that the independence movement is led by a crook and monumental swindler in Djukanovic doesn’t help at all. As a committed Kuehnelt-Leddihnist, I won’t stand for Jonah Goldberg lowering the name of the great man with such preposterous posts.

Given that episode, I am still inclined to remain very skeptical that Goldberg will make good use of the works of K-L in his work on fascism.     

Going over all this, an outside observer might say, “Okay, but so what?  Why does any of this matter?  Why should I care about your paleo polemics?”  In the grand scheme of things, maybe it doesn’t matter that much.  If, on the other hand, one of the editors of the flagship journal of mainstream conservatism is actually not much more than the ideological enforcer that he seems to me to be, that tells us something important (albeit perhaps a little redundant at this point) about the moribund state of much of what passes for conservatism in this country.  A lack of ideas also has consequences for the health and success of a political persuasion and political movement, and if there is indeed such a lack today among some of the more prominent conservatives that is a problem that needs to be diagnosed and remedied.  If these posts have contributed to that in any way, they have not been a complete waste of my time.