StarTrek in-jokes notwithstanding, Jonah is [sic] does fairly engage people who disagree with him. ~Koz

Sure he does.  That’s why he very “fairly” intimated that Rod Dreher and Matt Yglesias were respectively quasi-fascistic and anti-Semitic (no mean feat for Yglesias on this latter point) and then sought to tar Ross and Reihan with what he must have thought was the granddaddy of all negative associations by tying them to Sam Francis (thanks to his impressive ignorance of the sharp differences and even some contradictions between Dr. Francis’ theory and Ross and Reihan’s ideas).  That’s why during the entire “crunchy con” debate he pretended that the phenomenon under discussion didn’t exist, there was no such thing as a “mainstream conservative” and all of this was a construct of Rod’s ever-leftward-drifting mind–it’s all because he can fairly and intelligently engage his opponents in serious argument.  Yeah, that’s the mark of a fair and serious mind.  How could I have been so wrong? 

Those are just the examples that I happen to know about because I have been tangentially involved in the debates in question.  How many more examples are there?  I admit that I don’t know this, but there does seem to be a pretty consistent pattern over at least the last year.  His dense failure to understand a basic element in the thought of Joseph de Maistre (which dates back to 2002) certainly doesn’t recommend him to me as a keen interpreter of intellectual history, that’s for sure.  Personally, I would take the disengagement and indifference of Derbyshire over the fake, condescending attentions of Goldberg any day.  

As for Koz not knowing what “lower-middle reformism” means, it hardly gets Goldberg off the hook, since he clearly did seem to know exactly what Reihan meant at the time and decided to take a cheap shot at Reihan’s smart and basically on-target analysis.  He didn’t really understand what Reihan was saying, of course, since he rushed to conflate Sam Francis and Sam’s Club Republicans in a mishmash that would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic.  Since Goldberg doesn’t like populism, as he will tell everyone within earshot, and also apparently doesn’t care much for anything that vaguely hints at support for American labourers, he took Reihan’s claim that the GOP needs to address lower middle class interests and concerns in order to win in the next election (which is very probably true) as an occasion to engage in a lot of posing and gesturing about his own superior thoughtfulness.  Arguably, Goldberg has demonstrated some actual thoughtfulness and serious thought somewhere (the odds are in his favour that he must have, at some point in his career, written something slightly insightful), but it isn’t apparent in any of the controversies we are discussing here.  I am open to persuasion that Goldberg is not just an ideological enforcer with a weakness for sci-fi, but so far I don’t see anything that would make me change my judgement about him.