By Ankush
I wonder if this is a preview of the type of analysis we’ll get when Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism finally comes out and we can all bask in the glory of his very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care:
What’s not O.K. is Bloomberg’s clichéd call for a New Politics. This
shtick exploits democracy’s Achilles’s heel — the same that Mussolini
and Hitler exploited to dramatic effect. Bloomberg has cast himself as
a man of action who will fix our broken political system by
transcending partisan differences.
Indeed. “Obviously,” Goldberg observes in the last paragraph of his column, “Bloomberg is no Mussolini or Hitler.” What a relief!
In
any event, the problem with people who call for a New Politics isn’t
that they sound like fascists, or that they haven’t signed up for
Goldberg’s seminar on remedial political philosophy. (“Democracy isn’t
about agreement, but disagreement.” Thanks!) It’s that, across a
rather large number of issues, there are good ideas and there are bad
ideas, and consensus fetishists end up treating the bad conservative
ideas as though they’re worthy of our serious consideration. There’s
also the little problem, as Jonathan Chait writes in a not-crappy variation on the piece Goldberg was trying to produce, that “in the age of George W. Bush, the
substance of the partisanship scold ideology is no longer, by any
reasonable definition, centrist. They are moderate Democrats who don’t
want to admit it.”
