I forgot to link to this when it came out, but Sam Tanenhouse's list of essential readings to understand movement conservatives is very good. I'm mainly glad to see George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America make the cut, as it should be read by any and every politico interested in how ideas interface with public life. It's also a book that, sadly, has no corollary on the liberal side. Were I smarter, more thoughtful, and possessed of a more impressive attention span, I'd write one.
Speaking of which, something struck me as odd, rather than just humorous, about Jonah Goldberg's promise that his book is "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." Putting aside that the argument seems pretty unserious, and it's never been done with such detail or care because other writers had too much self-respect to spend 300 pages comparing Hillary Clinton to Benito Mussolini, it's sort of a weird thing for Jonah -- or any writer like Jonah, including me -- to pretend that a book produced over the past few years is a serious, intense work of scholarship.
Scholarship requires sustained time, and attention. That's why so many book writers go on extended periods of leave, without blogs, without work. Jonah Goldberg, however, writes a column for The National Review, a column for The LA Times, contributes radio commentaries to NPR, does various panels, book reviews, feature articles, and media appearances, and blogs about 35 times a day. I'm perfectly willing to believe that Jonah has written a very fine -- though disagreeable -- polemic. But I find it unlikely that he managed to compress years of serious study into the space between posting time wasters and completing columns. It's one of the drawbacks of of being a blogger. Given the number of bloggers writing books, and given how many of them have been subpar, it'll be interesting to see if anyone figures out a better way to meld the two forms. Trying to ape what authors with years of concentrated time for study and thought produce, however, strikes me as unlikely to produce very satisfying results.
