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. Thisshtick exploits democracy’s Achilles’s heel — the same that Mussoliniand Hitler exploited to dramatic effect. Bloomberg has cast himself asa man of action who will fix our broken political system bytranscending partisan differences.
Indeed. "Obviously," Goldberg observes in the last paragraph of his column, "Bloomberg is no Mussolini or Hitler." What a relief!
Inany event, the problem with people who call for a New Politics isn'tthat they sound like fascists, or that they haven't signed up forGoldberg's seminar on remedial political philosophy. ("Democracy isn’tabout agreement, but disagreement." Thanks!) It's that, across arather large number of issues, there are good ideas and there are badideas, and consensus fetishists end up treating the bad conservativeideas as though they're worthy of our serious consideration. There'salso 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, thesubstance of the partisanship scold ideology is no longer, by anyreasonable definition, centrist. They are moderate Democrats who don'twant to admit it."
