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I'm telling you, reading the office copy of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is like touring Willie Wonka's factory: A new, wonderful surprise awaits around every corner. Except instead of treats and sweeties, there are big, steaming piles of right-wing cant. Using the Jonah-vator (it goes sideways and slantways and longways and backways and squareways and front ways and any other ways that you can think of!) you can find this stuff just by skipping around at random. Whoa! Here we are on pg. 254, in the chapter entitled "Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine":
Mainstream liberalism is joined at the hip with racial and sexual identity groups of one kind or another. A basic premise shared by all these groups is that their members should be rewarded simply by virtue of their racial, gender, or sexual status. In short, the state should choose winners and losers based upon the accidents of birth. Liberals champion this perspective in the name of antiracism. Unlike conservatives who advocate a colorblind state, liberals still believe that the state should organize society on racial lines.There we have it: The very idea that government policy should take note of a person's race or sexual preference, for whatever reason, regardless of the context ... teh fascist. There is no distinction made between government taking steps to ameliorate the effects of centuries of institutionalized racism and sexual oppression, and that racism and oppression itself. This is the essence of the book, a series of comically tendentious renderings of liberal beliefs and policies, usually daisy-chained to some aspect of early 20th century Progressivism, and then cast into a soup pot with fascism through the identification of ideological traits so common as to be shared by countless contemporary political movements. It's sure to take it's place alongside Ann Coulter's Treason and Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy At Home as a classic of the genre.--Matthew Duss
