Goldberg Can't Explain His Own Book

The following clip of Jonah Goldberg being interviewed on the Daily Show should, I submit, convince anyone that Jonah Goldberg doesn't have any idea of what he's talking about. He gets numerous opportunities to explain why liberals aren't fascists and instead he just randomly combines words. I mean when the first thing you say when someone asks you why you think liberals are fascists is that the New Republic supported Mussolini in the 1920s you've made it clear that you don't actually have any evidence.

This also just reinforces my point [1] from the other day. Goldberg doesn't give a damn about fascism. He just wants to convince everyone that progressives are evil opressive racists and if that involves saying the environmental movement is fascist because some Nazis liked organic food then so be it.

Equally damning is this Michael Ledeen review [2]. Ledeen is a hard-right political scientist and pundit, but he's also an actual expert of fascism. His critique is all the more devastating because he so clearly didn't want to have to write it. The not-in-anger-but-in-sadness tone is incredibly effective.

He also highlights this damning passage which I just don't even know what to say about:

“What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics.” And in case you thought he was kidding, he repeats it a few pages later: “What mattered to (Hitler) was German identity politics.”