SALON

Thursday, Jan 17, 2013 10:02 PM UTC

GOP must work on persuasion, says man who constantly calls all liberals “fascists”

Jonah Goldberg says the GOP must learn to communicate to non-conservatives -- and trots out the same old discourse

By

Topics: Politics, Jonah Goldberg, Healthcare Reform, National Review, Editor's Picks,

GOP must work on persuasion, says man who constantly calls all liberals (Credit: Gage Skidmore)

Jonah Goldberg, conservative intellectual, revealed in his syndicated column yesterday that the conservative movement is apparently full of “hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can come only with persuading the unconverted.” As Conor Friedersdorf writes, it is sort of a cop-out for Jonah to make that claim and then not actually name these hucksters. (For the record, the hucksters are basically “most of the conservative media and many of its nonprofits.”)

Still, how fun it would have been to see Goldberg, a columnist who loves to use the wishy-washy “I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’” style of debate whenever he gestures toward making a provocative argument, call out his ideological and professional colleagues for constantly lying to and bilking the faithful? Maybe next week.

The main point of Goldberg’s column, as he explains at the Corner, is that contrary to common conservative belief, the Republican Party is not insufficiently conservative. In fact, the GOP is just not very good at persuading non-conservative Americans of the superiority of conservative beliefs and policies. This is a somewhat heretical argument on the right, where conservatism is always thought to be the natural inclination of all Real Americans, and every political defeat is due to a failure to be conservative enough, but I don’t expect many on the right to listen to Goldberg, mostly because he is not very good at “persuading” anyone of the superiority of conservative ideas.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, a longtime opponent of universal healthcare measures, recently, and unsurprisingly, referred to Obamacare as “fascism” in an NPR interview. That is just a bit of a historically ignorant hysterical overstatement (most modern universal healthcare measures were established in the period after the Second World War, primarily by the countries that beat the fascists). It is also a humorous callback to Goldberg’s all-time comedy classic, his “serious” “historical” book “Liberal Fascism.”

So, naturally, when Mackey retracted his comparison of the expansion of health insurance coverage to brutal totalitarianism, Goldberg was disappointed. “That Didn’t Take Long,” his headline reads.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey backs off the F-word in part because, while fairly accurate and defensible, it hurts the feelings of people who have no problem using it inaccurately and indefensibly all of the time:

Goldberg’s thesis is that it’s OK to call anything you don’t like “fascism” because the comical pantomime hippies that he imagines make up the vast majority of American liberalism constantly use that term as a weapon against conservatives. (In his writings, liberals always wear Birkenstocks and they all talk exactly like Rob Reiner in “All in the Family.”) And so this is the person — the one who thinks it is “fairly accurate” and, more important, “defensible,” based on playground rules of political discourse, to call moderate liberal social policy “fascism” — who is calling for the conservative movement to work on its “persuasion” techniques. The GOP has already tried the “repeatedly call your opponents Nazi Fascists” strategy, and it did not do much for them, last November.

Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 41 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations