I wrote a lot in the early aughts about Jonah Goldberg’s apotheosis at National Review in the wake of William F. Buckley’s purge of immigration
patriots like John O’Sullivan and VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow because I regarded him as a
symbol and a symptom of the intellectual and moral degeneration of a magazine I
once loved, and of the movement it purported to lead. Indeed, I gather that my habit of referring to the post-purge NR
as “The Goldberg Review” caused Norman Podhoretz to ostracize Brimelow,
once his close ally in Manhattan conservative circles, an unimaginable disaster
for which I am deeply sorry. Subsequently, Goldberg apparently lost his editorship of NRO for
some trivial reason of girly-boy intrigue. But Conservatism,
Inc-ers never die. For his newest venture into deep thought,
Goldberg has crassly stolen the title of James Burnham’s great work, Suicide of the West, published in 1964
at the height of the Cold War.
That is where the similarity
ends. Unlike Burnham’s scalding indictment of liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide,”
Goldberg’s random opinions represent the very pathology that Burnham railed
against. Goldberg hates national identities (although he
makes an exception for Israel), opponents of the Deep State, immigration
patriots, and those who imagine that democracy has something to do with the
popular will. Rather his “conservative” view of democracy privileges public
administration, the operation of multinational corporations, and socially
sophisticated journalists such as like himself.
One need only cite this passage from Burnham’s work to grasp
the extent to which Burnham might have been thinking of someone like Goldberg
when he described the quintessential liberal:
“Liberalism has always
stressed change, reform, the break with encrusted habit whether in the form of
old ideas, old customs or old institutions. Thus liberalism has been and
continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society: and in point of
fact it is through its negative and destructive achievements that liberalism
makes its best claim to historical justification.”
By now, however, Burnham’s
Leftist hallmarks are “conservative” positions. After all, Goldberg’s book,
which abounds in the Leftist virtue-signaling mandatory for Main Stream Media Token Conservatives, is
being sold by “conservative” book clubs. It is also
featured in a Crown Forum Series devoted to conservative
thought (whose editor pointedly refused to correspond with me about a book
proposal).
For those who may doubt
whether the author is an authorized “conservative,” one need only turn to National
Review, a publication at which Goldberg still holds an editorship, or else
watch him jaw with other Fox News Allstars as a
designated Man Of The Right.
I regard Goldberg as a
prime example of the near-total ideological primacy of the Cultural Marxist Left. We are living in a
time and place in which what would be crazy-Left up until about two generations
ago is assigned a “Right-Wing” label, in order to keep alive a dialectic that
is transparently phony.
In about a ten-page
digression into the nature of conservatism—his entire book is really nothing
more than a series of digressions—Goldberg identifies “conservatism” with resisting Donald Trump. The U.S.
President, whom Goldberg with other Never-Trumpers has inflexibly opposed, is
described as a vulgar throwback to the 1930s “on both sides of the Atlantic.” People back
then (let’s guess who they were!) believed “decadent
Western capitalism and ‘Manchester liberalism’ were inadequate to
the challenges of the day.”
All of this coming from
Goldberg is utter chutzpah, considering that he now happily accepts massive social engineering in order to
overcome “discrimination” against certain groups.
His version of Suicide
Of The West indicts—in what by now is neoconservative ritual—Bismarck, the Prussian state and the administrative
model of late nineteenth century Germany. All these pernicious forces allegedly
laid the conceptual foundations of American managerial democracy.
But in fact this
development was by no means due mostly to malignant Germans. Parallel
developments took place at about the same time in most Western states that had
introduced universal suffrage and in which the populace as well as political
elites believed in a “science” of administration.
If Goldberg had deigned to
read my work on the subject (which I wouldn’t expect him to
given my unpopularity among his employers), he might have understood how
widespread the growth of the democratic administrative state was in the decade
before the First World War. Curiously some of the most zealous supporters of an
expanded American welfare state, like Herbert Croly, Thorstein Veblen, and (after a youthful infatuation with Hegel) John Dewey, were by 1914 rabidly
anti-German. In a heavily-researched study “World War One as Fulfilment: Power and Intellectuals,”
Murray Rothbard showed how Anglo-American progressives presented World War One
as a struggle between their Social Democratic project and German authoritarians
who only pretended to believe in the same ideal.
Although Goldberg deplores
the beginnings of our Administrative State, he has no trouble supporting some
of its recent expansions. For example, he offers these impromptu opinions after
telling us how thoroughly wicked the creators of the welfare state were:
Freed slaves certainly did
deserve forty acres and mule (at least!), as many post-Civil War Radical
Republicans proposed. Similarly, the early affirmative action programs targeted
specifically to blacks in the wake of the Civil Rights Acts have intellectual
and moral merit.
This kind of inconsistency
runs through Goldberg’s tome. Although he vehemently objects to America’s early
welfare state, later broad government interventions intended to overcome
“discrimination” are perfectly fine with him. And, of course, Goldberg joins
the post-Civil War Radical Republicans in calling for punishing Southern whites
during Reconstruction by taking away their property and giving it to blacks.
Goldberg grovels
shamelessly whenever he turns to racial problems in the US. In contrast to the
traditional Right, Political Correctness is OK with him, providing it doesn’t
get too nasty—and It’s not quite clear at what point he would admit that
occurs:
At its best, PC is a way to
show respect to people. If black people don’t want to be called “Negroes,” it
is only right and proper to respect that desire. If Asians object to
“Oriental,” lexicological arguments can’t change the fact that it is rude not
to oblige them.
But what if (when) Jesse
Jackson, Al Sharpton or some other Civil Rights leader decides he doesn’t want
people of color to be called “black” any longer because he finds it demeaning?
Are we required to go on changing the name of a particular group that enjoys a
high victim profile in order to show appropriate “respect”?
And why are certain other
groups, like Southern white Christians and those who want to preserve ancestral
monuments that the Left and (now) National Review don’t happen to like,
not to be accorded the same sensitivity to group feeling?
Because in Goldberg’s eyes
they’re not Left-certified victims that professional Token Conservatives know
they must acknowledge.
Link to
website to order Prof. Gottfried’s book
ORDER IT NOW
Thus Goldberg predictably
goes berserk attacking the opponents of Brexit, the supporters of the National
Front in France, and “the story of Donald Trump’s victory” as part of a “new
global crusade against ‘globalism.’ “Those who participate in this neo-Nazi
enterprise are supposedly undermining democracy, like those Hungarians who
overwhelmingly endorse what George Will has proclaimed an “essentially fascist
government” in Budapest. [ George Will: What artifacts from Nazi murder machinery
can teach the U.S. and the world now, MercuryNews, April
26, 2018]
What this means: democracy
can only survive if citizens vote for neocon-approved candidates. Otherwise,
assuming Will is correct, “Anti-Semitism” will be “coming out of the closet.”
I am intrigued how often
Goldberg, who is essentially recycling conventional views interspersed with
chunks of history that seem to have been extracted from a high school survey,
uses the phrase “I tend to believe…”
Although he clearly shows
no trace of research curiosity, he may have no professional reason to do so.
And so he can get away with idiocies like this one:
I tend to believe that high
levels of immigration, particularly skills-based immigration, are economically
desirable policies. Also, the evidence that low-skilled immigration is a net
detriment to the country is not as cut-and-dried as some claim. (The field of
economics that studies immigration is shot through with methodological and
ideological problems.)
Really! Are there no
reliable studies (I’ve seen dozens of them) that show that low-skilled
immigration impacts negatively on low-income earners in the
US? And can’t most high-skilled positions that are available in the US be
filled by those who are already here?
Not surprisingly what
Goldberg “tends to believe” corresponds to the inclinations of the Koch
brothers, Paul Singer and other patrons of National Review. (Full
disclosure: I’m putting together an anthology om the funding sources of
Conservatism, Inc.)
Goldberg inserts silly complaints about how academic Leftists
diss him and his pals from National Review, like Kevin Williamson, when they pop up at
universities to speak on “conservative” issues. (I note he did not condemn the disruption of my own recent lecture at Hamilton
College.)
Personally, I can’t imagine
what “conservative” teaching Goldberg could possibly convey during his sojourn
in academe. His book conspicuously avoids taking hard conservative stands on
anything. When he complains about the breakdown of marriage, he noticeably stays away from gay marriage,
which he has already praised as a good thing. [A banner day for gay marriage on the right,
By Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, March 15, 2013] Instead Goldberg
blandly chides those who live in “open marriages” and coyly alludes to his own
marital bliss—as the husband of Nikki Haley’s speechwriter, Jessica Gavora. [Why Is Nikki Haley Still Trump’s UN Ambassador?,
by Philip Giraldi, American Conservative, July 7, 2017]
In the acknowledgements he
lists Jessica as his “best confidante, friend, and partner.” Perhaps it is this
“partner” whom we should blame for Jonah’s egregious book of opinions and
recycled historical platitudes.
A friend has described
Goldberg’s enviable career as the “curse” inflicted on us because his mother Lucianne (of Lucianne.com) betrayed the trust of Monica
Lewinsky and ratted out Monica’s secret affair with Bill Clinton to Republican
operatives. Because of this betrayal, Lucianne’s self-important son was
launched on a legacy path as a “conservative” luminary,
the end of which is not yet in sight.
But this curse has not
worked the same way as the fate that befell the subjects of Greek tragedies or
those who sinned in Hebrew Scripture. There, the offenders and their
descendants suffered the consequences of evil acts. Here the son of the
betrayer of confidences is lavishly rewarded, as the beneficiary of his
mother’s act, and the rest of us are made to endure his insufferable presence.
The older idea made much
better sense.
Paul Gottfried [ email him ] is a retired Professor
of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, PA. He is the author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt
and The Strange Death of Marxism His most
recent book isLeo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America.