The New Republic

I wonder if Jonah Goldberg actually supposes that attendees departing an actual Klan rally would be saying anything different. Conceivably they'd all get along swimmingly with like-minded folks too, right? The exit polls probably wouldn't be filled with lines like, "Man, I'm glad I went, but we really are a terrifying bunch of assholes!" or "I'm pretty sure that guy I was standing next to was some kind of racist!"

- adaglas

September 14, 2009 at 4:19pm

As a Serious Scholar of Fascism -- as I recall, Goldberg earned an MPhil in Comparative Nazism from Oxford -- Goldberg ought to know that the Nazis went to great lengths to make attending party events a really fun time. That was sort of, you know, the whole point of Nazi pageantry, from the films of Leni Riefenstahl right down to the particular arrangement of torches at rallies. You go, you hold up some ridiculous banners, you shout some vile slogans, you listen to some emotionally satisfying speeches, you share some personal space with a bunch of euphorically like-minded people, you maybe have drinks with some new buddies after the event, and then you promise to keep up with your new pals as you make your way home, giddy and tired, the next day. One gets the impression that if Goldberg were on the train to Paris the day after a Nuremberg rally, he'd likewise be impressed with what jolly bon vivants all the grassroots Nazis were. Plus, I'm not sure the teabaggers will be pleased to learn that Jonah Goldberg's takeaway from conversing with them is that they are all really happy, upbeat people who aren't angry about anything.

- rhubarbs

September 14, 2009 at 4:31pm

You don't have to be crazy to follow Glenn Beck to Washington. You just have to be a personable True Believer. And even if Glenn Beck's flock turns out to be at the vanguard of a march to the 4th Reich, it still doesn't make them crazy. You know, in a psychiatric sense. george

- iambiguous

September 14, 2009 at 4:49pm

Rhubes, small correction on Goldberg's CV: He's got a double BS in BS and ABS (Additional BS), concentrating in PBS (Poisonous BS), specifically CBS (Contemptible BS) and the emerging sub-field of UBS (Unforgivable BS). He wrote some rather well-received papers on one of the ongoing debates among BS artists, which is the concept of TBS (Total BS), typically thought to be logically impossible due to the fact that, even when speaking BS, one is still using words to refer to what they commonly refer to, precluding TBS. Thus, when one says, for example, as Jonah Goldberg said on Fox News recently referring to an innocuous VA pamphlet regarding end-of-life concerns, "Death panels may in fact be not too far off on the horizon," the statement is certainly BS in that it is false and knowingly false, but, the traditional theory goes, it cannot be TBS, because when Goldberg said "death," for example, he actually meant to refer to death, and not, say, kittens. In the field, this is known as Inherent Minimum Honesty -- the idea that the mere use of language requires at least *some* honest expression. One could theoretically speak gibberish, avoiding the IMH problem, but gibberish cannot be false and therefore cannot be BS. Thus, TBS cannot exist. In this way, BS will inevitably rely to some extent on truth. Goldberg, however, was not satisfied with conventional wisdom and sought to excise truth completely from human expression. The challenge was to figure out how expression could be both intelligible and totally false. His theories focused on what he called "the internal lie" and "being BS." The idea that TBS is a fallacy or impossible was premised, he argued, on the idea of intent -- that one meant, at least a little bit, what one said. But what if you could, as he said, "befog your intent," such that your mind ceased to operate upon a distinction between true and false, even when it come to the use of words. IMH proponents said what they always said, which is that you cannot tell lies if you don't know the difference between true and false. The befogged mind, they argued, could only speak gibberish, which cannot be BS. Goldberg disagreed. He argued that a statement could be BS in the objective world, but not necessarily internally. If you practiced the internal lie sufficiently, you would not distinguish between true and false yourself but, in relation to the outside world, you could theoretically "become BS" -- that is, transform your person into a manifestation of BS itself. The BS establishment found these ideas interesting -- Goldberg had about 15 minutes -- but the IMH boys reasserted themselves, and Goldberg's theories have since been confined to a dwindling cult of TBS enthusiasts.

- jhildner1

September 14, 2009 at 7:13pm

adaglas: LOL, which I rarely use, and only when it's literally true. Yeah, those "civil liberties or civil war" people are just plain happy-go-lucky folks. (I wonder if they marched with signs like that while the previous administration tried to dismantle due process, or if that was different because it seemed only to affect brown people?)

- frippo

September 14, 2009 at 7:17pm

jhildner, I stand corrected. Turns out Goldberg's MPhil is actually in Godwinian Rhetoric. He's currently pursuing a doctorate in the same by correspondence at Liberty University. My apologies to Goldberg for my earlier misstatement of his degree.

- rhubarbs

September 15, 2009 at 9:30am