We’re creating a worldview that other peoples’ feelings are sovereign. The intentions of the offender do not matter, only the feelings of the offended.
Continue readingPosts Tagged → Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg: The Cult of Unity Is a Poison
Has Romney at times been calculating? Of course. He’s a politician. But the suggestion that he is not an honest or decent man because he was “disloyal” to such a profoundly dishonest and indecent man is an exercise in mobbish immorality and the madness of crowds.
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Where the post-liberals have a point is that humans are happiest in communities, families and institutions of faith. The solution to the culture wars is to allow more freedom for these “little platoons” of civil society from which people draw a sense of meaning and belonging. If Sacramento wants Drag Queen Story Hour, so be it. If some other community holds a socially conservative version of the same, that’s fine too.
What America needs is less talk of national unity — from the left or the right — and more freedom to let people live the way they want to live, not just as individuals, but as members of local communities. We don’t need to move past liberalism, we need to return to it.
Jonah Goldberg
Suicide of the West and Its Critics
Goldberg does not deny the tensions involved in this conservative project within a liberal democratic capitalist system but rather accepts it as the challenge we face. The question is whether we are up to it.
Continue readingSuicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg
Under attack from the left and the right are the very values and ideals that sustain our civilization. Democracy, free speech, free market capitalism are all increasingly treated with hostility. If the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves shape our society, then these dramatic changes in rhetoric should be deeply concerning.
Continue readingJonah Goldberg on writing a book
The problem, you see, is that people who don’t write books don’t know what an unending, unyielding ass-ache they are. I’d compare them to a non-stop flight in a middle seat between John Goodman’s sweaty former body double who’s now jobless because he “let himself go” and a runny-nosed, cotton-candy-loving small child who is hard to distinguish from a deadly pathogen vector.
But I can’t make that comparison — because writing a book is worse than that. You see there’s nothing “non-stop” about writing a book save the constant yearning to either reach the destination or the unending sound of the siren on your shoulder counseling you to give up and beach the ship. Even though you’re often surrounded by people, you’re always alone in that community-of-one called “the author of your unfinished book.”
It’s more like a years-long journey with constant layovers, cancelled planes, and rerouting through Newark. Every time you push away from the keyboard, it’s like deplaning just long enough to see if Wolfgang Puck Express has finally decided to more accurately rename itself “Bowel Stewery on the Go.”
I know what you’re thinking right now: “Stewery isn’t a word.” To which I ask, “That’s your objection to this rant?”
The Tyranny of Cliches by Jonah Goldberg
In a humorous and engaging way, TOC forces you to unpack and re-think some of the fundamental cliches of our time. And to see the base stealing the left is engaged in every day.
Continue readingJonah Goldberg on The Tyranny of Cliches
It was my distinct pleasure to have Jonah Goldberg join Pejman Yousefzadeh and myself for this week’s edition of Coffee and Markets. We discussed his new book The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, the liberal pretense to being non-ideological – and just how much ideology is found in the use of cliches – and how we might be able to combat this ideological base stealing.
Not only is Jonah smart and talented – and really more insightful than he is given credit for – but he is a genuinely nice guy who has been a great friend to me.
Look for my review of the book soon.
