Jonah Goldberg Discusses The Tyranny of Cliches, Part II

If you enjoyed Part I of our interview with Jonah Goldberg concerning his new book, The Tyranny of Clichés, yesterday, here’s the concluding half. In this segment, Jonah discusses how the left uses phrases such as “diversity” and “social justice” to shortcut debate, and how Bill Clinton used the phrase “the middle class” to position himself as a very different Democrat than those of the George McGovern-era:

GOLDBERG: This is one of the more interesting ones to try and think through, you know.  You have—Bill Clinton’s—the genius of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign was that—and it’s really shocking how forthright he was—he talked about how he basically was going to be the president for the middle class.  And he used “middle class” in this really sort of brilliant dog whistle way.  Because he was relying on survey data from Stan Greenberg and others that showed that something like ninety-five percent of Americans consider themselves middle class.  Right?

So he’s basically appealing to the vanity of pretty much all of Americans, while seeming like he is doing something special for them.  And in the process, he talks about middle class as if—in this sort of dog whistle way, where as if it’s—you know, middle class of Middle America, traditional values and all of the rest, about bourgeois, hard-working, Horatio Alger work ethic middle class.

And that was a code that was a way for him to appeal to the white working class in a way that Democratic candidates for several elections before him had failed to do; that he was a different kind of Democrat.  You know, the whole welfare needs to be reformed as we know it; the government needs to give a hand up not a hand out; and all the rest.  This was language coded towards appealing towards constituencies that the Democrats had been losing.

But at the same time—and ever since then, this has been the path that liberals have taken.  You know, Al Gore; John Kerry; Barack Obama, they’ve all used the same argument, the same sort of language to appeal to the middle class.  But in fact, what they’re doing is they’re proposing policies that undermine the middle class, that sort of sap the independence, the entrepreneurial spirit, the moral capital of the middle class.

We now live in a country where sixty percent of the households get more from the federal government than they put in.  We now live in a country where the Democratic Party has gone a long way towards fulfilling its long-term dream of turning citizens into clients of the state.

And so they talk about middle class as if they’re appealing to sort of homespun cultural values and all of the rest, but the economic agenda that they’re selling is really one basically of widespread institutionalized bribery.

Crony corporatism, you might say — which brings us to Jonah’s previous book, Liberal Fascism. Jonah discuses how it was received by liberals, historians, and liberal historians, near the conclusion of our interview:

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A transcript of Part II of our interview begins on the next page. (Part I’s transcript can be found in that segment’s blog post.)

DRISCOLL:  This is Ed Driscoll for PJ Media.com, and you’re listening to Part II of our interview with Jonah Goldberg, founding editor of National Review Online, about his new book, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, published by Sentinel Books, now out at Amazon.com and your local bookstore. Jonah, to kick off the second half of our interview, could you talk a bit about the etymology of words like diversity and social justice and how they’re used by the left to shut down debate?

GOLDBERG:  Yeah.  I mean, diversity is an easy one.  You know, we constantly talk about how, in the original idea—let’s put it this way.  The original idea for affirmative action was, whatever the flaws with it, was a pretty serious moral argument, which was simply that, you know, as LBJ put it in his affirmative action speech in 1965, I think—I guess it was ’64—you can’t have kept a man in chains his entire life, then take the chains off, and expect him to compete equally in a race.

And the argument was, was that Blacks in particular needed special help because of the unique historical evil of slavery and Jim Crow, and all that kind of stuff.  A perfectly serious argument that I think that you can respect, even if you don’t like the way it was always applied or put into action.

But that argument has sort of gone by the wayside.  And now the argument has become diversity is a good in and of itself, that we just—we need to have a permanent system of enforced diversity throughout society.

And first of all, this is a wildly ideological position, right?  I mean, they try to defend it on this idea that—this sort of basic idea that diversity is nice and that you should be for nice things; but also on this sort of clichéd truism that diversity is strength.

And first of all, this notion that diversity is strength, is just a rank assertion that is sometimes true, you know.  The NBA was made better by the introduction of the integration of African American players.  I don’t think anyone can dispute that.  A stock portfolio is stronger if it’s diversified.  You know, some metals are made stronger when you add other ingredients to them.  I mean, you can think of all sorts of things that are made better—a menu, a diverse menu is better than one with only one dish.  That’s fine.

But then there’s other ways in which diversity makes things worse.  I mean, no one would think the NBA would be a better sports league if midgets and one-legged men were forced onto the teams.  No one thinks the NAACP would be more effective with a bunch of Klansmen in it.  And yet we are constantly told that diversity is strength.  And the reason why we’re told in these terms about how diversity is just a good in and of itself is a way to empower bureaucrats and social planners with a permanent right to meddle in the affairs of the citizens and to permanently have the power to do what they think is best in terms of moving populations around, messing with institutions and all of the rest.

And it is a wildly ideological understanding of the role of the state and of these institutions, and it’s just simply not true.  People talk about diversity making everything stronger.  Well, you know, Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist from Harvard University, you know, the guy that wrote Bowling Alone, usually respected, he found after exhaustive studies—I think 30,000 interview subjects—that communities become weaker the more ethnically diverse they are.  And it’s not because of racism.  He’s quick to point this out.  It’s just that social cohesion, social cooperation, civic engagement, all plummet when communities become much more diverse, when people start thinking of their neighbors as the other, rather than their friend.

And it’s a tragic fact of life, but it happens to be true.  And this is not necessarily an argument against diversity in all its cases.  I think diversity makes sense in some cases.  But it is an argument against the sort of Trojan horse approach, of just saying that your argument wins because diversity is strength.  You actually have to prove the case that diversity is sometimes good and sometimes bad rather than just sort of asserting it and then empowering a bunch of bureaucrats to decide things.

GOLDBERG: What was the other one, social justice?

DRISCOLL:  Yeah.

GOLDBERG:  I know I’m prattling on here.  It’s only because I’m sort of on a vision quest of no sleep.  But social justice is sort of a classic.  Right?  And Friedrich Hayek has that fantastic essay or sort of mini-book—volume 2 in Law Liberty and Constitution—I can’t remember which one it is at this point.  But it’s called “The Mirage of Social Justice.”

And he makes the argument that social justice is an idiotic phrase.  It’s like a moral stone.  There simply is no such thing as social justice.  That’s why he calls it a mirage.  Because justice is what individuals owe other individuals.  It is something that confers upon acts of intentionality.

If I do you wrong, I owe you justice.  Or if there is wrong done to you, the state has a role in compelling justice from the person who did wrong to you.  But you can’t talk about social justice as if—as a social injustice emerges from a system where no individual did anything deliberately wrong, but just sort of by virtue of the fact that some people are unlucky or didn’t work as hard, or not as good at something, that somehow they’re therefore owed something.  This is the argument of the Occupy Wall Street types.

And the Left will respond, oh, that’s not true, that’s not true.  Social justice, you know, you can have aggregate circumstances that result from the way our economy is organized that hurts the poor and all the rest, and something’s got to be done for that.

And I think there are responses to that too.  But the point I wanted to make is simply that once you believe that it’s the state’s role to basically take the place of god, right, and decide who deserves justice and who doesn’t, not in a criminal sense, but just in terms of someone’s lot in life sense, right, that someone has to be punished—someone who has too much money has to have some of their money taken away and given to somebody else because the other guy just is more deserving of your money than you are; you are now making a wildly ideological argument about the role of government.  You’re making a wildly ideological claim about the nature of justice itself.

And when people talk about social justice they talk about it as if it’s not an ideological thing; it’s just a good thing.  It just means goodness, you know.  The way I begin the chapter in the book, it’s like Judge Smails in Caddyshack, who says he had to execute those kids who came to his court because he felt he owed it to them.  It was a matter of goodness.

And you have these people who use social justice as if it just means goodness.  And social justice has to mean more than that if you’re actually going to put it into action.  And when you look at what the few institutions who actually spell out what social justice actually means, it is a wildly left-wing ideological claim about economic redistribution, about, you know, social engineering, reorganizing society.  It is not simply a universal claim of goodness.  It is a radically left-wing claim about the role of the state.

And yet when people talk about social justice, they talk about it in this clichéd, it just means good.

DRISCOLL:  Near the end of Tyranny of Clichés, you have a chapter on how the Left uses the phrase “the middle class” as a cliché, and one that, as you write, Bill Clinton ultimately rode to victory in 1992.

GOLDBERG:  Yeah.  I mean, this is—this is one of the more interesting ones to try and think through, you know.  You have—Bill Clinton’s—the genius of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign was that—and it’s really shocking how forthright he was—he talked about how he basically was going to be the president for the middle class.  And he used “middle class” in this really sort of brilliant dog whistle way.  Because he was relying on survey data from Stan Greenberg and others that showed that something like ninety-five percent of Americans consider themselves middle class.  Right?

So he’s basically appealing to the vanity of pretty much all of Americans, while seeming like he is doing something special for them.  And in the process, he talks about middle class as if—in this sort of dog whistle way, where as if it’s—you know, middle class of Middle America, traditional values and all of the rest, about bourgeois, hard-working, Horatio Alger work ethic middle class.

And that was a code that was a way for him to appeal to the white working class in a way that Democratic candidates for several elections before him had failed to do; that he was a different kind of Democrat.  You know, the whole welfare needs to be reformed as we know it; the government needs to give a hand up not a hand out; and all the rest.  This was language coded towards appealing towards constituencies that the Democrats had been losing.

But at the same time—and ever since then, this has been the path that liberals have taken.  You know, Al Gore; John Kerry; Barack Obama, they’ve all used the same argument, the same sort of language to appeal to the middle class.  But in fact, what they’re doing is they’re proposing policies that undermine the middle class, that sort of sap the independence, the entrepreneurial spirit, the moral capital of the middle class.

We now live in a country where sixty percent of the households get more from the federal government than they put in.  We now live in a country where the Democratic Party has gone a long way towards fulfilling its long-term dream of turning citizens into clients of the state.

And so they talk about middle class as if they’re appealing to sort of homespun cultural values and all of the rest, but the economic agenda that they’re selling is really one basically of widespread institutionalized bribery.

DRISCOLL:  Now that the dust has settled a bit on Liberal Fascism, how do you look back at how it was received by the Right and the Left, and how do you think “Tyranny” is going to be received?

GOLDBERG:  Well, you know, the Left has basically decided, you know, as far as I can tell, that Liberal Fascism was simply an illegitimate book with no redeeming value.  I mean, if you just go by the stuff I get on Twitter, if you go by the stuff I occasionally see on blogs, they think this is basically a settled issue.  And you know, that’s annoying, but at the end of the day, I don’t really give a rat’s ass.

For me, the really telling moment was when the History News Network, which is this sort of in-house forum for professional historians, organized this symposium on Liberal Fascism, and originally they weren’t going to even invite me to participate, you know, as if, like, I was the author—a dead author of a book that came out fifty years ago.  And to his credit, Ron Radosh sort of told them, look, this is just bad form, you’ve got to have—you’ve got to ask Goldberg if he wants to reply.

Because what they had done is, with the exception of Radosh, they had lined up like five or almost ten, if my memory serves, scholars of fascism just to tee off on me.  And they all hated the book for various and sundry reasons.  And what was really rewarding for me is that I read their criticisms.  And there were some things that were perfectly valid.  There’s some numbers I get off, you know, or that I was probably too high on, like the number of members in the—number of people who were rounded up and arrested under Woodrow Wilson, I probably had too high or something like—you know, there were a couple of things that were perfectly legitimate; they’re perfectly legitimate criticisms of interpretation here or there.  That’s all fine.  I’m willing to have those arguments.

But on the broad sweep and thrust of it, almost all of the criticisms to me seemed ill founded, ill tempered, and off the mark.  And going through it, I was like, holy crap.  You know, if this is the best that the living—that the leaders or the leading scholars of fascism have to say about my book, then man, I did a pretty good job.

And so I sort of concentrated on—what’s his name—Robert Paxton, who was sort of—he himself considers himself the dean of living American scholars of fascism, and I went point by point through his assertions, and if memory serves—I mean, people are free to go back and look themselves—I think I rebutted all—if not every single one of his claims, then, you know, ten of twelve, pretty authoritatively.

And if that’s what the dean of fascism studies had to throw at me, then I felt okay.  Because until then, you know, when I was working on the book, it was so other-worldly, the stuff I was reading and the conclusions I was drawing.  I was getting very nervous that man, I am heading out into crank territory.  And you know, what am I—and I started to restrict myself to sources that were entirely mainstream, just trying to be careful.

And I kept waiting when the first reviews came out for somebody to sort of catch me getting me something colossally wrong, like just totally missing it, or convincing me of how stupid I was.  And that review never materialized.

And it wasn’t until the History News Network thing that I finally said, okay, just the hell with these people.  I think history is going to continually move to my direction.  And I’m perfectly fine with what I wrote in the broad scheme of things.

In terms of the Right, I am astounded at how influential it has become.  I mean, I’m very gratified by it.  I meet people all over the country who tell me how it changed their life.  I meet people who tell me they’ve read it, you know, two and three times.  I met people who, you know, they’re starting to teach it in some college courses.  I spoke to a guy that’s at Harvard about it.

And it’s starting to worm its way into the mainstream intellectual bloodstream in ways that drive its critics batty.  But I think that’s because on the—at the end of the day, the force of the arguments and the facts I enlist to support my arguments, are sound.

And, you know, one of the things I simply do is I define my terms about what I mean by left-wing and right-wing in the book.  And when you define your terms, it becomes very difficult for the Left to argue with you, because it becomes a thing about—it no longer becomes a sort of ephemeral thing about fascism is bad and therefore—and conservatism is bad, and therefore conservatives are fascists.  It actually becomes an argument about what fascism was.

And so I’ve been—you know, I’m—Townhall had a thing about how it was one of the top twenty-five books every conservative has to read, recently.  And its influence, from what I can tell, seems to keep growing.  And I’m very grateful for that.  And one of these days, I should probably put out a new edition with, you know, some corrections and a bibliography and all the rest.  But on the whole, I’m very proud of how it’s holding up.

DRISCOLL:  Do you expect a similar result with Tyranny?

GOLDBERG:  You know, I don’t.  I think that The Tyranny of Clichés, you know, I know the subtitle is going to turn some people off, because I think there’s a lot of stuff in there that liberals would actually enjoy and have fun reading.  You know, the liberal part, it’s not that I disagree with it, but part of it is a way to sort of telegraph to people what—you know, the direction the book is coming from, and not make it seem like it’s just a style guide for writers.

The title The Tyranny of Clichés sounds sort of like one of those Strunk & White or Funk & Wagnalls kind of, you know, writer’s guides and not a polemical book.  So I mean, I think it’ll have—at least I hope it will have—I’ve learned to be humble about most of these kinds of things—an impact in that I think people who are my fans or who liked Liberal Fascism or liked “The Goldberg File,” like my column, they will be relieved to find it’s a much more entertaining and fun read.

And I think its impact will be, to a certain extent, that it changes the way—you know, sort of as a—I hope, as a sort of Rosetta Stone that helps people translate what sounds like sort of two-percent milk, bromides and truisms and fluff and rhetoric and see that there actually is a pretty radical agenda behind it.

You know, when we hear—so often hear politicians just filling the air in sort of general gas-baggery, and they think they’re getting away with saying nothing at all, but buried within a lot of the things that they’re saying are these deeply progressive and ideological assumptions about the nature of the world.

And I think this book will help at least some people decipher that, hear it, see it and understand it and have a good time along the way.

DRISCOLL:  You had some great posts at the blog you had set up for Liberal Fascism.  Is there a new blog at NRO devoted to the new book?

GOLDBERG:  There is.  There is a “Tyranny of Clichés” blog.  If you go to—I’m going to look for it right now so I get the URL completely right.  Because I am starting to see that naked Indian I’m so tired.

It’s basically just nationalreview.com/tyranny-blog.  And you can find it National Review Online.  It’ll have—hopefully, you know, if the reviews are interesting—I’m a big believer in reviewing the reviewers.  And it’ll also have media updates and where I’m going to do speeches and all of that kind of stuff.  And you know, one of the things I’m really happy about—and I don’t know if I’m conveying it here—is to have a book that allows me to have some fun.

You know, I mean, I was so invested in this incredibly controversial topic of fascism in 2008.  I had been attacked for that book for several years before it even came out.  And this is a book where I just really got to have some more fun with these things.  I mean, I think there’s a lot of serious intellectual history in here.  You know, you’ll get your full of Theodor Adorno and Napoleon and Marx and all of that kind of stuff.  But there’s also just a lot of Caddyshack and zombie jokes in there too.

And it allows me to sort of have more fun and be more free-wheeling and all of the rest.  And it’s a—I want to bring that up, because a) it happens to be true; and b) I hope that’s sort of reflected in the blog when it’s finally up and really going.

DRISCOLL:  This is Ed Driscoll for PJ Media.com. And this concludes our two-part interview with Jonah Goldberg about his new book, The Tyranny of Clichés, published by Sentinel Books.  Now out at Amazon.com and your local bookstore.

And Jonah, we’ll let you get back to your vision quest.  Thanks again once again for taking the time —

GOLDBERG:  Thank you.  Thank you very much.

DRISCOLL: —thanks once again for taking the time to talk with us.

GOLDBERG:  Hey, sure.  Thanks, man.

(Transcription by Penina Wolicki of eScribers.)

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