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.)
These ‘diverse’ peoples themselves come from societies that are not diverse and show no interest historically of caring about the greater good. The more ‘diversity’ you have from such polities, the more mini-Wannsee conference mentality erupts where everyone wishes there were fewer of the ‘other.’
The idea that Third World people, particularly Muslims, will ever buy into the concept of the greater good has no basis in reality. In Rio de Janeiro, a city of some 10 million about to host the Olympics and World Cup, good luck finding a lending library. No body endows such things because nobody cares, and this is only worse upon arrival in America where immigrants are taught by political correctness to go one further and not care in a systematic and institutionalized manner.
Immigration from the Third World has and will continue to tear down the fabric of American society and these new politicians agitate and vote by last names and skin. The result is a de facto Babel War where everyone is at each other’s throats, trying to advance their own cause rather than the one cause that will really work – the greater good.
Living in Egypt, Somalia, Guatemala, Mexico and almost any other Third World polity does not prepare these people for diversity. It can be plainly shown that the whole idea of diversity is a crock. Diversity of what? Skin? What we really want is a diversity of ideas plus peace; America already had that in 1960 and it’s now much worse, not better. Black American’s alone are a paradigm of a lack of interest in diversity. Were this not so, black folks would gravitate to issue and interest-based affairs, but instead huddle around, not the NHL oceanography or country music and Bach, but rap and the NBA. We are condensing diversity based on a false premise and it will eventually end America as it once was – it is already unrecognizable from 50 years ago and the inmates are very close to ruling the asylum.
The problem with “diversity” is that it is inherently racist.
It presumes that physical appearance correlates with identity. That because a person looks a certain way, they will behave in a certain way and believe certain things.
Totally bogus.
Ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and yes identity are not a matter of someone’s skin tone, or the origin of their surname, but come from who they truly are and the choices they make.
The left isn’t interested in attracting individuals who are truly diverse in their outlook on life, their ideas, or any other meaningful criteria. They don’t want a cosmopolitan environment that would promote the free exchange of ideas. When people start talking and thinking, the ideas the left is devoted to promoting cannot win.
What they do want are Marxists and their vassals, perfect vessels of ideological purity, in as many colors and pedigrees as they can get them.
Faux Diversity is the name of their game.
Even when Conservatives address that, they are too florid and generous.
“Diversity” is social tool for destroying a society. Debilitating and killing off the racial-ethnic majority males of a society, whose natural role it is to preserve that society from physical and moral interlopers.
There is nothing deeper to it than that.
Ask the Austrian Empire how well that diversity crap works! For 200 years, the mightiest economy in Europe lost almost every battle it fought.
Lesson One: speaking the same language as the other soldiers is usually a good thing.
The Germans might have beaten the French and British, but dragging the Austrians along was just too much.
Any specific human being (Homo sapiens is social animal, and does not live as an individual) belongs to a race/ethnic group/deme/breeding population. Mixed-breed people will designate, or be designate as, a member of one or another group. The members of each group constitute a separate unique society (first of all, societies are composed of related people). The US is a multi-societal state. The reason diverse neighborhoods disintegrate, is not because people don’t consider their neighbors ‘friends’, but because their neighbors are, in fact, ‘other’. They are not “my people” who in fact are a very extended family. Skin color is a slightly misleading term, as skin color is one aspect of a characteristic genetic inheritance, including not just skin color, but eye/lip shape, IQ, relative relationships between body size and limb length, hair shape, personality type, breeding strategies, impulse-control, etc., etc., etc. Human Nature is innate, hard-wired, genetic, and immutable. You can study HN all day long, and might discover some operating mechanisms. But this will not enable you to alter it. Since the Enlightenment, the Left’s fantasy has beeen that human behavior is malleable and subject to the influence of Reason. This delusion has justified the mass terror and mass killings of end-stage Leftist regimes (French Revolution, Lenin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia). Human Nature proves impossible to change, no matter how many people are terrorized, tortured, imprisoned, or killed. The fact that all animal societies (as opposed to solitary or herd animals) are formed of related individuals and function as dominance hierarchies, shows why economics is useless in understanding human behavior. Except for, theoretically, some economic exchanges, all human interactions are zero-sum games. Dominance is the ultimate zero-sum game. That is why the proper understanding of life in a multi-societal state always, always, always must be analyzed in terms of group dominance. Any racial group can dominate the US, but only one can. Every other group is subordinate. As a white person, I might be a nice guy or a sorry SOB, but in any case, every news story I see will indicate either a continuation of white dominance or a change in dominance by a non-white group. In case you haven’t been paying attention, blacks and Mexicans have figured this out, and vote in pretty good solidarity for the political party that promises them a real shot at dominance over whites. That’s perfectly natural. The fact that many whites are clueless, must be a shining example of effective total agitprop by the MSM, the academy, Hollywood, and pop culture in general.
I am not so sure. I grew up in upper middle class Connecticut where Catholic v.s. Protestant was the big dividing line. Today it seems almost no one knows or cares what a person’s religion/denomination is. And I cannot conceive of someone not being friendly with a neighbor because s/he is Protestant, not Catholic, or vice versa. These religious designations were most often highly correlated with Anglo-descent Americans v.s. more-recent-immigrant-descent Americans, primarily Irish and Italian ethnicities. Today its pretty much a big shrug of the shoulders.
Ah, Connecticut!
60 years ago, it was an industrial powerhouse. Now it is home to the greatest number of spinsters and single moms in the country, and there is very little economy at all; no manufacturing to speak of. Also few men.
It’s not surprising that not much matters to them any more. Don’t worry, Gov Malloy will manage the decline quite nicely, making sure his union pals don’t suffer too much.
And all during Slick’s first campaign ran the thread “Tax Cuts For The Middle Class.”
After the election he was asked when they would happen.
“I don’t recall saying anything about that” was his reply.
…the etymology of words like diversity and social justice and how they’re used by the left to shut down debate
Leftists (not liberals, there are no more liberals, the leftists ate them) use a methodology of “artificial dissemination”.
a)They create a class warfare, gender warfare, ethnic warfare, racial warfare, some suspect class artificial grievance;
b)they infuse it with a closed-end loop phrase as outlined by Jonah as a Tyrannical Cliche’
c)They send out the “narrative” through the Propaganda and Lies Ministry to begin adding the Tyrannical Cliche’ to the masses as a part of Lexicon Hipster Doofus World
d)The Stupid Party adopts the Hipster Doofus Lexicon while trying to combat the underlying narrative
e)By accepting the Hipster Doofus Lexicon as the prima facie starting point of the debate, the Stupid Party automatically loses, they are wrestling the crocodile in the water, not on land.
The “narrative” underlying the Tyrannical Cliche’ is now infused through artificial dissemination. We never get to the true starting point, which is Jonah’s seminal point (pun intended), the entire premise is a sham. The Tyrannical Cliche’ is a Trojan Horse for the phony narrative.
And, we bite on the bait nearly every time.
Words matter. Progressives, elite, liberals, “mainstream media” are all part of the fraudulent lexicon implantation. They are no such thing.
Jonah is great and this was a wonderful piece, Ed. Thanks.
debate can only be shut down if one party allows it. Instead of getting defensive when terms like racist, diversity, and all the rest come up, flip the argument around and call BS on the person making the charge. Conservatives have this preternatural tendency to self-destruct by buying into false premises and battling straw man arguments. Call statists for who they are, ask them why they hate concepts like individual liberty and freedom of choice, and how they can make the case that a govt that cannot manage its own budget can somehow manage 300 million lives.
Exactly. Don’t accept the left’s redefinition of terms–call them on it at every turn. For example, they try to make a differentiation between “racist” (bad, us) and “racialist” (good, them). I always (always!) respond by both refuting their claim of us as racist and defining “racialist” as “racist, but in a GOOD way” and showing that they proudly proclaim themselves to be “racialist.”
“The Stupid Party,” is the only way to describe the Dems. At college they “studied” the liberal arts (in between trying to get laid and high whenever possible), were almost never in the hard sciences and then went on to become teachers, lawyers or government bureaucrats. They are truly the most intellectually lazy bunch of people on earth. And as was said here, they should be referred to as Leftists, not liberals, because they are anything but tolerant of dissenting viewpoints. All they really know how to do in the face of conservative argument is hurl epithets and chant slogans.
One of the most common traits among Leftists is that they never seem to be people who actually build or create things. People who work with their hands and heads, business people for example, are almost never Leftists. People who understand how difficult it is to create something useful and tangible know how difficult it is to make things and have a realistic sense of how the world works. A Leftist is a know-nothing and do-nothing person who thinks all that is required to end poverty, create jobs, or make any of the other changes in the world he seeks is to legislate another government program. That what he seeks to accomplish is monumentally difficult never occurs to him because he never built anything in his life. He’s a consumer, not a creator.
That Leftist seem childish and stupid isn’t surprising. Leftist ideas are only fit for the young and dumb. They are all heart and no head. But once they learned how to vote for government subsidies for themselves, they became dangerous. Their greed and stupidity put Obama in the White House, a man with no accomplishments, except to convince others that he’s exceptional.
The stupid party will be dealt a setback in November, but don’t expect them to go away. They’re too stupid to give up on a system that promises to reward the lazy and incompetent if only you can gain access to the levers of power.
MARK -”One of the most common traits among Leftists is that they never seem to be people who actually build or create things. People who work with their hands and heads, business people for example, are almost never Leftists. People who understand how difficult it is to create something useful and tangible know how difficult it is to make things and have a realistic sense of how the world works.”
If true, how do you explain AFL-CIO, UAW leaders/members – people who build things – with minor membeship exception believe Leftists walk on water? Similarly, Gates, Buffet, Imelt are “business people” also in the tank. Granted, it’s not universal across-the-board but what is the anomaly that yields these monstrous exceptions?
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.
Justice ain’t just “social” for all these liars and dissemblers who wax about it endlessly as they manipulate the language to grow dependency and their own power.
The word gets attached to everything, climate justice (the UN demands reparations from developed countries in its name), food justice (Michelle O’s favorite), healthcare justice (lacking in America’s Constitution per Ruth Bader Ginsburg).
On and on the justice train rides.
It’s beginning to sound like an epithet, particularly when attached to organizations like Eric Holder’s.
Blindfolded Lady Justice is blushing at the perversion of her name.
Jonah Goldberg correctly identified Herder as the originator of multiculturalism in Liberal Fascism. Here is something that might be novel to PJ Media readers and Goldberg fans: http://clarespark.com/2012/01/28/popular-sovereignty-on-the-ropes/. It dwells upon Alexander Hamilton and Charles Sumner’s understanding of American nationality. JG will like it I hope.
The “diversity” of the Left is nothing more than the color of noses. There are no valid research studies that show this diversity to be compelling of anything. Having twenty different nose colors in a room brings nothing but twenty different nose colors.
When you discuss real, meaningful diversity of thought and opinion with a “Progressive” (sic) you get obfuscation, shifting and a quick change of subject.
I grant that diversity of thought is quite beneficial to most everything at the right time. But you don’t get diversity of thought from nose color.
I find it the height of irony that in the university setting, diversity is the highest value – with the glaring exception of the arena of ideas. Which is the only diversity that should matter, if universities had even the slightest interest in actually, you know, educating.
Charlatans. The entire lot of them.
Is it me or is it Firefox? I tried both of the download links above, both by right clicking and by left licking. The file named lofi downloaded at 5.8 MB. But the other file was 3.3 MB. not 18.4
Diversity is bird droppings in the ocean compared to the change from medical care to Healthcare. My first exposure to medical care was my Mother’s thyroidectomy in 1935 which was followed by 25 subsequent surgeries. I received my MD at Madison Wisconsin, Class of 1953. During my training I saw my family MD die with Tuberculosis while on that service rotation.I opened Dover AFB Hospial in 1954 and provided about 15000 anesthetics for open heart surgery between 1956 and 2004. During my 1953-54 internship in Lansing Michgan I attended over 500 deliveries. Two of my wives died with pulmonary disease. The most catastrophic occurance during this life was the lecture by Edwin Witte, PhD, Professor of Economics, U.Wisconsin Madison the day before my MD, 1953. Witte was the campaign manager for Robert LaFollette for the President, 1924 on the Progressive ticket. He then was the Bill writer for the Wisconsin Legislators and in 1935 wrote the OldAgeInsuranceBill for FDR. The SSA Bill originally included a Universal Healthcare bill, which was rejected by the party leaders as complicating the goal of introducing their Socialist agenda. The lecture to our ’53 MD class occured the day prior to our MD degree. Dean Middleton bade us adieu and congratulations, then introduced Witte to tell us of our future with government medicine. Witte’s closing remark was indelibly drawn on my brain when he said, ” Before you finish your residencies we will own you.” After many failures Obama has succeeded at forcing the medical profession into the newly established physician slavery known as Healthcare. We can only pray that the Supreme Court has sufficient wisdom to save US from an un-Constitutional slavery re-generation.
How about “preventive care” to mean birth control. As if pregnancy were an illness to be prevented instead of the healthy function of a sexual human being. Grates on me every time.
On a separate note, I always mull the significance of the archetypal “kitchen table” around which American “families” discuss their heavy issues. Is it a signer of “working class” because they don’t have dinner in a dining room? (Think Everyone Loves Raymond.) Or is it meant to hearken back to a simpler, purer America that Americans would like to get back to. What is it really? Ah, another one is of course “working class” to mean blue collar, I guess, as if white collar people, business owners and investors (with their ‘unearned income’) do not work. I haven’t read Johah Goldberg’s book, but look forward to doing so.
What’s this about Pulitzer Prizes nominated, not nominated. Crediblity.