With Obama as President, a 59-seat Senate majority, and Pelosi running the House, progressive bloggers will often have better things to do than mock right-wing authors. As a result, right-wingers must rise to amazing levels of absurdity in order to generate writing worthy of mockery. Michael Ledeen rises to the task, arguing that since current Democratic proposals like TARP and the stimulus package don't go all the way to socialist dreams of abolishing private property*, they are fascism.
Look, I'm a philosopher. I try to interpret this stuff charitably, reconstructing my opponent's argument so that it makes sense. Maybe "fascism" is some kind of typo for "mixed economy"? But even if you're using the Dvorak keyboard, the letters are not close together. (I checked.)
Jonah Goldberg of Liberal Fascism fame promises to weigh in tomorrow. My guess is that his bizarre misuse of the term "fascism" is in significant ways different from Ledeen's bizarre misuse, but that both men will focus on the overlap between their views, so as to create a more harmonious right-wing synthesis of total nonsense.
*I know. Socialists just want the state to own the means of production and distribute goods in a generally egalitarian way. Bear with me.
1 comment:
A while back, Jonah Goldberg came to UVA to give a presentation on Liberal Fascism to one of the more conservative student groups (which, for reasons I don't quite understand, I'm a member of). He shot off so much disinformation and well, nonsense that I could barely keep up, much less address any of it in my own head.
So yeah, good luck with that.
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