Jonah Goldberg Proves He Can Read

While the LA Times editorial page must be commended for joining the reality-based community and finally calling for an end to the occupation of Iraq, on the othr hand they still print Doughy Pantload Jonah Goldberg, whose scintillating column today reads like a fifth-grade book report on Jonathan Chait's netroots article. He literally regurgitates it, selectively picking and choosing the most off-base parts.

The conservative movement was a response to generations of growing statism at home and abroad. From the Progressive era to the Great Society, government seemed to be expanding in tandem with the threat of communism. The conservative project was first and foremost an intellectual one because, as Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell has written, it takes an ideology to beat an ideology (he also called for a military coup last week, but let's forget that - ed).

The conservative infrastructure that arouses so much envy among liberals today was an afterthought. It was created because the far more valuable real estate — universities, foundations, newspapers and TV networks — were held by liberals. Conservatives used their institutions to have serious arguments about what conservatives should believe.

Apparently loss leaders like the National Review (where Jonah Goldberg makes his money) were just something conservatives threw together with billions of dollars. Never mind that Goldberg mentions a think tank, the Hoover Institution, one of dozens which the conservative movement has constructed over the past 40 years, including AEI, Heritage, Cato, Ayn Rand, The Federalist Society, ACU, Hudson all of which employ people who write for those same "afterthought" publications. This idea that movement conservatism was all about deep thinkers sitting in a salon somewhere proffering arguments back and forth without ever wanting to amplify them is about as dishonest as you can get. And as it's manifested into blogs and talk radio and Fox News, it of course is a noise machine, primarily concerned with collecting media scalps and calling people traitors.

Then Goldberg lets his slip show:

Meanwhile, the supposedly all-powerful Republican noise machine's greatest victory is allegedly the George W. Bush presidency — which he barely won the first time. And, recall, Bush had to campaign as a "compassionate" conservative in order to get as far as he did. If we're so good at PR, why did conservatism need the adjective?

Exactly. Conservatism is deeply hated in this country, and must be dressed up and hidden away in order to appeal to anybody. That's the whole point of spending billions of dollars to come up with a way to sell it!

There are elements of the conservative movement that can be useful to progressives, but mainly they're just organizational and (largely) financial. The rest of it we can manage on our own.