My sense is that if Jonah was ever sincere, it was before puberty. I haven't seen anything out of him since that suggests he believes anything he says, and you'll remember how hard I tried to give the dude a break.
Conservative arguments were always bullshit, but now everyone on the Right has been swept up by the ill wind of anti-intellectualism and anti-expertise, even -- ironically enough -- the intellectuals and experts themselves.
Also, Trump’s success has shown them any so-called “policy positions” don’t have to even sound like they make sense when you articulate them, and can be directly contradicted almost minutes later, and your supporters will be just fine with it. Because emoting a general resentment against the out-groups and rewarding (if only in an owning the libs kind of way) the in-groups are the only things that matter.
Aug 29, 2022·edited Aug 29, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
I don't know how long I've believed it- I get a sense that I haven't always felt this way- but within recent memory I feel like the "thought leaders "on the conservative side don't believe anything except for what makes them Bank. They're completely soulless and the only real values they have are dollars and cents.
Somewhere on the Daily Caller Teams app someone just texted someone else ""Edroso called you Numbnuts"
I have always thought that the fact that Jonah Goldberg is considered a "public intellectual" amply demonstrates the mental bankruptcy of the current age.
Excellent post. I am old enough to distinguish between conservative, post-war thinking and writing/policymakinbg during and after the Cold War. A consensus of sorts existed between the Liberal and Conservative camps on the dangers of Soviet and Chinese “communism” for 40+ years based on the information (and massive disinformation) presented to the American public (quite aside from policymakers) about the “enemy”. Communism was clearly oppressive, inefficient, wasteful of human and natural resources and a dead-end solution to mankind’s economic efforts. I know, I worked a lot in this field and was impressed mainly by the adherence to the mid-century modern, bastardized Swedish look..
That situation, of course, largely ended with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since conservatives had always been tightly wound reactive and obsessive, the end of the Cold War resulted in the movement spinning and bouncing around like a plastic top, shedding bits and pieces of ideology all around.
That gave space for Gingrich’s inward looking Contract on America to promise deregulation and out-of-contol vicious and racist domestic policies without any resistance from the real world and so we are in this topsy-turvy world of right-wing ignorance that is heavily supported financially by the international oligarchy including, of course, the former Soviet Communists.
This intellectual and policy situation is wholly unsustainable and will come crashing down in terrible ruin and the conservatives secretly know this but continue to scream “Apres moi, la deluge.“
I sympathize with Roy. Yet while the details of the post are correct enough, I can't quite agree with his conclusions.
Firstly, because the people he's kvetching about are cogs in the Great Wheel of Repression, they're always fair targets for mockery.
As for conservative ideology: It's the one the nation was founded on: reducing the role of the state so that it never, ever interferes with the ability to accumulate. Nothing more. A tell is the incredible failure of the Articles of Confederation.
Any heavy intellectualizing like the Buckley/National Review project was, to a great degree, an artifice and performative. Having as a project exploitation of the general population (and old time Southern racism) can't be argued in good faith, only supported by bullshit of one kind or another. And while I'm overly generalizing here, a distant second in substantive conservative ideology is (was?) the opposition to commie states. But the real problem there was repression and bullying, that they didn't have unrestrained capitalism wasn't the primary problem. (And speaking of rank bullshit: The idea that free markets birth freedom. All I say about that is maybe we should try it for a generation and see what happens. Or not.) And if repression is the true problem with the commie states and not so much the economic systems, well, then, our conservative brothers and sisters have been pretty weak in that area.
Also working against the idea of conservative ideology is the true core of Trumpism: Making it safe for pols to echo the idiocy, delusions, insanities, etc., etc., etc., of conservative media.
So: No real ideology to spew -- positions, yes, sure, but a developed ideology, nah -- just performative bullshit.
So, we're back to mocking that.
But taking the ideology seriously as an ideology, please, no. Not worth it, never was. Or if it is, if one wants to piss in the wind, it should be left to the young so they can have a life lesson and learn better than to engage.
Those capable of reasoned arguments and such pretty much support the GOP for financial reasons, those in the base not really in it for the money mostly don't deal with reasoned arguments. They have beliefs that they want echoed and reinforced. Not at all in it for intellectual expansions or whatever. So, again, no reason for anything other than bullshit -- not that they're really is anything else.
Or maybe leave it to the Republican operative controlled Forward party.
Excellent writing. My first reaction on reading excerpts of Alito's decision was that so much of it was exactly in the style of right-wing talk radio (as was so much of Scalia's writing)*. The success of Limbaugh and his epigones taught them all that even the veneer of rational thinking or the pretense of intellectual rigor was completely unnecessary. You don't even need a party platform! Of course, then Trump revealed that the manhole covers had been completely thrown off -- the sewers are wide open! Crawl out and let your freak flag fly!
*As with his concurring opinion in Bruen: "Ha ha. Libtards think gun regs will prevent mass murder. Oh yeah? What about that shooting in Buffalo? Those New York laws didn't stop that one, did it? Ha ha! Suck it, Breyer!"
(Okay, I translated it back into the original talk-radio, but the gist is there.)
Talbott rightly focused on “Lemme find some historical justification for fucking you over” Alito, but the fact is, none of the Hateful Six is intelligent enough to be handed the keys of a school bus, much less the country’s future. Looking through the transcripts of the Q&As for recent disasterous decisions it’s plain that their mental machinery is suitable only for slicing and dicing the words of legal “reasoning” without a glimmer of awareness that there were good and bad motives in past jurisprudence and they have fallen deeply into the bad end of that tradition. Factual knowledge of the world beyond their cloistered halls is minimal and erroneous. Their appreciation of moral reasoning stops somewhere around Leviticus. But here’s the thing: legal abortion, same sex marriage, contraception, and gun restrictions became majority positions among normal Americans because the evidence is all on their side. Scraping through the legal and religious blather to find ways to justify taking down those positions unsurprisingly results in rejection of the Court and in the desire to wrest away their self-appointed control of the country’s future. Meanwhile, Pope Francis has taken a page from the Federalist Society and larded the College of Cardinals with liberals, so Alito will never see a Pope who agrees with his idea of the Church.
Speaking of Hillsdale, the chief of staff of our Governor, the Phony on a Pony, is from Hillsdale, and our state’s educational curriculum has been rewritten with Hillsdale material.
the Josh Hammer incident is so cool: defines biblical justice as "rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies", realizes under critical fire that that is really not kosher and changes it to "rewarding good and punishing evil".
Clarifying the intended subtext, not what he wants to say, but what he wants his audience to hear: Justice is rewarding Republicans and punishing Democrats.
It seems to me that, from the founding of National Review, conservatism was based on two axioms: A) Conservative economics *would benefit everyone* and B) Communism was bad. And Communism *was* bad. But once the Soviet Union collapsed, B had no more salience. All they were left with was A. And, time and time again and again and a-fucking-gain, it's proved wrong. Conservative economics only benefits the wealthy, and leads to crashes, bubbles, and farcical corruption.
So what else can conservative "thought" be at this point, but mere propaganda? Forget "is it true?" It doesn't even have to be plausible. Conservative thought--the op-eds, the books, the essays, the speeches in the Senate and the House--is one big ad campaign. The client is corporations and the 1 percent. And, like most advertising, the object isn't to convince. It's to cloud men's minds and prod them to give in to emotion and impulse. Trump isn't an anomaly. He's the natural successor to William F. Buckley, the chief salesman of a drastically degraded product, talking to a drastically degraded customer base.
My sense is that if Jonah was ever sincere, it was before puberty. I haven't seen anything out of him since that suggests he believes anything he says, and you'll remember how hard I tried to give the dude a break.
They're a lot less funny these days, though.
Conservative arguments were always bullshit, but now everyone on the Right has been swept up by the ill wind of anti-intellectualism and anti-expertise, even -- ironically enough -- the intellectuals and experts themselves.
Also, Trump’s success has shown them any so-called “policy positions” don’t have to even sound like they make sense when you articulate them, and can be directly contradicted almost minutes later, and your supporters will be just fine with it. Because emoting a general resentment against the out-groups and rewarding (if only in an owning the libs kind of way) the in-groups are the only things that matter.
I don't know how long I've believed it- I get a sense that I haven't always felt this way- but within recent memory I feel like the "thought leaders "on the conservative side don't believe anything except for what makes them Bank. They're completely soulless and the only real values they have are dollars and cents.
Somewhere on the Daily Caller Teams app someone just texted someone else ""Edroso called you Numbnuts"
I have always thought that the fact that Jonah Goldberg is considered a "public intellectual" amply demonstrates the mental bankruptcy of the current age.
Excellent post. I am old enough to distinguish between conservative, post-war thinking and writing/policymakinbg during and after the Cold War. A consensus of sorts existed between the Liberal and Conservative camps on the dangers of Soviet and Chinese “communism” for 40+ years based on the information (and massive disinformation) presented to the American public (quite aside from policymakers) about the “enemy”. Communism was clearly oppressive, inefficient, wasteful of human and natural resources and a dead-end solution to mankind’s economic efforts. I know, I worked a lot in this field and was impressed mainly by the adherence to the mid-century modern, bastardized Swedish look..
That situation, of course, largely ended with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since conservatives had always been tightly wound reactive and obsessive, the end of the Cold War resulted in the movement spinning and bouncing around like a plastic top, shedding bits and pieces of ideology all around.
That gave space for Gingrich’s inward looking Contract on America to promise deregulation and out-of-contol vicious and racist domestic policies without any resistance from the real world and so we are in this topsy-turvy world of right-wing ignorance that is heavily supported financially by the international oligarchy including, of course, the former Soviet Communists.
This intellectual and policy situation is wholly unsustainable and will come crashing down in terrible ruin and the conservatives secretly know this but continue to scream “Apres moi, la deluge.“
Intellectual poseurs, catapulting fascism, in support of treason, and funded by dictators. Same as it ever was.
"“irritable mental gestures” is so inclusive, succinct and pure that I will never try to parboil the cons' game any further...
I sympathize with Roy. Yet while the details of the post are correct enough, I can't quite agree with his conclusions.
Firstly, because the people he's kvetching about are cogs in the Great Wheel of Repression, they're always fair targets for mockery.
As for conservative ideology: It's the one the nation was founded on: reducing the role of the state so that it never, ever interferes with the ability to accumulate. Nothing more. A tell is the incredible failure of the Articles of Confederation.
Any heavy intellectualizing like the Buckley/National Review project was, to a great degree, an artifice and performative. Having as a project exploitation of the general population (and old time Southern racism) can't be argued in good faith, only supported by bullshit of one kind or another. And while I'm overly generalizing here, a distant second in substantive conservative ideology is (was?) the opposition to commie states. But the real problem there was repression and bullying, that they didn't have unrestrained capitalism wasn't the primary problem. (And speaking of rank bullshit: The idea that free markets birth freedom. All I say about that is maybe we should try it for a generation and see what happens. Or not.) And if repression is the true problem with the commie states and not so much the economic systems, well, then, our conservative brothers and sisters have been pretty weak in that area.
Also working against the idea of conservative ideology is the true core of Trumpism: Making it safe for pols to echo the idiocy, delusions, insanities, etc., etc., etc., of conservative media.
So: No real ideology to spew -- positions, yes, sure, but a developed ideology, nah -- just performative bullshit.
So, we're back to mocking that.
But taking the ideology seriously as an ideology, please, no. Not worth it, never was. Or if it is, if one wants to piss in the wind, it should be left to the young so they can have a life lesson and learn better than to engage.
Those capable of reasoned arguments and such pretty much support the GOP for financial reasons, those in the base not really in it for the money mostly don't deal with reasoned arguments. They have beliefs that they want echoed and reinforced. Not at all in it for intellectual expansions or whatever. So, again, no reason for anything other than bullshit -- not that they're really is anything else.
Or maybe leave it to the Republican operative controlled Forward party.
And as for it being impolitic to laugh at Jonah and his wail, the slow, sad head-shaking laugh was invented for just this sort of idiot.
Now that the scales are fallen from your eyes, Roy, just do what needs doing to preserve your incisive lizard brain.
Save the komodo dragon!
Excellent writing. My first reaction on reading excerpts of Alito's decision was that so much of it was exactly in the style of right-wing talk radio (as was so much of Scalia's writing)*. The success of Limbaugh and his epigones taught them all that even the veneer of rational thinking or the pretense of intellectual rigor was completely unnecessary. You don't even need a party platform! Of course, then Trump revealed that the manhole covers had been completely thrown off -- the sewers are wide open! Crawl out and let your freak flag fly!
*As with his concurring opinion in Bruen: "Ha ha. Libtards think gun regs will prevent mass murder. Oh yeah? What about that shooting in Buffalo? Those New York laws didn't stop that one, did it? Ha ha! Suck it, Breyer!"
(Okay, I translated it back into the original talk-radio, but the gist is there.)
Talbott rightly focused on “Lemme find some historical justification for fucking you over” Alito, but the fact is, none of the Hateful Six is intelligent enough to be handed the keys of a school bus, much less the country’s future. Looking through the transcripts of the Q&As for recent disasterous decisions it’s plain that their mental machinery is suitable only for slicing and dicing the words of legal “reasoning” without a glimmer of awareness that there were good and bad motives in past jurisprudence and they have fallen deeply into the bad end of that tradition. Factual knowledge of the world beyond their cloistered halls is minimal and erroneous. Their appreciation of moral reasoning stops somewhere around Leviticus. But here’s the thing: legal abortion, same sex marriage, contraception, and gun restrictions became majority positions among normal Americans because the evidence is all on their side. Scraping through the legal and religious blather to find ways to justify taking down those positions unsurprisingly results in rejection of the Court and in the desire to wrest away their self-appointed control of the country’s future. Meanwhile, Pope Francis has taken a page from the Federalist Society and larded the College of Cardinals with liberals, so Alito will never see a Pope who agrees with his idea of the Church.
Speaking of Hillsdale, the chief of staff of our Governor, the Phony on a Pony, is from Hillsdale, and our state’s educational curriculum has been rewritten with Hillsdale material.
“ his prose… became so gassy it became an ordeal to spelunk it for jokes.”
Like Uranus, Goldberg’s product is big, gassy, and hostile to human life.
the Josh Hammer incident is so cool: defines biblical justice as "rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies", realizes under critical fire that that is really not kosher and changes it to "rewarding good and punishing evil".
Clarifying the intended subtext, not what he wants to say, but what he wants his audience to hear: Justice is rewarding Republicans and punishing Democrats.
Terrific piece.
It seems to me that, from the founding of National Review, conservatism was based on two axioms: A) Conservative economics *would benefit everyone* and B) Communism was bad. And Communism *was* bad. But once the Soviet Union collapsed, B had no more salience. All they were left with was A. And, time and time again and again and a-fucking-gain, it's proved wrong. Conservative economics only benefits the wealthy, and leads to crashes, bubbles, and farcical corruption.
So what else can conservative "thought" be at this point, but mere propaganda? Forget "is it true?" It doesn't even have to be plausible. Conservative thought--the op-eds, the books, the essays, the speeches in the Senate and the House--is one big ad campaign. The client is corporations and the 1 percent. And, like most advertising, the object isn't to convince. It's to cloud men's minds and prod them to give in to emotion and impulse. Trump isn't an anomaly. He's the natural successor to William F. Buckley, the chief salesman of a drastically degraded product, talking to a drastically degraded customer base.