One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian "isms" of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do.
Jonah GoldbergThe government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.
Jonah GoldbergBut if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.
Jonah GoldbergIn the weeks prior to the war to liberate Afghanistan, a good friend of mine would ask me almost every day, โWhy aren't we killing people yet?โ And I never had a good answer for him. Because one of the most important and vital things the United States could do after 9/11 was to kill people. Call it a โforceful response,โ โdecisive actionโ ' whatever. Those are all nice euphemisms for killing people. And the world is a better place because America saw the necessity of putting steel beneath the velvet of those euphemisms.
Jonah GoldbergWhen you treat reprehensible and ludicrous arguments with respect you have elevated the reprehensible and made the ludicrous a bit more reasonable. Having a serious argument with a Nazi makes the horror of the Holocaust a debatable point. Don't wrestle in the mud with pigs. You get dirty and the pig likes it.
Jonah GoldbergI have a simple answer to any American patriot who claims that there is no conflict between his love of country and his desire to hitch our fate to the United Nations: โYou're mistaken.โ And, therefore, I'm thinking of adding this corollary to my General Rule of patriotism: The more intellectually consistent and pro-U.N. you are, the less patriotic you are likely to be. I haven't thought that all the way through, but it seems right to me.
Jonah Goldberg