Answering Jonah Goldberg’s blind attacks, Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute meditates on what has become of Goldberg and the sorry state of the class of which he is a part: the “cosmopolitan conservative.” The members of this “small clan” have degrees from elite schools, live in and around the DC swamp, spend their days touting the glory days of Ronald Reagan from lecterns in wood paneled rooms, and are currently being used as patsies for the liberal media. Doran notes that Goldberg has become the very thing he once loathed: a humorless ideologue who seems to have as much hatred for most Americans as his more liberal counterparts.
Boy, are there some on-target paragraphs in this piece:
The assistance cosmopolitan conservatives give Democrats does not stop with their criticism of the president and his voters. In their supposedly high-minded defense of principle, they have also given fuel to an aberrant conspiracy theory that is acting like a mental virus on the minds of Americans, especially liberals. However irrational Trump might seem—my sense is that he is crazy like a fox—and however much damage his tweets do to “civility,” the cosmopolitan conservatives risk shipwrecking our political compact by promoting fictions of Russiagate that are crazy in fact.
And this:
The Jonah Goldberg who in 2008 published “Liberal Fascism” would have recognized the FBI’s surveillance of Trump and the Robert Mueller probe for exactly what they are—outrageous abuses of power designed to smother the Jacksonian voice of the American people. The Jonah Goldberg of yesteryear wryly observed that if fascism ever came to America, it wouldn’t arrive dressed in brown shirts and jackboots. It would come instead wearing shirts emblazoned with big smiley faces. For some inexplicable reason the Jonah Goldberg of today fails to realize that those shirts would also say, “Impeach Trump!”
Ouch.
Goldberg has already sent out a lame, macho-sounding tweet calling this piece “thin gruel.” But this is simply projection. From where I’m standing, Doran’s piece is the Filet mignon to Goldberg’s hardtack.