Jonah Goldberg: Reliably Wrong

The NYT has a discussion about Conservative "hate" toward Woodrow Wilson and blame it on Glenn Beck. Importantly, Goldberg refuses to understand the issue under consideration.  It's not the exact origin of WW hatred. Even more importantly, Goldberg didn't start Conservative hatred toward WW. Still he get's all petulant.

But there are some chicken-and-egg problems with that. Beck got on the anti-Wilson train largely because of my book. And I started Liberal Fascism long before  I — or pretty much anyone — had ever heard of Barack Obama.

He also mocks the debate because unnamed some one was dumb enough to try "to make [Beck] into a mouthpiece for Leo Strauss (no, really)"

In the first and possibly second instances Goldberg refers to Georg Nash.  Here's what Nash wrote.

At one level, the phenomenon owes much to Glenn Beck. But Beck is not sui generis. In considerable measure he is popularizing the perspective of a school of conservative scholars associated with the Claremont Review of Books -- a group sometimes labeled the Claremont or West Coast Straussians, since many of them have been influenced by Leo Strauss and his student, Harry Jaffa.

Can you turn that into the claims that Goldberg made? Me neither.

Not content to be wrong once, he asserts that

John Milton Cooper — a great and revered historian — says that the chief problem with the right’s indictment of Woodrow Wilson is not that it is wrong on the merits, but that it’s too selective? In other words, the substance of the attack is fine, it’s just not inclusive enough. I’ll take that any day.

Goldberg then performs, what I believe to be called, a "take down" of Cooper's tragic error concerning TR.  He, of course, misses the point of Cooper's argument.

Cooper is actually discussing the ebbing and flowing of historical reputations and changes in the ideological makeup of political parties.. His first paragraph lets you know that, because he writes that

The barrage of denunciation of Woodrow Wilson from the right, most loudly but not exclusively from Glenn Beck, is not as surprising as it seems. True, most previous excoriation of him has come from the left, from those who have deplored him for abetting an attempt to segregate the federal workplace, for taking the country into World War I, and for overseeing repression of radicals and dissenters after we entered the war. He continues by making the point that these "detracters" failed to give Wilson his full due because they relied on a skewed understanding of WW's accomplishments.

Cooper goes on to point out that

That is a measure of how much our political culture has undergone a sea change in the last century. Nowhere has that sea change been greater than in the Republican party, which was born of the Civil War and proudly exalted federal supremacy. Devotion to state rights and limited government was the property of conservative Democrats such as Grover Cleveland and Southern "bourbons." First, William Jennings Bryan and then Wilson turned the Democrats decisively in a more centralized and interventionist direction.

Even a cursory reading of Cooper's text shows that he is not interested in condemning WW but defending him and that he is make a larger point by playing up some ironies of history.

Concerning his next victim, he

truly laughed out loud at Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s opening salvo. She writes:

Conservatives wish to turn the word “progressive” into an insult, in much the same way that the word “liberal” became a smear during the 1988 presidential campaign. Liberals are bad at labeling things, not least themselves, their political opponents, and their policies; conservatives are good at it.

Riiiiiight.

The rest isn’t much more persuasive.

While sparing us his misreading of Lepore, here is what she actually argues 1) nobody really likes WW consequently he is easy to demonize;  2) Wilson and Obama are similar in many ways; 3) if you are going to go after Progressives WW was, in fact, a Progressive and 4) Beck is a populist and

[p]opulism looks to a past thought to be better than the present; it therefore needs a “before”; its argument will always go like this: before X, all was well; since X, everything’s gone to hell. If X weren’t Wilson, X would simply be someone else.

Next up Micheal Lind, who Goldberg mocks as he thinks Beck is Strauss. Much like Nash, Lind doesn't think that at all. He writes that

[t]he recent elevation by the American right of Woodrow Wilson as the central villain in American history is itself something of a historical accident. That accident is the result of the publicity given by Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg to the views of a small number of conservative scholars, including Ronald J. Pestritto, William Voegeli and Thomas G. West. These so-called “Straussians,” or followers of the German political theorist Leo Strauss, argue that Wilson’s brand of progressivism marked a radical break with the older tradition of American politics based on natural rights and the idea of a social contract.

Goldberg reads him as providing

condescension . . . typical of Lind. You see, he’s here to tell everyone what conservatives are supposed to believe, and conservatives are supposed to start with the New Deal or the Great Society, not Wilson.

Oddly enough, Lind is giving Goldberg the credit he so badly wants, kinda. Lind's argument is that this Conservative version of America's  from greatness is only one among many.

Mark Lawrence concludes his contribution by noting that

The problem with the conservative view of Wilson is not that it is entirely wrong but that it is grossly incomplete. It makes almost no effort to view Wilson within the context of an era when most Americans eagerly welcomed the growth of government power.

And it ignores the obvious point that Wilson shares as many traits in common with the latter-day right as with liberals. After all, Wilson’s initiatives during the World War I resemble little in American history so much as the 2001 Patriot Act championed by the Bush administration. And Wilson’s notoriously moralizing, self-righteous personality would fit right in among the conservative punditry so eager to condemn him.

Goldberg complains that

I can’t speak for Beck too authoritatively here since I’ve hardly followed his every statement on Wilson, but Lawrence gets me just plain wrong. One of the central points of my entire argument about the progressive era (and fascism) is that these ideas were popular. They were in the water, on both sides of the Atlantic.

As for Lawrence’s bit about the Patriot Act, that really is hilarious. Who is lacking in historical context now? Whatever the flaws or excesses of the Patriot Act may have been, to compare it to what happened under Wilson is not only absurd, it reveals Lawrence’s political blinders. Indeed, the civil rights abuses under FDR, starting with the internment of the Japanese, but also including the harassment of political enemies, were far worse than anything that happened under Bush. And, they were a natural, if diluted, continuation of what happened under FDR’s old boss, Woodrow Wilson. But discussing that would be too inconvenient.

Lawrence isn't arguing about action but rather intentions and world views.

Goldberg in each case either misstates or misunderstands the texts he claims to have read.