Everything Is Like Everything Else
(posted by Daniel Koffler)
Others have already commented extensively on the inanity of Jonah Goldberg’s suggestion that Barack Obama’s call for high school and college students to perform community service runs afoul of the 13th Amendment — you know, that one that made it illegal to buy and sell people who look like Barack Obama. Not only is likening compulsory community service to slavery embarrassingly ignorant in the abstract, in reality, Obama is not proposing anything like direct compulsion of students, but rather offering a tax credit to schools that make community service a part of their graduation requirements. So it might be entertaining to see Goldberg field a few follow-up questions, like, say, does mandatory school for all American children violate the 13th Amendment? Are core curricula, if not exactly like chattel slavery, then on a relevant continuum? Where, for that matter, do parental notification laws put us on the road to serfdom? How about mandatory childhood vaccinations? Feel free to come up with your own.
But really, asking a clown like Goldberg to think through the philosophical consequences of his stated positions is quite beside the point. He has no ideas of his own, nor any tools for analyzing and connecting the ideas of others, apart from what John Holbo, capturing the entire Goldberg corpus succinctly, called “the two-step of terrific triviality“:
Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face. With luck, you will be able to generate the mistaken impression that you haven’t been knocked flat, by rights. As a result, the thing that you said which was absurdly strong will appear to have some obscure grain of truth in it. Even though you have provided no reason to think so.
It applies so seamlessly to Goldberg’s every utterance (see the example that occasioned Holbo’s post, for starters). Is there something prima facie objectionable about compulsory national service? Sure, and we can debate whether those prima facie objections are decisive. Is compulsory national service like chattel slavery in any relevant sense? No, and it would be idiotic to say so. Are there overlaps between modern American welfare liberalism and fascism? Indeed, just as there are overlaps between fascism and every ideology that has ever existed. Do those overlaps for a moment suggest a worrying connection between modern American welfare liberalism and fascism? No, and it’s insane to think so. Everything is like everything else.
Now Goldberg is hardly the only person to argue for the absurd by means of the terrible two-step — it’s a stock-in-trade of glibertarianism, naturally — but he has made something of an art of it, and so I propose naming a corollary to Godwin’s law after Goldberg: As a propagandistic hack runs out of cogent arguments against his partisan opponents, the probability that he will make a risible comparison between them and some historical atrocity approaches 1.
One last point: the incredible thing about Goldberg’s buffoonery is how vulnerable he is to his own brand of delusional bad faith. Take Goldberg’s argument that implanting American ideals by force in a radically different cultural milieu was a worthy cause that was poorly executed. Now substitute “American” with “German.” Does the parallel make Goldberg relevantly similar to a Nazi? Of course not, that’s a preposterous suggestion. But by Goldberg’s lights, it does. Likewise for countless other arguments Goldberg has made. Likewise, also, for countless arguments I’ve made and you’ve made. If Goldberg is right about liberalism in general and Obama in particular, everyone in the world is alarmingly Nazi-ish. But people who laugh away due process rights, restrictions on unjust imprisonment and torture, and fundamental checks on government power as “legal niceties” are in a particularly inauspicious position to deny that they are at least this much fascistic according to Jonah Goldberg. See also here.
People frequently tell me that Ann Coulter is just a performance artist. Any chance that’s what’s going on with Goldberg?
(h/t: Jesse Taylor)
Tags: idiocy, Jonah Goldberg
July 8th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
So it might be entertaining to see Goldberg field a few follow-up questions, like, say, does mandatory school for all American children violate the 13th Amendment?
Now that is getting closer to a violation, at least when we realize that people up to age 17, more or less, are compelled to attend. These ought to be considered sovereign adults IMHO. People of this age were considered adults in the time of slavery, were they not?
I know I didn’t want to be in high school. What a waste of time.
The draft would come even closer to a violation. I’ve heard it theorized that people don’t liken the draft to slavery because it’s forced labor on behalf of “the people”, and not just that crusty evil person.
I understand your argument that everything is related to everything else when considered broadly enough, but obviously there are times when we reject comparisons due to pure convention and popularly repeated claims of “Oh, it’s not the same!”.
If anything the soft coercion of cradle to grave “molding” of citizens is creepy, if nothing like slavery in the sense of the chained and beaten.
July 9th, 2008 at 1:08 am
Does mandatory school for all American children violate the 13th Amendment?
When you consider the psychological abuse that many students suffer during middle school and high school, I think a very strong case could be made that mandatory “schooling” is a gross violation of liberty. Corralling the teenagers of a town and locking them into a Lord of the Flies day care center is simply an insane policy.
July 9th, 2008 at 7:27 am
“Corralling the teenagers of a town and locking them into a Lord of the Flies day care center is simply an insane policy.”
Yeah, even before I became a libertarian, I noticed that the Lord of the Flies was much more “intuitive” to me when I was in high school than it was ever since.