Whoa! This is intense! Emerald Robinson said mean things about Jonah Goldberg and Michael Doran1 said she was “brilliant” and Jonah said no she wasn’t and so Michael said mean things about Jonah and then Jonah said mean things back and there you are.
Well, if you have the patience to wade through all of this faux earnest, dispassionate analysis and still keep your wits about you (no easy task), you’ll come to the heart of the matter—Mike’s “brilliant” tweet, which apparently pushed Jonah over the edge: “Brilliant analysis from @EmeraldRobinson of the collapse of Never-Trumpers | “the conservative intellectuals didn’t understand the base’s concerns about religious liberty b/c they hardly cared for religion — which should have disqualified them long ago”
Got that? The trouble with Jonah’s crowd is that “they hardly cared for religion”—that is to say, they hardly cared for Jesus. In Mike’s reply to Jonah he repeatedly accuses Jonah of being a “cosmopolitan conservative”. Well, as anyone who knows the history of Soviet anti-Semitism knows, after World War II Stalin began setting up another purge, this time against “rootless cosmopolitans”, who somehow all turned out to be Jews. In fact, this was one of the classic assaults on Jews from the anti-Semitic right as well—that they weren’t loyal to “the nation”.
Doran generally plays it straight in his (long) piece, “confessing” to have been a cosmopolitan conservative himself, though now he’s seen the light—and though his god is Trump rather than Jesus. Doran doesn’t say anything about his own religion, but he does throw an absurd curve ball at Goldberg, saying that in Goldberg’s new book Suicide of the West Goldberg idealizes what he calls “classical liberalism” and sees in Ronald Reagan’s years in office the culmination and climax of the ideal. ”To borrow a phrase from Islam,” says Doran, “Reagan is ‘the seal of the prophets’ of classical liberalism.” Yes, because two-fisted American he-men borrow so many phrases from Islam.
Yeah, if I were a Jewish neocon like Jonah I’d be nervous too. Because Jews are pretty good at reading the handwriting on the wall, and the handwriting is saying “Get out, you lousy stinking Jew.” Jonah, you’ve seen this movie. Time to move on.
Afterwords
I discussed the earlier phases of this dustup here. This new cycle suggests to me that what really got Jonah going in the first place was the fact that Doran used the word “brilliant” to describe Robinson’s religious sneer and then in his own piece continued the assault in a more coded manner. Doran’s overall “moral” is that anyone who criticizes Trump in any way is an “objective Democrat” (my quotation marks) and therefore pretty much a traitor to Donald, who is more or less God. The rest of his piece is pseudo-scholarly piffle, mixed with a sordid dose of Trumpian conspiracy mongering.
- “Who he?” as Harold Ross would say. ↩︎
