William Voegeli, a scholar of impeccable conservative credentials, has joined Ryan’s battle in his book Never Enough, a searing indictment of what he calls the Hundred Years’ War between the party of more and the party of less. Voegeli argues that American voters (including most Republicans) will never fully eradicate the welfare state, because they don’t want to. Therefore, conservatives should make peace with the idea that the federal government should help the truly needy, while rejecting both the sorts of middle- and upper-class entitlements that are bankrupting the country and the kind of government “dole” that breeds bad habits among the poor and able-bodied.

Purist libertarians who see in this argument merely a surrender to liberalism should at least acknowledge that liberals would denounce any suggestion of means testing America’s safety net as cruel cutbacks and a violation of FDR’s “vision,” and that many voters would agree with them. Moreover, the current strategy hasn’t worked. We’ve had a century of nearly uninterrupted growth in the welfare state, even under Ronald Reagan. That alone recommends a new strategy.

I think there’s a fair amount of truth to that. It’s worth observing, however, that in terms of reaching some kind of consensus there’s a serious problem of trust and credibility. As best I can tell, David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel genuinely think it would be morally wrong for the government to, for example, turn its back on the basic health care needs of the poor. In the United States, by contrast, we have a long history of the conservative movement turning its back on ideas like Section 8 and the EITC and conservative politicians working overtime this week to force big cuts in Medicaid. And note that the very same conservative movement that’s working to slash health spending on the poor viciously criticized Barack Obama for trimming Medicare.

And it’s not just politicians, the United States is a large net importer of right-wing pundits, so you have your Charles Krauthammers and Veronique de Rugy’s coming to our fair shores and leaving things relatively moderate back home. The result is a conservative movement that’s programmed to whack programs for the poor at every turn—much more committed to hurting the poor than to cutting overall spending or reducing the deficit—with which it seems difficult to compromise. Or to look at it another way, the same Jonah Goldberg who’s today trying to convince conservatives to embrace a slimmed-down version of welfare state capitalism spent much of the past several years trying to convince Americans that the architects of the American welfare state share morally and politically substantial ties to the Nazis.

One of the funniest aspects of conservative thinking on issues of racial and ethnic justice is that they appear to actually not know what racism or bigotry actually are. Thus, NRO’s Kevin Williamson, who I was praising just yesterday today writes that I “should be considered a bigot” for having written that Jonah Goldberg and Eric Cantor get my goat in part because “there’s something unseemly about seeing fellow Jews turn into rightwingers.”

Williamson’s argument takes the form of a diatribe about how some people who aren’t me regard Clarence Thomas as inauthentically black, which I believe I’ve never done, followed by a challenge to engage in some Torah scholarship: “I’m no Torah scholar, it is true, so perhaps somebody could explain to me why being Jewish precludes a belief in limited government, individual rights, free enterprise, traditional morals and manners, etc.”

So to clarify what I was actually saying, it was just this. The problem with being a conservative isn’t that it contradicts Jewish precepts. The problem with being a conservative is that conservative ideology is mistaken and the conservative movement is pernicious. Which isn’t to say that conservatives are always wrong. Oftentimes individual conservatives write insightful articles, often on the subject of how the mainstream conservative take on something is mistaken (which it usually is). Just yesterday, for example, Williamson himself was pointing out that conservative tax policy is largely woven out of myths. But as a progressive, I think conservatives are wrong. Separately from that, I’m also Jewish. And as a Jew, I’m not immune to a bit of communal pride in the fact that Jews are overwhelmingly progressive and that very few Jews choose to sign up for the wrongheaded and pernicious conservative movement in the United States. But some Jews buck the trend and undermine my effort at communal pride, which I find annoying over-and-above the fact that conservatives are just wrong generally.

To draw an analogy, nobody should be eating bad bagels, but it’s especially sad when you see Jews do it.

Separately, Jonah Goldberg himself chimes in to be fake-dismissive of me pretending to “often go months without even thinking about the guy or hearing his name” when he mentioned me by name in his recent Commentary feature and again in his last BHTV appearance.

Jonah Goldberg mentions me as someone who agrees with him that Obama is a socialist, which I assume is a reference to the argument he made about me in Commentary. As I’ve previously noted I was (a) joking, and (b) talking about the possibility that Obama would do things that he has not, in fact, done.

I’m egomaniacal enough to keep tabs on what’s being said about me on the internet, so I’ve seen a ton of conservative blogs quote this section of a Jonah Goldberg article in Commentary purporting to vindicate the right’s “socialist” hits on Barack Obama:

The left-wing activist-blogger Matthew Yglesias, echoing the Obama White House view that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, said the Wall Street meltdown offered a “real opportunity” for “massive socialism.”

If you read the post in question, which was written in September of 2008, you’ll see two things. One is that the phrase “massive socialism” was used ironically. The other is that in the intervening 18 months, Barack Obama quite clearly has chosen not to attempt to seize the opportunity I was outlining. When faced with this kind of thing, one is initially tempted to ascribe to the dishonesty of one’s opponents but it’s pretty clear if you follow the Goldberg ouvre over the years that he really is this dumb.

Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

Ginsburg is saying that her perception of the situation in 1980 is that there was a lot of concern on the right about Bell Curve-style dysgenics and that, therefore, insofar as folks were willing to tolerate legal abortion at all they would welcome Medicaid-funded abortions for poor people. But she was wrong. Jonah Goldberg decides, however, to read this as Ginsburg making the case for eugenics and then writes an LA Times column denouncing her and wondering if fellow liberal fascist Sonia Sotomayor is also hatching a eugenicist plot.

Now this all comes to me via Isaac Chotiner who remarks:

This leads to a more interesting topic. I had a drink with a conservative writer in Washington a while back who rolled his eyes at the mention of Goldberg’s book. My drinking buddy stated that he and many other conservatives believed ‘Liberal Fascism’ was rather amusing and ridiculous. I was heartened–behind Goldberg’s back, after all, even staunch right-wingers thought his thesis was a joke. But then it occured to me that the joke might be on the rest of us. Goldberg is a rather clever guy, and so I chalk up his decision to write ‘Liberal Fascism’ to purely financial motives. This column is just more evidence for my thesis. Again, Goldberg is not stupid; what are the odds that he happened to (grossly) misread a column in a manner that perfectly fits with the argument of his book? Hell, maybe he will even sell a few more copies today. Throwing away one’s credibility might be short-sighted or sad, but who says it is not profitable?

I think this is dead wrong. Goldberg is stupid.

My understanding from my own off-the-record chats with conservative writers is that Liberal Fascism was published for pecuniary reasons. Goldberg’s editor, in other words, understood that this was the sort of red meat the rubes would eat up. But the gossip I’ve heard has it that he was then taken aback to discover that Goldberg didn’t see the project that way. He’s sufficiently vainglorious, out of touch, and egomaniacal that he really does think of the book as a “very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care” and genuinely takes offense at the fact that people are grappling with his scholarship.

Recall his indignant huff that his book “isn’t like any Ann Coulter book.” It is! And just like some of Coulter’s work, it’s sold a lot of copies. But he really sees himself as embarked upon a more ambitious project than that of base-whipping provocateur.