By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 15th, 2012 
This time it was in a Connecticut elementary school, not very far from my home. The local and national news together are overwhelmingly depressing. I feel despair and powerless: such brutality, and Americans have kept on arming themselves, with support for gun control diminishing.
Why? Perhaps it is because too many of us confuse fictions with facts? On this issue the NRA view of the world seems to dominate. Consider this blast from Deliberately Considered’s past, the story of a preteen sharpshooter defending her home in Butte Montana. Gun advocates make up there own facts to justify their position that guns yield personal and public safety.
A fact free world provides the grounds upon which outrageous judgments are made. Charles Blow cited one today:
“Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, wasted no time trying to pin Friday’s shooting on gun control advocates. ThinkProgress quoted a statement of his that read, in part: ‘Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to ensure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.’ ”
How is it possible for someone to imagine let alone utter such words? Following their logic, and the sort of pseudo-evidence it is based on, “the fictoid from out west,” perhaps the answer to school violence is arming kindergarten kids. David Frum, indeed, in a tweet sarcastically declared: “Shooting at CT elementary school. Obviously, we need to lower the age limit for concealed carry so toddlers can defend themselves.”
And then there is the magical power of prayer. Mike Huckabee: “We ask why there’s violence in our schools but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would . . .
Read more: Another Day, Another Gun Massacre
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 16th, 2012 
I believe that the victory of truth over truthiness is the most important result of the elections last week. The victory is beautifully documented in Frank Rich’s latest piece in New York Magazine. In my judgment, the defeat of truthiness is even more important than the victory of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney and the victory of the Democratic Party over the Republicans, important though these are. A sound relationship between truth and politics will provide for the possibility of American governability and progress, informed by both progressive and conservative insights.
To be sure, on the issues, foreign and domestic, and on various public policies, the differences between the two presidential candidates and their two parties were stark, clearly apparent now as the parties position themselves for the fiscal cliff. Yet, these differences pail in comparison to the importance of basing our political life on factual truths, (as I analyzed here) instead of convenient fictions (fictoids), and on careful principled (of the left and the right) judgments and not the magical ideological thinking offered by market and religious fundamentalists (as I also previously examined) and by various xenophobes and racists (who promise to take their country back).
Stephen Colbert, the great political philosopher and public intellectual, the leading expert on truthiness, disguised as a late night comic, has most clearly illuminated the truth challenge in his regular reports. His tour de force, in this regard, was his address to the White House press corps in George W. Bush’s presence. But now it no longer takes a brave comic genius to highlight the problem. Republican and conservative responses to election polling and results provide the evidence, both negative and positive.
Though the polls clearly predicted an Obama victory, it is noteworthy that the Republican leaders and their advisers really didn’t see the defeat coming. They operated in an ideological bubble, which facts did not penetrate. Now they must (more on their alternative courses in our next post by Aron Hsiao on Monday).
After . . .
Read more: Truth Defeats Truthiness: Election 2012
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 24th, 2012 
In the past week, I have published in Deliberately Considered and posted on my Facebook page a series of reflections on the implications of the nomination of Paul Ryan as Vice Presidential candidate of the Republican Party. And I have explained that the basis of my understanding of the present situation is a conservative insight concerning the dangers of ideological thought. The replies have been quite illuminating. The discussion starts with an interesting American irony: amusing, perhaps more.
Ryan’s nomination, I believe, assures the re-election of President Obama. The basis of my belief is a judgment that Americans generally are guided by a conservative insight, an American suspicion of ideological thought. Conservative insight defeats the conservative ticket.
Yet, on the intellectual front, there are few conservative thinkers who would illuminate this. Exceptions? Andrew Sullivan, perhaps also David Frum. (Anyone else?) But because these two are so guided, few, if any, conservatives recognize them as comrades in thought.
Aron Hsiao in a reply to one of my posts on conservative intellectuals explains the factors involved:
“The essence of the moment is that the mainstream demographic blocs of the Right have, as an ideological move, adopted anti-intellectualism as a central tenet of conservatism. Any marriage of democratic practice and political epistemology at the moment therefore precludes the conservative intellectual; if someone is intellectual in the slightest, the Right will disown him/her. They are the oft-maligned “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only). To make matters worse, any intellectual at the moment of any value is loathe to be associated with the totality of the present (i.e. recent form of the) conservative project in America and thus tends to gravitate toward the (D) party. My suspicion is that rationally informed self-selection (they have careers and statuses, after all) results in a state of affairs in which few serious intellectuals can be found in the (R) party…”
Aside from the way he uses the term ideology, I agree completely with Hsiao. The implications are indeed scary. I explained my understanding in my last . . .
Read more: Reflections on an Irony of American Conservatism: More on the Ryan Nomination
By Paul E. Gottfried, February 23rd, 2012 
As someone who for decades has been kept out of the media-manipulated political conversation and who has had none of his many books reviewed in the mainstream press, despite being published by Cambridge, Princeton and other prestigious presses, I regard my presence in this forum as the equivalent of gate-crashing. Having said that, I see no reason why those who ignore me should want to treat me any better in the future. I have shown my contempt for their orchestrated discussions on whom or what is “conservative.” For thirty years I have argued that the Left enjoys the prerogative of choosing its “conservative” debating partners in the US and in other Western “liberal democracies.” Those it dialogues with are more similar to the gatekeepers, sociologically and ideologically, than they are to those who, like me, have been relegated to the “extreme (read non-cooperative) Right.” At this point I have no objections to creating new categories for “gay conservatives,” “transvestite reactionaries” or any other group the New York Times or National Review decides to reach out to. I consider the terms “conservative” and “liberal” to be empty decoration. They adorn a trivial form of discussion, diverting attention from the most significant political development of our time, namely the replacement of the Marxist by the PC Left.
While the American Right was once geared to fight the “Communist” threat, today’s “conservatives” (yes I am inserting quotation marks for obvious reasons) have capitulated to the post-Communist Left (to which in this country an anachronistic nineteenth-century designation “liberal” has been arbitrarily ascribed). The “conservative movement” happily embraces the heroes and issues of yesterday’s Left, from the cult of Martin Luther King to the defense of “moderate feminism” and Irving Kristol’s confected concept of the “democratic capitalist welfare state” to David Frum’s and Ross Douthat’s praise for gay marriage as a “family value.” When our conservative journalists and talking heads are not engaging in such value-discourses, they do what comes even more naturally, shilling for the GOP. Conservatism and whatever the GOP may be doing at a particular moment to scare up votes have . . .
Read more: The Right vs. Conservatives vs. The Left
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 17th, 2012 
I keep trying to find conservative contributors, without much success. Perhaps this is not an accident, but a consequence of the nature of the conservative mind. Thinking about my experience, and reading Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, gets me wondering.
Sure, when I asked in my last post, where are the conservative intellectuals, there were a number of sensible suggestions. Michael Corey pointed to a conservative institution of higher learning, Hillsdale College, and Regina Tuma and Lisa reminded me that there are some individuals, self-identified as conservatives, who are worth reading, David Frum and Andrew Sullivan (though if I am not mistaken, Sullivan has recently publicly renounced his identification with the label, given its crazy turns in recent years).
But I am looking for debate and for intellectual power, which forces me to pay attention and question my commitments, looking for committed conservatives that require respect. I have been reaching out to some conservative professors, with no success thus far. And while Frum is occasionally interesting, he is not really challenging, and Sullivan is fleeing from conservative orthodoxy. He is hard to pigeonhole. Perhaps that’s a hint of where I should go, seek “un-gated contributors.” Indeed, that is what I often do, as the editor of Deliberately Considered and in my reading, writing and teaching.
Over on my Facebook page, some friends have suggested that I may be delusional in my search for conservative contributors. One friend declared, “You are a Diogenes for our time, although with worse odds.” Another asked “Where is Ann Coulter when you need her?” Another wondered, “Are you going to play with necromancy?”
I realize that these ironic remarks imply a serious judgment. Perhaps, there is something fundamentally problematic with the conservative position, and that, therefore, my search is mistaken. Could it be that serious reflection on the events of the day shouldn’t include those on the right? Could it be that the center has shifted so far to the right that those who are now called conservatives are in fact beyond the pale of intellectual interest . . .
Read more: The Conservative Mind = The Reactionary Mind?
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