{"id":4923,"date":"2017-12-27T12:55:22","date_gmt":"2017-12-27T12:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/12\/27\/paul-gottfried-on-david-gordon-and-right-wing-celebrity-authors\/"},"modified":"2017-12-27T12:55:22","modified_gmt":"2017-12-27T12:55:22","slug":"paul-gottfried-on-david-gordon-and-right-wing-celebrity-authors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/12\/27\/paul-gottfried-on-david-gordon-and-right-wing-celebrity-authors\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Gottfried on David Gordon and Right-Wing Celebrity Authors"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is fun to play the public intellectual and drop the names of authors whose works one has never read with care. And it is very easy to get out beyond one's depth.  At the moment I am thinking of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and to a lesser extent, Rod Dreher. Their commentarial confidence  is sometimes out of proportion to their competence.  Gottfried, praising and drawing upon Gordon, here<\/a> lays into Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

He also targets Dinesh D'Souza and Dennis Prager:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Perhaps one of the most ludicrous examples of the conservative movement\u2019s recent attempt at being sophisticated was an exchange of equally uninformed views by talk show host Dennis Prager and Dinesh D\u2019Souza, on the subject of the fascist worldview<\/a>. The question was whether one could prove that fascism was a leftist ideology by examining the thought of Mussolini\u2019s court philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944). Gentile defined the \u201cfascist idea\u201d in his political writings while serving as minister of education in fascist Italy. He was also not incidentally one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century; and in works like General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act, adapts the thought of Hegel to his own theory of evolving national identity. It would be hard to summarize Gentile\u2019s thought in a few pithy sentences; and, not surprisingly, the Canadian historian of philosophy H.S. Harris devotes a book<\/a> of many hundreds of pages trying to explain his complex philosophical speculation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hey, but that\u2019s no big deal for such priests of the GOP church as Prager and D\u2019Souza. They zoom to the heart of Gentile\u2019s neo-Hegelian worldview in thirty seconds and state with absolute certainty that he was a \u201cleftist.\u201d We have to assume that Prager, D\u2019Souza and the rest of their crowd know this intuitively, inasmuch they give no indication of having ever read a word of Gentile\u2019s thought, perhaps outside of a few phrases that they extracted from his Doctrine of Fascism. Their judgment also clashes with that of almost all scholars of Gentile\u2019s work, from across the political spectrum, who view him, as I do in my study of fascism, as the most distinguished intellectual of the revolutionary right.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That's the scholar talking. I agree. But let me say a word in defense of Prager & Co.  They reach people. They have influence. Who has heard of Paul Gottfried? Me and five other guys. I exaggerate, but in the direction of an important truth.   <\/span><\/p>\n

Or take Limbaugh. One day he demonstrated his ignorance of the concept of negative rights. But so what given  that politics is a practical game the purpose of which is to defeat opponents and remove them from power?<\/span><\/p>\n

And then there is the much-hated Trump. You say he has the vocabulary of  a 13-year-0ld? That he is obnoxious and unpresidential? I agree. But he defeated ISIS. (And accomplished a dozen other important things in his first year in office.) Did Obama defeat ISIS? Would Hillary have? Of course not. She couldn't bring herself to utter the words 'radical Islamic terrorist.'<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is fun to play the public intellectual and drop the names of authors whose works one has never read with care. And it is very easy to get out beyond one's depth.  At the moment I am thinking of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and to a lesser extent, Rod Dreher. Their commentarial confidence  … Continue reading “Paul Gottfried on David Gordon and Right-Wing Celebrity Authors”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-social-and-political-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}