Jonah’s book has provided a useful new prism through which to view the world.

[Tuesday morning update]

Jonah says that “progressives” should be careful what they wish for, and understand their history a little better:

Today’s progressives still share many of the core assumptions of the progressives of yore. It may be gauche to talk about patriotism too much in liberal circles, but what is Barack Obama’s obsession with unity other than patriotism by another name? Indeed, he champions unity for its own sake, as a good in and of itself. But unity can be quite amoral. Mobs and gangs are dangerous because of their unblinking unity.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, often insists that we must move “beyond” ideology, labels, partisanship, etc. The sentiment is a direct echo of the Pragmatists who felt that dogma needed to be jettisoned to give social planners a free hand. Of course, then as now, the “beyond ideology” refrain is itself an ideological position favoring whatever state intervention social planners prefer.

A key point of the book, that many on the left miss, is that Hitler gave fascism a bad name. Up until all the racism and the genocide and the war mongering, they were all on board with the Nazi project. When mindless and ignorant leftists mistakenly call classical liberals “fascists,” they’re not calling them as bad a name as they seem to believe. Which is a good thing, because it is their own beliefs that are truly fascistic.