A guy who wrote a book declaring that liberals were the source of all evil in the world since 1915 attempts to make the case that the left is just as paranoid and crazy as the right.
Now, Jonah attacks several members of the left (and “the Left”, that mythical organization of baby-killing death machines who have molotov cocktails behind their “No Blood for Oil” signs). He calls out Naomi Wolf, I’m sure because she wrote a book on fascism rather than flip through a World Book encyclopedia from 1967 and figure out a way to call every Democrat in it a fascist. He compares Rosie O’Donnell - whose major ideological impact on leftism was The View, which would in turn make Elizabeth Hasselbeck the 21st century’s Barry Goldwater - to Michael Savage, despite Savage having had a mainstream political talk show, a handful of bulk-sold conservative bestsellers and, for a brief time, a prominent voice in actual conservative thought. Of course, it’s easy for Jonah to dismiss Michael Savage when his own magazine has theorized that Savage is a liberal agent provacateur.
Which is totally not paranoid.
He also delves down into a retracted claim by Randall Robinson and throws in Ward Churchill for good measure. The real problem that he has, though, is this:
The real problem is that the liberal establishment, starting with Hofstadter and Adorno, have perfected the art of proclaiming paranoia or populism they don’t like as “right-wing” when — often, but not always — there’s nothing right-wing about it.
There’s a very simple reason why there’s “nothing right-wing about it”: conservatives reserve the right at any time to declare that anything which embarrasses them is, in fact, not conservative but instead invariably liberal. Jonah’s actually the sterling example of this - Liberal Fascism is a few hundred interminably stupid pages of him declaring that conservatism is incapable of evil, which therefore makes all evil liberal in nature. Having such a reactionary, formless ideology makes you inherent paranoid, and drastically more so than the left. There’s little that conservatism believes which isn’t ultimately a response to something that someone else wants to change. There’s a reason that there’s a substantial conservative movement dedicated to the idea that the President of the United States is a Kenyan/Indonesian sleeper agent. There’s a reason that the major policy freakouts of the right over the past two months have been about the Fairness Doctrine and card check; that their modern-day heroes, from Joe the Plumber to Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh all share a common thread of victimization by their own stupidity (which is never their fault): conservatism thrives on paranoia in a decidedly mainstream fashion.
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I don’t know the context for the part you block-quoted and I don’t want to know, but the idea of calling Theodor Adorno part of the “liberal establishment” is hye-fucking-larious.