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marketplace; his views are just another impulse buy, like the potato chips near the cash register. The commercial imperatives of the Gut restrict the crank’s ability to allow his ideas to grow, lushly and wildly, to their fullest extent, and they deprive us of the crank’s traditional value. In exchange, the Gut becomes the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America.
    We hold these truths to be self-evident.
    The First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
    In her book,
The Age of American Unreason
, Susan Jacoby mercilessly lampoons the very American notion that, because there are two sides to every question, both deserve respect and both must, in some way, be true. The Gut tells us that this is only fair, and we are a fair people, after all. All one has to do is muster an argument with enough vigor, package it well, and get enough people to buy both the idea and the productthrough which it is expressed. The more people buy, the more correct you are. The barriers that once forced American cranks to adapt or withdraw—or even merely to defend—their ideas all have fallen. It is considered impolite to raise them again, almost un-American, since we are all entitled to our opinion.
    “The much lionized American centrists, sometimes known as moderates,” Jacoby writes, “are in no way immune to the overwhelming pull of belief systems that treat evidence as a tiresome stumbling block to deeper, instinctive ‘ways of knowing.’”
    Two of America’s best-selling authors present a good case study in what Jacoby is talking about. In 2008, a conservative writer named Jonah Goldberg shook up the best-seller list with the publication of his
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
Apparently written with a paint roller, Goldberg’s book is a lugubrious slog through a history without reliable maps, a pre-Columbian wilderness of the mind where, occasionally, events have to have their hearts ripped out of all context and waved on high to the pagan god of the unblinking sun.
    The book is little more than a richly footnoted loogie hawked by Goldberg at every liberal who ever loosely called him a fascist. In that capacity, if not as history, it is completely successful. There are people who too blithely toss around the concept of fascism. Some of his gibes at liberalism are funny. If he had stuck with them, Goldberg would have stood as tall and as proud as any American crank before him. He even would have made just as much money.
    Alas, his vengeful turgidity insisted on the conventional historical validity of its central premise—namely, that fascism is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the political left. Before Goldberg happened upon it, this provocative theory had eluded almost every serious student of fascism, including Mussolini. Atone point, though, Goldberg seems confused about whom he’s arguing with, and he winds up quarreling with the voices in his head:
    It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian—or “holistic,” if you prefer—in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outward appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend “nontraditional” beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a “Third Way” between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices