Charles Murray weighs in. It’s a thoughtful post, as one would expect. I’ll focus on the part that has to do with me, having had my say on the Beck and conservatism issues already. He writes, in part:

My reader—the one I’m talking to with every sentence—is a bright, reasonable person who doesn’t agree with me but comes to my text ready to give me a shot. My task is to get this reader to stick with me as we work through difficult questions. If I take a cheap shot at his point of view, I’m going to lose him. If I duck an obvious objection to the argument I’m making, I’m going to lose him.
I realize that this is a saccharine, maybe even a wussy, way of thinking about what I’m doing. And it’s more than a little elitist. But we live in a world where a majority of the best and brightest young people who are going to shape the culture leave college with a standard liberal view of the world. The contribution that people like Steve Hayward and Jonah Goldberg (and me too) can make is to get these people to take a fresh look. Doing that requires restraint. In Sunday’s article, Steve set up a sort of koan for thinking about this question when he wrote about Jonah:
About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present, it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.
Steve’s right, of course—the title sold a lot of books. He’s right about the serious book that Liberal Fascism really is. But he’s also right about the off-putting nature of the title. And so the question that Steve brought to my mind: what if I had entitled Losing Ground something like Liberal Cruelty? It probably would have sold a lot more than the meager 27,000 copies it actually sold on release. Would the book have had as much impact? That’s the koan. I’m sure Jonah can give me examples of people who did pick up Liberal Fascism even though they hated the title, but I’ll still bet he lost a lot of people who would have been deeply affected by his argument if they had read the book.

I understand the point Charles is making and I’ve been on all sides of the question myself over the last five years (though, frankly, I’ve always been more unsure about the cover art than the title). A few scattered thoughts in response.

First, it’s at least worth noting that the reaction to my book’s title pushes back against the grain of a pretty serious double standard. As I document in Liberal Fascism, the Left is perfectly comfortable asserting the fascistic nature of the Right. This tendency stems from convention, know-nothingism, arrogance, vestigial Marxism, and fellow-travelling, but also a pretty sizable body of bogus academic literature starting with Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, which says that the more you move to the classical liberal or traditionalist right in America, the closer you get to fascism. That’s partly why, for instance, Chris Hedges’s book, American Fascists, never received 1/1,000th the criticism mine did even though — I would argue — his thesis is more sweeping and his title less defensible and certainly more bigoted than mine (the Christian Right are fascists, full stop). It always seemed to me that given this climate that full-throated retort was warranted, particularly when the term Liberal Fascism has a serious historical grounding in the ideas of H. G. Wells (who called for “Liberal Fascism” or “Enlightened Nazism” to be the new banner for the left).

(By the way, I didn’t mean it as a “two wrongs make a right.” Rather, as I’ve written elsewhere, my real hope was to remove the word “fascist” from the public discourse. I failed miserably on that score.)

Indeed, there’s a funny irony here. One of the main reasons I started thinking about writing my book in the first place was that I was so appalled by the way the Left treated none other than Charles Murray himself. I was at AEI when The Bell Curve came out, and I was disgusted by the fact that one of the most libertarian policy experts in the country was being vilified as a neo-Nazi (Charles thinks the government is barely qualified to collect your garbage but, according to the Left he was just itching to round up people). I remember in particular the local news station in D.C. promoting a special segment on the book with footage from Nuremberg rallies. I don’t make any apologies for being offended by that sort of stuff and pushing back against it.

Second, while I certainly concede there’s a legitimate counter-argument, as Charles demonstrates, I’m not sure that marketing a book so that it will sell is such a grave sin, or even a sin at all. There’s a reason why we have that saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” after all.

It is an interesting koan, as Charles puts it, to ponder what might have been had I titled the book differently. I’m open to the idea that things might have been “better” in one sense or another. In fact, if I had the book to write over again, there are quite a few things I’d probably do differently. But that’s not to say I’m burdened with regret either. There’s a lot of clatter out there and a lot of deeply held and deeply wrong conventional wisdom. The title of the book reflected a best guess as to how break through all of that and given its success, I think I should count my blessings that the guess worked out as well as it did.

With that out of the way, Charles writes:

We are indeed engaged in a battle for America’s soul, but the way that battle is conducted makes a big difference. The goal—at least my goal, but I think it is Steve’s and Jonah’s as well—is not to elect a Republican majority to Congress. That’s not our job, and it’s not as if Republican congresses were so wonderful anyway. Our job is to engage in a debate on great issues and make converts to our point of view. The key word is converts—referring to people who didn’t start out agreeing with us. We shouldn’t be civil and reasonable just because we want to be nice guys. It is the only option we’ve got if we want to succeed instead of just posture. The Glenn Becks of the world posture, and make our work harder.

I think this is right on the big picture and open to debate on the finer points. I agree entirely that the purpose of conservatism is to persuade as many people as possible to become conservatives (feel free, for the sake of ecumenicism to replace “conservative” with “libertarian” or “classical liberal”). This was Buckley’s mission and it is my own as well. But one thing I think missing from Charles’s point is that, while converting liberals is a vital goal, equipping conservatives in that project is essential as well. That’s what National Review is for, after all (our circulation among liberals, open-minded or otherwise, is still regrettably small). On a grander scale, WFB made this point somewhere when talking about all of the disaffected whites who left the Democrats, loitered with Wallace, and then joined the GOP. Buckley was glad to have them aboard the U.S.S. Conservative, but he also believed they needed to undergo a mass conversion to conservative thinking as well.

It may be hard for Charles to determine the wheat-to-chaff ratio in Beck’s work. That’s fine. But it’s worth noting that Beck is getting generally conservative Americans to read about the founders and the progressives and whatnot. That’s important work too, and you’ll be hard pressed to find another TV host doing anything of the sort.

One of the reasons LF was so successful is that many conservatives craved something that could articulate what they already knew in their bones: that the National Socialists were socialists, and that faith in the Constitution and republican government, free-markets and individual liberty, traditional values and religion, are not hallmarks of fascism, but bulwarks against it. If I turned off more liberals than I otherwise would have with my title, that’s truly unfortunate (no sarcasm intended). But if by giving it that title I more effectively equipped conservatives to fend off the grotesque moral bullying involved in calling liberty-loving people Nazis, I think I can live with the trade-off.