A friend, vexed by Tomasky review, offers this addendum to an earlier venting of annoyance:
Another thought occurred to me about his “house organ of fascism” crack. He admits you pull out two or three dozen quotes—he implies you cherry pick, but we know you don’t. The fact that he’s taking to the pages of The New Republic to defend it against, well, its former self, is of a piece with the American left’s sentiment that their ideas are somehow ahistorical, abstract products of pure reason. Their amnesia—willful or not—is one of the principal objects of your book. You’re shouting at the good ship Progress, Look at where your ideas came from and can take you! Careful, here be dragons! And they’re saying, Look at this kook dragging out these dusty old history books! Anti-intellectual, anti-rational, anti-historical, and derived near as I can tell from a deadly combination of ignorance and moral arrogance. They’re always arrogating themselves the high ground without ever bothering to look at what the last generation of people who were that in love with their own goodness did. “Of course we need universal health-care!” (Just like we needed the Great Society! And the New Deal! And the Fourteen Points!)