Okay, I’ve given it a very quick read. I’ll probably do a point by point a bit later. Although I kind of feel like it’s a waste of my time given that there doesn’t appear to be a single new point or criticism in it. It feels a bit like he just aggregated the greatest hits of the leftwing blogosphere. But there’s one point I think merits a response now. Tomasky (much like Tim Noah and Matt Yglesias) uses a debater’s trick of sorts by basically saying there’s nothing new in the book and everybody who knows anything about liberalism knew all of this stuff already.

This is, quite simply, untrue. And, moreover, I am tempted to say it borders on a kind of lie. Tim Noah’s “there’s nothing new here” approach was the sort of hackish dishonesty I expected from him. But I’m more disappointed in Tomasky, whom I respect a lot more. I don’t think Tomasky’s necessarily being dishonest, but he is being highly selective.

Recall, that not long ago he ticked off the lefty blogosphere for lamenting that John Edwards didn’t know very much and he even published a political history quiz, ostensibly because he felt that there are certain minimal things liberals should know — and don’t.

More revealing to me — and hence more disappointing — is that Tomasky specifically told me that he agrees with me in my long running critique of liberalism (which amounts to a major theme of my book) that liberals are deracinated from their own intellectual history. This was a bugaboo of mine in the Corner several years ago and Tomasky told me more than once that he found it sufficiently persuasive to prompt him to hire Mark Schmitt to write about liberal intellectual history for The American Prospect, precisely because Tomasky felt that so many liberals don’t know jack about liberalism (I even discussed this with Schmitt on Bloggingheads if memory serves).

Tomasky may in fact be precisely the sort of liberal who rejects the fascistic or collectivist strains in contemporary liberalism. But it is silly, hypocritical and has the appearance of dishonesty for him to speak of “liberalism” and how I know “nothing” about it. The liberalism he defends is not liberalism as lived in America. Indeed, by his own account, most self-described liberals have little association or understanding with the (allegedly) grand intellectual project he is defending. The notion that the typical liberal — or even the average well-educated one — knows the history I’ve laid out in my book is complete and reckless nonsense. Indeed, if liberals know the history I’ve laid out, I wouldn’t have so many quotes from liberals getting their own history so spectacularly wrong.

So either Tomasky et al are wrong when they suggest that everyone on the left knows this stuff, or they are right and vast swaths of American liberals are outright liars for not publicly admitting and grappling with their own history.

But I know they are wrong because I know many serious and important liberals who do not know that Progressivism was steeped in eugenics, that Progressives were imperialist jingoists, that the editors of The New Republic, the muckrakers, and vast swaths of American liberalism were pro-Mussolini, that Woodrow Wilson made Joseph McCarthy look like the Spokesman for the People for the American Way, that the New Deal prolonged the Depression and was crafted by men who admired both Fascism and Bolshevism and sought to restore Woodrow Wilson war socialism, and on an on and on. (Heck, when Ron Radosh says he learned anything new from an intellectual history of the left, it’s just plain dumb to say there’s nothing new in it).

Moreover, I know that Tomasky knows that the vast majority of his fellow liberals don’t know this, which is why I find his everyone-knows-this-stuff dismissal so profoundly lame.

Lastly, Tomasky should ponder something. If, as he agreed when he wasn’t playing hatchet man, that liberals are ignorant of their own intellectual history, does it make much sense to talk about real-world liberalism as anything more than a collection of passions and impulses? If you don’t know where your ideas comes from, isn’t possible that they aren’t really ideas at all? Perhaps they are merely vague opinions, reflexes and prejudices? And if that’s the case, if liberalism is merely an agglomeration of passions and knee-jerk popular frontism, dictated by a majority of the crowd, isn’t it possible that there’s something a bit fascistic to liberalism after all?