From a reader:*

J-Go–first off, just got the note from National Review World Headquarters telling me the autographed book is on the way. Thanks hugely! Really looking forward to getting my sweaty mitts on the goldbergian goodness. Anyway, I wanted to offer a thought about why the left finds your book baffling and insulting. It may be covered in your book (I’ll see soon enough!), but I just wanted to toss it to you and see what you think. My thought is, many well-intentined but not well-read liberals vaguely define the past as “right-wing” and the future as “left-wing”. If they look at any figure in the past, even one they otherwise admire and respect, and find they disagree with him about something, they can just comfortably say, “Well, since he was in the past, he’s going to have some unpleasant right-wing aspects. If he lived nowadays, he’d know better about X.” I’ve found that if I, for example, ask a liberal friend what Martin Luther King would’ve thought about gay marriage (or guess what he probably thought about abortion), they view the question as being vaguely offensive. Their attitude seems to be that, well, he probably had the wrong views about that, because he had the misfortune to live when everyone had the wrong views about that–if he lived today, of course he’d be for gay marriage. So when you point out that, say, FDR or Wilson had racist views or supported oppressive policies, it feels like trickery to them. Their response is, in essence, “Because they lived in the Past (the time of right-wingness) we have to expect some little bits of Right-Wingness to show up”. Everything good about Wilson shows that he was a progressive; everything bad about him is due, not to his proressive ideology, but to the fact that having lived Earlier, he is going to be right-wing in some areas. The irony, of course, is that those figures were often at their worst precisely when they were trying to be most “progressive”, most different from their era. Wilson didn’t outlaw critcism of his policies because that’s what government was like at the time–he did it because that’s how the new, enlightened state ought to work. Outlawing dissent wasn’t “reactionary”, it was, to his mind, progress. Anyway, that’s my thought. Whaddya think? Old ground to you, I’m sure. —
Andrew Solovay

Me: I think this is exactly right. This comes up several times in my book. Below are a couple examples. From page 22 of the book:

One objection to all of this might be: So what? It’s interesting in
a counterintuitive way to learn that a bunch of dead liberals and progressives
thought this or that, but what does it have to do with liberals
today? Two responses come to mind. The first is admittedly not
fully responsive. Conservatives in America must carry their intellectual
history—real and alleged—around their necks like an albatross.
The ranks of elite liberal journalism and scholarship swell with intrepid
scribblers who point to “hidden histories” and “disturbing
echoes” in the conservative historical closet. Connections with dead
right-wingers, no matter how tenuous and obscure, are trotted out as
proof that today’s conservatives are continuing a nefarious project.
Why, then, is it so trivial to point out that the liberal closet has its
own skeletons, particularly when those skeletons are the architects of
the modern welfare state?
Which raises the second response. Liberalism, unlike conservatism,
is operationally uninterested in its own intellectual history.
But that doesn’t make it any less indebted to it. Liberalism stands on
the shoulders of its own giants and thinks its feet are planted firmly
on the ground. Its assumptions and aspirations can be traced straight
back to the Progressive Era, a fact illustrated by the liberal tendency
to use the word “progressive” whenever talking about its core convictions
and idea-generating institutions (the Progressive magazine,
the Progressive Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress,
and so on). I am simply fighting on a battleground of liberalism’s
choosing. Liberals are the ones who’ve insisted that conservatism
has connections with fascism. They are the ones who claim freemarket
economics are fascist and that therefore their own economic
theories should be seen as the more virtuous, even though the truth
is almost entirely the reverse.

And from page 246:

When reading the literature on the subjects of eugenics and race,
one commonly finds academics blaming eugenics on “conservative”
tendencies within the scientific, economic, or larger Progressive
communities. Why? Because according to liberals, racism is objectively
conservative. Anti-Semitism is conservatism. Hostility to the
poor (that is, social Darwinism) is conservative. Therefore, whenever
a liberal is racist or fond of eugenics, he is magically transformed
into a conservative. In short, liberalism is never morally
wrong, and so when liberals are morally flawed, it’s because they’re
really conservatives!
In an otherwise thoughtful essay in the New Republic, the Yale
historian and professor of surgery Sherwin Nuland writes:
Eugenics was a creed that appealed to social conservatives,
who were pleased to blame poverty and crime on heredity.
Liberals—or progressives, as they were then usually called—
were among its most vigorous opponents, considering the inequities
of society to be due to circumstantial factors amenable
to social and economic reform. And yet some progressive
thinkers agreed with the eugenicists that the lot of every citizen
would be improved by actions that benefited the entire group.
Thus were the intellectual battle lines drawn.
Alan Wolfe, also in the New Republic, writes: “Racial conservatism
has its roots in biological and eugenicist thought. Liberal theories
of racial damage, by contrast, grew out of a twentieth-century
concern with the impact of social environments on individuals.”
How convenient. Alas, this is simply untrue…..

* Note I included the readers name because he said in the email it was okay with him. I never divulge readers’ names without permission.