Oh look, a squabble between Jonah Goldberg and David Brooks, a Hi-Powered Titanic Intellectual Clash that offers all the fast-paced drama of a kickboxing match between the Michelin Man and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. How exciting! What compelling, wily antagonists: David Brooks believes, incorrectly, that he is a sociologist; Jonah Goldberg believes, in his case correctly, that his silly book has made an Important Contribution to Serious Scholarship. (True story. It’s reminded Serious Scholars that when right wing dingbats like Jonah Goldberg write books, they’re full of mendacious halfwit crap.)

Goldberg huffs and puffs and blows his ass round because Brooks said that “There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers…. But the similarities are more striking than the differences.” This is typical airhead punditry — “admire my striking thesis that sounds profound if we all agree not to think about it,” and it’s pretty transparently designed to bolster the pretense that there exists such a thing as Thoughtful Conservatism as distinguishable from the incoherent loutishness of the Tea Baggers, and that therefore David Brooks still deserves to get paid and go on NPR to spout incoherent airhead punditry.

Anyway, Brooks says this grass-roots, spontaneously arising movement of ordinary folks and Beltway Outsiders like, for instance, Dick Armey, is tactically inspired by Saul Alinsky. He offers as evidence for this contention the fact that according to the “software” of Amazon Dot Com, “the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book ‘Rules for Radicals’” are:

also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.” Those last two books were written by David Horowitz, who was a leading New Left polemicist in the 1960s and is now a leading polemicist on the right.

Or, in other words, the people most interested in Alinsky’s book right now are the kind of people who take Dick Armey’s book recommendations seriously, namely, the class of dopes who pay money for things written by clowns like Jonah Goldberg who like to sound smart but wisely choose to give peer review an extremely wide berth. This of course doesn’t prove there are Key Similarities between the New Left and the Tea Baggers; it proves that Tea Baggers like opening up their wallets for frauds, but we already knew that.

Goldberg, however, draws a different conclusion, based upon a comical assertion that the Alinsky buyers are just plain Objective Intellectually Inquisitive, something he knows because they also bought pseudo-smart wingnut welfare books by geniuses like Hoover Institoot shyster Thomas Sowell and Hillsdale College’s RJ Pestritto — Goldberg calls his book on progressivism “excellent and purely academic,” which is exactly what Glenn Beck thinks of it also. So you know it’s Disinterested Scholarship!

But the most fantastic bit of Goldberg’s post is this:

The Tea Partiers are not in any meaningful sense Rousseauians. They certainly don’t reject original sin in any serious way.  And I suspect if you asked many of them they would say that the American people deserve their share of blame for the financial mess we’re in. They do believe, I would bet, that America is a basically decent nation that has drifted into a kind of soft-despotism or Nanny-statism.   But that vision isn’t Rousseauian, it’s  De Tocquevillian.

Actually, it’s deeply confused ancient hoary paranoid silliness, but whatever. The point is, Goldberg is just smart enough to know that he gets paid and fed for telling the suckers flattering nonsense like their sincere belief that Barack Obama is a dangerous  hippie is not in fact crazy bullshit, but rather De Tocquevillian. David Brooks on the other hand just has to pretend it’s the rubes who’re the real hippies and non-true-conservatives. Either way, it’s a pretty sweet gig, as long as you can always remember to never, ever, know what you’re talking about.