Douthat passes judgement:
[Conservative] rethinking needs to circle back to the realities of contemporary politics, and the challenges of actual-existing policy issues, rather than indulging in manichaean fantasies about a final battle between virtuous liberty-lovers and wicked statists.What’s more, [Continetti is] right to suggest that certain ways of rethinking American politics are simply toxic and self-discrediting and ought to be labeled as such, no matter how many copies of “The Road to Serfdom” they inspire people to buy.
Indeed, to the extent that Jonah Goldberg is heavily invested in many of the ideas that Beck is popularizing, then it’s his obligation to draw a clear distinction between those arguments and the noxious, John Bircher paranoia that Beck often swaddles them in.