• Jonah Goldberg: The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, New York: Sentinel Publishing, 279 pages, 2012, $27.95.

A memorable moment of the 1984 U.S. Senate campaign between Jesse Helms and Jim Hunt occurred in a debate when Helms said, “Jim Hunt is a Mondale liberal and ashamed of it. I’m a Ronald Reagan conservative and proud of it.”

The statement infuriated Hunt and his liberal allies, but it placed the chameleon-like governor on the defensive. It also injected a stark contrast between the unapologetic conservative Helms and the ideologically amorphous Hunt, giving voters a clear view of where the candidates stood on the key issues in the election.

Moreover, it was accurate. As Helms pointed out in his memoir Here’s Where I Stand, Mondale’s political action committee sent out a fundraising letter under Hunt’s signature, saying, “Walter Mondale believes as you and I do in the very best for the Democratic Party.” And Hunt failed to distance himself ideologically from Mondale in any meaningful way.

That incident came to mind as I read Jonah Goldberg’s The Tyranny of Clichés. Goldberg, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has compiled an enlightening and often mischievous collection of examples showing how the American Left has grown sloppy over time, leaning on trite phrases rather than logic to defend its views.

Goldberg garnered fame and infamy with his previous book Liberal Fascism. In it, he reviewed the intellectual history of contemporary liberalism and — with meticulous scholarship — showed the debt modern liberalism owes to early 20th century progressivism and fascism. Modern liberals may not advocate genocide, but many of their policy prescriptions have pedigrees that Mussolini would have applauded.

While Liberal Fascism may be the sort of dense book you should read, Tyranny of Clichés is the kind of book you want to read. It’s both breezy and serious, with citations from deep philosophical tomes interspersed with references from Monty Python.

Goldberg got the idea for Tyranny as he was promoting Liberal Fascism. He found that his liberal critics often used facile slogans as crutches during political discussions. The tendency afflicted seasoned journalists, intellectuals, and political activists.

“[P]eople invoke these clichés as placeholders for arguments not won, ideas not fully understood,” he writes. “At the same time, the same sorts of people cavalierly denounce far more thought-out positions because they’re too ‘ideological.’”

And this is where the book takes flight. Goldberg points out that perhaps the most insidious cliché in today’s political discourse may be the liberal talking point that conservatives are dogmatic ideologues while liberals/centrists are pragmatic. (President Obama: “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”)

Goldberg makes quick work of this canard, noting that Napoleon Bonaparte took credit for inventing the term “ideologue” as an epithet to describe the French revolutionaries his coup replaced. Goldberg cites historian John B. Thompson, who noted that as the emperor was losing control, “Nearly all kinds of religious and philosophical thought were condemned as ideology. The term itself had become a weapon in the hands of an emperor struggling desperately to silence his opponents and to sustain a crumbling regime.”

Marx later “adopt[ed] Napoleon’s definition of ideology and add[ed] his own twist by universalizing the idea of an ideologue,” Goldberg writes. Ideology, in Marx’s view, is “something you are born into. … It is entirely a function of class.”

American pragmatists and progressives have continued the embrace of “ideology” as some sort of disease. Another recent book, The Republican Brain, by journalist Chris Mooney, argues that conservatives are close-minded and resistant to contrary views because we’re hard-wired to be thick-headed.

Riding this cliché, the Left argues that it is “empirical,” or “part of the reality-based community,” while conservatives and libertarians embrace mysticism and cant.

But modern liberalism is an ideology. It values some principles differently than classical liberalism, or today’s conservatism and libertarianism. Many modern liberals appear to be ideologues and are ashamed of it, while contemporary conservatives are more likely to own their ideology and be proud of it.

Goldberg then tackles clichés with vigor, among them: dogma; diversity; social Darwinism; social justice; the living constitution; and my favorite, “violence never solved anything.” (Really? Ask the millions of Europeans who were liberated by Allied forces in 1945.)

My main criticism is that Goldberg could have been tougher on conservatives who get lazy. He notes that Russell Kirk saw conservatism as “the negation of ideology.” This is nonsense, but Goldberg largely gives Kirk a pass because he saw “ideology” as utopian fanaticism. Instead, Goldberg views ideology as a general, usually consistent way of looking at the world. I agree.

But that minor gripe should not dissuade you from devouring this book. Goldberg’s list of clichés is far from complete, and the book may encourage you to shoot down others you run across. After reading Tyranny, you should be able to enter a political discussion with a lot more conviction than someone who got his talking points from a bumper sticker in the parking lot.