Audio Interview: Jonah Goldberg discusses The Tyranny of Cliches Part I

Perhaps the opening quote in Jonah Goldberg's new book, the Tyranny of Clichés from George Orwell — "We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men" — unduly influenced me. But as I joked with Jonah at the start of our two part interview, when I first read the galleys of The Tyranny of Clichés back in February, my first thought, despite how pretentious it sounds, was that whereas Liberal Fascism was the equivalent of Emanuel Goldstein's "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism," the alternative history book within the book of George Orwell's 1984, The Tyranny of Clichés was sort of like the Cliff Notes to the Newspeak Dictionary. As to the tyrannical nature of cliches, and how they're used to steel bases in political arguments, Jonah writes in his new book: "Sometimes the problem is simply lazy thinking. But in other cases the lazy thinking merely creates the vulnerability for radical thinking. Some incredibly ideological ideas simply ride into your head like the dream spelunkers in the movie Inception— setting up, working their way through your programming— all because they're wrapped in the protective coating of clichés."

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