...but he's right.

Anyone who has ever seen Jonah Goldberg on TV knows that he is a fat, unctuous, smirking prattler whose career has been built on arrogantly throwing around broad sweeping statements about "the right" and "the left" whose subtleties would not be lost on the average 8-year-old. Anyone who has ever read a couple of his columns knows all of that except the fat part, and for that there's always Google Image Search.

But in this sweepingly general, 3rd-grade-simple column, he's mostly right.

Goldbloat...er, Goldberg...offers up his "free advice for liberals," whom he characterizes as being hard at work forming think tanks and launching radio shows to try to match conservatives' success at getting their messages out. He points out that liberals already have quite a lot of think tanks (more well-funded than those of conservatives!), as well as quite a lot of sympathetic media outlets (The Nation has more readership than any conservative magazine). He's right. Liberals' machine may not be as focused as conservatives' (conservatism being more centered on the Republican party than liberalism is on the Democratic), but it's definitely bigger. Goldberg says that liberalism's woes come not from a lack of political-machine "hardware," but from the "the [questionable] validity of [liberals'] very outdated software." "Megaphones matter," he says, "but not as much as what you say into them."

This is exactly right. I've been saying all along that liberalism needs a redefinition for the modern era, a vigorous and thorough debate that leads to an updating of the basic liberal platform. Goldberg (don't you imagine the wrestler when I call him that?) calls this "[getting] into some big, honking arguments — not with conservatives, but with each other." Of course, he'd probably wiggle with joy to see the liberal movement consumed by infighting...until that movement emerged a few years later stronger, more cohesive, and more relevant to Americans' wants and needs.

I'll say it now: Goldberg is absolutely correct when he says that "[l]iberals have a tendency to mistake political tactics for political principles, and vice versa," and that "[unity is] often a handicap if you haven't figured out what to be unified about." And, most importantly, he's right when he says that "most of the arguments [within the liberal movement] are about how to 'build a movement' or how to win elections, not about what liberalism is" (all emphasis added).

He's right. Are liberals today dedicated to nothing more than manning the battlements of the wonderful society we created? Make no mistake, we liberals did create much of what's good in America (every time you say "TGIF," for example, you can thank the liberals for creating the weekend). But are we convinced that the civil rights, women's equality, workplace and consumer protections, and tolerant society that liberalism brought about constitute the best of all possible societies, and that all we have to do now is defend our castle from the ravening conservative wolves?

Nay, I say. There is still progress to be made. Exactly what I think constitutes that progress is the subject of my "Future of Liberalism" series. But the larger point is that we've got to open the gates and sally forth, go on the attack, not against conservatives, but against the remaining problems of our society. And if we attack social problems, we must agree on which direction in which to attack. And that means debating each other and questioning our ideas as well as our tactics. A new century has arrived, and a new American liberalism must emerge to make that century a progressive one.

It's time for us liberals to listen to Jonah Goldberg when he says we should "get past [our] passion and explore what [we] think." That's right, people, listen to the fat bastard. If we do, we may live to make him rue the day he gave us such good advice.