There is some evidence that Jonah Goldberg is a moron. For instance, this, where he says that if it's OK that conservative politicians can get asked about their religious convictions, how come liberal politicians can't get asked questions about their religion, which is liberalism.
I swear to John Stuart Mill that I am merely paraphrasing.
What I find annoying is that liberalism largely exempts itself from this sort of investigation (and liberal journalists dispense this exemption freely and without reflection). The beauty of religious conservatives is that their dogma is open to scrutiny and investigation. Conservatives generally have a written canon that includes everything from the Bible to scores of political books. Liberalism's canon is largely unwritten, it's dogma made-up as they go along (and yes, I'm over-generalizing to make a point; there are plenty of important liberal philosophical treatises that go unread by politicians and political journalists).
Goldberg is assuming that the thoroughly crazy culture of wingnut conservatism in which he was and is cocooned is some sort of norm and is trying to project that onto the rest of us, the fucker.
"Liberalism" is not my primary intellectual orientation or area of interest; neither is it my chosen criterion for social belonging -- the modalities of how I like to fuck around on the internet notwithstanding. I only do this shit here because assholes like Goldberg have power far disproportionate to their capabilities or deserts, frankly, and they are destructive and dangerous, and I like to make fun of them. (See, somehow, they're also completely hilarious, which is some compensation.)
Just because lunatics like Goldberg choose to belong to a ludicrous ideological cult with absurd dogmatic beliefs does not mean that "liberals" do. I'm a "liberal" because by and large I think that "liberal" policy choices will work better than "conservative" ones: no stupid wars; no torture; global warming is real, let's stop it; we need a not-nuts energy policy; women are too often given too much shit, even today; minorities get a raw deal; homosexuals deserve equal rights; the drug war is idiotic and wasteful; Social Security works pretty well, all things considered; a single-payer healthcare system would be better than the misbegotten wreck we have now....
These are NOT for me remotely philosophical or Jaysus forbid "spiritual" issues. They're matters of policy -- of what will work for the benefit of the greatest number of people, and what won't.
This is not an especially difficult point, but one Goldberg is completely incapable of grasping:
As someone who subscribes to the view that liberalism is a secular religion, it is very frustrating that liberal politicians do not offer up a paper trail for people to scrutinize the way conservatives do. Liberalism has a dogma as rich and serious as conservatism, but you can't go to a liberal politician and ask: Are you loyal to John Dewey? Richard Rorty? John Rawls? You can't ask what their bible is because they are acolytes of the bookless faith of good deeds, the cult of do-goodery. So when they argue for keeping "religion" out of politics they are saying "keep your religion out of politics." When they say that we need to "get past ideology" they are saying we need to get past your ideology. This means that conservatives must constantly defend their own territory rather than demand a similar accounting from liberals.
That Goldberg can't conceive of ideas, books, or thinkers without cramming all that shit into the categories of faith and belief and dogma tells you all you need to know about him, and the "movement" to which he belongs and which has given him a platform.
It tells you that Jesus fuck, he's one crazy dumbass. The "liberalism is a secular religion" stuff is an article of wingnut faith, but that hardly makes it true.
If "what will work and what won't" were even remotely characteristics of the wingnut mind, we would not have had (1) the 1990s impeachment madness; nor (2) the Iraq nightmare. The two greatest political traumas of my nation in my adult lifetime. Neither were remotely necessary. Both came about because a relatively small group of politicized fanatics believed insane things that were not true.
So fuck off with that "secular religion" shit, you horrible asshole.