[Jonah Goldberg 02/27 08:54 AM]While he seems like an interesting fellow, I've got a full enough plate without getting into the weeds with him. So I'll close with this short response. Perhaps "neo-Marxist" would have been better than pseudo-Marxist. I entirely agree that there is quite a bit to Marx that is not claptrap, but one must walk amidst a lot of claps and avoid a lot of traps to find it.
More substantively, the reader is still largely dodging the point. By making a big gray fog about the reasons that conservatives don't attack promiscuity (again this is premised on a false assertion almost all of you have been taking as a given) he makes it seems reasonable that it might actually have to do with this great corporate consipracy Berry is asserting exists.
Also, there is a something very, very odd about using today's market economy as proof that Marx's complaint about mid-19th century industrial capitalism was true. Do we really believe that, say, pre-labor law inner-city England was better for families than today's post-industrial economy? In the world Marx saw, men fell into vats and were never heard from again. They worked 14 hour days. They were summarily fired when injured. Etc etc. It seems to me, thanks to the free market as well as the labor movement, Marx's critique is becoming ever more antique, not ever more relevant.
As for the alienating and deracinating effects of the free market and all that, I think some of the critiques — Marxist and otherwise — have varying degrees of value and merit. But then, I've always believed that and said as much. For you see, I'm not the strawman conservative who idolizes the free market Rod has constructed.
