Yeah, and Ann Coulter too!

Maybe it's not the defense the authors would want, but it's a perfectly sound one. And their sales indicate that they don't need all that much defense.

"I don't think this is the defense Goldberg and D'Souza wanted their publisher to be making"

No, but then he's not defending *them*.  And he's right - he's a publisher, not an arbiter, and both sides have more than their share of execrable books.

In the free market of ideas, we want to see these books widely read and circulated.

It's the capitalism defense.  WHy would you expect anything else?

I think this is a case of Bellow wanting to have it both ways, and then when both ways turn out to be not so hot, you poke around under the sofa cushions and in the junk drawer in the kitchen to see if you can scare up a few more ways.

Pfft. I remember Ben Stiller responding similarly to charges that Reality Bites kind of sucked, by defensively snapping about how much money it made. Ha! I immediately thought, "so he agrees..."

Knowing Chait's reputation for veracity - or lack thereof - I'd say there's a 95% chance that Chait provided a false context for the passages he excerpted.

You can't hide behind the subscriber wall forever, Chait.  

Might as well fess up now, as it will be even more embarrassing when someone else posts the article in another forum.

A pox on both your houses

Chait, apparently, intended to give the impression that it's hard for non-subscribers to access the full article (thus preventing readers from checking Chait's claims.) Unfortunately for Chait, you just need to click this:

www.worldaffairsjournal.org/.../full-Bellow.html

What Bellow says about Goldberg's book is, essentially: While the book's thesis was suited for, and I did market the book, using "culture war" tactics designed to push emotional buttons, the book was "a serious work of intellectual history."  

AND, most importantly: That intellectual seriousness was not incidental to the book's bestselling status, but a cause of it: "But when the book turned out to be a serious work of intellectual history, enthusiastic word of mouth among conservatives launched it onto the best-seller list, where it enjoyed a good long run."

So Bellow's book-selling strategy was a 1-2 punch: Get people's attention by broadcasting a provocative thesis that gets liberals screaming and gets conservatives curious, and then close the sale with a serious and substantial text.

Bellow goes on to use the Goldberg book as evidence that his publishing House, Free Press, is presently better positioned to sell books than what he regards as the less intellectually serious Regnery.

I'll end with the entire 2 paragraph passage (which includes this last point), and let the reader decide whether Chait fairly represents Bellow on Goldberg's book:

"Liberal Fascism succeeded brilliantly, rising to #1 on the New York Times nonfiction list and knocking this newly minted publishing wisdom into the dumpster. The tried-and-true formula worked like a charm: Goldberg’s argument that modern liberalism was a descendant of classical fascism was outrageous on its face, unleashing the predictable Dresden-like firestorm. But when the book turned out to be a serious work of intellectual history, enthusiastic word of mouth among conservatives launched it onto the best-seller list, where it enjoyed a good long run.

Yet it would be just as easy to misread this upbeat sign as to misinterpret the declining sales of Coulter’s book. For what these dueling data points really suggest is that the Regnery model is entering a phase of eclipse while the more serious Free Press model is returning to the forefront. This, in turn, has everything to do with the movement’s political fortunes." [This last sentence is inscrutable, unless you read the rest of the article, which isn't all that interesting anyway.]