Hey, is that a cli-CHÉ Guevara t-shirt? In his newly released book, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, Jonah Goldberg argues that liberals craftily use innocuous-sounding yet hackneyed phrases such as “social justice” and “diversity” to obscure their nefarious intentions. Never mind that issue-framing is nothing new in American politics and that conservatives are pretty darn good at it. And never mind that Goldberg’s last book, Liberal Fascism, indulged in the very argument-by-sloganeering that he now decries.
Let’s focus on the book’s title, a call to arms against trite reductionism—which just happens to echo the title of no fewer than 52 previously published books, including:
The Tyranny of the Majority
The Tyranny of the Minority
The Tyranny of the Two-Party System
The Tyranny of The Status Quo
The Tyranny of Dead Ideas
The Tyranny of Liberalism
The Tyranny of Socialism
The Tyranny of Corporations
The Tyranny of The Market
The Tyranny of The Bottom Line
The Tyranny of Poverty
The Tyranny of Work
The Tyranny of Words
The Tyranny of Numbers
The Tyranny of Mathematics
The Tyranny of Data
The Tyranny of Values
The Tyranny of Elegance
The Tyranny of History
The Tyranny of Choice
The Tyranny of Ambiguity
The Tyranny of Health
The Tyranny of Slenderness
The Tyranny of Food
The Tyranny of Taste
The Tyranny of Pleasure
The Tyranny of Sex
The Tyranny of Guilt
The Tyranny of Noise
The Tyranny of Change
The Tyranny of The Urgent
The Tyranny of Unintended Consequences
The Tyranny of Magical Thinking
The Tyranny of Kindness
The Tyranny of Nice
The Tyranny of Malice
The Tyranny of Science
The Tyranny of Experts
The Tyranny of Shams
The Tyranny of Judges
The Tyranny of Reason
The Tyranny of Relativism
The Tyranny of Opinion
The Tyranny of Tolerance
The Tyranny of E-Mail
The Tyranny of Gun Control
The Tyranny of Time
The Tyranny of Heaven
The Tyranny of God
The Tyranny of Love
The Tyranny of Hate
The Tyranny of Irony
Book titles via Library of Congress
Front page image by Tom Newby Photography/Flickr
