published a column<\/a> in the New York Times, \u201cThe Resistance Libs Were Right,\u201c\u00a0that put the final piece of the puzzle that she started building two decades ago.<\/p>\nIn it, she laid out how the last two conditions that would allow Trump\u2019s regime to be labelled as fascist had been met this year: the presence of a street-level paramilitary force like Mussolini\u2019s Blackshirts and his pursuit of campaigns of imperial expansion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, it seems Goldberg\u2019s early hunches were correct.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe strangest thing for me writing about politics all these years is the fantasies that people have projected onto Trump that have allowed them to not see what\u2019s right in front of them,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Before she was a leading voice in progressive politics, Goldberg just wanted to get to New York City. \u201cIt didn\u2019t take a lot of arm-twisting to make me want to get out of Buffalo,\u201d she joked.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her ticket out was graduate school, not in New York City but at UC Berkeley. She was recruited by the director of its magazine program, the legendary editor and writer Clay Felker.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was blown away\u201d at the recruitment, she told the Brooklyn Eagle in a recent interview.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Despite her prestigious grad school experience, she had New York City in her sights.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole time I was on the West Coast, it was a question of when are we going to move back? We were always trying to talk ourselves into appreciating California,\u201d she laughed. \u201cMy husband is from Brooklyn, so don\u2019t think that there was ever any question that we would end up here eventually.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the end of a year of post-grad travel across Asia in late 2001, Goldberg and her husband returned to the East Coast, hoping to settle.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As with so many artists and creatives, Brooklyn wasn\u2019t necessarily the goal, but they needed an apartment immediately.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt that point, Brooklyn was still cheaper than Manhattan.\u201d<\/p>\n
They were helped in their search by another legend: Allan Gerovitz, who was known as a matchmaker for Brooklyn real estate, loved by his clients, creative renters and landlords alike.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a very mean, cutting person who would size you up and down and enumerate all your flaws, but he was also known for helping creative class-type people find Brooklyn apartments,\u201d said Goldberg.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gerovitz got the couple their apartment in something of a Brooklyn fairy tale.<\/p>\n
On Dec. 31, 2001, they saw an apartment that they loved but couldn\u2019t quite afford. Gerovitz insisted on calling the landlady on New Year\u2019s Eve; the line was busy, so he made an emergency breakthrough and explained the situation.<\/p>\n
The landlady heard Goldberg\u2019s husband\u2019s last name and \u201crealized that she had gone to the Y with his mother, because he\u2019s a Brooklyn person and that she had known him as a boy,\u201d said Goldberg. \u201cSo she lowered the rent and let us move in the next day.\u201d They\u2019ve been in Brooklyn ever since.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For her first 14 years in New York, Goldberg worked as a writer for several newspapers and magazines, including The Nation. In 2017, the New York Times named her an opinion columnist.<\/p>\n
She discussed how she thinks about \u201covercoming the overwhelm\u201d that can come with political writing over the last few decades of American politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t just want every column to be endless screaming. I wrote a column once where I compared it to trying to comprehend the vastness of the universe. It\u2019s big in a way that the human mind can\u2019t quite wrap around,\u201d Goldberg said. \u201cSo, at least for me, the challenge [is] you have to find small things that stand for the whole.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
She gave the example of Cory Mills, a congressman in Florida. \u201cThe accusations against him are of such spectacular unfitness that in another world, he would be headline news all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said he wasn\u2019t as newsworthy because his wrongdoing, which would have been shocking in the past, has now become normalized.<\/p>\n
\u201cI found him [to be] the perfect symbol of what the Republican Party has become and what Trump has done to our political standards.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brooklyn is not just a long-time home for Goldberg but a model in her work as a progressive political writer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now we\u2019re in this white nationalist administration that wants you to think that multiracial democracy is not possible, that it\u2019s this sort of hopeless dream,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you live in Brooklyn, you see that it\u2019s not. In New York, all kinds of people can coexist, sometimes with frictions and unease, but like nowhere else in the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been inspired by Zohran Mamdani,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe represents this vision that, in some ways, I grew up taking for granted: that America\u2019s greatness stems from immigration and stems from all the kind of treasures that people bring from their own societies here. It\u2019s been so painful to see that idea rejected at the national scale, but I think it\u2019s alive every day in Brooklyn.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michelle Goldberg is something of a political prophet. As a journalist, author and opinion columnist for the New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[2571,36036,2572,98,100,99,53732,70,74089,9,24,63,87,2578,2579,5489],"class_list":["post-184126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-authoritarianism","tag-bklyn-live","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-ella-spungen","tag-journalism","tag-neo-fascists","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-politics","tag-premium","tag-premium-content","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}