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Now, ladies and gentlemen, uh,
Jonah Goldberg
could I please have your attention? Hey, you, digger. [crowd cheering] [upbeat drum music] Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Not that you can necessarily tell where you are, but I am in, uh, LA. I’m here for the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival, which is pretty cool. I’m plagued with massive guilt for being here because we got so much stuff going on at home with the move and, you know, it’s one of those things you agree to way in advance, and then
Jonah Goldberg
you, like, when you get close, you’re like, “Oof, this is not great timing.” And also, I agreed to be out here longer than probably necessary, certainly longer than my wife thinks is necessary. [laughs] But, like, I locked into this stuff and, and look, it’s good to see… It’s really great to see my daughter, all the rest. But anyway, I feel really bad because my wife is at home toiling away with animals and moving stuff. I’m a bad person, so. The opening night was last night. You know, I didn’t really know what to expect from all this stuff, and I s- still don’t. I haven’t… You know, I’m speaking, but it’s not, like, a huge– It’s not like I’m giving a lecture or anything. It’s a short conversation about A Face in a Crowd, which I, I highly recommend everybody watch if you haven’t. Now, I’ve been here for a very short while, and I’ve already heard from several people about how Elia Kazan is problematic because of his pre- his naming names during the McCarthy stuff. I’m not gonna get into that here. I mean, I’m not gonna get into here, the TCM thing, but, like, Elia Kazan is not a villain in my book. He’s a hero and one of America’s best directors. I took my daughter for the opening night thing. I, I walked the, quote-unquote, “red carpet.” I say quote-unquote because technically it was a green carpet, but it was one of those things where, like [laughs] you know, there’s a bank of photographers asking you to pose in front of a wall. I felt absolutely ridiculous. Uh, I, I, I, I no longer cultivate a serious fashion sense, so, like, I, what to wear for this thing was always gonna be a bit of a challenge for me, particularly with most of my clothes packed up anyway. But at one point, the, you know, the, the TCM
Jonah Goldberg
host interviewer person, you know, was interviewing me about what a great night it is and then, like, all this kind of stuff and, like, right after me came Tony Shalhoub. It was just really weird. But I got some good pictures of me and my daughter in front of the thing, and, uh, who knows where these things are gonna show up, but it was, um…
Jonah Goldberg
it was a thing. And then in the theater, we, uh, they screened Barefoot in the Park with Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. And Ben Mankiewicz, who’s, like, the main host guy on TCM, uh, he gave, you know, his opening remarks and talked about, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
film, and it was basically, the opening night was basically a tribute to Robert Redford. And I wouldn’t say there were a bunch of famous people in the audience, but, you know, my daughter and I would very quietly say, “Remember the, um,
Jonah Goldberg
dad from Dead Poets Society? Yeah, he’s sitting two seats over from you.” Or, you know, “Remember the short guy from Usual Suspects? Yeah, that’s Kevin Pollak. He’s right over there.” You know, that was kinda fun. And then Ben Mankiewicz had Jane Fonda come out to talk about Robert Redford and his impact and his influence and what he was like and yada, yada, yada. Like, on the one hand,
Jonah Goldberg
I got major beef going back to the Hanoi Jane stuff with Jane Fonda, but she’s had some– she’d given some apologies. Was nothing, uh, none of this was supposed to be about politics. She kept politics basically out of it. It’s almost unfair when you encounter really old people, and I think it’s fair to say she’s really old, I think she’s eighty-eight, who are in great shape. I mean, she looks, she moves fantastically well, like she moves like she’s a still-in-shape s- you know, sixty-year-old or something. It’s very impressive, you know. And she gets slightly confused, m-misuses a word here or there, all over the place, and it’s really unfair to judge, hold that against them because they’re so much sharper, th- first of all, than I will ever be. They were sharper than either of my parents were at anything close to that age. They’re sharper than Joe Biden or
Jonah Goldberg
Donald Trump, or she’s sharper. I mean, she’s r- it was really impressive what great shape she’s in. But I was thinking about it. There’s this thing called the uncanny valley problem. Basically, it’s that there is this thing where in, like, animation, right, or in animatronic stuff,
Jonah Goldberg
if you have a creature
Jonah Goldberg
that doesn’t look at all like a human, right, or not very much like a, like a Wookiee or Yoda or Jabba the Hutt or Bugs Bunny. You know, I mean, just, you know, any sort of animated creature, even if it’s a really realistic-looking one, your brain just processes it as basically entertainment. But if you have a human who
Jonah Goldberg
looks like an anima- an animatronic or a animated human that looks
Jonah Goldberg
very close to being real, once you get past a certain amount of, what would you call it, verisimilitude of, of, of seeming like reality,
Jonah Goldberg
the, the last few increments make your brain kinda freak out. I often think about, um, the movie Mars Needs Moms, which was such an unbelievably creepy movie that I took my daughter to, actually in California, like twenty years ago, is that the closer you get to there possibly being human, your brain starts to say, “Okay, this is a humanBut there’s something off, there’s something altered, there’s something wrong with this person. And as long as you look– as long as the creature looks incredibly different than an actual human, your brain processes it really easy. But as the closer and closer you get to seeming like it might actually be a real human, your brain starts to pay much, much more close attention. And some of this, I promise I’m gonna bring this back to Jane Fonda. I realize I am utterly rambling, but I didn’t get much sleep [chuckles] last night or since I’ve been here. Like, this is a point– Actually, you know, Kevin Williamson was the first person to point this out to me, and I, I, I’ve, I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve done a lot of homework on it since. But, like, there’s a big chunk of our brain
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that reads faces,
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and a lot of it is at a subconscious level, and that part of our brain
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predates the speech centers of our brain by a long time, evolutionarily speaking. So, like, uh, Kevin used the example, I’m sure I brought it up on here before. I can’t remember which two actors he used, but, like, take like, I don’t know, Christopher Hemsworth and, and Matt Damon are, are two blonde, famous actors around the same age. I guess Matt Damon’s a little too old. When you see them, you can pretty much instantly tell them apart. But if you are asked to describe how they look different,
Jonah Goldberg
your brain, y- the speech centers of your brain, it’s very hard to connect the vocabulary to explain why two people that you can instantly recognize as being different people aren’t the same person, aren’t identical or something like that. And that’s because our brains are wired to, like, really look at facial details very closely. You know, this was one of the reasons why, like, there was, there was learning loss for little kids and stuff with the masks. It’s like little kids, their brains are working really hard at looking at people’s faces long before they’re following the speech stuff, and you cover all that up, it, it messes up the wiring. Anyway, I bring this up just because, like, I felt like I was being really unfair to Jane Fonda in her occasional, like, verbal slip-up, and it’s because she was in such good shape and she was so compos mentis that the little slip-ups were making me judge her as if she was, like, a forty-five-year-old person instead of an eighty-eight-year-old person. And, um, I don’t know, I thought it was interesting. It’s been in my head since last night, so I thought I’d mention it for a second. Just wanted to [chuckles] get this out of the way really quickly. I don’t know, three weeks ago now,
Jonah Goldberg
I brain farted it and said something about Tom Steyer being– I said something about him being on POTS, but I also said something about him being the Starbucks guy. He’s not the Starbucks guy. I immediately rewro- you know, corrected this in the comments on that podcast, like, three weeks ago, but, um, I haven’t done it on here. And one of the problems with podcasting, or one of the features of this podcast is, you know, the wisdom. The wisdom is just, it’s so timeless. Um, no, but, like, it’s sort of like there are a bunch of people who will listen to some of these episodes three, four weeks out,
Jonah Goldberg
um, from when they dropped, and obviously they’re probably not the kind of people who are checking out the comments or anything like that, and they’ll still email me almost instantly to say, “Hey, you got this wrong,” or, “I think you got that wrong,” or whatever. And I’ve been getting emails for three weeks or two weeks now from people saying, “Tom Steyer is not the Starbucks guy, he’s a private equity guy,” or blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I know. I cr- I, I, I regret the error. It was just a verbal slip-up. I’m working without a net here, and there you have it. That’s– I got nothing else to say about that. Sometimes it, it’s, make- makes me sad when I don’t file a G file and I don’t hear from people screaming, “Where’s my G file?” You know, lamenting, “Are you okay?” You know, or anything like that. But I missed the G file, the Wednesday G file this week, uh, ’cause travel was all messed up. Working from California, um, on East Coast time schedules just sucks for someone like me. [chuckles] So John Judas, about a month ago, wrote this essay that Trump is a world historical figure in the Hegelian sense. Now, this is a really important point here, like, just to emphasize. He was using Hegel, uh, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, right? The German idealist philosopher, the guy from whom we get the Hegelian dialectic, which people, including me, often misuse. And I wanted to write about it at the time. It was about a month ago it came out. We’ll put it in the show notes. He first did it for Nutus, which I think they’re, they’re changing their name, which is great. It’s spelled N-U-T-U-S,
Jonah Goldberg
and it’s supposed to be News of the United States. And the guy, Albritton, good guy apparently, I don’t know him, but, uh, I know people know him, who, um, [lip smacks] sold Politico. He launched Nutus as a nonprofit. I think it’s becoming a for-profit under the name The Star, which I like, in part because people don’t know this, or it’s amazing how many people don’t know this, is that for a very long time in Washington, DC, the paper of record in Washington, DC was not The Washington Post, it was The Washington Star, and that’s just gone completely down the memory hole. It, it bums me out to think about, like, where are the archives of The Washington Star? Like, you know, there’s all this stuff from American history, political history, that just because there’s no– it doesn’t show up in searches, like it’s
Jonah Goldberg
made invisible for a lot of people. Anyway. Oh, so anyway, Judas wrote this thing about a month ago for Nutus and, um, I told you I was a little fuzzy headed here. I thought it was interesting, it was f- be a fun thing to talk about. They talked about it on the editor’s podcast, uh, you know, all this kind of stuff. And but I never got to it. And then this week, [chuckles] The Atlantic
Jonah Goldberg
assigned two serious reporters, you know, including, you know, one of them was Ashley Parker, who, like, I think has a couple pollsters, to explore the question of whether or not-Donald Trump had discovered the writings
Jonah Goldberg
of Hegel
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and was trying to cast himself as a world historical figure in the Hegelian mode. Anyway, I ended up writing about this today, but I’ll give you a little
Jonah Goldberg
preview about it. So for Hegel, a world historical figure has a very specific, uh, definition, role, purpose. It is not merely a great man. The great man theory of, of history owes more to Thomas Carlyle, who’s– writes a little bit later, but, you know, was sort of a contemporary of Hegel’s and certainly was up to speed on a lot of German idealism and romanticism and all that kind of stuff. And Carlyle was much more of a romantic and weird in some ways, you know. And the, like, the Time magazine,
Jonah Goldberg
the old Man of the Year criteria, which they’ve completely abandoned, which was just sort of like the person who had the most effect on the events and news of the previous year. It wasn’t a value judgment about whether they were good or not, which is why, like, Hitler and Stalin were people of the year or men of the year. That’s not
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a Hegelian world historical figure either, right? So what a world historical figure, according to Hegel,
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does is
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he, and I, I, I don’t think there’s anything in Hegel that says it can’t be a she, but he never talks about, you know… I’d be curious, you know, I guess Joan of Arc could count. Uh, Queen Elizabeth, I think definitely could, or Victoria. You know, I mean, there, there are women who would qualify, but if I’m using he and, and male pronouns, it’s just ’cause that’s what Hegel does, and I am not excluding the fairer sex from, um, all of this analysis. But anyway, in Hegel’s analysis, a world historical figure is simply a, um, person for diverse specific motives. They’re not trying to do good necessarily. They aren’t necessarily a good person. They aren’t necessarily well-intentioned. But they are willful, and through will and strength and ambition, they
Jonah Goldberg
fundamentally transform society and politics or international relations or whatever you wanna, whatever paradigm you wanna use. They fundamentally change it and pull the world, or at least part of the world, and then the rest of the world follows, like pulling something through a keyhole or something like that. So it’s someone who, like-
Jonah Goldberg
Right
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… really
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messes things up, changes things, breaks things, and gets things done, right? And by doing so, changes the fundamental assumptions of society, and therefore changes the ideas and consciousness and spirit of the age towards improvement, right? So this is the thing. So, like, like, for Hegel, Hegel is Mr. Teleology, right? Hegel is Mr…. He’s considered, like, the, the greatest idealist
Jonah Goldberg
philosopher, and he, uh, doesn’t mean, like,
Jonah Goldberg
he had a lot of ideals, right? It means that he, he thought everything about human evol- about evolution of society was about ideas, consciousness, spirit, right? It was all in these, the abstract realm of ideas. And we advanced towards higher consciousness as a, as a species by
Jonah Goldberg
arguing things out, right? By different ideas com-competing with each other, ideas about religion, about metaphysics, whatever. They get into conflict. One defeats the other, and over time, the pro– uh, the time of the process is one of eventually getting us to dum, dum, dum, the end of history, which is not some, like, super nirvana where it’s, you know, it’s taco Tuesday every day or anything like that. All it is is this idea that
Jonah Goldberg
we’ll reach the endpoint of history when we have a, call it a consensus
Jonah Goldberg
that how we organize
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society cannot be improved upon any further, right? That the ethical, liberal state, constitutional system. It doesn’t mean that people won’t, that things won’t keep happening, right? It just means… I’m not gonna get into all the Fukuyama stuff, but, like, that’s what it means. But, like, it’s– He believed that, you know, he was sort of whiggish, right? He thinks things are,
Jonah Goldberg
because of a external metaphysical process of, uh, improvement and self-education as a species, that through argument and introspection and science and all of these, you know, competing things, that we were sort of panning
Jonah Goldberg
the river of time for the nuggets of gold through self-im– like, a kind of self-improvement process. And sometimes that could be really ugly, right? So his three great examples of world historical figures are Alexander the Great,
Jonah Goldberg
who, like, conquered a bunch of places for his own reasons, right? He wasn’t doing it for the, um, advancement of the Hegelian world spirit. He was doing it because he liked kicking ass and taking names, and that’s why he cried when they looked at the map and saw there was nothing left to conquer. But in the process of doing that, he radically transformed essentially the Mediterranean wo-world and the, um, and, and even parts of Asia and, um, spread Greek philosophy, Greek culture, Greek philosophy, Greek, Greek learning all over the place, which had profound impact on Western civilization and historical development. And Hegel liked, you know, the Greek ideas and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The second oneWould be Julius Caesar, right? I am not the Roman history buff that some of my listeners are, so I, I, I wanna be– I have a couple questions, which I’d be curious about. But Julius Caesar,
Jonah Goldberg
according to Hegel,
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is the guy who
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transitions
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the Roman world, let’s say, from a republic to an empire.
Jonah Goldberg
And at least that’s the way, you know, when I was reading about this, they talk about it. Um,
Jonah Goldberg
I’m not sure that’s entirely right. I mean, I, it’s, I think it’s right about what Hegel’s talking about, but, like, Rome was still an empire when it was a republic. It just wasn’t internally governed imperially. When Rome was a republic, Caesar was a general in Gaul doing emperor, e- you know, empire-like things. I’m sorry, but the question I have for some people is, like, is there any evidence that Caesar intended for the republic never to come back, right? Did he think that, like, him being imperator, whatever, dictator, that this was the new permanent government structure, or was it just something he wanted for himself and then, you know, he thought he was… ul- ultimately, he could restore the republic after fixing Rome’s problems? I, I, I, I don’t know the answer to that, but I, I kinda feel like it’s an open question. But regardless, the consequences of, of Caesar was to end the republic, usher in really with, you know, his adopted son, Caesar Augustus, the, the imperial age of Rome, right? And then the third one is Napoleon, and that’s the re- sort of the most famous one because
Jonah Goldberg
Hegel saw Napoleon in Jena on the eve of battle, surveying, like, the town or whatever. And here’s this famous letter where Hegel writes to a buddy saying, “It was amazing to see this world spirit on horseback,” and how basically, like, um, Napoleon represented the advancement
Jonah Goldberg
of capital H history, right? Remember, a– The way we remember Hegel is a very much a capital H history guy. And Napoleon was this, both a catalyst for and an avatar of this great wave of change, of, of liberalization, right? You know, I often make this point about that snapshots convey a lot of information, but they also conceal information, right? They don’t– they can’t tell the whole story. And, you know, the example I often use, which I think I first got from a biography of Schumpeter, is, um, if you took a picture of the Titanic as it’s leaving port,
Jonah Goldberg
it would give you an enormous amount of information. It would– its size,
Jonah Goldberg
the wealth of its passengers maybe, right? All these sorts of things. But it doesn’t capture the story of the Titanic because things move forward in time and things change, right? And so Napoleon, when Hegel was writing this stuff in 1806, really was the great liberator. He was seen as bringing some order to it, but basically extending the
Jonah Goldberg
revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution, liberating all these little crappy German city-states and dismantling the age of empire in the name of, you know, freeing peoples. And so, like, you know, back then, nationalism, I mean, democracy was really not a thing a lot of people talked about, but republicanism certainly was, and liberalism generally were kind of all wrapped together, right? Because
Jonah Goldberg
part of liberalism at the time was to have governments that represented you. What nation– what nationalists wanted was to be represented by their own people, not some, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, inbred dude on a throne in, in Vienna or France or whatever. And so, like, there were a lot of the, a lot of the early nationalists were, were also liberals ’cause there was, at that stage, there was not a lot of conflict. And Napoleon was this great deliverer for nationalists and liberals all over the place in 1806 when Hegel was writing this. Problem is, is that, like, it, it wasn’t that much long after that that it turned out that Napoleon
Jonah Goldberg
really wasn’t this great liberator. He, he was a liberator while it suited his purposes. He has a famous line where he says, you know, “I found the crown in the gutter and picked it up with my sword and put it on.” And he restores the monarchy of after himself. He becomes emperor for life, right? So later, Hegel would say that Napoleon was a tragic hero. But what I’m getting at is that the world historical figure,
Jonah Goldberg
um, messes stuff up
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or changes things, is transformative in such a way for their own motives that may not seem great at the time, but in the big picture, it advances humanity forward in this inexorable march towards improvement and self-awareness and, and, and, and good things, right?
Jonah Goldberg
And what Judas does, and I’ve noticed when, when I started poking around, a bunch of other writers do, and the guys at The Atlantic just didn’t even pay any attention to this point. They just yada, yada the essence of Hegel’s philosophy and just wanna talk about
Jonah Goldberg
world historical figures as if they’re people who break things and, and dislocate the status quo and shatter the status quo and all that kind of stuff. And I just don’t think you need to drag Hegel into any of this if that’s all you wanna say, right? And, like, let me– I j- I, I should, I should back up. [chuckles] The idea that Donald Trump, you know, in his spare time between truth social posts, thumbing through English translations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit is just one of the most preposterous things imaginable. And, like, in fairness to The Atlantic writers, they’re being cutesy about this whole thing ’cause they– what they’re– the real point of their th- article is to demonstrate that Trump’s megalomania and narcissism and self-regard and sense of, you know, sort of-Superman complex is getting really, really out of hand, but it has nothing to do with Hegel, right? And there’s all sorts of other sources you can go to to make this point, but, like, it’s kind of a weird Hegelian thing that
Jonah Goldberg
everyone’s talking about Hegel, which you– This sort of comes up– What you would think would be part of Hegel’s whole thing is, like, part of Hegel’s whole thing is that ideas ripen and then all of a sudden just start, you know, like taking on a life of their own. And, and in a weird way, this is Trump a Hegelian world historical figure thing.
Jonah Goldberg
It could be seen as, as part of that kind of process. But it’s not, right? And again, Trump has nothing to do with… Has never read a word of this. I, I promise you, he can’t tell you who Hegel was in any serious way. I, I think he probably thinks I was talking about Chuck Hegel. But anyway, Judas is a very smart guy, and all he does is he just, like, in two sentences says, you know, Hegel believed that world historical figures made things, you know, were, were moving society in a progressive direction of self-improvement or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you take out this Enlightenment-era optimism from Hegel, then Trump really does look like a world historical figure. Okay, but by that logic, so would Godzilla and so would an earthquake and so would a, you know, pandemic, right? I mean, if you, if you take out, like, the whole point of Hegel’s philosophy about the metaphysics of human progress, then
Jonah Goldberg
all you’re just talking– all you’re basically just saying is that Trump is a bull in a china shop with a huge ego. And he does have a huge ego. Like, um, a while back, remember Trump said when he was asked if there’s anything that is a check on him on the world stage, and he said, “Yeah, my own morality and my own brain.” Um, and that’s all, like, that’s the only thing that can stop me. And, you know, one of his aides in his Atlantic piece is talking about how Trump thinks he’s the most powerful person who ever lived, and he can do all these things through, um, sheer force of will. That’s creepy stuff, and I don’t like it. Anyway, I like talking about Hegel. I know there’s a no Hegel rule, but here we are. How’s this for a transition? One of the most famous things said about Marx, although I have no idea who said it, um, is that Marx turned Hegel on his head.
Jonah Goldberg
And what this means is that Hegel
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really wa– I mean, the idealist thing is real, right? He
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believed everything was about the mind, about ideas, about spirit, about abstractions, about subconscious. Everything was ethereal and conceptual, and that’s how progress was made, is through this, this competition of conceptual categories and whatnot. And, and there was a historical process by which these things worked themselves out. And Marx takes this idea of deterministic historical forces
Jonah Goldberg
and flips it upside down. And so instead of Hegel’s, like, life in the clouds, everything is about ideas stuff, Marx says, “No, no, no, no, everything’s about the means of production,”
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and that consciousness doesn’t shape reality. Physical reality shapes consciousness. And the reason I bring this up is that this was the conversation I had with, uh, Tyler Austin Harper
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earlier this week. As I predicted, many people loved the conversation, and many people hated it. I like talking to Tyler. I think that comes out clearly. I think, I think he’s a good faith guy. I disagree with him about a bunch of stuff, but I think he, he comes to his positions in good cheer. Just a couple thoughts about the, the conversation about Marxism. For those who didn’t listen, and I know it’s weird, more people listen to the solo than listen to the conversations. I don’t quite
Jonah Goldberg
completely get it. Makes me feel a little unsafe, but whatever. I asked him why he feels the need to call himself a Marxist, because the, the things he gets from Marx, you don’t need Marx for. And I asked him, you know, is it, is it a signaling thing, or is it a way to speak the, like, the lingua franca of the academic left? Or is it something that you think is of a more important, you know–
Jonah Goldberg
that Marx plays a more important role in your actual thinking about things? And I, I, I,
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if I remember correctly, his answer was sort of a little of everything. And, and anyway, what he gets from Marx is this idea that material circumstances, um, the institutional incentives on the ground, the technological influences impact on the ground are much more determinative of ideology and politics, which are downstream of those things. And as you listeners know, I am very sympathetic to a lot of that. Um, I think that, you know, that’s a big part of my whole ideas are lagging indicators thing, you know, and how cars did more to transform culture than any ideas that came out of some, you know, European salon. This was one of the reasons why Whittaker Chambers would never call himself a conservative. There are these great letters between him and Buckley where Chambers says, “I just can’t call myself a conservative. I’m just gonna call myself a man of the right.”
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His explanation for it was that he cannot shed… I mean, I’m doing this from memory, so apologies if I butcher it. But he says that you just cannot shed the
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old-time Marxist insight that the means of production
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determine the pa- the path of society, and therefore, like, he can have, uh,
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sympathies
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for all sorts of ideas and arguments on the right, but he actually is– can’t call himself a conservative because he thinks you can’t conserve things when the-Means of production are against you or something along those lines. And anyway, we can get– we can do a– we sh- you know, we should do a Whittaker Chambers episode one of these days, like who was Whittaker Chambers? So I’m very, I’m very sympathetic to the, the basic point if you don’t take it too far, right? You know, uh, uh, as the,
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you know, the Burkean rule is you can take any good idea or good principle too far, right? Th- things are correct, but only to a point. I got some emails from people asking about the Marx stuff, ’cause look, again, I think there’s some interesting things in Marx. I think Marx was wrong. I write about this in my book, but like, um, Marx’s labor theory of value I don’t even think is an economic theory.
Jonah Goldberg
Um, you know, Irving Kristol once said that there are no non-capitalist economic theories. I’m not a hundred percent sure that’s, uh, completely right, but I think it’s like directionally right insofar as once you veer too far from
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how economics actually works in the real world, it becomes more political theory than it become– at best than, or e- or even sociology, than it becomes economic theory. And like for those of you who don’t know, very shorthand, Marx’s theory, labor theory of value basically says that all of the value of a product
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comes from the labor of the worker who made it,
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all of it. And actually, one of the single best
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sermons on the labor theory of value, although they never use the term, is in Game of Thrones where the High Sparrow explains how he used to be make– used to be a shoemaker, and each shoe he made was really him selling a certain fraction of his time on Earth rather than the actual shoe. Anyway, the reason why the labor theory of value is so stupid, and it’s very different than Mar- than John Locke’s labor theory of value. But the–
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Marx’s theory, labor theory of value says that like
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the business owner who comes up with the idea for a better mousetrap or a stuffed crust pizza, right, and raises the money to build a factory and design the product and design the machinery that makes the product and figures out the marketing budget and figures out how to sell it and all these kinds of things, that
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none of the value of the product
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is reflective of his work. It is purely the guy on the assembly line
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putting the cheese in the crust of the pizza or making the widget or the mousetrap or whatever, and the owner of the factory is just exploiting the
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laborer, and that’s why all profits are theft according to Marx, right? I just think that that’s like objectively moronic. And a huge– Once you sort of like get that in your head about how dumb the labor theory of value is, when people, and I’m not talking about Harvey here, but like when people start talking about profit is theft and, and, or, you know, Marx was right about economics, this, that, or the other thing,
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you just realize they don’t know what they’re talking about. And I, I will defend this, you know, ad nauseam if need be, but that, that’s not what I wanna talk about. I do think that when people talk about how
Jonah Goldberg
they’re Marxian, you know, Marx, Marx-ish, I think it’s, it’s a little bit of oppositional defiance, right? It’s saying, “Look, I’m gonna own this thing that you hate and, and e-explain why it’s good or why it has value.” And l- I have a lot of that in me. I mean, I, I’m not wagging my finger too much, but you know. So I get it and, and like I name-check a lot of people. I, so this is not me trying to be on a high horse about anything. But it’s interesting, a few people wrote me and asked, “How come
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Marxism
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gets this sort of scholarly intellectual deference
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even, like even from people who disagree with Marxism, right? Even from people who agree that Marxism’s inf- net influence on the world was bad,” which I do. I think you still would’ve had socialism and some, uh, uh, I don’t know if it would’ve been called Engelsism or something else, but there would’ve been something else that took the role of Marxism, in part because I, I think Marxism or socialism is derives from human nature, and so the ideas that we call socialism or Marxism or whatever will emerge again and again and again throughout
Jonah Goldberg
all time because they’re, they’re basically forms of gene expression. But, um, we can do that another time too. But the question I got from a bunch of people was why does Marxism get this kind of deference that fascism, right, doesn’t get? And I wanna be real clear, I think Marxism
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as ende- as an endeavor is different than fascism in important ways.
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But um, so it’s a little apples to oranges, but I still think it’s useful. And like, you know, it’s one of my peeves about the phrase apples to oranges. People say, you know, people use apples to oranges as if they’re like
Jonah Goldberg
you’re saying two things are very, very, very different. But apples and oranges, in the grand scheme of things, are more similar than they are different, right? If you’re gonna pick two objects about the same size as each other at random from the total, you know, say one billion objects that we could pick from, and then you did a checklist, you know, a differential diagnosis, apples and oranges, you know, both fruits, grow on trees, sweet,
Jonah Goldberg
humans like to eat them, round. Just have a lot of similarities compared to, I don’t know, um,
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bottle caps and Peruvian spiders, right? I mean, they’re just like, like the… But anyway, you get the point. It’s about category of things. And so while fascism and Marxism are not necessarily the s- exact same thing, I think there’s, they’re close enoughAs abstractions to compare to each other, right? I mean, the easier way to do this is Hitlerism and Stalinism, right? That’s a really close to good parallel, and we’ve talked about this a bunch. I wrote a book basically covering a lot of this a long time ago. I am totally open to the idea that Hitler was worse than Stalin, and I did talk about this a little bit with, with Tyler. But Stalin was s- it is a perfectly defensible position to say that Stalin was worse than Hitler. Um, you have to sort of explain your terms and say why, but whichever side you take,
Jonah Goldberg
to say that someone isn’t w- is slightly better or slightly less bad than Hitler or slightly less bad than Stalin is not a defense.
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And so we get this thing with like with Marxism, where, you know, Marxism,
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Marxist-Leninism, if you prefer, has partly simply by virtue of its time on Earth, um, you know, it’s been around a lot longer in power,
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um, than Nazism was. But, you know, regardless,
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M- Marxist-Leninism has killed more people than Nazism. Nazism, a lot of crimes at its feet, don’t get me wrong, and I, and I– my basic position is that by virtue of the nature of where Germany was and what Hitler was trying to do, that Hitlerism is worse than Stalinism. But, you know, what has t-two thumbs and thinks Stalinism was like a
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big ball of evil? This guy. But, like, in polite society, it is very difficult to talk about
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the positive aspects of fascism or Nazism or any of these kinds of things. It’s very difficult to even construct a sentence about,
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you know, what’s the right-wing equivalent of Marx that you could bandy about cavalierly that you are, um, you know, that, like, you know, I’m, I’m fundamentally a Himmlerian, right? Or I’m fundamentally, um, a Schmidian or something like that. I mean, like, it just– The, it doesn’t really exist, and I don’t think that’s a terrible thing. I think the point is, is why is it okay with Marxism, not why is it wrong to cavalierly bandy about fascist thinkers. And, uh, the truth of the matter is, you know, it’s too complicated and too long, and there’s too many plausible theories of it, but I think the truth of the matter is, it’s just simply because
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Marxism
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is seen as,
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in theory, well-intentioned, and it is com– and it, it hit a critical mass of intellectuals who found it compelling enough that it became impossible to just utterly disregard and discredit it, um, in polite company, and so it endures. And I w- you know, I would like it to go away. I would like people to be embarrassed to call themselves a Marxist. You can make the points that Tyler Austin Harper wants to make about how the, you know, the ground truths and the material circumstances are more important and more determinative of political and cultural incentives and outcomes than simply a war of ideas. You don’t need Marx for any of that. I mean, the idea of figuring out how material incentives and material conditions, you know, drive politics, I am sure there are plenty of Greek philosophers and, you know, ancient Greek philosophers that have plenty to say about all that. And so I, I do think that the calling yourself a Marxist when you are not a sort of revolutionary Marxist and a doctrinaire Marxist, there is an aspect of shibboleth to it. There’s this aspect of, like, signaling to people that you speak that language and that you’re comfortable speaking that language and you’re comfortable making people who aren’t comfortable speaking that language a little uncomfortable. That’s fine. It just, it bothers me sometimes. Oh, uh,
Jonah Goldberg
this has been bugging me for two weeks now also. I wrote a column a couple weeks ago. It’s one of my hobby horses. I hate Banned Book Week. I hate ads. You know, there’s these ads from the ACLU with Judy Blume and this other, this other writer talking about how they’re banning books all over America. The American Library Association, that was the news peg for the column I wrote, a couple weeks ago came out with a, with their annual report on banned or censored or challenged books, and they keep it all fuzzy because the press loves– I mean, for twenty years, the press has loved to talk about book banning in America, and I’m sorry, it is journalistic malpractice. It is deceptive on the part of the American Library Association. We do not routinely ban books in this country. All of the cases that the American Library Association talk about, which get picked up and covered
Jonah Goldberg
by mainstream news outlets as banned books, involve a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of public libraries where somebody complained about a book,
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and it doesn’t even mean that the book was removed from the library. The number one most challenged book last year, can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head, m- was challenged, I think, thirty-six times according to the American Library Association. Not removed from the library, right? Not banned, but was challenged, which means that someone f- sent a letter, or some group sent a letter or appeared at a hearing or filled out a form saying, “We don’t like this book. We don’t think it should be available in this library,” or, “We don’t think it should be available to young kids.” The Li- American Library Association keeps all of this fuzzy to make it sound like worse things are happening than they really are. It is utterly and completely defensible to– for parents to say a book is not appropriate
Jonah Goldberg
for their seven-year-olds, right? Their, for their, for their first graders or second graders, that, that maybe some of the books that depictSex and violence or, or, or queer stuff or whatever for little kids, you need to go through the librarian to get them. I’ve actually never met a librarian who doesn’t think that that’s somewhat reasonable. I’m sure there… I, I know there are ones who think that’s unreasonable, but it’s nonsense. A cert- Some books, some controversial books behind the librarian’s desk that require permen- parental permission to take out from kids
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is not book banning. It’s not censorship. And in fact, since w- no library can carry more than a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of books
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that are in print or that have ever been printed,
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librarians are the chief force in America keeping books out of the library shelves of libraries, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s the job of a librarian. At least a big part of it is to, like, curate their collection about what’s available for people to take out and read. And what, what they object to is anybody else having any real input about it, and they turn it into this book-banning garbage. And it’s just… And I wanna be real clear,
Jonah Goldberg
I’m sure Moms for Liberty has complained about some books that I would not complain about. I’m sure there’s a lot of church lady, finger-wagging, Tom Stockish, um, homophobic nonsense that’s going on out there. That’s fine. It’s fine to make that accusation. I, I, I, I, I can’t get granular on every single book challenge across tens of thousands of libraries across the United States. Book banning is a, is a phrase that means something. In China, when a book is banned, it’s banned. In Tehran, when a book is banned, it’s banned. In North Korea,
Jonah Goldberg
having a banned book in your possession can get you shot. Anyway, I wrote that piece. I will defend it. I got a lot of pushback from people who wanted to do sort of Mott and Bailey change, move the goalposts, change the thing, who said to me very sincerely, “I get, I, I get where you’re coming from. I get, you know… But what you’re leaving out is a lot of people are really hostile and mean to librarians,” and I condemn that. I, I’m sure that’s true, the amount of crap that librarians probably have to put up with in lots of places. You know, there is a tendency, particularly for people who come from, like, my world of journalism, to turn every member of a group that you have an argument with into a caricature. But if you actually go out into real America, you know, there are a lot of just really sweet, decent, hardworking, love kids librarians out there, just like there are… I, I, I, I, I’m a huge critic of teachers unions, but there are a lot of wonderful teachers who are in teachers unions. I’m happy to stipulate all that, just not what I’m talking about. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is there was a point I wanted to make that is, um, that’s been bugging me that I didn’t make, is that, and it’s related to this, like, calling yourself a Marxist thing. And again, I’m not doing this to criticize Tyler. I really like Tyler and I respect him and he’s a good guy. But there is this
Jonah Goldberg
problem we have basically on the left and the right, and it’s, I think it’s much, it’s much longer lasting. At least I’ve paid a lot more attention to it on the left, but it’s got its… there are versions of it on the right, that want to talk about America as a, an Orwellian state, a police state, a Handmaid’s Tale thing, about how, you know, a racist country, all of these kinds of things. And if you wanna talk about a sort of Marxian interpretation of how institutional incentives are more determinative than pure battle of ideas stuff, look at the current thing about the Southern Poverty Law Center. I have no idea. I’ve not looked in the f- the fine print of the actual case that the Justice Department has brought. It sounds like there’s some there there, to be sure. I just, I no longer give Trump’s Justice Department the benefit of the doubt about anything. You know, like anything. So I will look into it further, but let’s just as- say, let’s just assume that the broad outlines are true. I haven’t seen any pushback from mainstream media outlets that love the Southern Poverty Law Center that denies the fundamental allegation, and the fundamental allegation is that the Southern Poverty Law Center was using
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money as a 501[c] whatever charity, right, that people make tax-exempt contributions to. They were using that money to bribe and run a string of informants inside of various white supremacist organizations as a, you know, run them as informants and all that. And like, and there’s claims, I again, I don’t know how true they are, um, that this in effect propped up some of these white supremacist organizations, and… Look, I, I’ve met some nice people from the Southern Poverty Law Center. I think the Southern Poverty Law Center has been hugely problematic all my adult life, or at least,
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yeah, for twenty-five, thirty years.
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They would get really promiscuous in who they would call a white supremacist or a hate figure. They would fundraise off of dubious claims about all sorts of things, and now we find out that they’re, like, literally giving money to essentially Klansmen. And what I see it as is sort of a Baptists and bootleggers kind of thing, right? Like, and this is one of the reasons why you don’t have to use Marx, right? I mean, there’s a lot of public choice theory that makes sort of the same points. You know, Baptists and bootleggers is sort of code in, in free market economics for this corrupt alliance between, you know, the Baptist ministers and reformers who were, who were for prohibition and the bootleggers who made money off of prohibition. And so you would actually get, uh, I, I don’t think they’re apocryphal, but you get stories about, you know, big moonshiners giving money to prohi-abi- you know, prohibition to dry politicians to keep prohibition going. Because as long as prohibition was going, they had less co- the bootleggers had less competition. And you can see this kind of thing in all sorts of aspects of life where, like, supposedly political groups that hate each other, they actually need each other for their own donor bases.And the Southern Poverty Law Center kind of needs the existence of these white supremacist groups to justify its own existence, and that’s been the complaint from a lot of people on, on the right for a long time, is that every now and then when racism seemed to be going away as a problem, um, or at least being reduced as a problem, um, and like most of the big Civil Rights legislation had already been passed, and all these kinds of things, groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and to a certain extent, the ACLU, and all these guys, went casting about
Jonah Goldberg
for other crises to elevate to justify their own continued existence. And I personally think, and I’ve thought this for a very long time, this is one of the reasons why the Democrats and the left got into such trouble with the transgender stuff. Because a- after the i- issue of gay marriage basically goes away because it just gets accepted incredibly quickly, there were a lot… You know, the human rights campaign and all these guy- they got, they got bills, dude. They have, they have to justify their own existence and their own, you know, lavish headquarters and all these kinds of things. And, like, it was amazing, right as, like, the gay marriage stuff had sort of been, was, was receding in the rearview mirror, you start seeing these pieces like in The New Republic, the next great civil rights cause, which was all about this transgender stuff. And I’m go- I’m not saying that anybody was insincere, but, um, this is, you know– But, like, this is just in part an example of the kind of thing Tyler was talking about, about how institutional incentives, sort of like as with colleges and the US news list and how they play number- games with the stats, there are these groups that will, that will create a sense of panic about new problems in order to justify their own existence and their fundraising. And I think that’s exactly what the ACLU and the American Library Association are doing with all this banned book stuff. Obviously, I think there are– there’s a real problem with, with a resurgence of racism on the right. Um, so I’m not trying to say that stuff doesn’t exist. But the Southern Poverty Law Center, uh, Southern Poverty Law Center’s, you know, approach to these things is that
Jonah Goldberg
when it couldn’t find them, it seemed to just sort of make ’em up, and I don’t mean make ’em up in the sense of, like, true just fraud. Um, I’m not talking about this, the bribing informers thing. I’m talking about, like, calling barely mainstream right-wingers, you know, members of hate organizations that, you know, therefore they should be de-banked, right? They, they could ruin people’s careers, um, based on their interpretation of somebody else’s motives. And there’s a big chunk of this crap that goes on in, in, in, in higher ed and academia too. I mean, like Nancy MacLean and a bunch of these people get, win awards for their supposedly brilliant books trying to claim that all of, like, free market economics and public choice theory and, and libertarianism bro-broadly understood, was all basically a exercise in racist white supremacy, and that’s just nonsense. That’s just nonsense. Were there cranky libertarians who were racist? To be sure. There still are. Was public choice theory and the work of, like, I don’t know, Buchanan and Friedman grounded in racism? Screw you. That’s stupid. The point I wanna get into about the American Library Association piece, because it bothers me,
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it bothers me even more now that it’s a bipartisan phenomenon,
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is that there is a kind of anti-Americanism to it
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that I really despise. This is a good and decent country. It’s got problems. It’s got a craptacular president. It’s a good and decent country that has been a force for good around the world for a very long time. It is a good and decent country that looked squarely at a lot of its biggest moral failures and did something about them. Um, we have a much more generous welfare system in this country than a lot of people on the left wanna concede and than a lot of people in Europe concede because of the way it’s structured. But our tax system is wildly progressive. I mean, just wildly progressive, far more progressive than a lot of places in Europe. I’m not saying that makes us a good and decent country on my terms. I’m saying for a lot of people who think this isn’t a good and decent country, it should make it one on their terms, right? If you think that, like, a genero- the lack of a generous welfare state, if you have this sort of AOC mindset that we have nothing but unfettered capitalism, like, I don’t know what the hell people are talking about when they talk about unfettered capitalism. We got a lot of fetters in this country. But the people who say, “Oh, we’re not decent, and kind, and wonderful, and, and, and modern,” which I’ll, I’ll hear from people at The Economist as often as I’ll hear from the Elizabeth Warren crowd, when it comes to taxes, like,
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rich people pay a lot more in taxes, carry a lot more of the load of our government operations than middle class and poor people do, just as a mathematical matter. The, one of the things that Europe does, particularly the Scandinavian model does, is it taxes the crap out of the middle class. We don’t do that this– do that the way that Europe does. And so when people talk about we’re a bad country ’cause millionaires and billionaires don’t pay their fair share, first of all, they’re wrong, unless you, you have to come up with a real interesting definition of fairness, right? But as a sort of a mathematical thing, it’s just not true. But, you know, all this rhetoric coming out of New York about how finally we’re moving our, you know, towards decent politics by imposing wealth taxes and all this kind of stuff, so much of it is predicated on a mythology about what America actually looks like in terms of its organization and its, its tax system and all that. But put that aside. The– My point is, is, like, when the ACLU constantly runs ads on TV, I see them all the time, talking about how book banning has never been worse in America, which is just a lie. Like, even if you wanna call some of the stuff, which the ALA report doesn’t do because it knows it’ll get called on it, even if you wanna call some of this stuff banning, like removing a book from a library is banningIt still doesn’t hold a candle to the level of w- actual book banning in this country, you know, a hundred years ago, right? It’s just, it’s nonsense. It’s nonsense on stilts. What bothers me about it is
Jonah Goldberg
you get these institutions that are raising money by saying we live in a terrible– or implying we live in a terrible country. This business model predates Trump by a long, long time, so I’m not, not trying to discount people who are worried about Trump. Fine. But, like,
Jonah Goldberg
they’re basically lying about America to make money off of it while pretending to be living up to America’s highest ideals,
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and I hate it.
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If I call the ACLU unpatriotic,
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people are like, “Bro, oh, you moron Archie Bunker type. You don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re the most patriotic organization in the world ’cause they’re the ones who, like, are holding us up to our highest ideals.” No, they’re not, ’cause they’re lying about the, the problems that we have. There are lots of problems the ACLU could deal with, but instead they’re like, “Give us your credit card, card number for a monthly deduction, and we’ll send you some swag so you can virtue signal on, you know, the 104 bus as you’re going down Broadway.” I, I dislike it. And now we have the same sort of thing all over the place, these institutions on the right that are
Jonah Goldberg
trying to say… Certainly, they don’t do it as much right now ’cause Trump is in office, but you know, they’re trying to say we live in this terrible country, these terrible things are happening to us. And look, I’m all in favor of calling out terrible things, but if they’re not actually happening, if this is in fact a good and decent country where there are specific discrete problems that we need to deal with, but that we are not, you know, you know, a country full of,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, just sea to shini-shining sea of book banners and drag queen story hours, and you’re just making it up to get people pissed off and get their, you know, monthly c-contribution, then you’re monetizing your anti-Americanism. It’s kinda gross, and that’s the thing that bothers me that I wanted to articulate about the why I dislike the banned books things. One of the reasons why I thought Citizens United was rightly, um, held, even though I think there have been some bad consequences of it, honestly, but, um, as a constitutional matter, was that the Obama Justice Department argued before the Supreme Court saying that,
Jonah Goldberg
um, the government could ban books that could influence an election within a certain window close to an election. Like, well, if you wanna influence an election with a book,
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the whole point is publishing it around the election, and… But the idea that, like, you could ban them, that was a progressive
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idea, and it lost. And since then, I just, I– there’s no evidence that people are banning books. But by all means, be outraged by book banning if book banning is happening. But going around saying this country is banning books all over the place, I think is… I, I just view it as un-American or anti-American because
Jonah Goldberg
it’s making… It’s a lie, and it’s telling citizens that we live in this censorious police state that we don’t in fact live in, that we are not. All right. Anyway, I’m, I’m, I, I ranted. Oh, so, uh, so last thing ’cause I, you know, I, I’ve been reading a bit of Hegel and on the plane I was revisiting Fukuyama’s book, uh, End of History, which I will still defend and I still think was, um, largely correct, maybe not in the timing stuff, but more broadly. But, um,
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this, uh, just it– all this talk about, like, undermining America, wanting to, like, go after taboos, wanting to turn over turtles, wanting to say this is a bad country, wanting to, you know, be transgressive and rebellious against bourgeois norms and all this, you know, the, the Hasan Piker, Nick Fuentes model of, of being offensive and embracing hideous ideas and arguments to get a rise out of people, and working from the assumption that this country is a hellhole or no better than, and, and in many ways morally worse than communist China or Russia or anything like that. All of these sorts of, like, approaches based on an- the unreality of their vision of America. Some of it is a grift, right? There’s the Marxist interpretation for you again. It’s a material circumstances kind of things, like Tucker Carlson makes money by doing this, although, I, I’ll get back to my point in a second. There’s a lot of talk on the Twitters about, um, how
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some guy hacked Tucker C- the T-Tucker Carlson Network’s database,
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and it turns out that Tucker has only, like, seventy-five hundred
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paid subscribers, and all this, all these numbers about how he has tens of millions of, uh, of viewers are based on these, like, typically bogus,
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you know, calculations of how many people see, you know, X number of seconds of a clip on social media, and then they get to say, you know, that counts as a view of Tucker’s two-hour show or whatever like that. So anyway, it’s interesting. It sounds like his actual monetizable audience is much smaller in terms of paid subscribers. Then again, he sells ads, you know, number of eyeballs there is matters, and, you know, and he gets, uh, non-traditional revenue streams, I am sure, um, that help him justify his constant running down of America, you know, his transgressive kinda BS going back to, you know, how… I mean, I, I… There’s so many quotes that come to mind about, you know, okay, first of all, his trip to the Moscow supermarket, um, but like, you know, how he recently said that Japan is just simply
Jonah Goldberg
a more vital and, you know, vibrant society and a healthier society, and he was talking about how Am- America’s declining birth rates and all this kind of stuff. Like, Japan’s birth rates have been declining. He was trying to make a point that, you know, or at least insinuate that-Ethnic homogeneity, um, breeds a certain extra vitality to a country, which I just,
Jonah Goldberg
uh, don’t think is necessarily correct. Mongrel vigor is a thing too. But, um, you know, Japan birth rates have been in the toilet thirty years, and Japan’s got massive pro-aging problems and all this kind of stuff. But anyway, this, this approach that says this pose, right, this shock the bourgeoisie pose, I think it’s a real problem because again, it’s a problem of human nature. You know, I, I, I, I’m serious when I say I think that socialism is essentially, uh, natural and there’s a naturalistic fallacy that is implicit in most advo- uh, um, support for socialism, is that it feels right. It feels like this is– ’cause it, it’s basically the economics of the tribe. And but there’s, there are other things in human nature. Hegel gets into this a lot about the, the desire, the struggle for status and, you know, and Hegel’s not alone on this. This is, you know, in Rousseau, it’s in, to a certain, it’s in Nietzsche, it’s in Aristotle, right? But this idea for recognition,
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um, for status, for
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respect from your peers, and it, it’s very strong. I’m not saying it’s not strong in women, but it’s like,
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it’s, I think as a evolutionary biology matter, it’s like crazy strong in, in young men. Anyway, when I say things are human nature, that doesn’t mean I say they’re right, right? There are a lot of things in human na- in nature that I, I believe in overcoming. Anyway, the, the, that this thing is built into human nature, and this is one of the great Achilles’ heels of Western liberal democratic capitalism. Big point of the suicide of the West, right, is, is how do you sustain a commitment to the system when the system is successful,
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right? How do you sustain passion, warrior’s passion
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for the system during times of peace and prosperity?
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This is
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one– uh, this is like at the core, one of the,
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the central questions of, of politics going back to the beginning of time. It’s like at the heart of
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a lot of these philosophical debates. It’s a big part of, of Fukuyama’s book, End of History and the Last Man, and which brings me to this quote, which I think is
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something to think about. Fukuyama is talking about a future where basically the, the fight for liberal democratic capitalism is over, right? As he puts it in ano- another book later on, we’ve reached Denmark, right? Like everybody is basically prosperous, democratic, rule of law, liberal, different size welfare states. But, um,
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the yearning for strongmen and collectivism and all of these kinds of things are sort of gone, and we’re just happy, shiny countries with normal person bourgeois problems, right? So he says, “But supposing that the world has become quote unquote, filled up, so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exists no tyranny and, and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle. Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom, for they cannot imagine, imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity and against democracy.” I think we see a lot of this
Jonah Goldberg
on the left and the right. I think, you know, I think in comfortable
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people of relative prosperity, either talking about how, you know, like the, the,
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th-there are people on the post-liberal, uh, there are people on the left and right who will say that,
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you know, liberal democracy is the problem, capitalism is the problem, free market is the problem, liberalism problem, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Constitution’s the problem, right? They will attack the actual system.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s one strategy. The other strategy is to lie about the nature of the system that we have, and to say that we’re going around banning books or to say that the woke universities wanna make your kids gay or whatever. Um, that, that we exaggerate, we distort, or the people who wanna just struggle,
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exaggerate and distort the reality to
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justify their revolutionary pose.
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And I see that in Hasan Piker, I see that in Nick Fuentes, I see that in Tucker, I see that in all of these, uh, jackass antisemitic cosplayers out there. And this is the challenge is, right, is how you– like, and I agree with Fukuyama and with a lot of other people about how the desire for struggle for some s- important subset of humans
Jonah Goldberg
in politics is always gonna be there. And so how do you channel that towards productive aims is a, you know, it’s like one of the f-fundamental
Jonah Goldberg
questions of political philosophy. But y- the thing is I, I totally believe that life is struggle, right? And I don’t mean that in the sort of German romantic sense about, you know, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
fighting nature to, to become an ubermensch or any of that kind of crap. I just mean that like a huge part of your life is the–
Jonah Goldberg
it, you know, it’s the journey, not the destination stuff, right? I mean, the… Whenever I, you know-Have a friend who has a new baby for the first time, you know? I always tell them, you know, the couple things and, you know, one is get ready for long days and short years. And the other thing I often will tell people when they’re thinking about having a baby is that all the cliches about having a baby are true, including the ones that contradict each other, and so f- are to some extent true, right? It is
Jonah Goldberg
exhausting, gross, expensive, grueling, emotionally wrenching to have a kid. It’s also totally worth it.
Jonah Goldberg
And when you look back, the struggle stuff, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s one of the reasons why like, you know, the, the Jewish expression, “May their memory be a blessing,” I think has so much wisdom is it, in it. The work you put in to raise kids becomes
Jonah Goldberg
defining to your life, right? And like the work you put in into your business or into your friendships and all these kinds of things, that’s struggle,
Jonah Goldberg
but the struggle gives you meaning, right? The struggle gives you a sense of accomplishment and earned success and satisfaction, and you see what happens to people who can’t find something to struggle for,
Jonah Goldberg
who have a lot of money and, you know, either they die of drug overdoses or they become Hunter Biden types. I… You see this all over the place with very rich people and their kids figuring out how to have kids who have basically everything, how to give them ambition to want something of their own,
Jonah Goldberg
is a challenge, and it’s a challenge at scale, right? So it’s a challenge for parents, it’s a challenge for individuals, and it’s a challenge for free societies. The reason why I got on this tirade about the American Library Association and the ACLU and all this kind of stuff is I don’t think they’re helping because they’re like these kids who convince themselves that the world’s out to get them, and they create these narratives that don’t line up with reality because they want a more heroic narrative for themselves. And in the case of these institutions, they wanna make money off of that heroic narrative. But
Jonah Goldberg
slandering the country or slandering your parents, slandering, you know, the institutions that you grew up in in order to f- puff yourself up and feel like you are a more consequential person is a, is, it’s a form of disorder,
Jonah Goldberg
moral disorder, psychological disorder, spiritual disorder. I don’t know. Come up with your own kind of terms. And, and I just think it’s, it’s interesting to me. I g- I know I’m talking around in circles on this, but it’s just interesting to me the way in which there are certain kinds of rhetoric that you condemn, you can condemn as un-American or unpatriotic or hateful, and some of those forms of rhetoric are un-American, unpatriotic, and hateful, but they don’t exhaust all the forms of rhetoric in that category.
Jonah Goldberg
And if you’re going around calling this an evil country based on f- on misinformation and lies, and you’re making money off of it, and you’re preening as if you are morally superior to everybody because you’re heroically calling out these evils that do not exist or that you’re wildly exaggerating for, for status and profit,
Jonah Goldberg
then I think that’s un-American. I think that’s unpatriotic. I think it’s hateful.
Jonah Goldberg
I know we’re running up against the clock here, but, uh, probably too late to do any just normal punditry. We had a good conversation on the Dispatch podcast this week on sort of the populism of the left and the right and, and also like right as we were recording, the news had broke that, uh, what’s her name, Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, dropped out of the race for the s- the primaries for Senate, so Graham Platner is gonna be– He’s the presumptive nominee for the Democrats in Maine. Graham Platner has got this Nazi tattoo. I made this point, the only reason why, like, it’s coming up now is ’cause of all the stuff I’ve just been talking about,
Jonah Goldberg
where I think Platner is a perfect example of
Jonah Goldberg
kind of the stuff I’m talking about, relatively privileged guy. Um, I, I know he presents as this salt of the earth blue-collar guy, but he went to a, you know, fancy school and I, you know… And look, he served his country. Uh, I’m not trying to run down his life story, but he’s like one of these Reddit thread rebels who’s said a lot of really crappy, stupid stuff. He’s got a n- a Nazi or Nazi-adjacent tattoo that, um,
Jonah Goldberg
if he, if he had a plausible explanation for it, um, I could overlook, right? I mean, or even like a, a plausible apology for it, right? But he’s just, he’s changed his story a bunch of times on it. It’s kinda like he wants the street cred of having it, while at the same time have plausible deniability about why he has it, and he strikes me as one of these people who likes to play the role of the transgressive critic of America, um, based upon sort of BS narratives. And I have no idea if he’s actually an anti-Semite. You know, I, I have not studied him and I can’t see into his soul. But one of the points I made is just simply that being anti-Israel or anti-Semitic now is now, it’s another shibboleth, right? It’s, it, it’s being willing
Jonah Goldberg
to invite the accusation of being anti-Semitic
Jonah Goldberg
is a sign not necessarily that you are anti-Semitic, but that you’re willing to, first of all, take on the Jews and the Jewish lobby, right? That you’re willing to make all the right enemies. It’s
Jonah Goldberg
a pose. I don’t think everybody who hates Israel is anti-Semitic. I don’t think everybody who thinks Graham Platner is awesome is anti-Semitic. I don’t think… Frankly, I don’t think everybody who likes Nick Fuentes-Is anti-Semitic either, or Hasan Piker is anti-Semitic. A lot of these people view these people as a kind of in this gray space between politics and entertainment, and people can catastrophize about that, but I’m, you know, whatever. Okay. My problem is that
Jonah Goldberg
it’s still a problem
Jonah Goldberg
if this is one of these
Jonah Goldberg
sort of
Jonah Goldberg
signals, one of these shibboleths, one of these codes, one of these ways in which you communicate to a broader audience that you’re on their team is by sort of feeding off the negative polarization about Israel, um, or being willing to take the charge that you’re anti-Semitic. That schmuck who’s running for governor in Florida, um, what’s his name? I can’t remember. He’s got a stupid name. He’s really leaning into it, but he’s gonna go nowhere. We’ve seen other people doing it. We’re, we’re getting, you know, we’re getting a similar version of it in the sort of heritage American nonsense. That’s a bad sign. It’s just a bad sign. After we recorded the podcast yesterday, um, I listened to some of yesterday’s commentary podcast, and obviously, you know, John Podhoretz has views about Graham Platner [chuckles] and all of that. And, um, one of the points that Pod was making is that, you know, look, I mean, in terms of how things affect people’s daily lives,
Jonah Goldberg
what Israel does in Gaza, right? I mean, you, you, you make a– I mean, I think Christine made the point that, well, the– if you buy the claim that the Iran war was for Israel and gas prices are going up, then the Jews are screwing with your pocketbook. I think those are a lot of dots to connect, but it’s definitely true that some people are connecting them that way. But the hostility towards Israel predates the Iran war, to be sure. And this idea that, like, for normal voters in, in Maine or Pennsylvania or whatever, that–
Jonah Goldberg
or Michigan, that signaling
Jonah Goldberg
your animosity towards Israel and the Jews, um, should be a priority for what you’re looking for in a candidate is really weird at a time of high inflation and dissatisfaction with the economy. And, and that’s what I mean by it being a signal. It is a– it is not a new thing to signal picking fights with,
Jonah Goldberg
with Jews or moneyed interests, right? I mean, we can euphemize this into broader categories, um, as a shorthand way to signal to populists that you’re on their side is not a new thing, but it’s taking a new form these days, and it’s, it’s on the rise among the left and the right, and
Jonah Goldberg
it’s bothersome. So there’s that. All right. I’m done. There was a great [chuckles] great piece in the New York Times where they were profiling voters who voted for Trump who now regret it,
Jonah Goldberg
and they had a focus group. And I’ve been writing about this for twenty-five years. I find the fetishization of swing voters or marginal voters as fonts of wisdom to be just kind of tedious and annoying. It’s kind of like, let’s send a foraging party out
Jonah Goldberg
into the wilderness and scoop up some savages and then talk to them about their savage views or their, their unsophisticated understandings of things. And I think it’s kind of mean. At the same time,
Jonah Goldberg
I enjoy it, and I’ll participate in it sometimes. Anyway, so there’s this woman
Jonah Goldberg
[sighs] who was explaining why, um… The moderator asked, “What do you wish other n- other people knew about your vote for Trump?” Right? These are people with buyer’s remorse for Trump.
Jonah Goldberg
And one guy says, “I was hoping for a great comeback. I was hoping that he’d learn from his past successes and failures.” Like, if this guy were not a Republican electrician from Illinois, but were– was a
Jonah Goldberg
pundit or intellectual,
Jonah Goldberg
I could have– I could be bopping scat alone all day long making an argument about, you know, you re- you really thought this septuagenarian dude who has shown no evidence of ever learning from his past successes and failures was suddenly gonna do it if thrust back into the White House after, like, uh, January 6th and all that, really? Like, that’s stupid. But you’re not supposed to say normal Americans,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, average Americans have stupid positions. I think this is a condescending double standard. If I’m a– If, if it’s fine to say intellectuals have stupid positions, why on earth should I be exempt from saying normal Americans can have stupid positions too? Um, doesn’t mean they’re stupid people. Doesn’t mean they’re bad people. But people can be really stupid about politics across the entire spectrum of IQ and sophistication. And that’s one of the things you learn from doing this for so long, right? And I don’t wanna call out this person by name. That’s not– ’cause he’s not in this business and, and it’s unfair. People who put themselves in my line of work and make arguments, they open themselves up for criticism. I’ve been called every bad name in the book for thirty years. It’s the life I’ve chosen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it doesn’t mean you should all–
Jonah Goldberg
It doesn’t mean you should hurl ins- insults at, you know, writers and, and intellectuals, but it does come with the job, right?
Jonah Goldberg
If you’re a, you know, a normal working-class person who’s been somehow dragooned into a focus group in a mall, it’s unfair to, like, signal you out for your bad political takes, um, by name. So that’s all I’m getting at. Um, you know, and so there’s this other woman, uh, Kitty, who’s, uh, Asian from Pennsylvania. She’s a student. She’s a thirty-six-year-old student. And she says, “I was expecting what he was like the first run around, and it’s completely different, completely the opposite of what you’d hope for.” Well, yes and no. Um-It’s certainly more of what I expected than didn’t expect, but I’ve been making this point forever that a lot of people voted for Trump because of the nostalgia for the pre-COVID economy of his first term. So that’s understandable. But it’s this one that I just think is important to keep in mind. Francesca, who’s an independent mixed race deckhand from Washington State, said, I thought I was helping us get and save more money with taxes.
Jonah Goldberg
I thought they would just get rid of taxes so we would get our full paycheck instead of just half of it.
Jonah Goldberg
I feel for Francesca. I get it. Withholding is brutal when you’re a 26-year-old. And it’s by far, because we have such a progressive tax system, for people
Jonah Goldberg
below a certain pretty high level of net worth, the biggest taxes they pay are going to be payroll taxes. And I know Trump went around basically suggesting that they were going to get rid of payroll taxes or something like that. But it’s really stupid. It’s just really, really, really stupid. And I feel sorry for her for believing that that was possible. I feel sorry for her for believing that Trump has the ability to do that. Anyway, I know I said I was done, but I just thought this thing was sort of fascinating. And it raises all sorts of interesting questions about how we talk about normal voters. And
Jonah Goldberg
we’ll revisit it another time because I think it has repercussions for
Jonah Goldberg
talking about the difference between democracy and republicanism, to the extent there is a difference between the two. And it’s an uncomfortable one for a lot of people. So with that, apologies for all the rambling and fuzzy-headedness. And I’ll let you know how it goes at the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival. Until next time.
