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[upbeat music]
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Ladies and gentlemen.
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Can I please have your attention? Can you dig it?
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. If I am talking too quickly, it’s only because I want to get to our guest today. Longtime friend, uh, former colleague, a frequent f-guest on here, and fan favorite in a sort of, uh, it’s really fun to play with a toothache, indulge your Eeyore kind of sensibility kind of thing. And I don’t mean Nick Catoggio, who we still have not managed to get on here. I mean, of course, Ross Douthat of The New York Times, and of course, in the old days, you know, now he’s hit cruising speed or cruising altitude, and he’s a, he’s now a fixture of the elite firmament.
Ross Douthat
I’ve flatlined is what you’re saying.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right. You’re not descending. It’s just like you don’t have further to go.
Ross Douthat
I’ve– I’ve– There’s no more lift. That’s right.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right. But when you were rising fast and was such a big deal that you got your New York Times column, for years, I always insisted on calling you purely National Review film re-reviewer who also has a column in The New York Times, Ross Douthat. So– And you still write reviews for NR, right? I mean-
Ross Douthat
That’s right. I still, I still answer to that description.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Ross Douthat
Project Hail Mary next issue, I hope.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I still have to see it. I’m very looking forward to it.
Ross Douthat
I– No, I, I have to take my kids to it, uh, maybe, maybe this weekend. We’ll see.
Jonah Goldberg
I’m, I’m happy to return to this stuff, but, uh-
Ross Douthat
No. Let’s, let’s, you know, let’s talk about the, the very important stuff, Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
Before I do wanna talk to you, and people have asked me to have you on to talk about our, our slight disagreement about the future of conservatism and whatnot. But before we get there, just kinda curious, what’s, uh… How’s your war going?
Ross Douthat
Every day that, um, the United States is in a bad situation and the global economy is facing
Ross Douthat
gas shortages, fertilizer shortages, everything else, and, uh, the Iranian government is holding a critical choke point of global commerce hostage, that’s a day that the advent of Skynet is delayed, Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm. Okay. Fair.
Ross Douthat
And so, you know, that’s, that’s– When I, when I sit here [chuckles] when I sit here watching events in the Middle East, I went straight from sort of taking a deep bath in AI stuff, that, that was sort of the focus of most of what I was reading, at least some of what I was talking, talking to people about, to the Iran war. And I’ve tried to read the Iran war in light of, you know, anxieties about, about something going badly wrong with AI and find some kind of weird, weird comfort in a modest slowdown. Um, but all of that, that’s-
Jonah Goldberg
Well, those stories are also converging.
Ross Douthat
Yeah. That’s not… I, I don’t know if I’m joking or not. I’m just-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Ross Douthat
… you know, putting, putting that in the thought space.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, we should say we’re recording this on Wednesday, April 1st. This is not an April Fool’s Day joke. This will air right after the weekend, I believe. So…
Ross Douthat
Okay. So w- so who knows-
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right
Ross Douthat
… where we will be in terms of
Ross Douthat
strikes, withdrawals, boots on the ground, anything else. I would say that I, I have a pretty negative view of how the war is going. I think that the US military has obviously performed admirably and visited all kinds of severe destruction on the Iranians and taken relatively few losses in return. But I think fundamentally, separate… You know, there’s many levels at which you could analyze this, but I think fundamentally the key thing about this conflict was that it began as a, not as a war against Iran’s military infrastructure, but as a decapitation attempt against their regime. Um, and you can sort of draw these fine distinctions and say, “Oh, well, we were doing the military to… You know, we were degrading the military infrastructure, and the Israelis were doing the decapitation, and these are different strategies or something.” Whatever. It’s one war. We went into it with the Israelis. We made a decision not just to attack Iran’s military, but to attack their political leadership. We’re still going after their political leadership, and the reason to do that
Ross Douthat
is to force, force a syri- an actual change of regime at the top. Maybe not a revolution, maybe not, you know, the Shah back or liberal democracy breaking out, but at least, at a minimum, something like the Venezuelan scenario where there’s new leadership that appears eager or willing to make a deal with the US. That has not worked. So far, doesn’t seem to be working. Because it doesn’t work, it puts the Iranian regime in a position where they are existentially threatened, and therefore, they can have sort of plausible escalatory threats that they wouldn’t have if we weren’t [chuckles] trying to decapitate them, right? Like, if we weren’t trying to decapitate them and they said, “We’re gonna blow up all the energy infrastructure in the Gulf,” we would say, “No, you’re not, because that could bring down your own regime.” But we are trying to [chuckles] bring down their regime, right? And I think the same, you know. There, there are sort of two levels. The, the strait is one level where would they have closed the strait if we had just attacked their military and hadn’t decapi- tried to decapitate them? I don’t know, but it seems like the two were connected. And then clearly their sort of secondary threats, or not secondary, but their escalatory threats, they just have way more plausibility because we’re trying to kill them all. And I think it’s just so far, it’s a, you know, the you come at the king, you best not miss. If your strategy depends on changing the regime and you don’t change the regime, you’re in a position whereThey can make some pretty crazy threats because you’ve raised the stakes for them. So that’s my– To the extent that I have like a personal narrative, that’s my narrative of what independent of whether the larger degrade their military campaign was a good idea. To the extent that things have– are not going well, that’s the core problem.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. That, that tracks pretty much. We’re pretty much aligned on this. I mean, Ken Pollack, I had him on the first week of this, or maybe even w-week before. No, I guess it was the first week. And he said, “Look, one of the things you have to keep in mind is that however much Trump thinks this is surgical and it’s about getting a deal and doing this or that or the other thing, or whatever the war goals are, the regime thinks it’s an existential threat to their existence, and they’re gonna act that way.” And when you blow up the supreme leader and his wife [chuckles] and, you know, and all sorts of other people, that’s not an unreasonable position for the regime to take. It’s like they, they think it’s,
Jonah Goldberg
it’s go time, right? And, and, and particularly when you have a f-religion that, or a branch of your religion that is already pretty apocalyptic and end timey anyway, they’re inclined to think that way. Yeah. So I agree with you on that.
Ross Douthat
And we’re do- and we’re doing it. We’re kill- we’re killing them, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Ross Douthat
So, you know, we attacked, we attacked their nuclear program,
Ross Douthat
and, you know, I will say I, I have always tended to be in the camp that is skeptical of war with Iran. But at the point at which we attacked their nuclear program last summer, it did seem like it was a ripe moment for it. Their proxies were degraded. Their ability to sort of launch a wave of terror attacks across the Middle East was clearly weakened. And in the end, you know, whether or not that attack worked to knock out their nuclear program and, you know, uh, I guess the, the narrative now is it didn’t, right? But whether or not it succeeded in that sense, it was successful in the sense that we delivered a serious blow to them, and they just took it, right? And I, I think that’s an indicator that there is room for non-existential warfare against Iran. But if you’re killing, [chuckles] if you’re killing their leaders, you’re not doing that, and you’re just changing the calculus for them.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. So this is a nerdy point, but you are one of the few nerds that I feel completely comfortable-
Ross Douthat
I, I prefer spaz, honestly.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Ross Douthat
You know, Jonah, if we’re gonna… Yeah, but go on.
Jonah Goldberg
Well, so I have been banging my spoon on my high chair about the misuse and abuse of the term regime
Jonah Goldberg
for a very long time, and I can actually probably give you a chronology of how it, it’s bad, like the, the how it happened. But the Clinton administration and then the Bush administration said the only s-real solut- long-term solution for Iraq is regime change. Before that, there was the first things thing about
Jonah Goldberg
whether our regime was legitimate, and this was the world in which I grew up understanding what regime meant. Like, the American regime is the US Constitution. It is not any one presidential administration.
Jonah Goldberg
Since those events, you had John Kerry talking about how re- we, we need regime change at home and, uh, and Howard Dean, and then
Jonah Goldberg
Republicans started op- using that language as well. DeSant– And I’m fast-forwarding. DeSantis starts saying the Biden regime. And at this point, we talk about regimes as if they inhere in specific rulers. Now, in some countries, that’s accurate. The Putin regime is the regime, right? ‘Cause it’s a personalist regime. But Donald Trump yesterday was saying we now have… We already have regime change in Iran because what he– and what he means by that is we have leadership change insofar as the top rung has been liquidated, and so the seconds and thirds have moved up to the top, but it’s still the same regime. Since I’ve spent nearly twenty years trying to like use– It’s like obsesses about who and whom and fewer and less. I’ve lost this battle everywhere. But as a practical matter, this distinction will matter to Trump, right? First of all, do you think I’m being too fastidious? That’s the nerdy question.
Ross Douthat
To the extent that there’s any case for using regime in the context of American politics that’s separate from the US Constitution, it only makes sense if you’re talking about like a para-constitutional regime, right? So the right-wing claim that essentially a deep state has usurped constitutional powers, right? Would the term regime, you know, agree with that or disagree with that? The term regime could make sense for that-
Jonah Goldberg
Sure. Fair
Ross Douthat
… kind of, kind of critique or a sort of leftist view that says, you know, there’s a, a plutocratic, you know, tech bro dominance or something. It, it would never make sense
Ross Douthat
in the American context as far as I can see for a specific president, even one like Trump, who has this kind of particular sort of personalist, personalist loyalty. And yeah, in Iran, there’s, you know, the change of regime would require the, you know, the IRGC and clerical power to be,
Ross Douthat
if not broken, at least transformed profoundly.
Ross Douthat
To, to say we have regime change. In Venezuela, it’s a little bit different because it was more of just like a gangster clique-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. It was a thugtocracy already
Ross Douthat
… at the top. Right. Right. So it’s like we changed thugs, and now they’re pro– they, now they deal with America. You, you know, that, that, that maybe you could call that a regime change. I, I would not… I mean, we’ll see what Venezuela looks like in five years, but I wouldn’t describe that as a, a rank abuse of language.But saying we killed the Ayatollah and then we killed 10 other people and, you know, now somebody different is in charge and it’s regime change is nonsense if the person who is in charge is a, you know, [laughs] an Islamist hardliner, right? You haven’t– And, and more importantly, if, I mean, what, as far as I can tell so far, what has worked for the Iranians, and plenty of things haven’t worked, we have in fact, you know, done incredible damage to them, but what has worked for them is a kind of decentralization of regime power where, you know, you have essentially commanders representing the regime who are making, who again, seemingly are making certain decisions on their own, and in this maybe makes it hard for the center to reassert control, but it enables the,
Ross Douthat
you know, the, the militarized theocracy to continue to exist even if you keep cutting off its head. And as long as that’s the case, yeah, there isn’t regime change.
Jonah Goldberg
So I find it interesting, the,
Jonah Goldberg
the debates on the right, I’m squarely in the middle. I’ve now written three different columns explaining how I’m in the middle on this.
Ross Douthat
You’re a respectable centrist.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right. That’s right. I, I… Which has been my reputation forever. And, um-
Ross Douthat
It’s you, when it’s you and Bronze Age Pervert together-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Ross Douthat
… holding down the respectable center of conservatism these days.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right. That’s right. I mean, I, I am, I’m a, I’m the, I’m the David Broder of conservatism. Anyway, um, a lot of my friends are talking past each other, I think. There are people, dear friends who I respect a lot, who are very, very frustrated that the media and the naysayers and presumably me, but they’re being diplomatic, aren’t celebrating
Jonah Goldberg
how successful this war has been so far. And they have a story to tell that is entirely plausible within the four corners of the story that they’re telling. You know, as Andy McCarthy said the other day, who I’m very much on the same page with these days, we haven’t lost a war militarily in like forever. I mean, like maybe since, I don’t know, do we count the War of 1812 as, as a victory? [chuckles] I mean like we don’t lose, particularly in the modern era, we don’t lose wars militarily. We lost Vietnam because it lost a lack of will. We lost, you know, the home front lost support, all these kinds of things. And so as long as the war is ongoing, it’s fine to judge the war to a certain extent on a military basis. But the second wars end, for whatever reason, they’re no longer judged as military operations, they’re judged as geopolitical strategic things. And geopolitically, for the reasons you’ve written about and you were already talking about, is that the Iranians have an asymmetric advantage because of their position with the Strait of Hormuz or whatever, and NATO alliance taking a really bad hit between, relationships around the world took a bad hit, and politically, Trump is taking a bad hit. And my friends who want to say this war is being hugely successful just want to keep it on like, “Look how many, look how many ships they’ve sunk and how many planes they down.” And so people talk past each other and all that. But then you get what I will say is the non-conservative, but definitely they’re sort of the new right MAGA crowd, some of them are conservative, I’ll be generous, who say this is a betrayal,
Jonah Goldberg
and who say that what Trump is doing is a betrayal, and some go even crazier with, you know, conspiracy theories about the Jews and Israel and whatnot.
Ross Douthat
There are many of, many such theories, yes.
Jonah Goldberg
Says Ross Douthat of The Jew York Times, as we used to call it. [laughs] Um, but, um, no, but back, back… I guess the question I’m leading up to is, one of the more interesting things about all of this is how
Jonah Goldberg
the loudest voices on the sort of, you know, from
Jonah Goldberg
Tucker Carlson and rightward,
Jonah Goldberg
they see this as a betrayal, and yet you look at the polling and the people who describe themselves as MAGA Republicans-
Ross Douthat
Right.
Ross Douthat
Are, are the most on board. They’re the only, they’re the only people on board. It’s people who-
Jonah Goldberg
No, they’re, they’re the only ones who are super on board. Yeah. I mean, generic Republicans are like in the sixties, seventies, I think is, you know. But the, the people who describe themselves as MAGA Republicans are 90. Trump says he saw some CNN poll that said 100%. I don’t know if that’s true, but like I saw one that said 90%. And, um,
Jonah Goldberg
and so one of the salutary things I find about this moment is how it’s demonstrated that Tucker and the new Megan Kelly and Steve Bannon and various others actually aren’t speaking for the mainstream MAGA base, never mind any, you know, large numbers of constituencies. So I’m, I’m wondering, first of all, do you think that’s right? But second of all, do you think that those sorts of people represent a future for the GOP in, in a way that maybe you wouldn’t have? Do you– Is your understanding of how much they represent the future of the GOP changed since the outbreak of the Iran war? You can see how I’m tagging you towards the other conversation.
Ross Douthat
Yeah, no, no, you, we, we, you’ve covered a lot of ground. Can I just say something about, about the-
Jonah Goldberg
You can say whatever you want.
Ross Douthat
I know, I know. Um-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Ross Douthat
Just, just on the military success point. Uh, on, on my own exciting podcast for The Times, I had on Mark Dubowitz, who’s the head of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, long time Iran hawk. Um, and I thought that conversation was useful insofar as he’s in the camp you describe of people who say, you know, “This is a military success. We need to focus on that.” But he was also straightforward in saying, “You have to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.” And he, you know, we sort of danced around different options, and it was a conversation, you know, that was maybe some of the things we talked about were edited because we went on a long time. But, um, but my, my impression from him was that, you know, he was willing to say,
Ross Douthat
“Look, you have to have a-“Strategy. The, the, to, to complete the military victory, you have to be able to open the strait. And I, I think that’s basically right, and that’s what I would like the, the sort of military victory people to generally acknowledge that if, if there is, you know, if there is a military or diplomatic mechanism to open the strait, and you open the strait, and you combine that with the amount of damage done to Iran, then you have a good case. Not an airtight case, but a good case that you can present that this was, you know,
Ross Douthat
whatever its costs were successful. But the whole debate [chuckles] is about whether there’s any reasonable plan to open the strait that doesn’t involve the US getting embroiled in a ground war. So that, that to me is the whole question that this sort of divide you’re describing turns on, right? The new right… Yes. So, so clearly, there is not a mass constituency for a politics that says, “We are extremely right-wing and MAGA, and, um, we think the president has screwed up in a big way,” which is the position of
Ross Douthat
Carlson, Kelly to some degree. I mean, Bannon maybe has gone back. I, I haven’t, I haven’t followed all the permutations, but it’s the position of a lot of-
Jonah Goldberg
The smartest and most articulate version of this is Chris Caldwell, who I have enormous respect for, but I think he, he had a really flawed piece on this.
Ross Douthat
Right. My, my colleague, my colleague at the… He, um, he’s a contributor at The Times, but he didn’t write that piece for The Times, right? He wrote a piece for The Spectator saying this was, this is Trump’s betrayal of the core thing that people supported him around. And if you’re looking at it in terms of what do people who identify as strong right-wingers think in polling, that doesn’t seem to be the case. And that is, that’s important information. Um, and it is suggestive of the way in which certain parts of the… I don’t even know what you wanna, what term you wanna use, but let’s just call it, we’ll call it like, you know, we’ll call it sort of new right populism for want of a be- better term. Certain forms of new right populism have a, clearly have a potent audience among high information podcast consumers.
Ross Douthat
That is quite different from a mass constituency, and that, that distinction is important. I don’t… The question is though, like, what– I, I guess, where does this go, right? Because
Ross Douthat
i-in a way, you could s- you could say, well, is it really surprising that intense Republican partisans
Ross Douthat
support a Republican president after, like, two weeks of war in which very few Americans have been killed? I mean, that, that’s probably not that surprising, right? And you could say, therefore, that it is… What’s notable is that there isn’t sort of a penalty for being against the president at this moment, right? You could say basically that there’s lots of people who are listening to Megyn Kelly or Tucker, you know, or for that matter, Matt Walsh, or, you know, to, to pick different people, right, who’ve been critical. People are sort of holding two things in their mind at the same time. They’re like, “I’m for Trump. I trust Trump. Trump’s my guy, so I support the war. But I’m not, like, turning on the people who are criticizing him. I respect what they have to say. I’m interested in it.” And so if that’s the case, then it just sort of depends on how the war turns out, right? [chuckles] If the, if the war turns out badly or if Trump walks away in a way that leaves hawkish goals conspicuously incomplete, then I think sort of new right populists will be able to say, “Well, people trusted Trump and stuck with him, but in the end, sort of we were kind of proven right about this.” And that, that will be a narrative with some potency. The other s- the other thing, the other possibility, right, is, you know, it may be that what we think of as that audience
Ross Douthat
also just sort of overlaps more with kind of disaffected independence in the Joe Rogan sphere sometimes than it does with people who really strongly self-identify as Republicans. In which case, maybe the people who w-watch or listen to Tucker and are disaffected with Trump just don’t show up in polls as MAGA Republicans. They show up as, like, lukewarm Republicans or independents. But I, I’m not, I’m not honestly… I’m, I’m basically sort of wondering out loud because I’m, I’m, I’m really not-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. No, I, I think that’s an interesting… That’s a good point
Ross Douthat
… I’m not, I’m not sure. I think this is for people who wanna say,
Ross Douthat
“Trump acted like a hawk and listened to Lindsey Graham, and the base went along with him, and therefore populism and restraint, realism, isolationism, whatever, these things are not actually gonna be that potent in Republican politics.” I, I’m not sure that that’s right, and I think so much depends on how the war turns out. And if the narrative of the war is…
Ross Douthat
You, you can imagine a world where for the typical MAGA voter, the narrative of the war is, “We went in and blew up some stuff, and that was good. But the Israelis and the neocons wanted us to go further, and Trump wisely pulled us back.” Like, that’s a narrative that spins forward into definitely a much less hawkish GOP future. I just, I just don’t know.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Look, I mean, uh, Nick Catogio has done some good stuff on this. The eventual scapegoating of Israel is coming. Uh, how widespread it is, how much it’s embraced, um, but there are, there are, you know, there are, there are signals even from within the White House that it’s coming, and I, I think that’s, that’s… Analytically, I think it’s true it’s gonna be an argument. Whether it becomes the consensus thing or not is completely different and unknowable at this point.
Ross Douthat
But, but that’s also… Can I, can I ask you? Like, i-in terms of Israeli choices and Israeli thinking, and extending this to include, you know, ourNeutral friends who are, you know, very much focused on being pro-Israel, sort of this is like-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
Ross Douthat
… you know, a central thing in their politics. This war is a big, big risk from the point of view of a kind of Zionist conservatism. And I, again, I asked Dubowitz about this, uh, and his view was, you know, it’s a risk, but it’s worth it because this is… You know, Iran is such a threat, and it’s a once in a generation chance to deal with the threat and so on, and maybe that’s true, right? But, you know, when, when you say scapegoating, I mean, it-very clearly the Israeli government [chuckles] wanted the war-
Jonah Goldberg
Wanted to do this. Yeah
Ross Douthat
… and talked Trump into it. And so if it goes badly, it will be Trump’s fault, and it will be other people’s fault, right? But i-if it… Like, if this goes really badly, I will be comfortable saying that it’s, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu’s fault. It will be his fault, right? There won’t– It won’t be, it won’t be false to say that.
Jonah Goldberg
There’s a lot going on in the phrase, “And talked him into it.”
Ross Douthat
Well, well, then let me, let me, let, let me pause and say, I’m not, I’m not doing the thing that you see people do where Tr-strong Trump supporters who are like, “Trump has no agency. It’s Netanyahu’s war,” and so on. No, this is Trump’s war hundred percent. I-In the context of American politics, Trump gets the blame and should. It’s not like the Jews tricked him or something. But
Ross Douthat
would Trump have gone to war without Benjamin Netanyahu arguing that this is gonna work?
Jonah Goldberg
For sure.
Ross Douthat
I’m skeptical.
Jonah Goldberg
I, I, I think… Look, I think that’s fair, and l- I mean, you can r-do it in reverse. What if Benya- what if Netanyahu had said, “This won’t work. Now’s not the time”?
Ross Douthat
Right. Trump-
Jonah Goldberg
Would Trump still have done it? Pretty unlikely, right?
Ross Douthat
Pretty unlikely.
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, it’s, it’s not a non-zer- it’s not a zero likelihood thing because Trump had done that tweeting that, “We’re coming to rescue the Iranian people,” and which was really a terrible thing to do.
Jonah Goldberg
But I, I think we’re agreed.
Ross Douthat
Part of the story is, as I understand it, that Trump had sort of drawn a kind of quasi red line with the Iranians. And
Ross Douthat
I, you know, that one of the arguments that he was convinced by was that you have to enforce your red lines, and that’s a little bit different from the view that, you know, this will be a successful coup, um, or something. But anyway, I, I just don’t-
Jonah Goldberg
So I, look, what, what, I… Look, I, look, I, I think that’s fair. I think you can make the case
Jonah Goldberg
or you make the analogy. It’s not a great analogy. It’s, let’s just say like all historical analogies, it can be picked apart. But if you wanna say Bibi talked
Jonah Goldberg
Trump into this in the way that Churchill tro-talked FDR into getting into the war, okay, you know? It was, like, definitely in England’s interest [laughs] for America to be in, their allies. It took
Jonah Goldberg
a certain event, you know, Pearl Harbor, to finally get FDR to go all in, but, like, he was heading there anyway. We don’t have to do the full Charles Beard thing.
Ross Douthat
It’s not wrong to talk a US president into a war if the war is a good idea. I, I agree.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. Right. Right. So like that, so that part I think that’s right. Okay. But at the same time, as with many things involving the Jews and Israel, every time you move the reasonable rhetoric a little bit, the leash
Jonah Goldberg
for crazy antisemitism stuff gets longer too, and the, the permit- the Overton window for rhetoric goes with it, and we’re just gonna see a lot of ugliness. And that’s all, that was all I was saying about that.
Ross Douthat
We’re not gonna see. We are already seeing it.
Jonah Goldberg
Yes. Yes.
Ross Douthat
I, I think-
Jonah Goldberg
I should say a lot more ugliness.
Ross Douthat
You know, there’s seven levels [chuckles] of worry about the war, global economic crisis, crack up of US alliances. Uh, you know, I, I can, I can give you, I can give you a long list. I can see this
Ross Douthat
dynamic forming of crazy antisemitism, but that is, that is fed, but that is fed by something where the Israeli government is profoundly involved [chuckles] in the decision-making.
Jonah Goldberg
Yep.
Ross Douthat
That’s, that’s in, in a way that, in a way that is, you know, I think goes beyond just like, you know… I mean, I mean, I think the, the claim that like Israel were both around for the Iraq War, right? And there were factions in Israeli politics that supported the Iraq War, and there were factions that opposed it, and we did not launch the Iraq War for reasons profoundly connected to Israel. They were connected to Israel in some ways, but, like, that, that narrative-
Jonah Goldberg
Right. The, the, the Joe Kent narrative is horse [beep]. I mean, that’s, that, that put it bluntly.
Ross Douthat
Right. But, but in this case, there is just a much closer alignment between-
Jonah Goldberg
For sure
Ross Douthat
… what the Israeli government wants and what we’re doing, and I just see that interact. If, if… I, I would like this war to end well for many reasons, but that combination is, is one of them.
Jonah Goldberg
In a climate where people increasingly will blame Israel for bad weather, when Israel’s actually involved in the war, [laughs] it’s going to lend more credence. So I agree with you on that. The question I have though is, and again, I love Chris Caldwell, and I’m, I’m grateful for the piece because he’s the guy to actually
Jonah Goldberg
write the thinking man’s version of what a lot of unthinking people were saying about a lot of stuff. The problem is, I just think even the thinking man’s version of it is wrong, and I have lots of analytical disagreements with Caldwell’s piece. But the fundamental premise was that this, as it was in the title of the piece, is that this was a betrayal,
Jonah Goldberg
right? Or, or I guess in the title, it was the end of Trumpism. But so, but the, the, the, the thesis was that this was a betrayal. We hear this from Tucker. We hear this from Bannon. We hear this from all sorts of people, and I think
Jonah Goldberg
that’s nonsense. I think this is what Trumpism looks like. I think this is not a deviation from Trumpism. This is just another manifestation of Trumpism. Do you think this is inconsistent in any way or in any signi… And actually, you can find quotes from him on the campaign trail to be sure.
Ross Douthat
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
But the same people who are saying this is a betrayal, like Steve BannonAre also the people who’ve been saying for ten years that Donald Trump is the modern Andrew Jackson. And you don’t have to be Walter Russell Mead to point out that Andrew Jackson liked kicking the [beep] out of people and enemies from time to time. He was definitely a rubble doesn’t make trouble kinda guy before the days we could really make rubble and at scale. So the, the idea– You can’t say the guy’s Andrew Jackson, then say, “Hey, wait a second. How dare you attack an enemy that has been yelling ‘Death to America’ for forty-seven years?” I just don’t think it’s inconsistent with the Trump we knew. I wasn’t surprised by it in the way a lot of people were surprised. And I’m wondering, since you are
Jonah Goldberg
more
Jonah Goldberg
fluent-
Jonah Goldberg
… in that language of the betrayal part of it, uh, what do you think?
Ross Douthat
I was a little bit surprised by it.
Jonah Goldberg
I should say surprised, not shocked. You know what I mean? That’s one of these distinctions we’ve had to come up with in the Trump era.
Ross Douthat
I mean, nothing shocks me, Jonah. I’m, I’m unshockable at this stage. [laughs] But I, I was-
Jonah Goldberg
Challenge accepted.
Ross Douthat
I, I was, I was– Don’t say that, man.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Ross Douthat
Damn it. What have we done? Monkey’s paw curls. I, I was surprised by not that Trump attacked Iran, but that he attacked Iran on this scale.
Ross Douthat
My, my read of Trump had always been, yes, he’s a Jacksonian, he’s not a pacifist, he’s not an isolationist in any kind of conventional definition of the term. You know, the idea that he was gonna retreat to the Western Hemisphere, right? That has been very popular among some critics of his administration from the start, I always thought didn’t make sense, like you just had to look around. Trump wants to be able to throw his weight around on the world stage. He wants to be, you know, he, he likes authoritarian figures, but he wants to be respected [chuckles] alongside them. He– and that requires being a global power. When– and so
Ross Douthat
that– Uh, so the fact that he would bomb Iran is not surprising. He ki- you know, he killed, you know, he killed Soleimani. He ki- right, he kills an Iranian general in his first term, right? Which is something that, you know, other presidents might, might not have done. I’ve just always thought of him as someone who
Ross Douthat
is just, is fundamentally wary of overcommitment and getting trapped, and that he wants off-ramps, he wants exits, he wants to be able to pull the plug immediately if, if something isn’t going wrong or isn’t going-
Jonah Goldberg
And he thought he could. I mean, I, I, he– How many times has he said that this was gonna be a Venezuela model thing? I think that’s what he thought.
Ross Douthat
Right. And, and I guess that just, you know, that, that maybe is down to what people around him were saying or sort of, you know… But or maybe it’s just down to, it is down to some combination of what people were willing to say to him and his own post Venezuela hubris, because I think clearly there’s a post Venezuela like, you know, we have a new model of quick, easy regime change, right? And this is, you know, whatever, there’s this debate back and forth about, you know, did Mossad or the Israeli government really tell him that they thought we could do a quick regime change, or did they always tell him it was a multi-month process? Who, who knows what the truth is? I’m sure Trump believed we could do a quick regime change. I’m sure he believed that. But I guess I am– I, I was surprised that he talked himself into this depth of commitment where, you know, you are sort of, you, you are removing your off-ramps. A-and again, this goes back to what I was saying earlier. Once, once you’re trying to kill the regime, you’re removing off-ramps. And I guess he just, you know, he didn’t believe that or wanna believe that, but, but that, that, that is sort of what surprised me. And then the betrayal aspect,
Ross Douthat
again, it’s like, what, what is Trumpism, right? You can follow a thread of Donald Trump’s rhetoric back to the nineteen eighties, where he is a baby boomer who lived through the Iran hostage crisis and always wanted to get back at Iran. You can find tape of him talking about Kharg Island in the nineteen eighties.
Jonah Goldberg
I know, I know. Yeah.
Ross Douthat
And in that sense, there’s no betrayal, nobody should’ve been surprised. But look, he also very concretely built up a narrat– He didn’t just allow it to be built up, he built up a narrative himself where he was, you know, the guy to vote for if you didn’t wanna be embroiled in the Middle East the way his predecessors had been. He picked a vice president who, who did have very concrete and specific views about the risks of American intervention. And, you know, we have a certain amount of behind-the-scenes-
Jonah Goldberg
After he was bullied out of picking Rubio or Burgum. But yeah, okay. Sure.
Ross Douthat
Well, but if you’re… I mean, what does this mean? If you’re– T-Trump is bullied into, you know… I mean, he, he picked him, right? And he picked– He had, he, he-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he picked him, absolutely. Yeah. He– Like he made, decided to go to war, he decided to pick J.D. Vance. So yes, it, it-
Ross Douthat
Put it this way. In his first term, in his first term, he had a lot of much more conventional Republican hawks in his administration, and he was often sort of in tension with them, trying to pull troops out of theaters like Syria or Afghanistan, facing resistance from sort of the institutions, the military, sometimes Republican hawks. He famously did not go along with John Bolton at a moment when Bolton thought we were gonna bomb Iran, and Trump pulled the plug. And then in his second term, he put many more people in positions of power, from the vice president through the Defense Department and the State Department, through, you know, the Director of National Intelligence, right? He made a bunch of personnel choices that meant term one, Trump was at war with the hawks, often term two, he had more sort of non-hawks, non-neoconservatives. Why would you expect– W-couldn’t, couldn’t you say, looking at that narrative, you should not expect this to happen? I think you could.
Jonah Goldberg
Well, you could say it for sure. I– Here’s where I think is the fundamental problem with that analysis. It’s not that it’s not true, it’s that it’s, itImposes, it projects the idea
Jonah Goldberg
that Trump is about ideas of any kind
Jonah Goldberg
onto him. And be- and if you like those restrainer ideas, you find the evidence really compelling because y-your people are in there. I’m not saying you, I just mean in the abstract, right? I can name twenty people this applies to.
Ross Douthat
Look, I’m, I, I’m sympathetic to not all, but, but some of those views, yes.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. So, so the criteria for joining this administration
Jonah Goldberg
was not whether you were a restrainer or not. It was whether you were willing to be first and foremost an absolute compliant loyalist to Donald Trump. And it turned out the people from the restrainer world
Jonah Goldberg
were, because they were outsiders in the GOP establishment of old, were disproportionately available to fill those kinds of slots. Pam Bondi isn’t there because of her views of the law at all. She’s there because she’s a yes woman to Donald Trump. You can go through that cabinet, and very few of those people, and Rubio is probably an exception. Hegseth is there because he was a total toady to Trump and because he likes blowing stuff up.
Ross Douthat
And he’s good on TV.
Jonah Goldberg
And he’s good on TV.
Ross Douthat
Right. Well, good, good is-
Jonah Goldberg
None of that had anything to do with ideas
Ross Douthat
…good is a debatable proposition. He is, he is on TV, or he was on TV. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
And, and he’s on TV in a way that Trump likes, right? And so this is sort of in miniature my problem with all of these analyses, is that Donald Trump has no compelling ideological priors. He has a few ideas about what we should do that would show strength, that would be smart, you know, that kind of stuff. He has some potted ideas about tariffs. He wants Karg Island, right? But here’s the broader question, which I, which I think, I, I, I, I think your, what your analysis is problematic for me is that the people who are against going into Iran were against going into Iran before he went into Iran in any form, in any way, right? They’re just like, “Restrainer, this is not what– No forever wars.” For all they knew, it could have been a Venezuela model redux and been a quick mowing the lawn operation and get out. They were still against it in a way that they weren’t against Venezuela. They weren’t against Trump’s talking about making Canada the fifty-first state. They weren’t against Trump talking about using force to take Greenland. They
Jonah Goldberg
are not per se opposed to Trump being a bull in a china shop, taking territory, asserting himself in the… Being Jacksonian, until it comes to something that involves Israel and the Middle East, and then all of a sudden, they fall back to these pretextual arguments about ideolo- about restraint and say, “This is a betrayal.” I would have a lot more respect for Steve Bannon and a lot of these people if they thought Venezuela was a betrayal, if they thought talking about taking Cana- going, taking Canada, you know, a-annexing Canada was a betrayal. If they thought, if they thought about the Greenland thing as real. But they thought that was funny. They thought that was cool. They wanted to let Trump be Trump. And then when Trump is Trump, once again, when it comes to Iran, they’re like, “Whoa, this is a first order betrayal. This is not what he was elected for.” And I just, I don’t find it persuasive at all.
Ross Douthat
I mean, I’m not, I’m not gonna defend every sort of podcasting and influencer take. Some, some, some-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Ross Douthat
…some of which have the flavor that you’re describing. I, I would say that-
Jonah Goldberg
Reasonable New York Times columnists have to defend crazy right-wingers. [laughs]
Ross Douthat
I’ll just, I’ll just speak, I’ll just speak, I’ll just speak, I’ll just speak for myself, just, just only, only for myself, right? As someone who thought Tru– I thought Trump’s foreign policy in his first term was surprisingly effective, much more effective than I thought. And I thought it was effective in part because I thought there was a kind of dynamic interaction between Trump’s instincts, which were different from any, [chuckles] any other recent president and were like Jacksonian plus, like why are we over-committed, mixed with the national security establishment, right, trying to sort of work through and around him. But that yielded some of the things that, you know, I, as a skeptic of certain kinds of like hawkish maximalism, thought were good things. That it is good. The US, the US, the US should be getting NATO to, you know, do a lot more stuff. The US is not in a position to fight wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, and China simultaneously, and we need, while we’re rebuilding our defense base, we need to reprioritize, right? And so on, so on through that list. And so if you look at things Trump has done in the second term… I mean, look, I think the Greenland stuff is just, you know, you can treat it as a joke or not. It is fundamentally indefensible and can only be defended as a like sort of, “Oh, he’s just joking,” or something.
Jonah Goldberg
But I don’t think he was joking.
Ross Douthat
He’s Trump, right. He’s not, it’s never fully-
Jonah Goldberg
He was testing the-
Ross Douthat
Trump is never fully committed to something, but certainly he was, he was sincere. Um, and that’s– And again, I, I would be fine with the US buying Greenland, by the way. In fact, I would, I would support it. But threatening, you know, threatening our NATO allies and threatening to seize Greenland is indefensible. I think, though, that the, the sort of restraint-friendly view of Trump prior to four weeks ago in the second term, apart from Greenland, would be to say, you know, we took a risk in Venezuela, but it was a high upside, low downside risk. If it had failed, we would’ve been in the same position we were in to begin with, and in the event seemed to modestly succeed. It required no commitment of US troops, you know, no occupation, nothing, nothing like that, right? Same with the bombing of Iran’s nuclear program. It was hawkish, Jacksonian, but inherently limited. Uh, we were not over-committed, and it was an example of sort of, you know, Jacksonian means to realist ends. And then at the same time, the other thing we haven’t, that’s in this mix is Russia, Ukraine, right? WhereA lot of the people that you’re criticizing for being sort of Israel-focused were also, you know, ended up like sometimes almost obsessively anti-Ukraine, anti-Zelensky, and, you know, there’s some is-issues related to Jewish questions there too. But, but that was sort of its own separate thing. I thought– I would say personally, I thought the, you know, the sort of anti-Ukraine right view went way too far. But where the Trump administration has actually ended up over the last year of basically trying to get Europe to do more of the work supporting Ukraine, trying to negotiate a deal, but not just like taking any deal, and obviously the war is still ongoing, and I, I think that’s a defensible view too. And you could say, yeah, you’re getting, again, you’re getting like the mixture of Trump threatening to abandon Ukraine, which gets you more European buy-in, and in the end, the US sort of gets to recalibrate, but we don’t just… You know, Russia has not taken over Ukraine. It’s working out okay. What it– What makes Iran different at the moment is just like the scale of the risk
Ross Douthat
that we’ve, that we’ve undertaken. Trump did– has not added new risk substantially in Russia-Ukraine. He didn’t add that much risk with Venezuela. He didn’t add that much risk bombing the nuclear program. He’s added tons of risk here, the risk we’ve already talked about, and also just the risk of, you know, the US doesn’t have that many weapons, [chuckles] right? Like if you’re not an isolationist, but you are a, you know, wanna be realist, and you’re like the big thing is like US versus China for the long term, what we’re doing in the Persian Gulf right now is just a bigger problem for any plan to be f-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, that’s fine.
Ross Douthat
So that’s, that’s the argument basically, that Iran, Iran is just an… Trump did non-restrainer things, but he didn’t do non-restrainer things at this scale with this risk, and so it’s different.
Jonah Goldberg
As is your want, you wanna make serious arguments about something that I don’t think are necessarily apropos when talking about Trump. Because I, like Trump-
Ross Douthat
Well, but they’re apropos when talking about the people. Like there are actual people trying to run American national security. Like s-forget the podcasters and influencers-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
Ross Douthat
… for the moment, right? There’s a group-
Jonah Goldberg
Sure
Ross Douthat
… of figures around Trump who have their own different sets of views, you know, Vance, Rubio, and their subordinates, right? And they represent sort of… You know, Vance and Rubio are,
Ross Douthat
are friendly and have, I think, more in common than some people think, but obviously Rubio is more hawkish and Vance less so. Both of them made a calculation when they went, [chuckles] went to work for Trump, right? That essentially you could have a wha-whatever the best version of their own preferred foreign policies were, you could get that through Trump. And I think both of them in different ways could have made a case
Ross Douthat
that they were doing a pretty good job a couple months ago, and that case is in trouble right now. Whether you’re the more hawkish side of Rubio or the more dovish side of Vance.
Jonah Goldberg
I agree with that entirely. That’s, that’s perfectly fine.
Jonah Goldberg
My point is, is that the, uh-
Ross Douthat
That’s, that’s, and that’s the, that’s, that’s the limit of my argument.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. If we’re talking about criminology within the, the greater White House
Jonah Goldberg
appar- administration, you know, apparatus and the people who are thinking about futures and politics and different factions of the GOP, all of that is fine. I don’t, I don’t dispute of that. To me, the idea of watching for ten years now a bull in a China shop
Jonah Goldberg
smash one thing after another and then all of a sudden be like, “How dare that bull smash that vase? We wanted to keep that vase,” is ridiculous. It’s, it’s just utterly ridiculous. And the idea that-
Ross Douthat
But they aren’t even… I mean, the, the, the podcasters, the influencers, whatever, they aren’t even say– They aren’t, they don’t, [chuckles] they don’t wanna criticize Trump. [chuckles] So it’s more, it’s more like-
Jonah Goldberg
Oh, I think it’s they’re cowards. I, I get it
Ross Douthat
… they can’t have a good Benjamin Netanyahu make the bull [chuckles] break that vase.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. No, exactly.
Ross Douthat
Right. Right.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. Well, Benjamin is the bull whisperer in this analogy, right? So b-but the serious people, the Colbys and all these, all these people that you’re talking about and the people who work for them and all the rest, they put out a document, you know, about the US [chuckles] national security strategy, and then virtually every significant thing in foreign policy that Trump did after that was either like wholly not mentioned, like I don’t think the word Greenland was in the national security strategy. Certainly doing this with Iran wasn’t mentioned in it. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. I’ve been writing this for, for ten freaking years. Trumpism is not an ideology. It’s a psychological and sociological phenomenon, and the idea of trying to impose a single coherent worldview on what Trump is going to do or what Trumpism means, I just think is, is a fool’s errand. And I think this Iran thing is a demonstration of that, and the protest about it, to a certain extent, is a comeuppance from people– for people who thought all that other stuff he did, that was extraneous, but the true core of Trumpism is X, and now he’s showing that it’s not X either because there is no ideological core to Trumpism.
Ross Douthat
Yeah, yeah. I, I… Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I– Let’s, let’s make a distinction. Yeah. There’s no, there’s no true Trumpism here that has been betrayed. There is a, let’s… There, there is a, an ongoing attempt by people who are more responsible than Trump, and the… Again, this encompasses everyone from
Ross Douthat
Mike Pence to Elbridge Colby, even though Mike Pence and Elbridge Colby have very different worldviews, but they are both more responsible than Trump and have more responsible views of what foreign policy looks like than Trump. So in the first term, there was an attempt to basically sort of work with Trump’s impulses and tendencies in a way that yielded a good outcome for foreign policy, and that’s what people tried to do in the first term, and that’s what, again, in different waysColby and Rubio, again, taking them as polls instead of Vance and Rubio. Colby and Rubio are trying to do in the second term, and a document like the National Security Strategy, yeah, it’s not actually channeling Trump’s id. It’s saying, “Here’s a strategy, and we think Trump’s, you know, instincts, impulses, and so on can work with it.” And I agree with you. I think that Iran’s at the moment, we’ll see where we are when this airs, right? That’s, that’s th-this is-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Yeah, fair. Fair
Ross Douthat
… this is the moment when that effort has sort of come closest to just ending in disaster. And some of it is like, I, I think there’s also just a narrative of, um,
Ross Douthat
the, the narrative of, of hubris, right? Which is that a Trump foreign policy works as long as his
Ross Douthat
psychological impulses, and sometimes megalomaniacal impulses, can be constrained and channeled, and they can be constrained and channeled as long as he’s afraid of things going to [beep]. And at a certain point, it’s his second term, he, he, he gets, he gets on a roll, and he thinks he’s… You know, I, I wr- I wrote about– My first column about Iran basically said you could see it sort of in continuity with just, like, how Trump approached US politics, right? It’s like he felt like he took the measure of the Republican establishment and crushed them in twenty sixteen, and he took the measure of the liberal establishment, and they beat him for a while, but eventually he beat them, and now he’s taken the measure of the world. And he thought he could do to Maduro what he did to, like, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker, and he was right, and then he thought he could do [chuckles] to the Iranian regime the same thing, and maybe this is the moment when… Yeah, that when neme-nemesis, nemesis shows up. Pending him having like… I mean, the other thing about Trump is that he has a lot of luck, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Yes. No, that’s, that’s the problem. He is the millionth monkey banging on typewriters. That’s the problem.
Ross Douthat
Yeah. He, he… Well, you know, we’re the, you know, there’s, like, a Hegelian, like, bizarro spirit of history-
Jonah Goldberg
Uh-huh
Ross Douthat
… right, where, like, Trump is, you know-
Jonah Goldberg
He’s Napoleon on a horse at Jena. Uh, I don’t-
Ross Douthat
I mean, not on a horse
Jonah Goldberg
… I don’t see it.
Ross Douthat
Right? But-
Jonah Goldberg
But I
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Ross Douthat
… he’s, he’s a, he’s a figure in whom certain things are expressed and furthered, and at some point that process will end, but until it does, he gets, like, the dice, the dice roll his way. And I don’t wanna be there when they stop rolling his way, but I’m just saying, like, he could, he could still luck out here. We’ll see.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s entirely true. That’s entirely… I am guilty of baiting and switching, um, my audience here because I said we were gonna get to this disagree- this other disagreement that we had, and now we just really don’t have time, um, because I promised you a hard out, and I have a hard out as well, but-
Ross Douthat
I’ll, I’ll come, I’ll come back.
Jonah Goldberg
All right.
Ross Douthat
I mean, they, they wanted us to disagree about whether…
Ross Douthat
At least my, my view of the claim was that what we think of as the conservative movement era, the movement that starts, you know, with Buckley in the fifties, it’s, it’s at an end in the Trump era, and whatever comes next
Ross Douthat
may still be informed by that kind of conservatism. But, like, we’ll have… There’ll be sort of a break there. And h-honestly, Jenna, I think that’s gonna be up for debate for a little while [laughs] to come. So-
Jonah Goldberg
For sure
Ross Douthat
… I’m, I’m happy to come back and, and talk about-
Jonah Goldberg
Fair enough. Fair enough.
Ross Douthat
Talk about that.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. And my only point is, is that… And my, my core disagreement was just simply that, um,
Jonah Goldberg
in all of the various scenarios, which you ha– Again, you caveated and you said time will tell-
Ross Douthat
I have no idea what’s gonna happen
Jonah Goldberg
… and it’s unknowable. Right.
Jonah Goldberg
So but, but you, the core of your analysis was where the Trumpian mantle, in effect, goes. And I think it is highly debatable about whether the Trumpian mantle is something that someone,
Jonah Goldberg
w- that people will want or that will be wise to try and take, or that any one person will get it. And the secondary point, it was just that the story that you hypothesize, the easiest historical rebuttal to it is just simply that’s not how it worked with Nixon and Reagan. Nixon won forty-nine states in seventy-two. No one want… And then he, then, you know, he res- IMPE or threatened with, IM- resigned. No one wanted the Nixon mantle. No one campaigned for the Nixon mantle, um, this guy who had this massive new coalition. And Reagan, in effect, he never criticized Nixon, but he also didn’t run to be another Nixon, and his worldview was profoundly different ideologically from the Nixonian worldview. And so my only point is, is
Jonah Goldberg
I don’t think Trump is gonna be popular w- at the end of his term. He’s not popular now. Um, he didn’t end his last term popular. And this idea that the mantle of conservatism will reside in who can claim, claim to be the inheritor of Trumpism, I, I’m just not, I, I don’t find it all that persuasive.
Ross Douthat
Yeah, I, I think there’s two, two questions. One is-
Jonah Goldberg
And we’ll leave it on a cliffhanger, whatever your question is. [laughs]
Ross Douthat
We have five minutes, right? Do we have five minutes? Yeah, those are five minutes.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay, go.
Ross Douthat
Um, one, one question is Trump, Trumpism, like, as something people call Trumpism, right? The question of, like, who, who is the inheritor? I think
Ross Douthat
things would have to get much worse than they are now for Trump’s political position, and they might. But I think they’d have to get much worse than they are right now for there not to be a four to eight-year period in the Republican Party where sort of being seen as an heir to Trump and not a repudiation of him is not really important for becoming the Republican nominee and leading the party. That, that, that will end at some point, um, but I think
Ross Douthat
the, the extent, the extent of the identification with Trump among Republican voters is such thatYeah, things would just have to get a lot worse. It’s not enough for him to leave office unpopular with the country as a whole. He did that once already. Uh, you’d, you’d have to just get more damage before you could have someone who is like clearly a post-Trump figure taking over. That– So that’s, that’s one, one point. I don’t disagree that in the longer run, there will be these, you know, sort of the, the leader of the Republican Party in eight years may not be sort of Trumpy in various ways. I also think, though, that Trump has succeeded, and this, this is where we disagree to some degree, I think, the ways that fit into our earlier conversation. But Trump is sui generis. He is, you know, he’s a celebrity figure and so on. But, you know, the sort of nationalism and populism that he has ridden to power is visible all over the developed world. It shows up in totally different contexts and situations. Um, and it’s connected to a bunch of challenges. We don’t have time to list them. I’ll come back. [laughs] But a bunch of challenges that are just completely, completely different from the, you know, the situation in which movement conservatism took shape. And it doesn’t mean that like a bunch of conservative ideas are all just gonna go away, but it means that sort of the kind of populist nationalist turn, it, it is just something that like is you’re gonna be reckoning with it for a while. Unless, further stipulation, right, um, we get, you know, the absolutely crazy AI revolution, and politics is revolutionized in some further way. But in that case, too, I don’t think you’re, you’re sort of– that’s not gonna wind us backwards
Ross Douthat
either, right? That like there’s a different, you know… And again, whatever we’re talking about when we say m-
Jonah Goldberg
You’re basically taking the Beaconsfield position from Whittaker Chambers. Um-
Ross Douthat
That’s what I’m– That’s exactly what I’m doing. Yeah. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
No, I’m serious. That’s, that’s, that’s very much what you’re doing. It’s, it’s, it’s just fine. It’s a very respectable position. Um-
Ross Douthat
I, I, and I would, but I would just– My last, my last comment is just that this doesn’t mean that a kind of
Ross Douthat
a, a principled view that says Reagan was basically right, and, you know, the three-legged stool is still the best mode of politics, and we– you know, what-whatever you wanna, however you wanna define the conservative movement, that it just disappears. It, it doesn’t disappear, and it may be right and correct and worth defending, but it is negotiating its position. I, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. It i- it will be negotiating its position in a way that is
Ross Douthat
very different from how it was negotiating its position in the Gingrich era or the Tea Party era. That’s, that’s sort of-
Jonah Goldberg
Sure. From consensus to faction is a fair point. Yeah.
Ross Douthat
Yeah. I think, I think that’s, that’s– And that’s what, what– To the extent I was like giving advice, I got some, you know, the Mike Pence people really didn’t like that essay [laughs] ’cause I sort of treated them-
Jonah Goldberg
I’m sure.
Ross Douthat
But, you know, if I’m giving advice to like the Mike Pence people, don’t stand up and say, you know, “We represent conservatism, and this is what conservatism is.” Like, ’cause that’s just clearly not where we are. You are a faction inside conservatism, and you are fighting, building alliances, negotiating, and that’s the world you’re in. That’s all. Or you’re a rem– you might say you’re a remnant, but that’s a more, that’s a more, that’s-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Ross Douthat
I, I mean, I, I think that you, you know, I, I think you’ve always been comfortable with the idea that sort of the most principled form of conservatism could become politically irrelevant for a while. Um, and sometimes, sometimes that happens too.
Jonah Goldberg
For sure. Yeah. As a devout Christian, you have to have your own version of that view.
Ross Douthat
I think, I think there is, there, there are many worlds in which my preferred set of political commitments ends up feeling totally irrelevant, and I,
Ross Douthat
I– And, and honestly, the, the second Trump term, the, the way the second Trump term has worked out, the dire– some of the directions that populism have gone, like away from in sort of the Christian conservatism version, away from like, you know, it, I mean, those, yeah, those, those have made some of my own religious conservative commitments feel
Ross Douthat
at, at a remove from the place where American politics is being contested, let’s say. Nobody’s talking about abortion, as you may have noticed, in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six.
Jonah Goldberg
I have noticed. I have noticed. Except Ramesh Ponnuru. All right, my friend, thank you very much for being here. Um, we will have you back. Uh, I have notes. I have to go say goodbye to my daughter who’s leaving for the airport. You have things to do.
Ross Douthat
I have so many things. Thank you, Jonah. This was fun. And hopefully by the time it airs,
Ross Douthat
all, all will have been resolved in the Middle East.
Jonah Goldberg
We will live in an era of clarity. Yeah. All right.
Ross Douthat
Take care. [whooshing sound]
Jonah Goldberg
All right. Ross Douthat has left the studio, and, uh, that didn’t exactly go according to plan, but I thought the conversation was sufficiently interesting and on the news and poorly timed because by the time this comes out, events will have matured or changed or deteriorated in such a way that, you know, it may seem like a quaint tidbit from a f- bygone era, but who knows? And we will revisit the reason I ha- wanted to come have him on in the first place. The next time he comes on, hopefully, we can talk about the future of conservatism and the right, and, uh… But it’s always fun to talk to Ross. And, um,
Jonah Goldberg
we’ll put links to the columns that we were talking about in the show notes. And, um, thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
Ross Douthat
No, you won’t. This is a podcast. [upbeat music]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.