Jonah Goldberg
[upbeat music]
Jonah Goldberg
Ladies and gentlemen, uh,
Jonah Goldberg
can I please have your attention? Can you dig it?
Jonah Goldberg
[cheering] Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of The Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. It has been a whirlwind of a week, a whirl of wind. I can’t get into everything ’cause it’s, some of it’s just, like, internal dispatch stuff, but big things are happening, and I’m really excited and bullish about the future, and I know for a fact you’ll be hearing a lot about all of that forthwith. But it’s just been crazy stressful week, and with the moving and the packing and the… Yesterday I had to, uh… So,
Jonah Goldberg
and, you know, feel free to fast-forward, I don’t know,
Jonah Goldberg
a minute and a half or however long it takes me to do this, ’cause I’m just trying to get up to speed. Yesterday I had to, uh, I had to get rid of some motor oil.
Jonah Goldberg
So my old car, car I got rid of seven years ago, had some sort of, like, factory defect that eventually was part of a recall kind of thing, where it leaked oil. It just leaked oil. And so, like, every,
Jonah Goldberg
it was like every six mon- It’s, I would have to… It wasn’t so much that it leaked oil, it was that the oil dripped out of the thing into the pan, and then it smoked and blah. Anyway, it leaked oil. And so, like, every six months I’d have to put more oil in it, which was just weird for a car, you know, uh, it was a Audi, to need that much oil. I’ve had cars where I don’t think I’ve ever put oil in them. And [chuckles] um, so I, at one point I just bought in bulk a bunch of this oil, because it was just a pain in the ass. Then I got rid of the car, you know, forgot about it, and it’s been sitting in my garage for probably 10 years, give or take. And, you know, I’m not a super green guy, but I don’t want to pour oil
Jonah Goldberg
down into the sewer system. It’s illegal, it’s wrong, it’s gross. But the rules for disposing of oil are crazy in the District of Columbia, and the only official way to do it, if you’re u- going through the city, is to make an appointment for the toxic chemical
Jonah Goldberg
removal team meet-up in the parking lot of RFK Stadium on X date, and there are a limited number of spots where you can hand over your oil or your other weird chemicals. And I just, you know, I wasn’t gonna be in town the next available date, whatever. But AutoZone collects oil, will take oil, and so I boxed up, you know, like, 10 bottles of this never-used motor oil, which I don’t think you can still use, because there’s, like, an expiration date of five years. Maybe that’s BS. You know, Scott Lincecum thinks all expiration dates are kind of BS. But, um, and I had to drive out to this AutoZone all on the other side of DC, and I could just tell when I was talking to the guy, and I told him that it wasn’t used oil, it was never-used oil, and it’s still in the original packaging and all that kind of stuff.
Jonah Goldberg
You could just see the wheels in his head turning about, “Huh. So you’re saying you’re giving me about 100 bucks worth of, uh, motor oil that still has sealed caps on it that I can sell as new and pocket the money or whatever?” And anyway, I, I don’t know that he’s gonna do that. He seemed like a very nice guy. It was just, I hope someone doesn’t get some, like, fermented motor oil for their car. Anyway, that was a crazy hassle to get all the way across town, because DC’s traffic, I don’t know what the hell’s going on. Some bus blew up yesterday in the Ninth Avenue tunnel. But what should have been, like, a
Jonah Goldberg
40-minute drive was, like, an hour and 40-minute drive and, and then the chuds came out of the sewers. But anyway, I don’t need to get into all that. I, I don’t even know why that story was interesting. My dad used to call this the talk below small talk, nano talk. So maybe that was just nano talk, and we can cut it. I don’t know. Whatever. I guess we can start by just talking about where we are with Iran. It’s kind of funny. I listen to, you know, I listen to a bunch of podcasts, and people will acknowledge it, right? Like, we got nothing new to say. It’s the exact, it’s the status quo for, like, 10 days, you know, two weeks. There are no new points to make, like, on the commentary podcast or NR podcast. There’s lots of, “As we’ve talked about many times,” or, “As we’ve said before.” Did the same thing on the Dispatch podcast yesterday. And that’s because the whole thing is just sort of in a holding pattern, and I think that’s sort of the way Trump kind of wants it for the time being at least. I don’t think he wants to start bombing again. I don’t think the Iranians want to be bombed again, but it’s in their interest to not give in and not negotiate and drag this thing out. And, you know, Trump has this thing about telling you what he’s worried about by saying he’s not worried about it. You know, so he’s saying, “I have all the time in the world. I don’t care. I’m not on a, under any time pressure.” You know? Because he’s under time pressure, and he feels like he’s under time pressure, and people are saying he’s under time pressure. And the time pressure is simply that, you know… I mean, [chuckles] like, Trump is right when he talks about how this is very early for a war. I don’t think he necessarily helps himself when he says, “Look, how long did Vietnam last? Vietnam lasted so much longer.” How is that encouraging for anybody? Like-Oh, now I feel better about this thing? It also create, raises all sorts of political issues for him. Like, if you just keep calling it a war, and you keep comparing it to World War II and the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the case that this is just a military operation gets weaker and weaker by the day. Of course, he’s backstopped, or he’s helped by the fact that the congressional Republicans have absolutely no desire to actually
Jonah Goldberg
make this point that this w- we’re not supposed to be at war without their approval because they don’t want any responsibility in approving anything. But still, the more it goes on, to, to pretend this legal fiction is a thing is kind of nonsense. And I was joking the other day with Steve and a colleague from AEI, we were talking, and I was joking the other day. I was like, “You know, one of the biggest burdens of this particular moment in American politics is carrying the load of being right about so many things.” And I was joking, but I’m k- I’m kind of serious insofar as, like, you know, everything I ever said about Trump’s character is coming, you know, on full display, and we’re getting all of these people, like, suddenly realizing the problems with Trump’s character as if, like, nobody knew, right? You got Tucker Carlson doing his BS apology for helping get Trump elected as if, like, this, you know, the, the Trump we’re seeing now is somehow materially different or a surprise. I don’t know, three weeks ago, I wrote in a G file that we were heading towards something like a JCPOA plus kind of settlement to this thing, and now it’s sort of conventional wisdom that that’s what they’re going for. I think the first column I wrote about the Iran war was about how Iran had an asymmetric advantage because of the Strait of Hormuz, and, like, that’s conventional wisdom now. I mean, again, none of these are, like, scintillating insights or anything like that. It’s just that, like, it feels like there’s nothing new to say about this war that I didn’t say and some of my colleagues at the Dispatch didn’t say in the first week of it, you know, that he wanted this to be a replay of Venezuela. What is going to really annoy me is that whenever the Strait of Hormuz actually does get truly open because of some sort of deal, we saw a glimpse of this last week, I guess, when Trump had declared that the strait was fully open. All of these sort of MAGA types talking about what a genius Trump was to get the Strait of Hormuz open, this vital waterway. Only Trump could be this smart. And it’s like,
Jonah Goldberg
getting the Strait of Hormuz open wasn’t the strategic goal of this war because it was already open when the war started. Fixing, uh, quote unquote, “fixing” a problem that you created and then wanting all of this credit for how brilliant you were to be able to do it, it’s just such a familiar pattern, and we’re, we’re gonna hear so much more of it when this thing is finally settled. Anyway, I, I think that the, the reason time is more on
Jonah Goldberg
Iran’s side
Jonah Goldberg
geostrategically, right? Or I should put it this way. The reason I think it is more likely that time is on Iran’s side, because we don’t know really what’s happening internally with the regime. There are signs of fracturing. Just because Trump says that we don’t know who to deal with because the regime is coming apart doesn’t mean it’s not true. And as you know, I talked about with Eli Lake and Ken Pollock long ago, the only way you actually get real regime change is by members of the elite turning on each other. And so we could, you know, very suddenly see something that looks actually like a kind of regime change. It doesn’t mean that the regime is gonna get necessarily materially better, but it could. But I just don’t think, I don’t think we’re there. And so barring that, the reason why I think it’s on Iran, time is on Iran’s side is that the closing, the partial, mostly closing, right, there are some ships getting out of the Hormuz Strait, but also, you know, just the tightening of the supply that goes through there isn’t really just about oil. Like a third of… I think it’s, you know, let’s just say I know people criticize me for using the word directionally right. Let’s just say it’s, uh, it’s in the ballpark that something like a third of the world’s helium supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz from Oman or one of those countries. And the computer chip industry massively depends on helium to make chips, to make transistors or whatever, microchips, including the ones with a hint of lime. No, kidding. And we’re already finally hearing, getting real coverage about the problem with the fertilizer stuff and, you know, the increased costs, the shortages, the economic problems with having traffic curtailed or throttled through the Strait of Hormuz, they accumulate, right? Trump is kind of hoping that this thing kind of goes on a back burner and people stop paying attention to it, and that’s why he keeps saying, you know, “I don’t care about the Strait of Hormuz. We don’t use it. We don’t need it,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Jonah Goldberg
But the world economy needs it, and we are at the center of the world economy. And, and so, like, having just ten or twelve or five ships a day coming out of the Strait of Hormuz is just a huge tax on industry, on consumers in all sorts of ways, and those taxes are gonna accumulate. They’re cumulative. And if Trump wants to, like, get the economic consequences of this thing behind him and get the price of gas down, just putting in e-essentially a semi-permanent ceasefire and saying, “We’ll get back to this when you guys can talk,” it helps the Iranian regime more than it helps
Jonah Goldberg
Trump. And, you know, now we’re hearing these estimates from the Pentagon that’ll be six months before they can fully demine the Strait of Hormuz, which I think is, is kind of weird. But six months ofGas getting more expensive. And like, and also keep in mind, this stuff about the blockade, I think the blockade is actually smart, and I think the Trump administration was right to do it. I love listening to people, including the Iranians, you know, saying,
Jonah Goldberg
“This blockade is an act of war.” Well,
Jonah Goldberg
yeah. Yeah, it’s an act of war. So is, you know, [chuckles] bombing your capital and killing your supreme leader and, you know. Like, it’s weird how they’re m- they sound more angry and outraged about a blockade than they did about, you know, the blowing up of the IRGC barracks and the killing of the supreme leader and, and all the rest. But it’s absolutely true, blockades are an act of war. This does not bother me
Jonah Goldberg
conceptually at all, and it’s funny to listen to people who are talking about how,
Jonah Goldberg
like, oh, some of the… I’ve heard some of the commentary on cable and on NPR or whatever, you know, people, they throw in this, “blockade is an act of war” thing as if, like, it’s escalatory or categorically different than what we’ve been doing for the last sixty days when, you know, it’s just not. It’s, blockades are part of war. In fact, I wrote a column a couple months ago about this, about how, now that I think about it, how it’s, I think it’s kinda funny how
Jonah Goldberg
Trump likes to,
Jonah Goldberg
has been like re-release, w- has been lifting sanctions and, and restraints on Russian and even s- in the early part of the war, Ira- Iranian oil to get it to market to keep prices down. And what’s sort of funny about that is that, you know, there’s this h- famous Henry George quote about protectionism, that protectionism teaches us to do in times of peace what we usually only do in times of war against our enemies. When we’re in war, Trump wants to lift sanctions and tariffs, essentially, on foreign goods, but at peace he wants to raise them. It’s a really kinda weird scenario. Um, anyway, I think the blockade is a good idea. I think what it does is, is it puts more time pressure on the regime, because they need the petrodollars that come out of selling oil to China and whatnot. But the thing is, is like the blockade, it squeezes Iran. It also squeezes us because even though Iran says it sells ninety percent of its oil to China, or eighty percent or something like that, oil is a global commodity market, so if the price goes up anywhere, it goes up everywhere. It’s not like China’s not gonna buy oil from someplace else if they can’t, can’t get it from Iran, which means there’s gonna be more demand for oil from someplace else, which means prices are gonna go up. And so again, I think militarily the blockade, and strategically the blockade makes a lot of sense, but it’s going to make the economic squeeze of all of this on American consumers worse. And if they’re really talking about even under the best of circumstances, the Strait of Hormuz not operating properly for six months, well, you know, six months from now is what? October twenty-fourth? That’s like, in other words, ten days before the midterms. That’s not great for, for Trump or the Republicans. Not that I’m,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, oozing with sympathy or anything like that. Sorry, I’m also on some weird medication. I’m taking some steroids and, um, they’re making me a little loopy. Not fun steroids. I’m not, I’m not getting jacked or anything like that. Where to go? I wanna talk about the Clarence Thomas thing. I think I’m gonna write about it today, but I know once I start that, I’m not gonna be able to stop for a while, and so if you’re interested in that, just stay tuned and we’ll get to it.
Jonah Goldberg
Why don’t we start with this Hasan Piker thing? It’s weird. Like, I don’t… You know, I wrote about Hasan Piker like a week ago, and as I admitted in the thing, I don’t, I just, I n- I, I don’t follow the guy, I don’t know much about him. I know that there’s, you know, a lot of the left is having this debate about whether or not they should welcome Ha- Hasan Piker to their ranks. I think the lefties who think they should are making a catastrophic mistake because the guy is– I mean, I think the guy’s a complete frigging fraud and, you know, grew up rich, hates, says he hates capitalism. There was this, some interview or, you know, round table discussion in The New York Times this week that everyone’s freaking out about where all of these hardcore lefty
Jonah Goldberg
types are talking about how it’s okay to steal and do some, a little domestic terrorism for the right thing, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know, the social contract shouldn’t apply to them. And there’s this New Yorker writer who talks about how she steals from Whole Foods and, you know, it’s okay, they’re talking about it because, you know, Jeff Bezos has so much money. And screw all of them. Shame on them. They shou- Like, it’s great. There was, someone confronted this New Yorker writer who lives in a two million dollar brownstone, which I know sounds like a lot, but like in New York, it, it just means she lives in a nice brownstone. It’s not like it’s a super mansion or anything. But still, she lives an affluent lifestyle. She writes for The New Yorker and, and someone approached her about her comments about being in favor of theft, and she blew her stack about how outrageous it was to confront her. And I was like, “Screw you, lady.” Like, you can’t… I think it was Josh Barrow who said, you know, funny how people all of a sudden believe in the social contract when it, you know, when rejecting it inconveniences them. I’m not for harassing anybody or anything like that, but I have just such contempt for these people, for these arguments. They’re so stupid. You know, first of all, this cavalier attitude towards crime, I don’t know how many times I have to make this point. Crime is a regressive tax on poor people.
Jonah Goldberg
It is worse for poor people. It creates more problems for poor people. It makes life just difficult. And I’m not even just talking about as victims of crime, although poor people are disproportionately victims of crime. I mean that, like, in high crime areasEverything is more expensive. That’s why there are food deserts, right? Or it’s a big part of the reason why there are food deserts. You know, the little stores that, you know, if you ever go into, like, a bodega or, as Trump recently learned the term, corner store. I don’t know if I talked about this before, but, like, that’s just so weird to me that he didn’t know the term corner store. Not because it’s like everybody
Jonah Goldberg
uses it and it’s a household name or anything. He also, remember, he hadn’t heard the word… He, he kept talking about how groceries was a forgotten word during the campaign. He’s like, “You never hear about groceries, but I use that term, groceries, you know?” Well, like, people u- people use the term groceries. Anyway, people use the term corner store. But the reason why it’s really weird that he didn’t know the term corner store is just that he’s a real estate guy from New York, but he has real estate stuff all over the country, and the idea that nobody in a meeting or proposal or, like, when he was doing eminent domain to kick that grandma out of her home in, in Atlantic City, no one ever said, “Okay, yeah, and we got the rights to this corner store,” I just find it really, really weird. And maybe he’s just getting old and read it funny and it, and his brain wasn’t working, but anyway. Where was I? If you go to these corner stores or bodegas or whatever and you try to buy staples of like, you know, flour, crackers, whatever, they’re just much more expensive than they are at the Kroger or the Piggly Wiggly, you know, out in the suburbs because the transportation costs are higher, the insurance costs are higher, the rents are higher. The need for, you know, higher profit margins to operate in sketchy neighborhoods is a real thing, and the people who buy their groceries in those kinds of stores are poor because they can’t afford to go anywhere else. They don’t have cars, right? Or if they do have cars, it’s expensive to go. Uh, just like, uh, uh, in every single way. I mean, I think of this, this woman who used to work for us as a nanny, and I used to drive her home all the time, and I’ve been to her neighborhood and all that, and it’s like the, just the existence of crime made her life m- much harder than it needed to be. You know, like, to get to a, you know, there were fewer pharmacies, all these kinds of things because
Jonah Goldberg
of crime. And then you add in the fact that, like, “Ha ha, I stole avocados from, from Whole Foods, so Jeff Bezos, eat it.” Well, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
what about the truck driver who brought the avocados to Whole Foods? What about the farmer who grew the avocados? Stealing stuff is just… Well, first of all, stealing stuff is just wrong, but it’s this cartoonish attitude that somehow there are no externalities, there are no, you know, unintended consequences to theft, and it’s just a political act. It’s so sophomoric. I’m just, I’m just so unbelievably contemptuous or, or believably contemptuous of these people, and I, I really resent
Jonah Goldberg
the fact that The New York Times and other people, these very, very freaking old ideas. I mean, talk about not being a new idea. Um, the idea that somehow, you know, theft is a rebellious act and you’re sticking it to the man. I mean, that is just an ancient frigging cliché, and the idea that we’re gonna imbue it with radical seriousness from these poser morons, it just infuriates me. And, you know, it’s funny, because of the Clarence Thomas speech, lots of people have been emailing me about m- my book, Liberal Fascism. I gotta say, like, and I’ll get to the Clarence Thomas thing in a second, but, like, Suicide of the West keeps popping into my mind all the time, and I’m not trying to move books here. And there’s a lot of s- stuff I write about in Suicide of the West in Clarence Thomas’ speech. But just the fundamental ingratitude of these people who live these bespoke first world lifestyles. You know, Hasan Piker grew up a spoiled rich kid, and he is just, as a fashion statement, adopting all of this Maoist
Jonah Goldberg
nonsense. I mean, I honestly, uh, maybe he has, like, raw cognitive intelligence or something like that, but I just, I find all of it so incredibly stupid, and I really do resent, you know. It’s not envy, it’s not jealousy. It’s, it’s kind of like an intellectual vandalism. It’s just wasteful and ugly,
Jonah Goldberg
and it’s kind of like a, you know, a Bastiat broken window fallacy, ’cause the amount of time, and time is, you know, time is a kind of currency when it comes to intellectual life and political life. The time and, and energy people are investing in just these really stupid, intrinsically boring and juvenile ideas, I find it personally insulting in a way that it’s very hard for me to fully articulate.
Jonah Goldberg
But anyway, so, like, the,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, the reason why Suicide of the West comes to mind is, you know, I’ve talked about this a bunch here, I know, but Joseph Schumpeter. Some people say Schumpeter, and some people say Schumpeter. I like Schumpeter, but I hear people say Schumpeter, and I, I just don’t know if it’s, which A sound it is. But anyway, Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, pretty sure that’s what it’s in, he’s pretty pessimistic about the future of capitalism precisely because it creates such wealth
Jonah Goldberg
that it makes it possible for, you know, it makes it possible for the children or grandchildren of capitalist, you know, dynasties or whatever, uh, robber baron, I hate the term robber baron, but, of self-made, you know, Carnegies and Melons. By the time you get to their grandchildren, they’re all, you know, spoken word poet,
Jonah Goldberg
puppets for blind people kind of artistes.Or foundation weirdos. Not exactly the terms Schumpeter uses, but you get the point. And, you know, basically what happens is, is that you get the, you know, that rich kids, or at least prosperous kids, they get this romantic thing about shocking the bourgeoisie, about biting the hand that feeds them, about taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox that they’re standing on. They have this– They adopt all of this language about anomie and radicalization and, and alienation and how the system is corrupt. And, uh, some of it has to do with sort of, I don’t know, weird Freudian paternal crap. Some of it has to do with elite success strategies and various forms of resentment. You know, a big chunk of what Schumpeter was getting at is borrowing conceptually from Nietzsche. Again, I know I’ve talked about a bunch of this. I wrote a book about this. But, you know, Nietzsche has this idea of resentment, ressentiment. You know, they always– he spells it in the French, and it just means resentment. But he uses it in a specific context insofar as you take what the elites value most, their principles, their ideals, and you flip it on the head, and you ma- you turn virtues into vices and vices into virtues, you know. And this was Nietzsche’s big critique of Christianity because it took the knightly virtues of strength and will and making your own morality and flipped it on its head and said, “No, no, no. Meekness and gentility and turning the other cheek and, and universal morality were the new hotness.” And Schumpeter takes sort of that dynamic and applies it to a kind of economic sociological analysis of capitalism. And he says, “You know, the problem with capitalism is that it, it kind of…” And he’s right about this, right? There’s– Part of the creative destruction of capitalism isn’t just about inefficient monopolies and stuff. It does go after
Jonah Goldberg
n-norms, morals, values, anything that capitalism sort of seizes, the market seizes, inefficient and an obstacle to profit maximization, you need to maintain, or it’s gonna wear down, right? That’s, that’s part of the reason why I get into all this stuff about, you know, about, about entropy. You know, the stuff that’s really valuable in life, y-y-it’s not just enough to leave it alone and respect it. You have to maintain and restore it. Anyone who’s ever had a boat knows that if you don’t take care of a boat, uh, you’re not gonna have a boat for very long. You’re certainly not gonna have a valuable boat for very long. And the same thing goes with friendships and family. You know, you have to maintain those things or they, they, they decay. And so anyway, the, what the he- what the hell this has to do with people like Hasan Piker and, and frankly, Tucker Carlson, is that it doesn’t take long for very rich people who no longer think that, you know… They– who take for granted their own economic prosperity and comfort to start minimizing the importance of economic growth and of prosperity for other people and start elevating this idea that somehow capitalism is theft and the system is corrupt and it’s exploitative. And they get this super romantic notion about how society works and that they’re calling BS on it. And it’s very personalized insofar as like, you know how many middlemen there are between Jeff Bezos and an avocado that you steal from Whole Foods? A lot. But the moral prism of it is to reduce everything down to, like, the malefactors of, of great wealth and yourself. And it’s, it’s, in some ways, it’s a way of buying status on the cheap, right? It’s a way of making– of elevating yourself to say, “Well, I’m sticking it to Jeff Bezos.” Because if you say, “Hey, you know, I’m sticking it to the produce manager at, at the Whole Foods on Forty-Eighth Street,” it just doesn’t sound as impressive.
Jonah Goldberg
And anyway, Schumpeter points out, Deirdre McCloskey’s very good on this. Lots of people have pointed this out over the years. Paul Johnson, I think in Modern Times, has a riff on this. Certainly, Tom Sowell does in Intellectuals. You know, very few of the heroes of radical politics, of, you know, Marxist and Leninist-inspired politics, very, very, very few of them actually come from the ranks of the real poor.
Jonah Goldberg
Almost all of them come from fairly prosperous bourgeois lifestyles. You know, Lenin was not of grinding poverty. Fidel Castro was not from grinding poverty. I don’t remember Mao’s background, but I think he was on, you know… He, he wasn’t among the poorest of peasants, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, the point is, is like, it’s, it– A lot of this crap is just what Rob Henderson would call luxury beliefs. And it is just inherently ungrateful for our system and for the good that it has provided. And it’d be one thing if I thought these people were smart or serious or had real ideas, but I just think it’s all,
Jonah Goldberg
it’s all intellectual costume jewelry. You know, it’s flashy but cheap and just not very impressive. Anyway, I’m rambling about this. I just– I, I try very hard, you know, these days to not indulge my anger, my temper, and my contempt for people because I just, you know, I feel like I’ve checked that box in my life. And, uh, but wow, I just–
Jonah Goldberg
just so contemptuous of these people. And, um, anyway, there you have it. Oh, I just… So
Jonah Goldberg
I’m not gonna get into a big, long thing about this, but last night I saw on Twitter that Bill Kristol
Jonah Goldberg
tweeted out excerpt from an article by Jonathan Last over at The Bulwark making the case that, you know-The redistricting thing in Florida and the, you know, and gerrymandering to help Democrats is conceptually basically no different than court packing, and therefore the next step should be to pack the court.
Jonah Goldberg
And I just think that is just
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a monstrously bad idea. JVL is not a dumb guy, Bill’s certainly not a dumb guy, but it’s a really dumb idea. And it’s, it’s not just a dumb idea, it’s a dumb argument, right? This idea that there’s no difference between the gerrymandering stuff and court packing,
Jonah Goldberg
I just– I’m completely and wholly unpersuaded by it. Gerrymandering from the beginning has always been, from the very first gerrymander, which was done for Elbridge Gerry in, what, I think seventeen ninety,
Jonah Goldberg
this has always been a political thing. I think the Republicans were incredibly stupid to launch this mid-decade thing in Texas. I think Democrats have been incredibly hypocritical claiming that they don’t like gerrymanders. Of course they like gerrymanders. And in fact, Democrats, one of the reasons why they don’t like the idea of revisiting this stuff is because they have these baked-in advantages already. So a pox on them for their hypocrisy and all the rest. So I, I, I got, you know– Cotogio had a good piece about how this is just like the ultimate both sides thing. Kevin had a good piece about how he’s been writing about how gerrymandering works for thirty years. But court packing is different. Court packing was wildly controversial when FDR tried to do it for a reason. It’s a completely different form of norm-breaking. And when you say you wanna do it in order to advance the interests of, of Democrats, you are fundamentally undermining the integrity of the court. And, you know, I’m not here to plug Last Branch Standing, which debuted at number five on The New York Times Best Seller list, but I do think Sarah is absolutely right that, like, the court has actually been working pretty well. And, you know, this– all this talk about how the,
Jonah Goldberg
the Supreme Court has just been a bunch of, you know, the conservatives on the court have been a, just a bunch of rubber stamps for Trump is just factually not true. Doesn’t mean I agree with everything. I’m, I’m with David. I did not like the Supreme Court immunity decision. I think it’s really flawed and, and it’s, it’s solidified my thinking that we need to, you know, I am not an amend the Constitution guy, but I think we need to amend the Constitution to revise, reform, or remove, uh, the president’s pardon power. Because so long as impeachment is a dead letter politically, the only check on abusing pardon power n- particularly now with the Supreme Court s-stuff, is impeachment. And if, if impeachment is politically impossible, then the abuses of the pardon power are just wildly dangerous. And I think both Trump and Biden have committed, uh, committed impeachable offenses with their uses of the pardon. You know, James, I think it’s James Madison at the Virginia Ratifying Convention talks about how, you know, having people do criminal things on your behalf in any way, and then with the promise of the, that they’ll be pardoned for it, would be considered an impeachable act. I think Trump has done that more than once. I think you can make the case that Biden did it. I certainly think the preemptive pardons were outrageous. Pardoning his son was outrageous. Regardless, like, that stuff’s not reviewable, so I would, you know, I would– I’m not for getting rid of pardons. I think pardons are good for the system. But I would have something like a, a congressional veto
Jonah Goldberg
of pardons, like Congress would have to approve pardons by the president or s- or, like, some commission or something. I’m open to a lot of different things, but, uh, the breakdown in how pardons are done is just outrageous. But I didn’t start this by wanting to talk about pardons. Oh, it’s court packing. Oh, it’s– Yeah, so I, I didn’t like the immunity decision, all that, but the Supreme Court has just simply not been a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. And the claim that we need to pack the court to correct its Trumpification is based on just a completely false premise. And, and I just think it would be essentially, it would be constitutional vandalism to try and do it, and I don’t think it would remedy any of the problems that we have. And I just, I, you know, I don’t know why
Jonah Goldberg
Bill of all people would, would endorse this idea. I just, I just don’t get it. All right, Clarence Thomas, let’s do this. So Clarence Thomas gave this really remarkable speech at University of Texas at the Civitas Institute. Full disclosure, I got friends at the Civitas Institute. You know, Will Bowdoin is, I don’t know, the, is he the provost or the president? He’s, he’s like a big muckety-muck at UT and a really good guy. Just– He’s been on the, on this podcast before. He’s just a really solid guy. And he actually used to teach a class with Ben Sass. They’re old buddies from, I think, at least grad school or something. And my friend Ry-Ryan Streeter is like the director of the Civitas Institute and used to be a colleague of mine at AI, and as I’ve often said about him, he has really important hair. But none of that really matters to this. So Thomas gave this speech, and I’ve been pretty fascinated by it. First of all, I think Thomas’ personal story is remarkable and
Jonah Goldberg
admirable, and, you know, just so people understand that I’m not, like, just sort of fanboying here and all that. I think
Jonah Goldberg
Ginni Thomas, his wife’s behavior, particularly leading up to the January sixth stuff, has been very, very badAnd I think it’s been embarrassing for the country that a Supreme Court justice is married to someone who’s made, who made really bad decisions. I’m not gonna get inside their marriage or anything. I’ve, I’ve known Ginni Thomas. I, I– she’s a very nice lady. I have friends who are very close to her. But, you know, that’s, that wasn’t good. I’ll just… You know, I don’t think it’ll shock anybody when I say that. Rose, but I think Thomas’ story is amazing. I think it is a sign of how politics is so deep into the groundwater in American life that he is so reviled and misunderstood and vilified by people on the left. Whereas if you had the exact same life story, but he were a progressive justice, he would have a cult of personality in pop culture greater than, you know, than, you know, notorious RBGs. He would be a rock star, and any criticism of him would get you attacked by, you know, the MS Now crowd. It would get you attacked by late-night, you know, liberal comics and The Daily Show crowd. But because he’s a right-winger or a conservative, it’s fine to essentially be racist towards Clarence Thomas, and I, I think that’s gross and unfortunate and unfair. And if you wanna know why that guy is not gonna retire from the Supreme Court until they have to carry him out, it’s because he wants to say F you to a lot of those people, and, um, whether you like that or not. But, you know, the story of his upbringing, you know, the people who call him, you know, this defender of… this Uncle Tom kinda guy,
Jonah Goldberg
if you even… You know, if you could read that speech or listen to that speech with open ears and an open, uh, you know, open mind. Like, I’ve heard Clarence Thomas talk about segregation and growing up under segregation a million times, or not a million times, a bunch of times, and, like, the idea that he’s a defender of any of that. Like, they used to give him crap because he had… You know, I remember there was supposed to be this huge kinda, like, Daily Beast-generated, I don’t know if it was Daily Beast, but it was that kind of story, um, scandal because he allegedly had a Confederate flag in his office. He had the state flag of South Carolina, which has, like, some stars and bars kinda, you know, pattern in it or something like that. And people try to turn him into, like, this, you know, head butler of the slave mansion kinda guy, and that’s grotesque, and it’s slanderous, and, and it’s just, it’s profoundly unserious. Anyway,
Jonah Goldberg
I admire the guy a lot, and, and I think the speech
Jonah Goldberg
was, on the whole, great, and not just because it, it tracks with so many of the things. I mean, he even, he quotes the Calvin Coolidge on the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the declaration stuff, which, you know, I’ve done on this podcast ten times. It’s a big part of my book. I use it in closing speech- to close out speeches all the time. I love that stuff. But, uh… And we’ll get to the intellectual import of that in just a second. But, you know, this is, this is sort of… The whole speech is, in many ways, my–
Jonah Goldberg
he’s singing from my playbook, or I should say he’s singing from the same playbook I– songbook that I sing from, um, ideologically on a lot of this stuff. I would say philosophically, I am probably in some ways closer to Clarence Thomas than I am to anybody else on the court, but not necessarily jurisprudentially. There are times where I kinda disagree with him about how he rules on things. But philosophically, I’m very sympathetic to Clarence Thomas because he kind of understands that the state isn’t there to be your parent and isn’t there to necessarily endorse,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, your preferred sense of morality. But that doesn’t mean his conception of the state doesn’t have a morality to it. And, uh, anyway, so the freak out about it from the left I find very, very annoying. I think Kevin is right when he summarizes it is as, “Wah, wah, wah. Don’t you know progressives do nice things,” right? And, like, you’ve heard me talk about this a million times where… So prog-progressive is one of these words that has just simply positive connotations to it. Who’s against progress, right? It’s sort of like in, um, Parks and Recreation, the crazy cult that believes in the eventual return of some volcano mouth giant liver-lizard that will destroy the planet. They call themselves the Reasonabitarians because they wanna be able to say anybody who criticizes them is against reasonableness. Progressivism has one of these vernacular meanings that found-sounds very difficult to disagree with. You know, progressive rock is cool. Progressive coffee is hip. You know, progressive values are what you’re supposed to want and all that kind of thing. And
Jonah Goldberg
it’s no shock that people who are ideologically progressive happen to believe that cultural line as well, um, because it’s the story they tell themselves about themselves. And so for them, progressive just means good. But progressivism as a philosophy is a different thing, and as a historical matter, it was a specific thing. So he says in his speech… Well, let me read the whole two paragraphs. This is Clarence Thomas’ speech. “The Constitution is the means of government. It is the declaration that announces the ends of government. The Constitution achieves its purpose by protecting our natural rights and liberties from concentrated power and excessive democracy. Our Constitution creates a separation of powers and federalism, truly for the first time in modern history, to prevent the government from becoming so strong that it threatens our natural rights. Federalist Number 10 proposed the idea that the great threat to our rights comes from majority faction.”Human history teaches us, alas, that numerical majorities frequently seek to control government and use the state to violate the rights of the minority. Because man is fallen and the desire for power was, as James Madison described it, sewn into the nature of man, government had to be limited. For as Madison said, quote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Unquote. But men are not angels. The slaveholders used the power of government to deny the fundamental natural rights of the slaves. The segregationists used the state to oppress the freed men and women, including my ancestors. As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism. Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many re- inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever. Okay, so this is where I have some disagreements, but let’s just finish, let’s tie a bow on the progressivism qua progressivism thing. Think about it this way. I think longtime readers and listeners know that I really don’t like philosophical pragmatism, American pragmatism. Doesn’t mean everything the pragmatists said was wrong, and doesn’t mean the pragmatists were bad people. William James was a wonderful guy and really smart, and there’s stuff in Principles of Psychology that I think is just absolutely brilliant. John Dewey, I have less favorable things to say a-about, but whatever. The thing is, is like pragmatism is another one of these words that when you say you’re against capital P pragmatism, people scratch their head and don’t know what you’re talking about, um, because pragmatism just sounds like it’s just, it’s reasonable, right? It’s practical. Who isn’t… You know, Americans are practical people. Who, who’s against being practical? But pragmatism is actually a pretty coherent,
Jonah Goldberg
deep, philosophical
Jonah Goldberg
school or project that has some very basic metaphysical assumptions baked into it that I dislike. It doesn’t mean I’m against using the right screwdriver to remove a screw or something like that, right? That’s not, that’s not what I’m saying. And similarly with progressivism, progressivism was an actual real philosophy of government, right? You know? I think Thomas is right to ding Wilson. Lord knows I’d never criticize anybody for dinging Wilson. But, like, I think he did that in part because people know who Wilson was, and Wilson was an important, you know, progenitor of, of, of progressivism to be sure. But I don’t think he ca- you know, he’s, he’s, he’s, he says, you know, Woodrow Wilson called it progressivism. Uh, that, he didn’t… Wi-Wilson wasn’t the guy who coined the phrase. He didn’t bequeath the na- the ti- the label progressivism to progressivism. But he was, you know, a champion of the ideas that were in the water then. And, you know, and Thomas is absolutely right to say that progressivism came, was a foreign idea.
Jonah Goldberg
It blossomed in America, but it was part, you know, a lot of this stuff came from Germany. W- I mean, uh, virtually everything Thomas says about facts of this stuff I think is right. It’s, I, I, I, I have more sort of nuanced disagreements. But, you know, I had it open because I was looking up something, and I was thinking about writing about this. So I wrote a piece for National Review, I don’t know, fifteen years ago, about Richard Ely, or E… I always pronounce it Eli, but then people correct me. It’s another one of these things. Who was the, he was the foremost progressive economist in America. He was the head of the American Economic Association. He was the founder and godfather of the Wisconsin Idea, which was basically this proto-think tank at the University of Wisconsin, where almost all of
Jonah Goldberg
the twentieth-century ideas about American progressive welfare state stuff and the New Deal, all that stuff, basically you can trace back to there from everything from, like, concept of living wage to minimum wage to all the labor laws. And, you know, I’ve told people this a million times, but when I would speak at the University of Wisconsin, it would be fun to, like, point out the names of various rooms or buildings or whatever and say, “Oh yeah, that guy was a racist eugenicist. Oh, that guy was a racist eugenicist. That guy was a racist eugenicist.” You know, ’cause a lot of these ideas about, you know, the minimum wage, look, you can be in favor of the minimum wage. I’m, I guess I’m in favor of a minimum wage conceivably, you know, but you can’t, you just, the problem is, is that you really can’t deny that the people pushing and really working out and, and essentially creating the concept of a minimum wage in the progressive era, big chunk of the reason why people like E.A. Ross and these other people were doing it was to, was for eugenic purposes, right? I think it’s Ross who has this line where he says, you know, “The coolie,” referring to basically Chinese workers, “cannot outwork the white man, but he can underlive him.” And the point was, if you paid a white man’s wage, of course employers would only hire white men. They wouldn’t hire Black people, Asian people, other, you know, immigrants or minorities. You know, you know, like Irish barely qualified for a lot of, a lot of parts of the country as white people. And [chuckles] the point was is that, that if you create a barrier to entry in the wage, in the labor market-You won’t get these super poor people who, you know, live under terrible conditions to compete for this w- to, to compete for this work by taking lower wages. You’ll freeze them out of the marketplace. And the eugenic kind of ideas embedded in all of this, you know, they,
Jonah Goldberg
they were part of the feature of the, you know, a lot– some of the union legislation in the New Deal was a way to like, you know, freeze Blacks out of, of the labor force who had, you know, been moving to the northern cities. But anyway, Richard Eli Ely was, you know, one of these guys trained in, in Prussia, in Germany. Got, I think got his p– I can’t remember if he got his PhD there. Anyway, let me read you this from this piece about, ’cause I think it’s just sort of relevant. I talk about, uh, so I’ve mentioned this here before, you know, Hillary Clinton in two thousand and seven when she was running for president was asked during a primary debate if she was a liberal, and she said, “Well, liberalism used to mean standing up for the little guy against big power, but now it means something else, so I don’t call myself a liberal. I prefer the word progressive, which has a real American meaning going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the twentieth century.” She’s absolutely right. Progressive does have a real American meaning, you know, and s-so by the way does the word confederate. That’s not necessarily a, you know, by itself a defense of it. But it’s important to understand that like, like I used to write about the intellectual pursuit of Europeanizing American politics all the time. The American progressives saw themselves as part of a worldwide movement. So this is from the piece. The irony here is that the supposedly more authentically American tradition of reform also has a heavily European line-lineage. Indeed, American progressives saw themselves as the US franchisees of an international effort. Quote, “We are parts of one another in the United States and Europe,” proclaimed William Allen White. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Juarez in Paris, the social Democrats in Germany, the socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland fighting a common cause. When Jane Addams seconded Teddy Roosevelt’s nomination at the Progressive Party convention in nineteen twelve, she declared, quote, “The new party has become the American exponent of a worldwide movement towards juster social conditions, a movement which the United States, lagging behind other great nations, has been unaccountably slow to embody in political action.” One more paragraph. If America was lagging behind, Germany was leading the pack. Bismarck’s top-down socialism was, in the words of liberal historian Eric Goldman, a catalytic of American progressive thought. A young Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck’s Prussia was, quote, “the most admi-admirable system, the most studied and most nearly perfected in the world.” That’s a quote that Thomas used in his thing. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of its first– of the first six officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In nineteen oh six, a professor at Yale polled the top hundred and sixteen economists and social scientists in America. More than half had studied in Germany for at least a year. And I go on about all this stuff, but so Thomas is right when he talks about how this was, uh, that progressivism in some ways is a European import or at least an American attempt to be more like Europe, particularly Germany. And where I kind of disagree with him, let me get back to
Jonah Goldberg
his speech, as I said I disagreed with something. He says, “Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.” And here I just, I just– this is where I agree with him philosophically to a great degree, but politically I just don’t think that’s necessarily right. There is no, like, ticking time bomb that says one of them has to ultimately go. They could, like a bad piece of DNA or a virus that sticks around in your body, we can have a-aspects of progressivism in our politics for the rest of our lives and our grandchildren’s lives. I’m, I’m all in favor of having the arguments and all of that, but I just don’t think that n- that he’s necessarily right that it, it’s sort of, it’s this implying that there’s this countdown clock to a confrontation between the champions of American principles of the declaration and sort of, you know, Walter Lippmann Mankais or something like that, and I just, I don’t think that’s true. You know, the progressive era was over a century ago. You know, America has done pretty well over the last century. I give more credit to the principles of the founding and the declaration than I do to progressivism, but like my thinking on this is like
Jonah Goldberg
evolved, but like for all the talk about how it’s a European import and we were trying to copy Bismarck’s Prussia and all of that is true, at the same time, the stuff that the progressives were trying to do, not all of which was bad. You know, look, I mean, like food safety standards and clean drinking water and all of these things, these are things that, you know, you can be a pure Hamiltonian and think there’s a role for government to do that stuff. But it could be entirely homegrown American political movement with no reference to foreign intrusion of any kind, and it would still be the kind of approach to politics that the founders anticipated because of that stuff that Thomas is talking about in terms of man’s fallen nature, right? Because at the end of the day, a lot of the stuff the progressives did was just simply about power, and it wasn’t necessarily about high-minded philosophical stuff. I mean, I’ve made this,
Jonah Goldberg
this argument a million times before about how if you want a short history of AmericanProgressive political priorities, you’ll find that they champion whichever branch or, or institution of government allows them to carry the ball down the field.
Jonah Goldberg
So when Woodrow Wilson was young, and I think, I think it’s in his book Congressional Government, don’t hold me to the titles of these things that I haven’t read up on in almost twenty years. But when Wilson was young, he was a huge champion of congressional supremacy and sort of the parliamentary approach to politics, in part because he envisioned himself as like the next Henry Clay or something. He thought he was gonna be, you know, a Speaker of the House type, and so that was the form of government he liked. And then when he realized, in part because of like Teddy Roosevelt, that power could be concentrated in the executive, he became obsessed with the ex- you know, the power of the executive. Woodrow Wilson was, I think it’s the historian Richard Gamble, but it’s, it’s one of his major, one of these major historians, said that at the end of the day, the thing that most explains Woodrow Wilson was just his obsession with power. He loved power for its own thing, thing. He thought power was self-justifying. You know, remember, this is the guy who said
Jonah Goldberg
that what Lincoln did with power was awesome and great and inspired envy in him, but he hated the reasons why Lincoln did it, right? So Wilson is one of these guys who loved
Jonah Goldberg
the means of Lincoln, but hated the ends, ’cause Wilson thought it was a tragedy that the, the South had lost the Civil War. He thought slavery was fine, and so, but he, so he liked the, the necessary evil of Lincoln’s tyrannical use of power and his conception of it, ’cause he liked the unalloyed wielding of power. He just wished he hadn’t used that power to free the Black, you know, to free Black people because he thought slavery was fine, and he thought the South should have won. Bad dude. But anyway, I’m not saying all progressives were racist like Wilson, though let me be really, really, really clear,
Jonah Goldberg
American progressivism was shot through with a lot of racism. You know, it’s, it’s, it just, it– Again, it doesn’t mean that there weren’t people who absolutely abhorred racism who were progressives as well, but, you know, like a lot of the progressives from the South, Josephi- Josephus Daniels is a sort of a famous one, were extremely progressive about economic stuff and just, just unbelievably racist at the same time. And this is one of the reasons why the people who fetishize the term progressive to just mean you’re in favor of good things should either, you know, abandon that idea or stop taking offense when you point out that the progressives were racist, because a lot of the progressives were crazy racist. And, you know, some of the responses from people to Thomas’s speech wanna have it sort of both ways in that they wanna say that Thomas was attacking anybody who calls himself a progressive today and that it was a partisan speech. It wasn’t. But that he, you know, to insult the progressives of the progressive era is to insult progressives today
Jonah Goldberg
is a really problematic argument for a progressive of today to make. Does that mean I’m not allowed to, to point out that so many of them were racist eugenicists? You know, does that cause you to, “How dare you point out that about…” You know, like, either own the label in whole or don’t. Um, but if you own it in whole, be aware that some of the worst racists of the twentieth century were progressives. Anyway, but my point about the, these things can be in tension and endure is just simply that they have been for, not the racism stuff, I mean, just simply progressive ideals have been, you know, have endured for over a century, and maybe the way to think about it is that these competing impulses… Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t give you my history of progressivism in p-political progressivism in the twentieth century ’cause I got distracted by Wilson ’cause I hate him so much. The progressives, generally speaking, were in favor of any approach to politics
Jonah Goldberg
that allowed them to carry the ball down the field. So when the executive was the most powerful agent of social change, they were all in for the imperial presidency of FDR, of LBJ, of, of any president that could carry the ball for them. But when that no longer worked, right? You had a backlash against it. You, you had Nixon, among other things. Then all of a sudden, progressives are in favor of the Supreme Court carrying the ball. They loved, they loved, you know, expanding the franchise when expanding the franchise was to their benefit, and they hated expanding the franchise when it wasn’t. You know, it, like, it’s a lot like this gerrymandering crap right now. The arguments used to defend various sort of political reforms were basically pretextual to the desire to advance political power. And progressives had a lot of political power in the twentieth century, and, you know, they made a lot, they did a lot of things I disagree with and don’t like, you know, including under the rubric of Republican policy as much as Democratic policy at various times. I mean, Nixon was the last New Dealer president, and the things he did were perfectly consistent with being a progressive Republican from, you know, the 1950s, which he basically was. And, you know, right now, we’re gonna, we’re still waiting for the Humphrey’s Executor decision about the Federal Reserve, which, like, I’m very sympathetic to the, the intellectual argument,
Jonah Goldberg
constitutional argument that the Federal Reserve is, like, really problematic in our constitutional framework, right? Because if all the executive power resides in the president, and the president has the ability to fire people in the executive branch, then saying that he doesn’t have the ability toFire the head of the Federal Reserve is just kind of iffy, and the Federal Reserve is a classically progressive kind of institution where it’s just like, let’s put experts in charge to run the banking system in this, you know, technocratic kind of way. At the same time,
Jonah Goldberg
I’m for it, right? It’s, if I could amend the Constitution with the snap of my fingers, I would create some provision for keeping the Federal Reserve working basically the way it works, and, because it’s been good for America. And, but so the constitutional argument is, like, really problematic for me because I’m, I’m pretty sympathetic to it. But the point is, is that, you know, our system has made allowances for some of these sorts of things in the past without abandoning the idea that we’re all equal in the eyes of God and government, and that we’re all endowed with in-innate dignity and, you know, because we’re all human beings cr- and, you know, endowed by our Creator and all that kind of stuff. Like, like, the Federal Reserve does not trample on that. And, and so one way to think about it, instead of this idea that, you know, there is this coming helter-skelter conflict between these two philosophies, is that these things wax and wane in American history. And there were times in American history where, you know, Congress was exceeding its authority or the courts were exceeding their authority, right? It’s, it’s like it’s, it’s, it’s a muddling through thing where the institutions try to claw back their proper functions, and they make these arguments about the Constitution, and I like arguments about the Constitution. But it does not seem obvious to me that these things are in
Jonah Goldberg
danger– that we’re in danger of some collision where everyone has to accept one or the other. I think that framing is just a lit- it’s a, it’s, it’s a little co- it’s a little too Jaffaite, right? And, and let’s,
Jonah Goldberg
just for some context, you know, I said last week it sounded like, you know, Thomas read my book. Since then, I’ve heard from two people that Thomas has in fact read my book. But I was also very careful to say I didn’t think he got any of this from my book necessarily, because he has been sort of schooled in this stuff
Jonah Goldberg
much longer than I’ve been writing about it. His, two of the guys who worked for him at, uh, at the EEOC, this guy, guy you speak pretty friendly with, Ken Masugi, and another guy, uh, John Marini, both sort of Claremontsters, they’ve been talking to him and, you know, and I don’t wanna say indoctrinating him because they revere Thomas, right? This is not like, they’re not manipulating Thomas. The, uh, everybody I know who’s ever worked for Thomas just loves the guy with a passion and, and they all think he’s brilliant and all that. But they brought a lot of these ideas with them. Masugi was the co-author of a great book about the, I think it’s called The s- The Progressive Revolution in American Politics, which I have a dog-eared copy of. I read the whole thing and, and, and quoted a lot in my book. And Thomas has always been part, has been part, and th- and those guys were students of Jaffa, and they’re from the Claremont Institute, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don’t have to get into all the begats. But one of the problems, you know, we had that, that episode about this stuff when we did, when we talked about the book Furious Minds. There is a strain of Jaffa thought that is catastrophist, that puts, that I think reifies ideas and makes them more sort of tangible and like Hegelian or something than they need to be. And, you know, and Jaffa writes about, you know, in the cl- crisis of the house divided, it’s sort of a Jaffaite argument that, you know, the, the, and it’s an argument that I share often, you know. It’s like this is part of my point in Suicide of the West about the ideas of the declaration. You know, the, the hypocrisy they expose in the, in America is one of the things that ended slavery. It’s because we were falling short of our ideals. And, you know, when Lincoln
Jonah Goldberg
does his Gettysburg Address stuff by basically
Jonah Goldberg
relaunching or refounding America based on the preamble of the declaration, what he’s doing is, is saying, “Hey, we’ve strayed from our mission statement, and this war was because we strayed from it, and the inherent contradiction of our ideals versus the institution of slavery is what caused the war in the first place, and this resolution gives us an opportunity for a new birth of freedom, and, and we’re gonna recommit to the founding, you know, mission statement in the declaration.” I get that argument about, and I agree with it to a huge extent, about the ideas inherent in, in the declaration and how they should govern this creedal nation, you know, which is what we are. The problem I have with, with the way Thomas sounds at times in, in this is that living with some progressive ideas in our politics, which are like just normal political governance in, basically in all of Europe, is not like the house divided between slave and not slave, right? Between free and unfree. Like, the thing that drove the Civil War
Jonah Goldberg
was
Jonah Goldberg
the fact on the ground of actual slavery.
Jonah Goldberg
The fact that we have some technocratic progressive institutions and assumptions about how government should work is not the kind of contradiction with our founding ideals
Jonah Goldberg
that can for- that, that will force a final reckoning where only one will survive. I just think that framing is wrong, and I think it’s, I think it’s interesting that it’s in there in Thomas, and that w- leads me to this otherYou know, disagreement that I have, which is that the way he talks about the, the final statement that the,
Jonah Goldberg
of the declaration about what, you know, we,
Jonah Goldberg
with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, let us mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Thomas thinks that’s like the most, the second most important line in the declaration because of the radical commitment to our founding principles it, it, it underscored, and I get it. I just think that that misses an important point that you make those kinds of pledges to each other when you’re revolutionaries trying to overthrow an empire in a violent revolution. I think people can relax a little bit when all you’re trying to do is have arguments about what the constitution means and how we should run our politics. And look, I’m, I’m not, I, I am no way saying that Thomas is calling for violence or anything like that. He’s not. He’s a wise and decent man. But the retical- rhetorical analogy to say you should have the same fierce commitment to your principles in politics, which I think people know I have a pretty strong commitment to my principles, like the r- our revolutionary founders did, I just think is a bit of an, o- of a stretch because the stakes in a free society arguing about politics with other members of a free society are just simply different than the stakes where if you lose
Jonah Goldberg
the actual physical fighting, you’ll be hung as a traitor, is just different. And this just has a little bit too much of a whiff of Flight ninety-threeism to it for me. But if it’s purely metaphorical about sti– and he has a lot of great advice for people who kind of sell out to be popular. It, a lot of it really resonates with me. People who, you know, hide in the tall grass with big words while compromising their principles. There’s a lot of stuff in there that I agree with that I think speaks to his, his jurisprudence. You know, he’s… It’s interesting, he’s the guy who doesn’t really care about precedent. He thinks that, you know, if you have a…
Jonah Goldberg
If something is unconstitutional, it’s unconstitutional. And, and the fact that there are a lot of precedents on top of it supporting this unconstitutionality
Jonah Goldberg
is, is not a reason to let it stand. It’s a reason to stop compounding the error, right? And so some of this stuff has to do with his approach to jurisprudence and to constitutional interpretation, and I think it’s often correct and almost always admir- admirable. I thought his decision on the tariff ta- ta- case was not good. But anyway, the point is, I think saying that we should try in our daily lives to be, like, as committed to our principles as the Founding Fathers were to winning the revolution, I think is, uh, it m– it, it, it misses a couple key ingredients to be persuasive to me. The thing I find remarkable, and I’ll, I’ll just close on this because I do think I want to write about this. The thing that is absolutely remarkable is how all these progressive outlets took the bait, freaked out, said it was an outrageous tirade and a, and a screed, and it wasn’t. It’s a very thoughtful, very interesting speech. But you know who’s been just, like, remarkably silent? All of these post-liberals, all of the nationalists, all of the, you know, neo-Monarchists, all of these people who have been waging intellectual and rhetorical war
Jonah Goldberg
on the philosophical assumptions of the American founding that Thomas is celebrating here, right? I mean, Thomas talks about how the Europeans don’t have the, you know, these Lockean… He uses the word Lockean, right? Which L- And John Locke is like the boogeyman for h- you know, Yoram Hazony, and Deneen, and, and Vermeule, and all of these people. And here’s Thomas saying, you know, how awesome it is that we have these Lockean safeguards in our constitutional order that they don’t in Europe, and that the, because the lack of them in Europe led to things like Nazism and communism. And meanwhile, like, where are all the people saying, “Oh, you stupid cucks, you don’t, you know, you still think Locke is good?” You know? W- They’re just silent. I went looking to see if any of them had a problem with the speech, and it’s almost like when someone as, as popular as Clarence Thomas makes, on the right, makes these arguments, all of a sudden, these guys who hate all of these Enlightenment principles, and liberal principles, and checks and balances, and all this kind of stuff, the people who mock this stuff, the Orbanists, who think this is all outmoded, outdated stuff that we can move on from, they get kind of quiet. You know? Like, you know, they don’t, they don’t wanna do any horseshoe theory work with The Daily Beast or with Jacobin. I think it’s pretty cowardly. You know, wh- why isn’t Adrian Vermeule, you know, big Harvard Law School guy, calling out Clarence Thomas for an idiotic speech? Because if I make these arguments, he’s l- he’ll call me an idiot, you know. You know, Hazony and Deneen will call me a fool. You know, not in maybe those words, but in, in, in, that’s the idea. If I, if I make the case that, that Thomas is making here, um, if David French makes the case that Thomas is making here, they’ll, you know, they’ll leap to Twitter and, and throw stink bombs. Where’s the American conservative denouncing this speech? Where’s First Things denouncing this speech? I think it’s, I think it’s really, really telling. And I don’t know how much Thomas thought he was trolling the, the new right guys. I would have liked it if he kind of like-Turned it up a little bit on, on this point. I don’t know if this point was if he’s sort of, you know, sub-tweeting, if he’s doing it, you know, passive-aggressively, or if it, it just didn’t occur to him because he doesn’t pay attention to these fights on the right these days. I, I, I don’t know. But all the, the Red Caesar dudes who’ve, you know, circled the Claremont orbit, you know, or the neo-monarchist, you know, Curtis Yarvin dudes, like, hi- Thomas’ speech here, particularly the stuff from Calvin Coolidge, is kryptonite to them, you know? And, and they’re just, they’re just ignoring it. And I think that’s a shame because it would have been a much more interesting, like, debate or argument than, “You don’t understand, progressive means good,” to hear the people who’ve been making these arguments on the new right actually have to contend with Clarence Thomas’ patriotism and his, his love of the declaration. That would have been interesting to see, but I guess we’re not going to.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. We’ve gone long enough. I feel like I failed you guys again. I never know if I’m doing this thing right. If you’ve seen clips of me on, like, YouTube or anything while we’ve been, um, packing up, I apologize for the hideousness of the shot. I know our AV team is scandalized by it. It looks like,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, I’m doing this from a
Jonah Goldberg
Soviet grocery store or something during a shortage, which has these empty shelves behind me. That’ll change. I’m probably gonna be doing it from– I actually have a physical office again at AI, and I’ll probably be doing a lot of these from there for a while because we’re moving into a one-bedroom apartment where regular podcast is probably not gonna be too easy to do from there. And hey, you know, just fair warning to you guys, if you listen regularly to this podcast or AO or the Dispatch Pod and you’re not a subscriber to the Dispatch, we’re gonna start hitting you up more because we really need to grow. And the best way to grow– You know, we, we introduced a test of advertising in the morning dispatch, and we got very little, I’m glad to say, but we got some pushback from people on, you know, how this violated the manifesto and our mission statement. And I’m sorry, it just doesn’t. We’ve never said that we would never advertise at all. I would like to never advertise. You know, if we had a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand paid subscribers, you know, we would be less inclined to do a lot of advertising. And, but what we said was that we’re never gonna screw with our people with pop-up windows and autoplay things, and we’re never gonna make the user experience super crappy. And internally from the beginning, and we’ve talked about this on, on the State of the Dispatch podcast with me and Steve many, many, many times, you know, we’ve always talked internally about tasteful sponsorships and that kind of thing. And the simple fact is we need to grow. We have a big headcount at the Dispatch. We’re trying to do all sorts of exciting things. We just launched Dispatch Markets, which we’re really excited about. We just did a redesign on SCOTUSblog, and we wanna do all these Junto events, and we just– the way you pay for this stuff is with subscribers. And I know for a fact there are a bunch of people listening to this podcast who aren’t subscribers because there’s reason to believe that we have more listeners of this podcast than we do subscribers, right? And one of my colleagues was at a meetup thing in North Carolina, I think it was, and met a guy who was like a remnant and Dispatch super fan.
Jonah Goldberg
And he said, “Yeah. Oh, yeah, but I don’t subscribe,” because he gets enough from the free stuff we put out and the generous paywall stuff and the podcasts that he still was willing, psyched to come to a meetup, but he just didn’t feel the need to actually subscribe. We are in the process of figuring out ways to tweak our digital marketing and our payroll stuff, not payroll, paywall stuff, and all the rest to get pe- to get, you know, in a s- I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense, but to get the free riders to sign up. Because as they say at Animal House, “We need the dues.” And we just can’t… Like, it’s, it’s a sort of a come to Jesus for us about this. We need more subscribers, and we can no longer just ignore the possibility of, of the revenue for, from, from tasteful sponsorships and the like. And it’s not a crisis or anything like that, but, like, we’re fed up with, uh, w- with the lack of growth, and, and we really believe in what we’re doing, and it’s important. And we got, you know, we got payroll to keep with people with families and are working incredibly hard, and we think this is sort of our moment. You know, we founded this thing. When, when Steve and I were going around pitching this thing, we talked all the time about how we saw the Dispatch as a post-Trump rather than anti-Trump thing. And, you know, the post-Trump era is not here yet, and it’s taken longer to arrive than any of us would have liked, but it’s coming. You can see it. It’s shaping up. And we think we’re better positioned than almost anybody else, or, well, better positioned in some ways than anybody else,
Jonah Goldberg
less well-resourced than some places, to be the go-to place to understand politics and what’s happening on the right and all sorts of other things in the rapidly approaching post-Trump world. And we’re also the place to be as the wheels come off the Trumpian world. You know, we’re now at the cabinet secretaries are like Spinal Tap drummers phase of this presidency, and I don’t think it’s gonna– it’s, it’s not gonna get more stable as time goes by. And we think we just do a fantastic job of providing incredibly high-quality stuff. And there are Substacks out there that people pay, you know, they pay more for one person’s stuff than we’re asking people to pay for the entire suite of things from, you know, me, Kevin Williamson, Nick Catoggio, occasionally when Steve, you know, decides to write. You know, Megan is doing stuff with us these days. Scott Lincicome, you know, is just sort of invaluable. And I’m so psyched for some of the people who’ve joined for Dispatch Markets. My friend Marian Tupy is just phenomenal. Lincicome’s gonna do more stuff for us on that. And, um, you should subscribe. Help us help you.
Jonah Goldberg
Anyway, we are taking seriously, nothing is off the table about ways to sort of fuel growth, fuel revenue, and you’ve been warned. So, uh, that’s all I can say for right now. Many meetings ahead. But I am deeply grateful, you guys, for listening and for the support that you do give. And, um, I’ll talk to you next time. [upbeat music]