By Jonah Goldberg
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
If you’ll forgive the self-indulgence, let me start by
sharing a few things about my professional life since Donald Trump won the
Republican presidential nomination, in no particular order. Every day, on
social media, I am attacked, dismissed, or otherwise declared an illegitimate
analyst or fake conservative because of my criticisms of President Trump, even
if I include praise or beneficial context.
During the election season, I lost large sums of money —
large to me, anyway — because I had to turn down speeches in which I was
expected to be a de facto surrogate for the Republican point of view. My
appearances on Fox News have dropped precipitously. It’s not a ban or anything
like that. It’s just an unavoidable fact that the way a lot of cable news works
is you have a person defending the incumbent administration and a person
criticizing it. I’m ill-suited for many of these debates, because I don’t fit
in the obvious grooves. Some friends of National
Review complain about me, including donors. Just a couple weeks ago, a
prominent Republican politician chewed me out for the better part of an hour
because of my criticisms of President Trump.
I could go on like this for pages, but you get the point.
Or maybe you don’t. So let me explain. I offer this seeming tale of woe not out
of self-pity or a desire for yours. This is the life I’ve chosen, to paraphrase
Hyman Roth in The Godfather II.
Indeed, I should add that I’ve also heard from hundreds of readers, peers,
friends, colleagues, and more than a few politicians thanking me for my efforts
to combat the attempt to redefine conservatism as mere nationalism or Trumpism.
I have written literally tens of thousands of words
explaining that I will criticize Trump when I think it warranted and praise him
when warranted as well. I won’t let him make me a hack or a liar. I think I’ve
done a pretty good job sticking to that policy (and so has National Review).
Which brings me to the left-wing polemicist Rick
Perlstein. He has a big essay in the latest New
York Times Magazine. It begins with some typical bragging about his role as
a historian of conservatism and some table setting about how conservatives
tried to stop Trump. He then quotes me:
Then the nation’s pre-eminent
birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was surreal and an intellectual
embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes told us he could never
become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. National Review devoted an issue to
writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah
Goldberg, even became a leader of the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won —
and conservative intellectuals quickly embraced a man who exploited the same
brutish energies that [William F.] Buckley had supposedly banished, with
Goldberg explaining simply that Never Trump “was about the G.O.P. primary and
the general election, not the presidency.”
Perlstein doesn’t explicitly say that I (or National Review) “quickly embraced”
Trump, but the insinuation is (Perlstein has a gift for snotty insinuations)
that I am emblematic of this sudden, hypocritical transformation. For the
reasons stated above, this came as news to me.
Now I’ve never taken Perlstein very seriously and I see
little reason to start now. I’ve long known he dislikes me (he recently whined
on Facebook about the outrage of NPR having me on), but he’s known for
disliking conservatives generally and letting that tribal partisanship infect
almost everything he writes (which is why he’s so popular with the Left). In
short, who cares?
But Perlstein is writing this for the New York Times, and I think it offers a
really good insight into the way the Times
— and much of the mainstream media — has jettisoned so much credibility in the
age of Trump.
For starters, Perlstein’s insinuation — that my
declaration that “Never Trump” is over represents some kind of “embrace” of
Trump — isn’t just wrong, it is breathtakingly dishonest. The very
article he’s quoting from has the sub-headline: “The Never Trump movement
is over, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop criticizing Trump when he
deserves it.”
I also described precisely what Perlstein is doing in his
embarrassing essay:
The thing is: Never Trump is over.
Never Trump was about the GOP primary and the general election, not the
presidency. The Left wants to claim it must be a permanent movement, denying
the legitimacy of Trump’s election forever, or we were never serious. Well,
that’s not what we — or at least I — signed up for.
I then go on to criticize the Trump-can-do-no-wrong
crowd, which I’ve been doing since Election Day. Not only that, I’ve attacked
the tendency of many people on the right to fall back into the political safe
harbor of anti-anti-Trumpism. I’ve also been criticizing Trump. A few
headlines:
“Trump Is Taking the Bannon Way, and It Will End in
Disaster”
“Trump’s Rhetoric on Russia Throws the U.S. under the
Bus”
“The Right Can’t Defend Trump’s Behavior”
“The False Prophecy of the Presidential Pivot”
“The President Is This Presidency’s Worst Enemy”
I could go on of course. But there are three points worth
making. First, Perlstein’s essay is titled, “I Thought I Understood the
American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” The funny part is he can’t even figure
out why Trump proved him wrong. He entirely misunderstands — either out of
blinkered partisanship, personal animosity, simple obtuseness, or all three —
my own position, even when he quotes from
articles that describe my position. He started with a thesis and then went
rummaging about for random sentences that would support it. He then uses this
misunderstanding as a window on the American Right generally. It’s like he
confused a clock for a compass and for the life of him can’t figure out why
he’s walking in circles.
Second, there’s Perlstein’s larger “argument” — which
prattles on about how the modern Right is descended from the Klan, blah, blah,
blah. It’s mostly so much indictment-padding and guilt by tenuous association.
I particularly love his insinuation that Father Coughlin was a right-winger (a
topic I’ve written about at length). In brief: Coughlin supported FDR, saying
the New Deal was “Christ’s Deal,” and the Roosevelt administration welcomed his
support. It was only after FDR moved too far to the right that Coughlin broke
with Roosevelt.
Now, I do think Perlstein has some points on his side
when he says that Trump has tapped into various streams of American nativism —
a point I’ve actually written about and a practice I’ve condemned. But
Perlstein, whose whole career amounts to little more than “discovering” new
evidence of conservative racism, is a poor source to rely on when he — once
again — discovers new evidence of conservative racism.
Lastly, there is the matter of the New York Times. I actually got a call from their fact checker for
this article. It was a strange conversation because all he seemed to want to
confirm was that I had written the quotes Perlstein used. Since I knew
Perlstein was writing the essay, and knowing of his animosity toward me (which
I informed the fact checker about) and Perlstein’s general dishonesty, I went
on to explain what I meant by Never Trump being over. He listened for a few
moments and then informed me that this call wasn’t really about fact checking;
it was just a “courtesy call.”
That’s weird, I thought. Weirder still, the fact checker
did not ask me if I actually “embraced” Trump or if Perlstein’s spin about my
position was remotely accurate. Apparently confirming that someone didn’t steal
my byline was all the “fact” checker needed to do. (I sent him an e-mail this
morning asking if he had recorded the conversation and if I could have a copy.
He said he didn’t, which is unfortunate.)
Of course, one can make too much of this. But I do think
it’s remarkable that Perlstein’s editors and the fact checker never bothered to
figure out if the example setting the premise of the whole article was
actually, you know, a fact — or even a remotely reasonable interpretation. My
only conclusion is that confirmation bias runs so strong at The New York Times Magazine (and
journalistic curiosity so weak) that they didn’t see the need.
There’s an irony to Perlstein’s title: “I Thought I
Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” No, Perlstein proved
that all by himself, Trump just put fresh light on that fact. More to the
point, Perlstein and his editors seem remarkably uninterested in actually
figuring out why he — and they — were wrong. They’d rather peddle the same
self-serving story they’ve been telling all along.
I’d demand an apology and a retraction, but that would
require the Times to understand a
perspective outside their bubble. They’ve already demonstrated that’s too much
to ask.
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