By Jonah Goldberg
Thursday, June 28, 2023
You might have noticed that I’ve been on a bit of a
philosophical kick of late. There’s a reason for that.
As I’ve said many times, during the Trump years I’ve
never felt more politically homeless or more ideologically grounded. I think a
lot of people, particularly people who feel the same way, understand what I
mean intuitively. But I’ve found a lot of people don’t. Let me explain for a
moment. I feel like I’ve been freed from a level of partisanship I never fully
appreciated in myself when I thought conservatism and Republican politics were
more in sync and their interests more aligned. I’ve lost the sense of
obligation or compulsion I once felt to defend Republican positions. I was
never a hackish water-carrier for the GOP (opinions differ!) but I confess that
sometimes I was too quick to assume that if progressives or Democrats angrily
insisted that Republicans were wrong, there’s probably something right about
what Republicans were doing. Or, conversely, that if Republicans were angry
about something Democrats were doing I should defend that anger.
Donald Trump just makes it so easy to give eleventy
billion examples of this. Even if I loved Trump, I’d think the effort to
“expunge” his impeachments is at best childish. I think the House’s January 6
committee wasn’t organized optimally and had other flaws, but 95 percent of the
GOP criticisms left me cold. The Mar-a-Lago raid was wholly legal and
justified.
But I differ from Republicans on policy arguments that
are only indirectly about Trump, too. For example, I think the problem with Joe
Biden’s support for Ukraine is that it’s been too piecemeal and reactive, and
the GOP talk about “blank checks” is mostly nonsense.
Think of it this way: Why on earth should I give, say,
Lindsey Graham the benefit of the doubt? I could pick Republican senators I disagree
with more often and more intensely—J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Tommy Tuberville,
to name a few—but that’s sort of my point. Graham is very good at sounding
smart and truthful, and sometimes he actually is. But he can also sound that
way when he’s saying dumb and untruthful things. At any given moment, depending
on his political needs, he can be statesmanlike or wildly partisan or an
astounding Trump suck-up to a degree that only proctological terminology can
capture the extent of it. And, to make things worse, his positions change as
the moment suits. That may be fine for an elected official of the Republican
Party these days—he does have a very good sense of what he has to do to get
elected—but why should I care about that?
I don’t want to speak for my colleagues at The
Dispatch, but I think this general worldview captures a big chunk of what
we’re trying to do. Say what you will about Kevin Williamson, Nick Catoggio,
Steve Hayes, Scott Lincicome, Sarah Isgur, David Drucker, and the rest of our
team, but they’re not water-carriers for any party. I’m not trying to cast us
as the journalistic equivalent of the Untouchables (everyone knows, I hope, how
much I still love and respect my friends at National Review). But
as a right-of-center institution founded in the Trump era when conservative
criticism of Trump was treated as everything from tactically misguided to
treasonous, we just have a different set of foundational and psychological
commitments than most other comparable institutions. When you burn bridges you
think less about how things are going at home.
Anyway, I don’t want to make this ad for The
Dispatch.
As ideologically grounded as I think I am, I find that
the intellectual churn on the right is forcing me—and a lot of people—to
revisit ideas and concepts that were once givens on (most of) the right. If you
had told me 10 years ago that in 2023 a lot of self-declared conservatives
would be attacking the free market, constitutional originalism, limited
government, internationalism, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the idea that
character matters—not to mention broader philosophical underpinnings of the founding—I
would have been very skeptical. But that’s precisely where we are.
I have an enormous amount of muscle memory when it comes
to defending such concepts against assaults from the left. But the calving of
big chunks of the right from the ice sheet of conservative dogma is new in my
lifetime.
The last time we saw anything remotely like this was
during the Pat Buchanan moment in the early 1990s. But even then, the standard
conservative response to Buchanan’s protectionism and populist-tribal
“conservatism of the heart” was to point out that
operationally it was simply right-wing
progressivism. And that usually did the trick.
For instance, Buchanan would often invoke FDR’s line (usually
without attribution): “Better the occasional faults of a government that
lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government
frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” You could often brush back that
stuff simply by pointing out that he was, in effect, a pro-life New Dealer.
Now, there are self-styled conservatives who take such a description as a
compliment (and assume that having a problem with New Deal style statism makes
you a “libertarian”).
And, I should point out, Buchananism’s fondness for New
Deal statism ended at the water’s edge. Say what you will about the New
Dealers, they wanted to win World War II without reservation. Pat had
reservations, at least in retrospect.
It’s funny, I wrote Suicide of the West in
an effort to convince progressives of good will that liberal democratic
capitalism was the best system imaginable for their stated
priorities. What is politics for? What is the government for? Ask most
people of the left and you’ll get an assortment of responses: improving the
health, wealth or education of the common man, protecting the rights of
minorities, protecting the environment, etc. Suffice to say I think liberal
democratic capitalism is the best system possible—over the long term—for
these priorities. I don’t think I had huge success in convincing large numbers
of people who didn’t already agree—but I tried, in part because I thought I
should model what was increasingly lacking on the right: persuasion instead of
performance.
The reason I bring this up, though, is that just as I was
working on making that good faith argument to good faith progressive readers, a
whole bunch of people on the right started rejecting liberal democratic
capitalism—in whole or in part. Some just don’t like the liberalism but are
okay with the democracy and capitalism. Some think the democracy part is
negotiable but we should keep some of the other stuff. Some hate all three and
think we’d be happier as serfs. It’s a hodgepodge.
It’s also mostly absurd. And, sometimes,
depressing.
I think some questions should simply be settled. Close
the books, lock the door, and worry about other things. Liberal democratic
capitalism—broadly speaking—is one of them. Obviously, it’s an open question
about where to circumscribe the free market. But on the issue of whether the
free market is better at generating prosperity, that is a settled question for
me. So are all sorts of liberal commitments—fair trials, individual rights
(including property rights), freedom of religion, etc.—I think we’d be better
off if these weren’t topics for serious debate in sort of the same way serious
people don’t debate whether murder or genocide are wrong. And I certainly think
these should be settled questions among conservatives. But they’re not.
It really is amazing to witness the damage Trump did to
the right. It’s not that defending Trump requires defending serfdom or the
imposition of a confessional state. It’s that the project of defending Trump
required so many people to tear down so many of the philosophical and
theological support beams of conservatism, the structural collapses created
openings for opportunists who really don’t care about Trump at all—or
conservatism—to make their own little forts out of the rubble. The
Littlefingers understand: Chaos is a ladder.
So now, many on the right think we should be revisiting
whether the Enlightenment or the Founding were mistakes. They question whether
the “procedural” elements of the Constitution deserve respect from the right.
Some think it’s fine to cast doubt and anger on the electoral process or even
celebrate the violation of the peaceful transfer of power. Or that the
rightwing economic planners can do what the leftwing ones never could.
Just last night there was a story about a young New Right
guy who apparently thinks “the Jewish Question” is still a thing that needs to
be addressed. I resent that I feel the need to explain to people that even
raising “the Jewish Question” presupposes that there’s something to be
done about the Jews: “When we get in power, what
will our answer to the ‘JQ’ be?”
This whole line of thought is so grotesque—no matter how
playfully or trollishly entertained—it represents a cancerous rot on the right
(as do many of the defenses of this poor misunderstood lad betrayed by his
former MAGA compadres).
Anyway, it’s this new push—or putsch—on the right that
has me wanting to revisit, relearn, or repeat some of the most basic tenets of
conservative, liberal and Western thought. Or just my own thought. So when you
send me an angry email asking why I wrote about, I dunno, the Peace of
Westphalia instead of the controversy of the day at MSNBC or Fox, I’ll refer
you to this note.
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