Magical Promises and Enduring Principles

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

Most film buffs and wannabe critics are familiar with the term “willing suspension of disbelief.”

 

Basically, the idea is that when you start a movie, TV show, play, or book, you leave your skepticism—as much as you can—about whether something is believable at the door. Of course, that’s not always possible. You can try to believe that it would be easier to teach oil drilling roughnecks how to be astronauts in a week than to train astronauts to drill a hole on an asteroid deep enough for a bomb, but few are up to the task. Still, Armageddon can be a fun watch. Some artistic endeavors ask so much, you can’t even bring yourself to try, like when it was floated that Annette Bening would play journalist Helen Thomas in a movie. Even the producers couldn’t stick with the bit, and it never made it to production.

 

But relatively few people know the origin of the phrase or the original meaning of the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief.” It was coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his collaboration with fellow poet William Wordsworth on their groundbreaking work Lyrical Ballads, seen by some as the starting point of English literary romanticism. Coleridge saw the work as having two aims. One was to make the supernatural seem believable, realistic. The other was to make the normal and quotidian seem magical. The two poets divided up these assignments. Coleridge would handle making the superstitious and supernatural seem real to the reader, while Wordsworth would work on enchanting the everyday stuff. He would “give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural.”

 

Now the needle on the gauge of my holding tank of literary knowledge is trending toward the red zone, so I’m going to change gears and talk about politics and political theory.

 

Every political system depends on a certain amount of what we might call myth. Some require a lot more myth than others. In North Korea, the state insists that the patriarchs of the dynasty, the Kims, are divine beings, with superhuman abilities. Kim Jong Il, for instance, could walk at 3 weeks of age and talk at 8 weeks. While at university, he wrote 1,500 books in three years. In his off time, he liked to golf. On one outing, according to North Korean media reports, he made 11 holes-in-one, shot 38 under par, and decided the game held no more challenges for him.

 

America depends on less mythmaking than a lot of countries because it was created around the time of the Enlightenment and was trying to throw off a lot of the just-so stories that justified monarchs and emperors. But we still glorify the founders, and for the most part I think that’s a very good thing. Abraham Lincoln injected a little myth—or at least poetry—into the founding by elevating the Declaration of Independence’s opening words as the mission statement of the country. Again, I think that was mostly a very good thing.

 

America has had many dark chapters and, collectively, has done many bad things. But its ideals—the myths—have directed us toward improvement by acknowledging the errors and trying to correct them as we move toward a “more perfect union.” There’s something to be said about printing the legend, to paraphrase The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. So maybe George Washington didn’t say “I cannot tell a lie” after chopping down a cherry tree. I’d rather live in a country where kids are taught that, at least for a while.

 

Second Amendment enthusiasts often spin up scenarios in which we will need guns to ward off a tyrannical government. Some of these scenarios are far-fetched and implausible. But I’d rather live in a country worried about preventing bad stuff from happening than in a country where people think bad stuff can’t happen.

 

Which gets me back to the willing suspension of disbelief in politics. My point isn’t that it’s bad, but that it’s out of whack.

 

I loathed a lot of Barack Obama’s rhetoric—and the rhetoric about him from his worshippers—not because I thought it was ill-intended but because it was magical. When he said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he imbued himself and his “movement” with messianic qualities. When he secured the Democratic presidential nomination, he proclaimed that the moment would be remembered as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” One writer insisted Obama was a “Lightworker” who would help us “evolve.” There was lots of talk about whether he was a—or the—Messiah, though Oprah Winfrey merely called him “the One.”

 

And don’t even get me started on the ludicrous rhetoric used by and about Donald Trump. All of the talk about him being anointed by God strikes me as even creepier, not simply because it’s so preposterous, but also because it involves so much reality-defying sycophancy. I have a really hard time believing that the Christian God would pick a man who rejects the core of Christian teaching—he doesn’t believe in forgiveness, finds prayer laughable, and looks at the Bible the way an orangutan looks at an iPad (“Oh, this is interesting—I wonder what it does?”). The people who impute genius to him do so the same way Chance the Gardener is viewed as a genius in Being There—it’s the only way to explain his idiocy without feeling like an idiot yourself.

 

The problems with this kind of rhetoric are too numerous even to list here, but the relevant point is that it heightens expectations far beyond anything a mere president can do. The problem with making magical promises is that they will fail, but the failure of magical promises doesn’t invite a return to realism and pragmatism, at least for many—it invites a new round of magical explanations for the failure.

 

It’s sort of like my problem with the soft Marxist rhetoric of Bernie Sanders & Co. They insist everything they want to do is obviously right, obviously popular, obviously doable, and obviously easy—if we just tax rich people more. But you could confiscate the top 1 percent’s wealth and still not achieve half of what they want. Regardless, when they fail, for myriad reasons, the conclusion isn’t “Oh, let’s be more practical and compromise.” It’s “the will of the people was thwarted by unseen forces!” Since they are unconquerably sure their aims are not just achievable but definitionally good, failure must be explained by evil actors working behind the scenes. This reduces to its emotional essence the argument behind vast swaths of Marxism. We all know what is right and what (according to Marx) is inevitable, so any failure or delay must be the handiwork of the ruling classes working behind the scenes to prevent the arrival of cosmic justice. Revolutions never fail; they can only be betrayed.

 

This, by the way, is precisely the logic Trump uses to explain his 2020 election loss. That he won is objectively true because he is good and the people love him. Therefore, his loss can be explained only by a conspiracy involving, variously or in tandem, the Deep State, corrupt Democrats, the Chinese, the Venezuelans, and—at least for some jabronies, but not Trump himself—the Jews.

 

Conspiracies do the same work as magic for the conspiratorial. It’s no coincidence that the fever swamp right talks so much about demons and demonic forces amid all the talk about Zionists and Marxists.

 

This is all reminiscent, to me at least, of the Wordsworth and Coleridge project, in what we might call Lyrical Politics. The normal functions of politics and economics are a façade behind which evil forces work their will. This is one reason why the Epstein files are almost perfectly engineered for this moment. Behind their public reputations, powerful men do demonic things for fun and profit.

 

I’ve been on a kick lately about trying to convince people that democracy is not a guarantor of good results—how could people think otherwise given the last decade or 10?—but a hedge against worse results. Elections are good because they let us fire people; they don’t guarantee that whoever replaces them will be good or even slightly better. But the need to get elected, and to make arguments for why you should be elected or reelected, is healthy. When we try to make claims about what democracy should deliver or what it should mean, we lose sight of what it can deliver and what it is for.

 

And those deliverables are magical enough. As we approach the 250^th founding of this country, we should be celebrating our remarkable achievements. In the long sweep of history, the ability to fire bad rulers is a profoundly radical invention. That invention isn’t just about elections, either. It’s about the separation of powers, the sanctity of individual rights, and the republican idea that different institutions play a crucial part in our novel experiment in self-government. Self-government isn’t just about elections or “democracy,” it’s about the limits on democracy too. We don’t elect a king with some divine (or democratic) mandate to do whatever he wants. We elect a public servant to do a specific job, curtailed and constrained by rules and other institutions.

 

Again, against the timeline of human history, that’s a near miraculous achievement, and we should imbue that achievement with a little more awe and appreciation for its magical qualities.

 

Edmund Burke believed in liberty, rights, and limited government. What he didn’t believe is that they all appeared magically when a handful of philosophers incanted the right words about principles. Instead, he believed that English people carved out a society through trial and error that settled on these principles and sought to nurture them. This story had in it its share of myth and magic, too. But it was a story that sustained and supported the principles. I believe in all of those principles, and I’m glad the founders plucked them from the myth and turned them into something more explicit and enduring. But the advantage of the Burkean vision is that it fosters gratitude for what we have. Because no one really knows how the English stumbled upon their social compact, we should be not only reverential about the providence of it, but extremely cautious about mucking with it in pursuit of magical solutions to its shortcomings.

 

Our politics need a little less Coleridge—fewer tales of demons and hidden forces or divine intercessors—and a little more Wordsworth, i.e., recognition that the system we take for granted has within it a magic all its own. What we have is extraordinary enough, and it deserves more poetic faith.