By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, March 06, 2026
John Lindsay, the handsome golden-boy, two-term mayor of
New York City from 1966 to 1973, was one of the last liberal Republicans, right
up until he switched to the Democratic Party, partly in the hope of winning the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. In his first run for mayor, Lindsay
defeated Democrat Abraham Beame and Conservative Party provocateur William F.
Buckley Jr.
None of that is important right now. I just wanted to
point out, for those who don’t know who he was, that among his
accomplishments—occasional guest host on Good Morning America, honorable
service in World War II and in Congress—John Lindsay also gave Florence Henderson crabs.
Why do I need to point that out? I don’t really, but this
is my “news”letter, and I’m about to talk about The Brady Bunch, and I
don’t know when I’ll have another peg for that fascinating bit of trivia.
Still, I promise the rest of this “news”letter won’t be
as crude. Let’s get serious and talk about something at the intersection of
literature and politics.
Brady agonistes.
One of the seminal episodes of The Brady Bunch was
“Adios, Johnny Bravo.” Attempting to summarize great
literature is always daunting. How do you boil down Anna Karenina or Moby-Dick
to a few sentences? But I will try.
The Brady kids appear on a variety show as a singing
group. Greg Brady, the scion of the Brady clan, is approached by fast-talking
talent scouts. They want him to launch a solo career as Johnny Bravo. Greg sees
the offer as welcome recognition of his artistic skills. But his family is
offended that he would leave the ensemble, creating a dramatic tension familiar
to readers of the Odyssey and David Copperfield. Or perhaps the
writer, Joanna Lee, was drawing on the rich tradition of Doctor Faustus.
Becoming Johnny Bravo, the agents tell him, would make
him a sensation. “You won’t just be in the Top 20, you’ll be the Top 20. … Just
sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.” Like Robert Johnson at his meeting with
the devil at the crossroads, Greg has a big decision to make.*
This fine print of becoming Johnny Bravo, the producers
explain, will be to wear a flashy matador-style costume of the sort you might
expect Matt Gaetz or Roger Stone to wear at a private party.
After some soul-searching, Greg initially accepts the
offer until he finds out that the executives don’t want him for his musical
ability or his singing. They’ll reinvent all that electronically. Greg blanches
at the suggestion, saying that he thought they wanted him for his talent.
The producer snorts, “You? Now c’mon, baby, don’t get
caught up on an ego trip. I mean, who cares how you sound? We’re after the
sound.”
If that’s the case, Greg asks, what do you want me for?
“Because you fit the suit,” another producer responds.
The Johnny Bravo theory of politics.
Okay, enough of all that. I bring this up because,
starting about 20 years ago, I used to invoke Johnny Bravo as a way to describe
a tendency in Democratic politics. In 2004, there was a boomlet around retired
Gen. Wesley Clark on the theory that a decorated general would be the best
candidate to defeat George W. Bush. Michael Moore himself championed
Clark, which tells you how much the left-wing base of the Democratic Party has
changed. Today, the idea that the base should compromise for the sake of
electability is considered a surrender to fascism or something.
Clark eventually flamed out as a candidate, but the
theory endured. John Kerry became the nominee not so much because most
Democrats liked him, but because they thought other voters would. They
needed a “military man” to go against Bush during the war on terror and the
build-up to the Iraq war. It’s not a terrible theory—in theory.
The problem is that Kerry had spent the decades since his
service in Vietnam burnishing his credentials as an antiwar guy. I don’t want
to revisit all of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth brouhaha, but the larger
point is that Democrats thought Kerry should have credibility with
pro-military and national security voters because of his service without
recognizing that his record denouncing the war, repudiating his medals, etc.,
put him on the other side of the cultural divide. The fact that Kerry was a
human toothache who talked like an AI-generated hologram for a Davos climate
change initiative only exacerbated the problem.
In short, Democrats picked a guy who fit what they saw as
the Republican suit but sang like a conventional Democrat—and thought that
Republican or Republican-leaning independents would fall for it.
This sort of thinking boils down to a form of tokenism.
It’s why Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot, raised $90 million to challenge
Sen. Mitch McConnell in Kentucky in 2020. Progressives bought the theory that other
voters would just see the flight suit.
As Ramesh Ponnuru notes, a version of this rationale is why Kamala Harris
picked Tim Walz as her running mate. He wears flannel! He hunts! He served in
the military! The white working class will totally fall for him! If you think
that’s unfair or simplistic, take it up with Walz, who explained at a Harvard Institute of Politics post-mortem,
“I could code-talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck. I was
the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can do this and vote for this.’”
Nothing says “authentic white working class” like a dude
using “code-talk” and “permission structure” at a Harvard egghead confab.
Republicans aren’t immune to such self-delusion either,
but it gets covered differently because the demographics and sociologies of the
two parties are so different. From time to time, Republicans will nominate
black candidates on the theory that having dark skin is a kind of Johnny Bravo
suit. The candidate can be as right-wing as the next white guy, but because
he’s black, Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents won’t see past his skin
color. I think Trump endorsed Herschel Walker in the 2022 Georgia Senate race
for a few reasons. He was a friend of Trump’s and a famous ex-football star.
But a kind of Johnny Bravo rationale was definitely part of it.
Progressives, especially black Democrats, denounce the
tactic as tokenism—and they’re right. But they also often denounce it as
racist, and they’re (often) wrong. Thinking that, all things being equal, black
(and many left-leaning white) voters will prefer a black candidate is not
racist, it’s just politics. Sure, it can be racist if you’re working from the
assumption that black people won’t see what you’re up to. But that’s rarer than
progressives think. In fact, Republicans welcome black candidates not because
they think they’ll win droves of black votes, but because lots of white
voters—including very conservative ones—like voting for black candidates.
Two of the most popular Tea Party politicians were Herman Cain and Ben Carson,
at least in part because a lot of conservatives don’t like being called
racists.
Two cheers for tokenism.
Tokenism is a universal feature of politics and always
has been. The term has a negative connotation, for understandable reasons. So
if you want to use “inclusion” or some other euphemism, that’s fine. But we
should acknowledge it’s just that—a euphemism. It’s just a fact of logic that
the process of inclusion is going to begin at the retail level, not wholesale.
Going back at least to the Roman Conflict
of the Orders, inclusion starts as symbolic before it becomes structural.
Jackie Robinson was accused of being a token, but he was also a fantastic
baseball player—and human being. Someone had to be the first black
player in the major leagues. The fact that he was so good and had so much
integrity was instrumental to getting beyond mere tokenism. People who heap
scorn on tokenism make the perfect the enemy of the good, because wanting even
symbolic inclusion is a concession to the moral logic of inclusion. It’s fine
to say it’s not enough, but to say it’s worse than nothing is idiotic.
But here’s the thing. In contemporary politics, tokenism
doesn’t settle any arguments. It merely provides an opportunity to make those
arguments to an audience that would otherwise be unwilling to listen to them. I
am old enough to remember lots of people on the right getting angry about
Republicans speaking Spanish to Hispanic audiences. I always thought this was
preposterous. Speaking Spanish to Spanish-speaking audiences is a great way to
make your case to—wait for it—Spanish speakers. But if you send Marco
Rubio to a meeting of the organization formerly known as the National Council of La Raza
conference and he says—in Spanish—the sorts of things Stephen Miller says, he
won’t make many inroads. “You people don’t belong in my country” doesn’t sound
any better in Spanish than it does in English. In fact, it might even be more
insulting.
Which brings me to James Talarico, the Democratic nominee
for the Senate in Texas. A Presbyterian seminarian who speaks the language of
Christianity fluently beat Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the primary for a number of
reasons (election results are never monocausal). But one of them was the idea
that he could appeal to white Christian voters who typically vote Republican.
If his November opponent ends up being Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—the
Baron Harkonnen of the Lone Star State—it just might work well enough.
But here’s the thing. The progressives who are so enthusiastic about Talarico are trotting out a
quasi-theological version of the Johnny Bravo Suit Fallacy. They love him
because he’s essentially a Bernie Bro populist with a Texas twang and more
Bible verses on economic issues and a Tim Walz manqué on most cultural issues.
As both James Carville and John Heilemann have correctly noted, Talarico and Crockett
would likely vote the same way in the Senate and largely have the same views on
policy. Talarico believes there are “six sexes.” He’s resolutely pro-choice, saying that “creation has to be done with consent.” “God is nonbinary,” he once insisted (in fairness, he later
explained that he meant that God is beyond gender, which I think is fair. But
the phrasing certainly was intended to take a side in the transgender debate).
He’s for a kind of watered-down version of Medicare for All. In short, he talks
right but thinks wrong—at least for a lot of voters.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that Talarico’s
moderate persona and his biblical fluency will get him a hearing with some
voters that would have been out of Jasmine Crockett’s reach. But many of the
progressive assumptions behind Talarico’s Johnny Bravo Technicolor Dreamcoat
rest on the idea that large numbers of Texas voters will overlook ideological
and partisan preferences because he can, in the words of Tim Walz, “code-talk”
them into voting for things they don’t believe in.
Politically, “code-talk” belongs next to “Latinx” and
“birthing person” as terms that retail politicians should never, ever use. But
code-talking is a valuable skill if by code-talking you simply mean being able
to communicate with people on their terms (Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, with
a law degree from Oxford’s Magdalen College, knows this well). But what you
actually say matters, too. And what you do matters even more. If
Talarico wants to win, he should take positions that piss off the progressive
left without fully alienating it. The problem is that it’s hard to get anyone
to believe what unelected politicians merely say, and because they don’t hold
office, there are few things that they can meaningfully do that can demonstrate
they are different.
But there is one thing: They can pick a fight on their
own side—find a Sister Souljah and throw her under the bus. (If someone has
his ear, maybe they can code-talk him into this realization by reminding him of
the story of Sheba being sacrificed to save the city of Abel-beth-maachah.
Or maybe just tell him he needs a scapegoat).
Whether you like it or not, voters judge politicians by
their enemies at least as much as their friends. And Talarico needs some
enemies on the left, which will prove to the non-left he’s not just another
Johnny Bravo in a dreamcoat. Without those enemies, I think Democrats will have
almost as many regrets as Florence Henderson in the morning.
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