The Rocks and the Orgy

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

Rarely have I felt so remnanty.

 

Many of you know that I named my podcast The Remnant, partly as a homage to Albert Jay Nock, a fascinating, brilliant, intellectually flamboyant weirdo, belonging to a great tradition of homeless geniuses and, often, cape-wearing eccentrics, content to be out of step with the times. Nock introduced me to the concept of the remnant, as laid out in his amazing 1936 essay “Isaiah’s Job.” Nock believed that right-thinking has to exist. In other words, there are true things—moral, political, ethical, economic, theological—that cannot be reduced to mere opinion or passing fad. The masses are rarely, if ever, bound to right-thinking, but that doesn’t mean nobody is. For Nock, the right-thinkers are the remnant.

 

But Nock himself stood on the shoulders of Matthew Arnold, who did the heavier lifting in working out what the remnant was—and wasn’t. For both men, the remnant was the small slice of the people who got it, who understood what right-thinking was and tried to live up to it.

 

For Arnold, the idea of the remnant goes back to the Hebrew prophet Isaiah and the Greek philosopher Plato—Jerusalem and Athens for the win!—both of whom used the word to describe similar groups.

 

Arnold quotes Plato: “There is but a very small remnant of honest followers of wisdom, and they who are of these few, and who have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession is wisdom, and who can fully see, moreover, the madness of the multitude, and that there is no one, we may say, whose action in public matters is sound, and no ally for whosoever would help the just. …”

 

This remnant, Arnold’s Plato continues, can be compared “to a man who has fallen among wild beasts; he will not be one of them, but he is too unaided to make head against them; and before he can do any good to society or his friends, he will be overwhelmed and perish uselessly.”

 

Therefore, the lover of wisdom should hide from the masses behind a “wall” and resolve to “live his life clear of injustice and of impiety, and depart, when his time comes, in mild and gracious mood, with fair hope.” (If your Straussian spider-sense is tingling, it will pass.)

 

Isaiah was not so defeatist. “Isaiah, however, does not make his remnant confine itself, like Plato’s, to standing aside under a wall during this life and then departing in mild temper and good hope when the time for departure comes,” Arnold writes. “Isaiah’s remnant saves the State.”

 

I’ll spare you the biblical exegesis on how Isaiah managed that and skip ahead. Arnold believed, basically as a mathematical proposition, that members of the remnant could reach a sufficient share of the population to wield actual power, in a small-r republican way, and put society on a just path. That was his hope for America.

 

Nock was more on Team Plato while Arnold was more on Team Isaiah. Nock thought there was no real point in trying to save the world or society. He was one of the “Superfluous Men”—a ragtag group of brilliant curmudgeons and ivory tower observers whose ranks included H.L. Mencken, Irving Babbitt, Allen Tate, George Santayana, and José Ortega y Gasset. The term “Superfluous Man” was borrowed from Russia to describe intellectuals out of step with their times. Nock even titled his autobiography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.

 

Nock’s self-styled superfluity was a bit of an act. He claimed he didn’t read the newspapers, but William F. Buckley’s father once recounted discovering Nock on the floor devouring the Sunday papers. But Nock’s public persona and arguments pointed elsewhere. An “individualist” back when that term had not just libertarian or anarchist connotations but also aristocratic and Platonic overtones, Nock championed the idea that one should resist the fads and obsessions of the age and simply tell the truth as you see it. This was in part because Nock believed that most fads and obsessions were simply ancient ideas repackaged with modern labels. He would agree with my estimations that there are vanishingly few new ideas.

 

“Taking his inspiration from those Russians who seemed superfluous to their autocratic nineteenth-century society and sought inspiration in the private sphere, even to the point of writing largely for their desk drawers,” writes Robert Crunden, Nock’s best biographer, “Nock made the essential point: ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permitted, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself.” You might say he championed the “Benedict Option” minus the Benedictine stuff.

 

This idea was more pithily captured by one of my favorite and oft-repeated quotes, from another superfluous Russian of another age: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

 

Arnold defined the remnant as “that substratum of right thinking and well-doing.” Nock accepted that definition, but he tellingly ended the quote there. Arnold’s full statement described the remnant as “that substratum of right thinking and well-doing which in all ages must surely have somewhere existed, for without it the continued life of humanity would have been impossible.”

 

For Nock, the remnant was a term for eternal internal exile. For Arnold, it was the direction to look in the hope that help was on the way.

 

Arnold was more of a small-r republican, believing that if the remnant could attain a kind of critical mass—simple raw numbers—it could lead society on a more just path. Arnold was not an enemy of democracy, nor was he advocating a kind of Leninist avant-garde. He believed that “[p]roperty and intelligence cannot be trusted to show a sound majority themselves; the exercise of power by the people tends to educate the people.” In other words, the only way for the majority to learn sound government is to give them the power to govern in the first place. The remnant can merely help them to learn from their mistakes.

 

What I love about the term “the remnant” is that it appeals to both the Plato-Nock side of the coin and the Isaiah-Arnold side. In biblical terms, a remnant is both something left behind and something to rebuild with. It’s the last of your seedstock and the means for regrowing plentiful crops in the future.

 

I did not intend to go so long with the eggheadery, but I’ve never really explained in much detail my fondness for the term “the remnant,” which is weird given that it’s the title of my little podcast and such a big part of my worldview. I never subscribed to the pure Nockian fatalism. But I was always respectful of the point that the remnant can never count on victory.

 

No cause is truly lost, and no cause is truly won. It’s arguments forever. Sometimes—often—right-thinking loses the argument.

 

I don’t pretend to have a monopoly on right-thinking, as Nock and Arnold define it, nor do I claim to always live up to it even when I am confident of its existence. But I do believe that one should argue for what you think is right, even when you think you’ll lose. And just because you might lose in the moment, that doesn’t mean your arguments won’t find purchase in the soil down the road, even long after you’re gone.

 

Woke 1.

 

What put me on this path was the conversation about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using the phrase “Woke 1.”

 

My friend Charlie Cooke’s summary is useful—and correct:

 

Seeking to dismiss the record of one of the many kooky political candidates with whom she is now reflexively associated, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed aloud as if she had been told that she had a speck of mustard on her lip. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she submitted. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”

 

Is it? Do we? Why? “Woke 1” was, indeed, “crazy.” But Ocasio-Cortez’s implication is that that “crazy” moment was something that happened to her and her ideological compatriots — like an earthquake or an invasion from the sea — rather than something that was contrived, dispersed, and enforced by her and her ideological compatriots. In this, Ocasio-Cortez seems confused once again by the appropriate pronouns. It wasn’t “crazy.” They were crazy. And that “they” includes her.

 

Charlie goes on, and I agree with all of it. The idea that a politician can get away with not merely kowtowing to mass hysteria, but egging it on, exploiting it for personal glory and political profit, and unleashing it on opponents, and then shrug it off by saying, in effect, “Man, that was weird. Let’s all forget about that!” is simply outrageous and preposterous.

 

While I agree with Charlie and many other folks piling on Ocasio-Cortez, I have two objections. The first is the phrase “Woke 1,” which, as many have noted, implies a Woke 2. “Calling it ‘Woke 1’ is like calling it ‘World War One’ in 1930,” another friend, Dan McLaughlin, observed.

 

But that’s not my primary problem with Woke 1. Sure, if you want to define “woke” by some coherent, or incoherent yet bounded, ideological commitments, the term works well enough. But even on those terms, the “political correctness” of the ‘90s should be Woke 1, since most of that nonsense was already there. The young’ns may not remember, but I do. “Women’s herstory,” “don’t call them seminars, call them ovulars,” “hate speech,” “phallocracy.” This stuff was commonplace when I was in college.

 

If we’re going to analogize Woke 1 to World War I, then the era of political correctness was at least akin to the Franco-Prussian War, laying the groundwork for what was to follow. Most of the academic terms we associate with woke craziness—“intersectionality,” “white privilege,” etc.—were coined in the late 1980s or 1990s.

 

But if we broaden our understanding of that “crazy” time a few years ago to moments of mass hysteria and elite panic, then the political-correctness era was merely one chapter in a much older story. I’m already running long, but the craze for eugenics—led by progressive elites in America and the U.K.—was another such chapter. The latter stages of the French Revolution marked another, and not the first. The history of humanity is punctuated by bouts of St. Vitus’ dance and tulip bulb crazes and is littered with the bodies of lynched Americans, Huguenots, Cathars, and, of course, Jews, Jews, and more Jews. McCarthyism had good arguments on its side, but the populist frenzy it represented undermined those arguments.

 

Which is to say that defining what we might call “Greater Woke” as a phenomenon purely of the left is folly. Which is why I find criticisms from the right, including Charlie’s, as wholly sound and correct as they are, to be a bit like the sound of one hand clapping.

 

Nick Catoggio alluded to this yesterday. After endorsing the criticisms from the right, Nick added:

 

I wouldn’t trust any Republican with power who supported Trump’s coup plot in 2020 even if he or she now claimed to be contrite. Repentance is cheap in politics; character, as demonstrated by terrible judgment, is destiny. If your reaction to the Woke 1 era is to laugh it off and muse that neo-McCarthyism was crazy, man, you’ve told us something important about your own character.

 

It’s fine—nay, necessary—to mock the “defund the police” nonsense of Woke 1 (which I did, often). It’s absolutely correct to reject a chuckle and shrug as a sufficient mea culpa for your own participation in a puritanical, hysterical jihad against reason and sound argument. If I can’t trust a leader to be sane in crazy times, I can’t trust you at all. It’s easy to be sane when it’s in your political self-interest.

 

But an enormous number of leaders on the right have failed the exact same test. Focusing on Woke 1 doesn’t absolve the fanatics and hysterics of the right nor the people who surrendered to the fanaticism and hysteria of the Trump era—and continue to this day as enablers and peddlers of it. If you claim to stand for the Constitution and honest elections but sat down for Trump’s attempt to steal an election, never mind cheered it on, why on earth should I take your fair-weather patriotism seriously?

 

Similar questions flood the mind: If you endlessly mock the eminently mockable idea of defunding the police but shouted that we should defund the FBI solely because it executed a lawful and justified raid on Mar-a-Lago; if you decry the “weaponization” of the justice system under Biden but yawn at the deliberate criminal prosecution and persecution of Trump’s enemies and accidental pawns in his narrative; if you rail against the “cancel culture” of your enemies but cheer the same practice among your friends; if you wax sanctimonious about the antisemitism of the left but insist upon a “big tent” for the antisemites on the right; if you deplore the cronyism and corporatism you call “socialism” when deployed by Democrats but celebrate the same thing when championed by Republicans; if you heap scorn on left-wing identity politics but celebrate talk of “Heritage Americans” and other “real Americans”; if you spoke of the “Biden crime family” in whispered earnestness but write off Trump’s corruption as simply his nature … you get the point.

 

Your selective condemnations of your opponents make me trust you less, not more. Your double standards reveal what your real standards are.

 

I should be clear because I mentioned them by name, I don’t include Charlie and Dan in this broadside. They’ve criticized many or all of the things I’ve mentioned, and many more.

 

But my problems with the broadsides remain. We live in a moment of competing hysterias, populisms, and institutionalized corruptions. They are not symmetrical or ideologically identical. The sins are piled high on both sides, but they are not all of equal weight or height. But such scorekeeping misses an important point. And my refusal to accept lesser evils as tools of some greater good enrages many people who only want to talk about one side of the scale.

 

To borrow a term from Julien Benda, we live in an age marked by the organization of political hatreds.

 

What I love about Nock was his stubborn refusal to join a team during a similar time. “The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone,” Nock observed. “They want a government they can use.” When Biden or Obama were president, I could make that observation about the pigs at the trough, to the sound of right-wing applause. I could make the same observation now under Trump, to the sound of right-wing silence.

 

I think the corruption now is more open and hypocritical for reasons that should be obvious. But they were no less true under Biden and Obama. Nock believed that causes like communism, fascism, Nazism, and, yes, the New Deal were “merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.”

 

Now, I do not think the New Deal, for all my well-chronicled objections, was “exactly alike” those other movements (though many prominent people, including some New Dealers at the time, would not object to the claim nearly as much as you might think). But I would rather live in an era that worried that the statism of the New Deal risked sliding into those other -isms than in one where such -isms are fine, so long as “we” are the ones in charge.

 

If right-thinking exists, and I think it does, I think it is probably more of a spectrum of views than a binary formulation. For me, what defines right-thinking involves the word “right” less and “thinking” more. I can disagree with people I consider to be part of the remnant. We can argue about the efficacy of this program or that. We can debate how much we should tax and spend. What wars to fight, and which threats to simply endure.

 

Thinking is an activity, not a fixed state of mind. If you care about facts and reason, if you think that a kernel of truth or justifiable anger is not an excuse for hysteria, if you think leaders owe people calmness and prudence precisely when panic and rage are popular and momentarily rewarding, if you think the Constitution and the rule of law should be paramount precisely when most people find them most inconvenient, if you think that the rules of supply and demand cannot be suspended because they hurt your feelings or lend weight to your political opponents, and if you think the path to truth lies in arguing with people you disagree with, not pandering to people who already agree, then I consider you part of the remnant.

 

I don’t care if you vote Republican or Democrat. I can happily and productively talk to progressives who don’t think facts are partisan all day. But I don’t have five minutes for members of either party who claim facts are only facts when they confirm their desires or inconvenience their enemies. The electorate may be thermostatic in its beliefs, but the truth of those beliefs isn’t.

 

I have to side with Arnold and Isaiah because I believe that’s the only path out of the darkness. But I have to acknowledge that Plato and Nock had a point, too. A number of prominent right-wing “influencers” have told me or people I know that one must abide, even abet, lies and slanders in order to stay “relevant.” They tell themselves and others that they do so for noble reasons, to defeat the worst ideas and nudge the powerful or the people toward better ones. I have no doubt that is true, particularly for some politicians trying to navigate these toxic waters. I can muster some sympathy and grace for these people. But not a lot, because I’ve seen how the seduction of relevance often renders their compass unreadable or unreliable. What starts as seduction too often ends in comfort at the orgy.

 

I expect politicians to compromise with reality because politics is, and always will be, about muddling through and settling for the good instead of the perfect. My problem with this era is the way the politicization of everything causes normal people and “influencers” alike to think like politicians. They make what is good for their party, or the person running it, their true north, and the orgy the rightful spoils of power.

 

The remnant of Arnold and Isaiah holds that we should not accept this as inevitable and permanent. There is hope. There is work to do. There is a reason to get out of bed and try to persuade people to commit to right-thinking. Meanwhile, the remnant of Nock, Plato, and Solzhenitsyn speaks to me, not in its fatalism, but in its warning that right-thinking is not something you do solely in pursuit of the prize or payoff of “relevance,” but because right-thinking is its own reward. It is self-justifying. Hope for relevance. Work for relevance. But don’t make it your true north, for that way lies the rocks and the orgy.