By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
About a month ago, Bridget Phetasy posted on Twitter that
it’d been two years since her dog passed away.
This was my reply:
The great thing about dogs — one
of the great things at least — is the rules that govern ranking other things
don’t apply to dogs. I have never doubted that someone was telling the absolute
truth when they said their dog was the best dog ever, even though I know for a
fact that I’ve owned two of the best dogs ever and my current dogs will one day
join them on Mount Rushmore as the four greatest dogs ever. It’s just not like
mountains or money. There’s only one tallest mountain or richest person. But
the number of obviously best dogs ever is almost infinite.
I bring this up not to talk about dogs, though I think
you know that I am happy to be thrown in that briar patch. I bring it up to
talk about something that dogs are a good illustration of.
So, against all my better judgment, let’s stick with dogs
for a moment longer. The
replies to
my
tweet were more
edifying than most, and not just for the conspicuous
absence of antisemitic bile. People got what I meant. It’s not like I persuaded
anybody. They already agreed before I said anything, because people who love
their dogs understand that the realm they share with them is outside of the
realms in much of the rest of their lives. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I
like posting stuff about dogs—they don’t care about politics or “influence” and
their indifference is contagious. I find that deeply comforting in this time of
stupid, ugly politics.
Humans and dogs are very different in all sorts of
obvious ways: number of legs, mathematical aptitude, etc. But one difference I
think about a lot may not be so obvious. Telling your dog you love it is
pretty futile; you have to show it. I know dog owners who will disagree
with this. The ones who aren’t entirely wrong will say that dogs can pick up on
your voice, mood, etc. Fair enough. But even so, that’s more showing than
telling. The words alone are the “blah blah blahs” from The Far Side cartoon.
We show our love in all of the mundanely obvious ways. We feed them, we play
with them, and we just hang out with them. The hardest parts of dog ownership,
by far, are the ones where our love seems like punishment: taking them to the
vet, retrieving delicious but dangerous things from their mouths, giving them
pills, and, worst of all, having to decide to say goodbye to them (though
you’re doing that wrong if it seems like anyone but you feels punished).
Which brings me to parenthood. Children and dogs are very
different, and I think it can be a mistake to be confused on this point. People
frequently ask me why, in my tweets in which Pippa talks to people, she refers
to me as “thumb guy” and my wife as “the special lady.” Part of it is just a
long-running silly joke about how, when we’re in the park, I’m using my phone
to take her picture on the thumb machine I’m always using. But the more serious
reason is that I don’t want to contribute, publicly, to the “furbaby” discourse
in which we talk about dogs as if they are human children. I don’t want Pippa
referring to me as “daddy” or to the Fair Jessica as “mommy.” I won’t claim we
stick to this rule in private, but that’s sort of the point: That’s private. You
can quibble with the reasoning of my rule of thumb (guy), but I’m sticking with
it.
For all the massively important and real differences
between human children and dogs, those differences are, in some respects,
narrowest when our kids are babies. That’s because when they’re babies, words
don’t matter very much. Yes, talking to babies is good for their development
and all that, but the imperative is to show your love more than tell it.
Among the worst experiences in my life were the times I had to take my
preverbal daughter to a doctor or hospital for her own good, because I couldn’t
explain that it was for her own good. I had to do it anyway. Because
that’s what parents have to do. Because we love our children.
We’ll come back to that.
Nikole Hannah-Jones’ values.
Nikole Hannah-Jones has generated a lot of buzz over her
revelatory essay about deliberately sending her kid to a bad school.
Some would describe her pensée as “soul searching.” I’m not inclined to do
that, because I don’t think she searched as deeply as she wants to suggest.
Charlie Cooke covers a lot of my thoughts on the matter.
He focuses, rightly, on something Hannah-Jones said
in 2024: “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.”
This is wrong. It’s wrong in profound ways. It’s also a
very old and shockingly common idea.
In 2013, Melissa Harris-Perry was featured in one of
MSNBC’s old “Lean Forward” agitprop ads in which she said public education was
underfunded “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children
‘your kid is yours’ and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very
collective notion of these are ‘our children.’” Her solution: “We have to break
through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids
belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
Hillary Clinton said in 1996, “As adults we have to start
thinking and believing that there isn’t really any such thing as someone
else’s child.”
The first-wave feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated
it more starkly. “There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day, than this
new thought about the child … the recognition of ‘the child,’ children as a
class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state;
instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is,
parental] ownership—the unchecked tyranny … of the private home.”
I think this is gross. It’s no less gross if you are
willing to grant that it is well-intended, something I struggle to do at times.
We’re all familiar with the way good intentions can pave a path we don’t want
to go down. Indeed, I find it fascinating how anyone can simultaneously treat The
Handmaid’s Tale as almost a form of secular prophecy and entertain this
line of thinking. After all, nationalizing, or socializing, the raising of
children seems like a necessary first step down the path of good intentions
leading to a kind of hell.
Before I get to my fundamental objection, I should offer
a lesser one. This is bad public policy. One of the best ways to identify when
the government is failing is not when we vote at the ballot box, but when we
vote “with our feet.” There are few better examples of what social scientists
call “revealed preferences” than packing up and moving someplace else—for
better schools, lower taxes, or, in the case of people fleeing despotic
regimes, for simple freedom. Watching a video of
Germans trying to escape East Berlin, or of Vietnamese boat people, or anyone else fleeing countries with a more
“collective notion” of raising children, will teach you more about those
regimes than any textbook.
Our system works on the assumption that parents care more
about their children than anyone else. I’m not saying it works great, and
sometimes that’s because parents don’t care enough. But a system
designed around the assumption that parents not only don’t but should not
care more about their kids is a recipe for a system that would make “the
tragedy of the commons” a real tragedy. Imagine a school system where parental
feedback did not exist, save as some sort of sentiment about children as an
undifferentiated, commodified mass of future workers.
But my point isn’t about public policy per se. It’s about
parental policy, for want of a better word. Hannah-Jones didn’t vote with her
feet, she voted with her child. She made her daughter an instrument of
her politics, a flesh-and-blood virtue signal. And she did it based, at least
in part, on her “values,” which take it as a self-evident truth that her child
is not worth more than any other.
Now, seen from the perspective of an education bureaucrat
or a politician, this is a more defensible claim than some are willing to
concede. The job of public officials is to care about all of the kids under
their supervision more or less equally. I say “more or less” because I think
even here some distinctions can and should be made. The students who really
care about doing the work should be rewarded with the ability to do it without
having to navigate bullying, violence, or disruption by students who don’t.
That doesn’t mean the bad apples should be written off. It just means that choices always
have to be made. Having a whole class held hostage to the worst-behaved
troublemakers is a choice, just as removing those troublemakers is a choice. To
govern is to choose. There are no policy solutions, only trade-offs, and all
that.
But Hannah-Jones isn’t an administrator or politician.
She’s a parent. And her kid is hers—and her husband’s—and no one else’s. It’s a
bit like the Marine Rifleman’s creed: “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this
one is mine.” Except a child is not a rifle, it is a human being that is
dependent upon its parents to become the best, happiest, and healthiest person
possible. It’s hard. Every parent fails to one degree or another. But the
failures are all relative, and with love, hard work, and, alas, a good deal of
luck, the failures are modest.
But what is essential is the idea—no, not the idea,
because ideas are just theories held in the mind—the passion, the conviction,
the certainty that your child is worth more than all the others, to you.
That’s the realm that children are supposed to live in. It should follow them
around like a force field as they navigate the world around them. My parents
are in my corner. They may get things wrong, they may make mistakes, they
might “just not understand” this or that, but that they love me is
unquestionable.
I’m trying not to cannibalize my book in advance of it
(eventually) being done. But the category error that Hannah-Jones makes is
importing the logic of the external order, what Friedrich Hayek called the
“macrocosm,” into her “microcosm” of the family. It’s the same mistake all of
the people who want our children to be raised collectively make. They think the
rules of our private realm of sacrifice and solidarity, familial loyalty and
collective purpose, can and should be extended to the whole of society. But the
political order in a liberal system—and ours is still a liberal system, for
now—is for political things. Again, a politician can and should ideally work
from the assumption that all children are of equal worth, because in a liberal
system all humans are of equal worth. That is the core idea of liberalism: We
are all equal in the eyes of God and government. But a parent isn’t a
politician. A parent is a jealous guardian of their child or children. Vast
swaths of good parenting are captured by the statement, “I don’t care what the
other kids are doing. They aren’t my kids.”
And I should say, this is true in nonliberal systems,
too. No society has ever been constructed where the attachments of family have
been completely erased. Many have tried, with horrific successes at the
margins. But total victory has always been impossible because love of children
is written on the human heart, not in law books.
That’s because the microcosm is the cosmos we are born
into. We can be torn from it, and trained to see the state as our parents, in
some real-world version of Plato’s republic or some cockamamie postliberal
“common good” or “social justice” utopia. But in the real world, we call such
efforts the very definition of totalitarianism. That microcosm is where
children and, yes, dogs live. The difference between dogs and children is that
dogs never leave the microcosm. They stay in the pack of the little platoon
forever. Where all we can do is show love without being able to explain it.
Children always keep one foot in the microcosm, ideally.
But they also learn how to live in the macrocosm by first being formed in the
microcosm. And eventually, the idea is that they create a new microcosm of
their own.
I’m not saying what Hannah-Jones did was totalitarian or
a crime. I’m not saying that she doesn’t love her child. She obviously does.
I’m saying her attachment to politics broke the force field that is supposed to
surround her child. As the line—often misattributed to Talleyrand—goes, what
she did was worse than a crime. It was a mistake.
When Hannah-Jones explained that she voted with her child to her child, she
“just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else:
betrayal.”
“‘So you had money to send me to one of the best schools,
and you chose not to?’ she said, hurling her words. ‘Because other kids are
disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?’”
Hannah-Jones seems to realize her mistake: “Najya was
asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her. And the
honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I
have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my
values and my child.”
But the primary mistake wasn’t that she didn’t send her
child to the “‘best’ school” (there’s so much going on in those scare quotes by
the way). That’s secondary. Najya’s shoddy education can be remedied, to some
degree. But that’s a symptom. The real mistake, the actual betrayal, was in
showing—and then telling—her child that she wasn’t worth the world, compared to
all the other children in it, to her.
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