Jonah Goldberg stories, Page 4
Jonah Goldberg: What’s convincing voters that the economy is worse than it ever was?
One of the worst things about democracy is the way we talk about it. For instance, politicians love to talk about unity, but our constitutional system was set up to keep unity at bay, preferring a more adversarial approach, pitting faction against faction. Checks and balances, separation of powers and...
Jonah Goldberg: Trump and Biden agreed to debates. That’s a lot less important than it was made out to be.
The Biden and Trump campaigns agreed to two presidential debates last week. Who among us can contain our excitement? Well, it depends on what you mean by “us.” In my corner of the professional world — pundits, commentators, political junkies — there was much rejoicing. Watching the Sunday shows, you...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden’s problem goes beyond inflation, Gaza and age
A batch of new polls from The New York Times, Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer has very bad news for President Biden: He’s losing. Among registered voters, he’s significantly behind in five of the six battleground states that are most likely to decide the election. He does slightly better...
Jonah Goldberg: What happened to the Republican war on ‘woke’ — and what we should have learned from it
This isn’t going to be more musing about whether America has reached “peak woke.” But that is part of the story. So let’s start there. About a decade ago, many on the left embraced the word “woke,” a term with roots in African American culture and activism. It originally meant...
Jonah Goldberg: What we keep getting wrong about campus protests
The current campus demonstrations are a reminder that, of all the mossy clichés and puffed-up pieties of polite (and impolite) American discourse, the sanctity of protest is the hardest to question. Doubting the loftiness of protest invites elite scorn more than any other skepticism about a constitutional right. Proposing limits...
Jonah Goldberg: Republican Party can still do what’s rational and right. Here’s the proof.
There’s no record of Edmund Burke — the great Irish-born British statesman and father of modern conservatism — actually saying what is often attributed to him: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” But it does capture his worldview well enough....
Jonah Goldberg: For Israel and Ukraine alike, U.S. support is proving unreliable and inadequate
After Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel Saturday, President Biden reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “You got a win. Take the win.” Most of the weapons, the first Iran had ever fired on Israel from its own territory, were successfully intercepted. “From its own territory” is...
Jonah Goldberg: Republicans abandoning even their most deeply held principles
The changing of the conservative mind in recent years could hardly be captured more pithily than in the headline of a recent op-ed: “Why I believe in industrial policy — done right.” So opined Sen. Marco Rubio for The Washington Post and, at greater length, for National Affairs. Note that...
Jonah Goldberg: Voters wishing for an alternative to Trump and Biden got one. Unfortunately, it’s RFK Jr.
American politics is so intensely stupid and nasty that it sometimes seems as if somebody made a series of wishes with a monkey’s paw. The dark moral of “The Monkey’s Paw,” a 1902 short story by the English writer W.W. Jacobs that became a pop culture trope, is that you...
Jonah Goldberg: Why Trump’s running mate is less likely to be Marco Rubio than Marjorie Taylor Greene
Now that Donald Trump is officially the presumptive Republican nominee, he’s getting ready for the general election. In just the last couple of weeks, he’s scratched a lot off his to-do list. He installed new leadership, including his daughter-in-law, at the Republican National Committee and negotiated a joint fundraising agreement...
Jonah Goldberg: Did Trump literally threaten a ‘bloodbath’? No, and claiming he did only helps his campaign.
At a rally in Ohio on Saturday, Donald Trump said that if he is not elected in November, there will be a “bloodbath.” That he said that much is true. Having actually read the text of his remarks, however, I do not believe he was threatening: Elect me president or...
Jonah Goldberg: Trump, MAGA movement stormed GOP establishment. Now they have become it.
Donald Trump’s domination of last week’s primaries made it official: He has successfully routed the GOP establishment. Some would argue, with ample evidence this happened a long time ago. Particularly in Congress, the party is divided into three sometimes overlapping factions: Reaganites, pragmatists and populists, the last being Trump’s “MAGA”...
Jonah Goldberg: This is what’s wrong with the rush to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza
If I were a Palestinian struggling amid the rubble in Gaza, I would probably think Israel is committing genocide. If I were a German hiding in Dresden or a Japanese civilian outside Hiroshima in 1945, I’d probably feel the same way about the United States. But none of these amount...
Jonah Goldberg: Nikki Haley keeps losing — and revealing something important about Trump and Republicans
Celebrating his victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday, Donald Trump declared, “I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now.” It was an indisputable victory for Trump, particularly given that it was in the home state of his last remaining rival for the nomination,...
Jonah Goldberg: No, Donald Trump does not equal Alexei Navalny
Alexei Navalny didn’t simply die. He wasn’t just murdered. He was tortured to death. It didn’t happen on the rack or mid-beating, but Vladimir Putin — who had tried to eliminate him earlier — slowly killed Navalny all the same. Vladimir Putin sent the Russian dissident and anti-corruption activist to...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden’s job approval rating is abysmal. Here’s why he might beat Trump anyway
There’s bad news and good news for those who want to see Joe Biden win in 2024 (or who really just want to see Donald Trump lose). The bad news is that, in the era of modern polling, no president has ever won reelection with approval ratings as low at...
Jonah Goldberg: Trump’s rants about NATO making U.S. weaker
On Sept. 12, 2001, 24 hours after the 9/11 attacks, representatives of the then-19-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization convened to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, which holds that an “armed attack” on one member “shall be considered an attack against them all.” This was the first and only...
Jonah Goldberg: Vague laws hand extreme power to courts and bureaucrats. Where’s Congress?
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in a case about fishing boats, and it could spell the end of government as we know it. I hope it does. The legal questions might not be all that fascinating. What is fascinating, however, is how the legal issues help explain...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden is late but right to strike against Yemen’s Houthis
With the possible exception of fights over the national debt and Supreme Court nominations, there is no topic that arouses more partisan hypocrisy than presidential use of military force. And, globally, there is no issue that arouses more hypocrisy than Israel. Put them together, and you have a perfect storm...
Jonah Goldberg: Will Mike Johnson get away with betraying MAGA House members with his proposed budget?
The House Freedom Caucus is largely right about debt and deficits. Some members might be staggering hypocrites, given that they had little problem with Donald Trump’s spending when he was president. They’re also right that the budget deal worked out between Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer...
Jonah Goldberg: Nikki Haley’s slavery gaffe is a rare misstep for a good politician
Nikki Haley gave a bad answer to an easy question: What caused the Civil War? She replied with a word-salad on freedom and the role of government while failing to mention the word “slavery” at all. We don’t need to dwell on why it was a bad answer. The Civil...
Jonah Goldberg: 2023 was the year I started believing in the horseshoe theory of politics
This is the season for columnists to offer some new idea that encapsulates the year that was. I got nothing. But 2023 was the year I finally abandoned my opposition to an old idea — the horseshoe theory of political ideologies. The term is often attributed to French author Jean-Pierre...
Jonah Goldberg: The right’s antisemitism problem is well known. What about the left’s?
The good news is the bad news is wrong. The bad news? Harvard-Harris poll which found that 67% of 18 to 24-year-olds believe that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.” One piece of good news: The poll is pretty lousy, as Ilya Somin, author...
Jonah Goldberg: Trump’s ‘Day One’ dictator comment is a sad symptom of populist politics
Everyone knows that politics involves more truth-stretching than most professions. As the line (often misattributed to Mark Twain) goes, “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.” It’s also a well-established truism that populist politicians lie even more than conventional politicians. This is in part because...
Jonah Goldberg: George Santos hasn’t been convicted of a crime. Congress was still right to kick him out.
George Santos, the infamous fabulist, got the boot from Congress last week. The first member to be expelled in over 20 years and one of only three members to be kicked out for something other than fighting for the Confederacy, Santos was the only representative since the Civil War to...
