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The Goldberg Rationalizations
“It may be that once Trump is no longer the commander in chief in the war against Blue America, the ardor of his troops will give way to a better understanding of the price the GOP paid on his watch.”
This is the last paragraph of Jonah Goldberg’s latest, edifying us with his crack understanding of history, wholly out-of-context. You can read it here. Most of it is written to advance his rationale for why Republicans are supporting Trump.
He deftly (he is a professional) inserts the idea that Trump is a wartime President, only the enemy this time is Blue America. Why is his popularity so high he asks? It’s because he’s a wartime President! See? You have to read the whole thing to understand, but it makes sense – as long as you don’t think about it too much.
There’s not one mention of the media’s hostile obsessions, their disingenuous – often wholly false – reporting, which is unprecedented in modern history, or Obama/Bush embeds in our intelligence agencies and Department of Justice who have been proven to be liars, leakers, framers, and rank partisans without a smidgeon of professional ethics. Very likely some of these people may be traitors. Certainly, they have worked to undermine the will of the American people. I think that qualifies. All of which predated Trump even taking office. If there’s some kind of war happening, as Jonah asserts, it might be important to mention who started it. (Some FBI agents did something?)
Almost as noteworthy, Goldberg makes no mention of Trump’s accomplishments on behalf of his voting bloc as possible reasons for the strong support, nor is there any reference to likely alternatives which might be animating Trump’s support, all of whom are somewhere on the socialism spectrum.
He’s a wartime President. That’s it.
According to Mr. Goldberg’s account, Trump started this “war” he speaks of. And he never really explains how Trump is warring against “Blue America” or who or what this Blue America is.
Taking issue with Jonah’s conclusion, I would say that Trump is the price the GOP paid for being weak, for being fraudulent, for being the party of perpetual war and globalism, and for misunderstanding and/or taking advantage of their base.
Mr. Goldberg is fantasizing that someday the ardor of his “troops” will better understand how wrong they were. On the contrary. The game Jonah, et al., have been playing is over for good. There will be no going back. It may well get a lot worse for the Nevers after Trump is gone. They will have to take refuge with Democrats. Some already have.
Now, for some real genius, edification and a palate-cleanser, I offer this:
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Published in General
I tried to read Godel Escher Bach and it’s still on my bookshelf. I had only a faint grasp of the concepts and had to skip parts but I think it grew on me over the years. I didn’t get a formal education and I often wondered if 18 year-olds can possibly grasp their studies at that age ( how can you really understand Shakespeare or literature if you e barely lived?) , but now I believe that even if they don’t at the time, concepts come to fruition over time, like planted seeds.
There are so many great videos out there today! Glad you enjoyed it!
I sometimes embellish a point to get the conversations going.
Let’s say this … the party has substantive tools that can tip the scales. To your point, not entirely or even 50%. But the party always has a favored candidate and does what it can to make that path the smoothest.
The GOP is not the DNC in this regard, but to suggest that they have no role whatsoever in shifting money, state party resources, advertising, etc. in a certain candidate’s way is naive, pure and simple.
We agree on this. Skip, please contrast Jonah with Kristol for me. I see more similarities than differences.
Compromised to the gOpE. Not to the disaffected base. Reject Newt; get Trump.
Anyway, it was an interesting piece by Jonah. Trump figured out that stoking your base perpetually is a recipe for a certain success. Obama largely did it. Lizzy Warren is trying it now for the D’s. So, you become popular with your own party with this strategy……and everyone else pretty much hates you.
The problem with this strategy is its tough to govern like this. All you do is stoke your base…and get a whole lot of nothing done. So, i would tell Jonah that “stoking your base” presidents invariably aren’t all that successful. They tend to be weak and have almost no spare political capital to upset their core followers, because they have no others. Not a sign of overall strength.
Reject Trump; get Socialism. Hard.
Haley/Crenshaw for the win!
Jonah still has an interest in being fair, and can be an entertaining read. He’s also capable of writing about things other than Trump (and frequently does) – his book Suicide of the West, is decent work. Kristol, though, is a monomaniacal bore.
There’s a way to test for this too: take Jonah’s column in question here, and remove the byline. If it didn’t have Jonah’s name attached to it, how would you interpret it? Would you give it more credence? Could you tell it was Jonah’s work? I would argue that its authorship would be harder to pin.
Kristol, by contrast, is rather consistently polemical. If you took his byline away you’d still know it was either him, or someone very like him.
He couldn’t just listen to or look at the democrats? Some truly support Trump, some just think he is way better than the alternative.
Latest off of Rachel Maddow’s Mon or Tuesday program: New York Times and Washington Post reveal that secret double agent working for our CIA but ostensibly for the Russians now reveals that as an insider who infiltrated the WH, he knows how our President managed to fool the Mueller probe. But now that double agent has been revealed, the President’s impeachment is imminent.
In fact, since I have taken some time away from politics, he may already be impeached! That is how accurate Rachel is.
And Jonah is right at about the same level that Rachel is, although he apparently hasn’t heard of the secret CIA operative just yet.
A great turn of phrase, and the comparison invited is warranted. We are still dealing with ongoing unconstitutional and lawless subversion of our republic by a network of government employees and their confederates. The latest act is an apparently completely false scandal about a fake extraction of a fake Russian source, when RealClearInvestigations did a simple search and found the man living under his own name at a publicly listed property address.
So, we have once again been buried in bovine stuff, with stories that are complete applesauce from CNN, NYT, and WaPo.
I love your statement that Goldberg confuses being clever with being correct. That is true of so many people. (In fact, most of us probably do that from time to time.)
Goldberg has had two and ahalf years to come to terms with exactly why Trump has the popularity he has. It boils down to one and only one thing: although he is not of the middle class, he understands the middle class. I am also quite sure he understands what political experts have preached until quite recently: without a strong dynamic middle class, you can forget any notion of democracy influencing the Republic.
That sounds like a description of the pre-Trump Goldberg. Now it is very hard to click on any Goldberg article, on any topic, and not see a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) dig at Trump supporters. Goldberg isn’t a typical TDS case. He has TSDS – Trump Supporter Derangement Syndrome.
Goldberg would be much more readable if he limited his insults to Trump himself, and not Trump’s supporters.
Goldberg used to be very good. It is tragic what his obsession has done to him
Kristol, on the other hand, was out to lunch before Trump came along.
I can listen to J.S. Bach’s music for hours. I began to understand why that’s so after reading Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Highly recommended.
Put on any of Rampal’s Bach concertos and give it another try.
In other words, Marci, I think you are simply saying that Trump is real. He gives you something you do not get from any other politician. And, truly, whether Trump is a politician at all is open to debate.
Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is a great book and I would recommend it to everyone including Goldberg himself, who needs to read it again.
Ironically, that book was a contributing factor in my opposition to Trump during the primaries – and to my support of him during the general.
Trump splashed onto the scene in 2015 sounding like Huey Long with a Brooklyn accent. I was afraid we were on the verge of nominating a Teddy Roosevelt type wannabe strong man. Government coercion being the solution to everything.
Once Trump’s nomination was a done deal, I looked into the future and saw a cackling Hillary looking back. (Oh, the nightmare! Yuck!) I had to support Trump. Hillary was even more of an example of the kind of things Liberal Fascism warned about. Didn’t Goldberg notice that?
Trump helped his own case by sounding more Reaganesque as time went by, and with his Supreme Court list. The warnings in Liberal Fascism became less applicable to Trump. Again, Jonah Goldberg should have noticed.
I would also listen to Partita No. 1. Crisp and clean throughout. None of the “sawing wood” sort of thing you hear in the Brandenberg concertos, for example.
There’s an irony about Bach’s emergence as a great composer. Although known for the Christian themes of much of his music, it was the Jewish grandmother of Felix Mendelssohn, Bella Solomon, as well as other members of Mendelssohn’s family, and finally Mendelssohn himself, who brought Bach out of obscurity. Until Mendelssohn’s popularization of Bach, nearly a century after Bach’s death, Bach’s music was shunned, as it was not regarded favorably by music critics or the general public.
This is my daily workout on my violin. Still working through the first section…
As I started late and played fiddle ( mostly Irish) and I couldn’t afford the amount of lessons I would need, YouTube videos like this are a Godsend. I’m learning so much because of this technology!
Playing (or trying to play)Bach is really informative. Those dissonant chords are all surrounded by logical progressions of notes before and after.
I also played Bourre on guitar years ago but have largely forgotten it now. That, I read, was an exercise in tuning the guitar using every note in the scale. Amazing.
I try really hard to be in the Jonah/J Pod group and not the Rubin/Boot/Kristol group. I sure like the judges, regulations and taxes.
Amen.
That is the dilemma. That is why I would love for us to nominate Sanford, Weld, Romney or Haley. Unlikely to happen, though.
My problem with the first group is that they can’t stop insulting Trump supporters, particularly Jonah.
Jonah and JPod need to understand that you don’t become the person you vote for. Adults voted for Trump and had rational reasons for doing so. It’s OK to disagree with those reasons. (Something tells me you know that.)
Gary, as much as you dislike Trump, I haven’t seen you insult his supporters. (Maybe you have, but I haven’t seen it.) That makes you a less than perfect fit for the JPod/Jonah group.
My sainted mother voted for Trump. Some of my best friends voted for Trump. Almost all of Trump Supporters are good and decent people. We just happen to disagree.
JPod’s more emotional than Jonah — in the span of one Commentary or GLoP Podcast, he can swing back and forth from denunciations of Trump and his supporters to comments that would come across as staunch defenses of Trump’s positions, if someone else was making them. Jonah’s kind of in the “Yeah, Trump did something conservative that I agree with there, but we all know he really doesn’t know why he did it, so he only gets partial credit.“
That’s interesting. My mother can’t stand Trump.
But is she sainted?
I’ve seen more of Jonah’s writing than JPod’s. Jonah likes to psychoanalyze people’s reasons for supporting Trump (tribal mentality etc.) He doesn’t want to consider the idea that people might support Trump for rational reasons.
Of course.
A whole lot of nothing done? Hmmm…
Anyway, which were the Presidents who governed ‘successfully’ and weren’t the “stoking your base” kind? And the ones who everyone else didn’t hate?
It’s not that Trump picked a fight with Blue America, it’s that hardcore Democrats picked a fight within anyone they deemed undesirable or deplorable.
During the Obama administration, we had Operation Choke Point, Operation Fast and Furious, the IRS non-profit scandal, the routing of DOJ fines to left-wing groups, and that’s not even mentioning turning the DOJ into an opposition research firm against the Republicans.
And the beat goes on, with the Green New Deal, Gun Control, Wealth Tax, 4th trimester abortions, you name it.
“You may not be interested in war,” Trotsky once said, “but war is interested in you.”
I am not interested in going to war with Blue America.
But I am also not interested in being conquered by them, either.