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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
As the person with the first comment on the three-year-old thread you reference, I feel compelled to ask you how my role is reversed? Or what the hell you are talking about here?
Er, . . . no.
Skip, you’re lumping all anti-anti-Trumpism into one category and then defining that category as the most unreasonable (and infrequent) of the type. The specifics matter! As others have pointed out we can still have disagreements over policy. When it’s clear that the disagreement is really over personality or over fake news or over sour grapes then the specifics of that still matter.
No, Franco did not do that.
No, Franco didn’t say either of those things.
Jonah entire interview with Jane Coston was to show how she was wrong. The discussion did not go as he liked because Jane knew she was vulnerable and filibustered, it is common tactic in such a circumstance. Jonah not a trained interviewer did not make Jane come to grips with the many flaws in her arguments, partially because she refused to answer the question and talked about something else. Jonah landed some good blows.
Jonah thought Jane was talking about him and the movement he is a part of and thought she was wrong. He made that clear. He wished he had been a better interviewer but interviewing someone is a skill and Jonah does not have a lot of practice at it. Interviewing someone hostile to your point of view takes a really deft hand, Jonah does not have that yet. But it was good start.
It is true that Jonah did not shout at her, but I am not sure how shouting at her would have been helpful.
I finished the interview knowing that Jane Coston is unsure of her opinion and is afraid of being closely questioned on the facts and I found that very revealing and useful. I am really glad for the interview and hope Jonah pulls off more interviews like that and gets better at it.
I should say he is doing the only thing he can do to get better at it by interviewing people.
Over all a good job.
This is kind of an important point. The way movement conservatives played Obamacare was just shameful. They criticized all the conservative parts of the law while lionizing the leftist ones. I remember reading Richard Epstein argue that socialized medicine was constitutional, but an individual mandate to purchase insurance was not. The entire point of the individual mandate was to avoid socialized medicine.
The worst was during the 2018 ObamaCare repeal debate, when various conservative pundits started saying nice things about single-payer, much to the delight of leftist pundits who started writing blog posts about how maybe single-payer was within the realm of political possibility after all.
The problem with ObamaCare wasn’t the individual mandate or giving subsidies so poor people can leave Medicaid and join private health insurance plans. It was the Medicaid expansion and the absurdly micromanaging federal regulations.
I’m not saying movement conservatives explicitly lied. They simply acted in the same tribal manner so many are now tut-tutting the rest of us for supposedly engaging in. I guess tribalist nonsense isn’t a problem when elites do it, even if they did nearly destroy the healthcare system and might very well have doomed us to a socialized medicine hell.
To be fair to Jonah, he admitted on a later podcast he hadn’t done a great job interviewing Coston.
That is not the persuasion model I am aware or support. The intellectual battles are important in politics for various reasons but the most important one, politically, is that very few people really want to be on the side of the “stupid people”. If Conservatives, Liberals or whatever constantly seem unsure and afraid in debates or just ill informed there can be a sense that “you” are stupid for supporting them. That is bad and that was the kind of thing that William F Buckley and his merry band founded National Review to combat. They did a great job doing it too.
The more convincing way to persuade is by modelling. When you model something people are more likely to believe it because they can see it. People were afraid that the Presidency was too big and complex for anyone to run it. LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter had shown that to be President is to be a failure. Then Reagan modeled a successful Presidency, fear relieved.
Modeling is important but for the model to be adopted and last the model has to be explained. Say people love the style of Judging and Law interpretation that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas, et al, perform. Great but they need to know why those are good judges. If people believe partisan loyalty is the key then they will aim for Gorsuch but get a Sotomayor. They will aim for a Thomas and choose a Ginsburg. So it is important, especially with the Supreme Court, to get beyond “this is my guy” and into why this guy is great for the court so the model of picking judges that Trump as employed will be picked after him and become Orthodoxy that no one can reject and might even limit the ability of the Left to appoint Liberal Ciphors, as they like to do.
That is how you persuade. Reagan did this but Bush did not and that led to Clinton that was still restricted by Reagan but did great damage, that was not repaired by Bush II.
If you don’t articulate your philosophy and model its success you do not persuade or change the terms of debate in a way that lasts. No one does this now and we all suffer for it.
Here’s one of my favorites. Even though I’m Jewish, this Jesus song, as far as I’m concerned, is the essence of music. Bach said that everything he composed was “for the glory of G-d.” In much of his music, especially the choral compositions, if you listen closely, you can hear angels singing.
Has Jonah ever addressed why he hasn’t had someone like VDH on his podcast? For God’s sake, if you’re going to give Jane Coston a platform, why not have on VDH and actually debate?
I don’t recall this Compromise becoming law. It did not accomplish anything. History is full of bad compromise legislation that never becomes law. Rather than taking a bad compromise, the effort was put into killing Clinton’s reform. Killing the bill actually worked. I don’t want things accomplished if they are bad things.
I think you over state things by saying all conservative think tanks liked the bill. Cato hated the bill. Ramesh Ponnuru looked into this and found that rather than the dominate conservative opinion Heritage was an outlier in supporting this plan.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/history-individual-mandate-ramesh-ponnuru/
Oh my! Sincerest apologies for having caused such offense to you by my comment as to make you swear.
The recollection and reminder was solely about me. Not you. Not anyone else commenting on the thread. And not that anyone else, but me, whose ‘role’ was reversed.
In July, 2016, being even an apologetic Trump supporter, even to the point of saying it was only a ABH* vote, I (just little ole me and my feelings) felt like I was a ‘fly in the ointment’ at Ricochet. Others certainly can disagree and have other feelings and perceptions, but these were mine.
Today, in September, 2019, I don’t feel like the ‘fly in the ointment’ here any longer. I think a great majority here are either supporters of President Trump or at a minimum believing that he is infinitely better than the best of the socialist democrats. There are a few here that still hold out the Trump is terrible and worse than the worst of the socialist democrats. Ergo … my comment of role reversal. My role is reversed and I suspect those few OMB holdouts at Rico (if the shoe doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit), must feel just like I did in July, 2016.
Is that clarifying?
*AnybodyButHillary (including an Orange Man)
Very few people? And your evidence for this is. . . ?
One of Bach’s biggest “hits” for sure! I was tempted to ask Dr. Bastiat if he was familiar with this one. Have a good Shabbos!
From a distance, it appears to me that the GOPe is in a pre-Trump 2015 mode and just waiting for Trump to go away. If they stay that way, apathy from Trump voters 2024 is not likely. It will be more like open hostility.
Back at ya, tzadik!
I’ll start now. I am openly hostile to a second run at this by Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush
Can’t like this, but believe you are correct.
I might have missed it. Has anyone tried to psychoanalyze why Jonah dislikes Trump so much? And if so, how did Jonah react? All I can remember is something about pants.
You ain’t the only one, brother.
One of these days, @django, we will do a meet up with @bossmongo, and we will toast to slaying the socialists … by President Donald J. Trump.
#Are you tired, yet?
Don’t forget that Mitch McConnell said he would “crush” the TEA party.
No offense taken here. And, certainly, you’re not the first person on Ricochet to cause me to utter a mild oath. You probably won’t be the last, either. Merely a request for clarification.
Ah.
OK. I don’t think of anyone here, including myself,as any sort of fly in the ointment. This isn’t Ravelry, after all. But then, I’ve been accused of obliviousness before. YMMV. AAD.
Yes, that’s helpful. Thanks.
Yep. Look at what Mitch (and Haley Barbour’s war machine) did to challenger Chris McDaniel in MS in 2014.
And look what they did to Mo Brooks in Alabama in 2018. Roy Moore won the primary because angry Mitch wouldn’t move to the best candidate Mo, away from his preferred Big Luther, so Mitch was happy (and helped) to lose the Alabama (Alabama!) GOP Senate seat, out of spite. Crush the Tea Party indeed.
It’s not gonna be apathy.
It’s going to be full blown disgust and loathing.
I don’t know about the rest of the world – or even ricochet – but I haven’t forgotten. Nor have I forgotten the idiot who described the Mitch/TEA situation as follows: The TEA Party roughnecks have been going up and down the street trashing bars, but when you enter Mitch’s bar, he locks the doors. Think A Bronx Tale and the bikers. So that’s how the GOPe viewed the TEA party? And they wonder why we despise them.
Exactly! McQueeg and his Wacko Birds … they detest us.
Trump fired at him over having bad pants after Jonah was one of his earliest high-profile critics on the right when he entered the race, and if you grew up or lived in NYC during the past 40-plus years, Trump’s personal life and his shifting back and forth between GOP and Democratic support was hard to miss.
Based on that, I actually shared the same fear, that Trump was more of a following indicator than a leading indicator of where swing voters would go, and when push came to shove, he wouldn’t stand firm as a conservative if the swing voters started drifting back towards the Democrats. That hasn’t happened in the past 10 months, possibly because he knows he’s torched his bridges with the Democrats. That’s sort of left Jonah with the complaint that Trump can’t diagram his sentences — he does conservative things, but he can’t explain at any length an ideological reason for doing those things (which is still better than Hillary or any of the 2020 field, which would never do those conservative things).
Me too. I had read some of Trump’s books, and went he mentioned politics it was mushy, leftish conventional wisdom. He also talked up his relationship with the Clintons.