Jonah Goldberg Columns category, Page 2

The single most abused, misused and misunderstood word in American politics is “unity.” All presidential candidates vow to unite Americans. Nearly every pundit and public intellectual laments the lack of unity. “When America is united, America is totally unstoppable,” Donald Trump declared in his inaugural address. “With unity, we can...

The best thing about Kamala Harris’ policy debut last week was the backlash. I don’t mean the political backlash; Harris’ attack on “price-gouging” was probably smart politics. It amplified her campaign’s message that she’s “fighting for the people.” That economists scoff at the tools she would use in that fight...

Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issue uniting pundits, editorial boards, virtually all Republican politicians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to the issues and attack Vice...

To the surprise of just about everyone, Kamala Harris has had a remarkably good two weeks (whether her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz marks the end of that honeymoon or an extension of it remains to be seen). Democrats, of course, have been pleasantly surprised. Prior to President Joe...

One of my great peeves of the Trump era is the Greenland effect. I belong to a small group of people who think America should peacefully acquire Greenland. It’s an old idea. The State Department pitched buying the vast arctic island in 1946, but the Danes didn’t want to sell...

Alas, the coronation of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee is complete. Democrats are surprisingly ecstatic with the decision, and Republicans, or at least the Trump campaign, are very cross about it, complaining that democracy has been subverted. This is something of a reversal, given that Republicans argued Biden was...

One can hardly fault Donald Trump for believing divine providence is on his side. He’s had the most impressive lucky streak in living political memory. While his debate performance was exceptional only if graded on a curve, his opponent’s was a debacle by any objective standard. Then the Supreme Court...

Donald Trump isn’t normally thought of as a consensus-builder, but in one sense that’s exactly what he is. Many of Trump’s most ardent fans and foes alike believe he is the leader of a political movement with a clear and defined set of principles and goals. They disagree only on...

The fallout from President Biden’s miserable debate last week is giving me deja vu. In the political right’s intramural arguments over Donald Trump, I got some things correct and some incorrect. But I believe I was indisputably right in one respect: From the outset, I argued that Trump’s presidency would...

I’ve changed my mind: This presidential debate matters. Before I continue, a quick recap: Last month, I expressed my longstanding view that presidential debates aren’t very meaningful and are very stupid. They are pseudo-events, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin’s term for manufactured media spectacles that feel significant because we imbue...

For more than 20 years, I have held one position constant when it comes to immigration policy: We should have one. I am less concerned about the number of immigrants we take in every year than I am about the fact that we — voters, policymakers, politicians, what have you...

How much will Donald Trump’s conviction in the New York hush money case matter come November? The obvious answer is that nobody knows. Still, I suspect the verdict will matter, just not in ways that are easy or even possible to predict. A lot of the instant reaction revolves around...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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”...

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...