Jonah Goldberg Columns category, Page 5

As 2022 draws to a close, it’s worth celebrating that this hasn’t been a good year for authoritarianism. This might seem Pollyannish. After all, just last month, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance issued a report concluding that democracy is in decline while authoritarianism is deepening. Freedom House...

The midterm elections, as expected, delivered the House to the Republicans, but our democracy still stands. Congressional candidates who won the most votes will come to Washington to confront and compromise and do some good and some bad, owing earnest intentions and poor judgment. Either we accept human frailties or...

At President Biden’s behest, the Democratic National Committee is poised to throw Iowa and New Hampshire under the bus. Assuming he gets his way, the new order will be South Carolina, followed by Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia and Michigan. It’s fine with me. I like both Iowa and New Hampshire,...

Kevin McCarthy’s quest for the House speaker’s gavel is a near perfect inside-the-Beltway story because it’s about pure politics and personal ambition without many narrative-muddling concerns about principles, governing philosophy or policy considerations. McCarthy was never a policy wonk or doctrinaire conservative; he’s a dealmaker and glad-hander, which is why...

A lot has changed since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, the country club resort and unofficial classified document storage facility where Donald Trump resides. Back in August, the search was denounced by many on the right as an unprecedented outrage befitting a banana republic that challenged the very legitimacy of the...

On election night, Donald Trump took to his post-truth social media platform, Truth Social, to spin the results. His first utterance was to celebrate Republican Joe O’Dea’s loss in the U.S. Senate race in Colorado. “Joe O’Dea lost BIG!” Trump crowed. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” O’Dea had distanced himself from...

There’s something tragically poetic about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. There’s a whole subculture of lamentation about modern society that can be fairly well summed up in Peter Thiel’s roughly decade-old gripe that things such as Twitter were distracting us from greatness: “We wanted flying cars. Instead, we got 140...

Vladimir Putin is a murderer and tyrant. He’s also a hypocrite. “It is no coincidence that the West claims that it is its culture and worldview that should be universal,” Putin explained last week at a pro-Putin Moscow think tank, the Valdai Discussion Club. His remarks echoed previous statements of...

“The elites plunder this country and then blame us for it in the process,” J.D. Vance, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, declared when he announced his bid for the seat from Ohio. Elsewhere, he’s insisted that America faces a stark choice. “We can have an American Republic or a...

Herschel Walker, the Republican former football star running for a Georgia Senate seat who supports a total ban on abortion, denies he pressured a former girlfriend to have an abortion, which he paid for. He’s almost certainly lying. The allegations are easy to believe, while his rambling, often contradictory denials...

It’s an article of various faiths — both secular and religious — that misunderstanding is the cause of conflict. This sort of insight is generally true for individuals, so it’s often considered equally true of nations. Hence vast amounts of antiwar activism and state-level diplomacy rest on the assumption that...

I’m a fan of ironic nicknames: big men named “Tiny,” bald dudes who go by “Curly,” etc. But, in politics, there’s no nickname more ironic than RINO, short for “Republican in Name Only.” Originally, it was supposed to describe Republicans who went along with Democrats for political expediency. In the...

“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman, the legendary screenwriter said. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out, it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” I’m starting to think the same thing is true of foreign...

It’s one of the most enduring rules of thumb in American politics. Since 1862, the president’s party has lost seats in the House in every midterm election but three (1934, 1998 and 2002). Until very recently, it seemed like the 2022 midterms would provide one more data point to this...

President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel billions in federal student loan debt is like a pinata: You can attack it from any angle and find some reward. In short, people making less than $125,000 will get $10,000 of their debt forgiven, no strings attached. Recipients of needs-based Pell Grants will...

Well, I was wrong again. For much of the summer, I’d been writing that Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP was shrinking. I thought I was right at the time. But the times changed. Right now, his hold appears to be growing. That’s at least in part because it is...

Donald Trump has a lot of charisma. Let me finish. I do not mean charisma in the colloquial sense of being charming, though he has charmed millions. I’m referring to a style of leadership famously described by the German sociologist Max Weber, who described three forms of authority or leadership:...

On Monday, evening news broke that the FBI searched the Florida home of Donald Trump, the former president. Trump himself informed the world, calling it a “raid” and an “assault.” While both words are colloquially defensible, it wasn’t some Eliot Ness style breach with a battering ram or sledgehammer. The...

In an era of ugly legislative gridlock, it’s easy to forget that progress isn’t necessarily pretty. Last week, Washington got blindsided by the unveiling of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. For Democrats, it was a moment of spontaneous joy, while Republicans reacted with instantaneous outrage. In brief, here’s what...

“It’s not like in the movies,” is good advice for almost any field or endeavor, from war to Wall Street. But perhaps nowhere is it more true than in politics. At the end of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Claude Raines admits he was the villain all along. Lonesome Rhodes,...

The wall-to-wall coverage of progressive carping about Joe Biden has been interrupted by reruns of progressive carping about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Last week, in the wake of horrible inflation numbers, Manchin said, in effect, “I’m out” on President Biden’s climate, energy and tax package. Because the Senate is...

President Biden is in deep trouble. A New York Times-Siena College poll released Monday is just the latest survey showing profound discontent with the president and the direction of the country. His job-approval rating is a mere 33%. More than 6 in 10 Democrats want someone else in their party...

Will the Jan. 6 committee issue a “criminal referral” to the Justice Department for Donald Trump? Committee members can’t give an interview without being asked that question. Pundits can’t stop talking about it, and cable TV anchors can’t stop asking legal experts for their predictions. It’s nothing less than a...

In overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court delivered the right’s biggest single victory ever, and it may spell the end of the conservative movement as we’ve known it. It was Ronald Reagan who popularized the notion that the conservative movement rested on a fusionist “three-legged stool.” In theory, the...

For congressional Republicans, the election can’t come soon enough. In the modern era, it’s hard to think of a time when the party out of power had more things going its way. Harry Enten, CNN’s political data analyst, recently noted that, going by the generic ballot, things haven’t looked this...