Making Sense of the Populist Present—1
A wide-ranging conversation with The Dispatch's Jonah Goldberg about where we are, how we got here, and where we might be going
As I say at the top of my first volley below, I’ve been reading, learning from, and productively disagreeing with Jonah Goldberg for more than two decades now. He’s one of the country’s leading center-right intellectuals, just as The Dispatch (the online publication he co-founded with Stephen F. Hayes and Toby Stock in 2019) is a must-read source for news and ideas from an anti-Trump conservative standpoint. I hope you’ll join me in subscribing to The Dispatch—and that you enjoy my conversation with Jonah, which I’ve broken into two parts to run this holiday week. Part 2 will be posted on Friday morning. In the meantime, best wishes for a happy and healthy Independence Day holiday. (Also: There is no audio version of this or Part 2. As I explained when I ran my conversation with Alexandre Lefebvre, the dialogue is simply too long, and I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to read both my own and my interlocutor’s words.)
DL: Thanks so much for agreeing to do this, Jonah. I’ve enjoyed your writing for such a long time — all the way back to the years I worked at First Things (2001-2005), when you were writing every day for NRO. I’ve been especially impressed with your unwillingness to compromise with the Trumpification of the Republican Party, even when it adversely affected your career. On that note, The Dispatch is great, very much including your regular column, the old “G-File,” now reborn as a newsletter. I never miss it.
One thing I’m eager to discuss with you, in light of how the presidential race is unfolding, is the old question that animates so much of what I write at Notes from the Middleground — namely, Why is [hands gesticulating wildly] all of this happening? By which I mean: Why has the GOP become a party of the populist right led by Donald Trump, with the Reaganite/fusionist conservatism you prefer in eclipse (supported by something around 20 percent of the party, if we use Nikki Haley’s vote margin in the 2024 primaries as a rough measure)? Here are some options you’ll hear from pundits of various stripes:
The Republican Party has been racist since the Southern Strategy, the country as a whole is still very racist, and Trump is the result.
Reaganite conservatism was discredited by the Iraq War, and Trump is the result.
Rush Limbaugh and Fox News (and now myriad imitators who are even more rabidly right-wing) have turned Republican voters into reactionary morons who live in an alternative reality of lies and care only about driving liberals crazy, and Trump is the result.
Right-wing populists are paleocons, paleocons are the Old (pre-fusionist) Right, and Trump is a vehicle for paleocon/Old Right revenge.
Americans love gangsters, con men, and crooks who thumb their noses at “the system,” and Trump (with the help of criminal prosecutors) has turned himself into a vehicle for this very American love of outlaws. (You might call this one the dark side of American libertarianism.)
Democrats have moved further and further left on social and cultural issues—including immigration, crime, race, and sex/gender—and Trump is the result.
What I just said about Democrats is true of center-left parties in many places, and this has super-charged the populist right in countries across the democratic world, making Trump just the local example of a much broader trend.
And I haven’t even mentioned social media!
So what do you think? Which of these are your favorite explanations? Or would you like to offer others?
JG: Damon, thanks very much for all the kind words and the opportunity. I do miss the old days. Even past disagreements seem quaint now, given how much has changed. I’ll skip the mutual admiration society bullet points and get straight at it.
The way you put the question to me makes me feel a bit like Rodney Dangerfield taking his economics oral exam in Back to School.
“I have only one question for Mr. Mellon, in 27 parts…”
But that’s okay, because I think my succinct answer to nearly all of this is, “Yeah.”
This isn’t a dodge, nor is it self-contradictory. I think the Trumpification of the GOP is what social scientists call an “overdetermined” phenomenon. When I make this point, I often illustrate it by first answering another question. I used to get asked all the time, “Why are Jews liberal?” There are at least dozen answers to that question – and they’re all true, to some extent. Jews are liberal because they are disproportionately urban and educated. They’re also liberal because as a matter of survival, Jews historically looked to central governments – the king, the czar, the sultan – to protect them from more local threats. The Jews who immigrated to the US in large numbers came from Europe at a time when the prevailing ideas about politics were decidedly to the left. In the 1930s, Jews were more welcome in FDR’s Democratic Party, and the partisan allegiance of your parents, like religion, is highly determinative. Harry Truman recognized Israel. The Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement both played independent and combined roles in Jewish culture and its relationship to politics and the state. Many Jews are very secular and feel put off by overt talk of a “Christian nation” and that sort of thing. Also, because of their secularism, some Jews came to see political or charitable engagement with society as a substitute expression of Jewishness.
I could go on. But the point of bringing this up is to say that some of these explanations are very powerful for some American Jews, now or in the past, and less so for others. But it’s nearly impossible to tease out any one of these threads and say, “See? This is why they’re liberal.”
In other words, I can agree with all of your proposed explanations to one extent or another for some conservatives or some Republicans. But I don’t think any one of them alone explains what’s happened, or why. I promise to drop the analogy to the Jews in a second. But it’s worth noting that at some point the diverse forms of causation become irrelevant to the emergent culture as a whole. Jews growing up in many Jewish communities today are liberal because that’s the way mainstream Jewish culture is. Big chunks of the American right today are MAGA because the culture has become MAGAfied. Some are faking it, most aren’t. The causation stuff is really interesting about specific personalities, but I think hard to tease out for large groups.
I’m happy to return to that, but let me do some quick clean-up work before readers think I am endorsing all of your suggested explanations, equally (and I realize they are only suggestions). I think your first bullet point is probably the weakest, with the least explanatory power: “The Republican Party has been racist since the Southern Strategy, the country as a whole is still very racist, and Trump is the result.”
Eh. I’m not saying there’s nothing to this, but I think there’s very little – on both ends of the claim. At the front end, I think the racism of the Southern Strategy is often very overstated. We don’t need to get into the weeds on that – unless you want to – but I don’t think Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (mistaken as it was) was particularly driven by racial animus, nor do I think Nixon’s politics are all that helpfully illuminated by the prism of racism. I’m not in the business of defending Nixon on much, but I’ve never found the “it was always about racism” schtick to be very persuasive when you look at the details. I certainly think the collaboration of the Republican Party and Black Democrats 40-50 years ago to create more gerrymandered black districts was cynical and problematic. But I don’t think it was motivated by racism more than more mercenary political impulses.
As for the other end of the claim—that America is very racist today and that’s why we have Trump—I’m even less persuaded. Oh, I think Trump is racist in a New York City, Archie Bunker, sort of way – at least when it comes to black people. That’s not a defense, I’m just saying the guy isn’t a Klansman type. He's an old dude who thinks in outdated stereotypes (recall his comment that didn't want blacks counting his money, but Jews). He’s much more open to the charge of bigotry when it comes to Muslims and immigrants. That’s not a defense either. I just point it out to note that trying to draw a straight line from George Wallace to Donald Trump, dragging a half century of GOP politics along for the ride, is kind of silly. It’s one of those self-serving stories liberals like to tell themselves in order to say “we’ve always been good and right and they’ve always been bad and wrong.”
Last point on this, contrary to the apocalyptic, Manichean, rhetoric about race from the left over the last decade, America is not a very racist country, and it has been getting, albeit with ups-and-downs, steadily less racist for our entire lives (this is not to say there isn’t any real and gross racism out there. To paraphrase Adam Smith, there's a great deal of ruin, and racism, in a nation). And to the extent one could point to recent anecdotes or trends to the contrary, I would argue that much of the gross racist nonsense on the right has two main drivers. The first is cultural and turbocharged by social media and Trump’s success: Idiots, grifters, and demagogues want attention and, in particular, want to be attacked by the left and the establishment for saying controversial or ugly things. The “influencer” right is full of this garbage. But I don’t think it reflects where the broader culture is that much.
The second, related, explanation is a thermostatic response to ill-advised, ugly, or radical projects and arguments on the left. That excuses none of it. But it’s worth saying nonetheless.
I guess that tips you off that I think there’s a lot of merit to the claim that, as you put it, “Democrats have moved further and further left on social and cultural issues—including immigration, crime, race, and sex/gender—and Trump is the result.” Again, I don’t think this explains everything, not even close. But the behavior of the left elicited a response from the right. I am happy to concede that the way Rush Limbaugh. Fox, et. al. covered the left and the Democrats made the right’s response worse than it should have been in some respects. But the left is hardly blameless in the craptacular state of American politics.
And that gets me to the explanation is most sorely missing from your menu. I am the first to admit the right has many problems (which is why I am so unpopular these days on the right). And I’m also quite game to point out the left has many problems. But what I think is missing from a lot of these kinds of debates is that we overlook the fact that both right and left suffer from many of the same problems.
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