Tag Archives: JonahNRO

Jonah Goldberg takes my side

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He writes,

For years, conservatives have quoted my late friend Andrew Breitbart’s pithy rephrasing of a very old idea: “Politics is downstream of culture.” The odd thing is that, almost overnight, many of the same conservatives now argue as if industrial and trade policy is upstream of culture.

I wrote,

Many observers emphasize economic threats posed by trade and automation. But I believe that the divide is mostly cultural.

Let me repeat something else I wrote in that essay.

In fact, I think it would be good for the Republican Party for a leading figure with a conservative agenda and a moderate tone to compete with President Trump for the nomination in 2020. The goal would not be to take Mr. Trump down but to set an example for a different Republican Party. This might give hope to those of us who wish for a political future that is less viciously tribal.

Yuval Levin on Jonah Goldberg’s latest book

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Levin writes,

And ingratitude, he argues, is the spirit of our age, on the left and right alike. This is why the task of restoration must be a labor of love, and why its character must be fundamentally intellectual. Taking up the terms of Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg suggests that we can protect the Miracle only by making the case for it. We are essentially called to the task of argument. “Our civilization, like every civilization, is a conversation,” he suggests. “Therefore the demise of our civilization is only inevitable if the people saying and arguing the right things stop talking.”

Read the whole review. I, too, have written a review, but it will not appear for at least several weeks.

I think that if Goldberg wanted to recycle a book title, instead of Suicide of the West he should have picked Civilization and its Discontents. He sees our civilization as threatened by those who are ungrateful and resentful toward the institutions that have brought us prosperity and individual freedom.