Let’s establish some relevant facts.

On Oct. 7, Iran-backed Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel, a close American ally, from Gaza. Israel counter-attacked. President Biden repeatedly warned regimes in the region, specifically Iran, not to get involved. On Oct. 24, Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed America would respond to attacks on American forces “swiftly and decisively.”

Iran didn’t listen (and America didn’t respond swiftly or decisively). Iranian-backed militias attacked American bases in Iraq and Syria. In November, Houthis, an Iranian proxy group which controls parts of Yemen, started launching rocket, drone and missile attacks, on both Israel and on international shipping in the Red Sea with logistical support from Iran.

Houthis claimed they were merely attacking ships trading with Israel, but the attacks were indiscriminate, ensnaring ships with no ties to Israel and dislocating global trade. In December, a U.S. warship shot down three drones in self-defense.

Last week, after intense criticism for failing to make good on his warnings, Biden ordered significant attacks on Houthi assets in Yemen, with assistance from Britain and other allies.

There isn’t room to feast on the banquet of hypocrisies on offer, but let’s nibble on the most obvious. One of the first things Biden did upon taking office was remove the Houthis from the official list of terrorist organizations. He now says they are terrorists.

Many on the right who blistered Biden for dithering are now angry that he didn’t consult with Congress before retaliating. Many on the left, who had no objections to the Obama-Biden administration’s attacks on Libya in 2011, are mad at Biden for attacking a group allied with Hamas.

Globally Israel critics, who make a big show of being supporters of international law, are rallying to the Houthi cause. One chant, heard in New York and London, “Yemen, Yemen make us proud, turn another ship around.” This crowd insists that its animus toward Israel is driven by a passionate commitment to human rights, but seems to have no noticeable objections to Houthi atrocities (or Hamas atrocities), including the Houthis’ restoration of slavery in Yemen.

Anti-Semitism, we’re constantly told, has nothing to do with anti-Zionism. The official slogan of the Houthis is “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.” You can tell me that “death to Israel” is merely anti-Zionist. But “curse the Jews”?

Perhaps because such hypocrisy is so hard to defend, the substance of opposition to the strikes, at home and abroad, is either to American military “escalation” or to escalation without required congressional approval (or parliamentary approval in the U.K.). Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) declared, “This is an unacceptable violation of the Constitution. Article 1 requires that military action be authorized by Congress.”

Throughout this crisis, “escalation” has been code for striking back. Even in the immediate hours after Hamas’ butchery, there were demands that Israel not “escalate” by responding. As for America, many opponents of escalation had no problem with Houthi and Iranian “escalation” by indiscriminately attacking global shipping and threatening American interests.

This illustrates the weakness of the constitutional argument. In March 1801, President Jefferson dispatched two-thirds of the U.S. Navy to wage war on the Barbary pirates. He didn’t formally notify Congress until December. As legal historian Robert Turner notes, “the Annals of Congress reveal no expression of concern that the president should first have obtained prior legislative sanction.”

The constitutionally dubious War Powers Act requires congressional authorization for the use of force, except in cases of “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its Armed Forces.” Even if, for some tendentious reason, you do not believe the Houthi attacks qualify for the exception, it’s worth remembering they’re just one facet of broader Iranian aggression — and escalation.

I have no objection to getting congressional buy-in, and Biden’s critics have a point: If he was willing to wait this long to respond to the Houthi attacks, he could have consulted with Congress. But that’s the real problem: he shouldn’t have waited this long in the first place.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

The primary stated reason McCarthy had to go — over the objections of 96% of the GOP caucus — was that he agreed to a budget deal that relied on Democratic votes and exceeded spending caps that had been agreed on earlier. The Johnson-Schumer deal — which, if enacted, would prevent a looming government shutdown — pretty much does the same thing.

Outraged, the House Freedom Caucus condemned the deal: “Republicans promised millions of voters that we would fight to change the status quo and it is long past time to deliver.” The deal, they declared, is a “fiscal calamity.”

And they’re right.

But all of that is beside the point. I’m a big believer in the power of arguments in a democracy, but the simple fact is that arguments within Congress matter less than the raw numbers behind who is making the arguments.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt entered office, Democrats had huge majorities in the House: 313 seats to the GOP’s 117. In the Senate, Democrats had 59 seats, the GOP 36. In the next Congress, Democrats had 70 seats in the Senate and 322 in the House. History gives FDR the lion’s share of the credit — or, in my ideological backwater, the blame — for the New Deal. But the simple fact is that little of it would have been possible without these super-majorities in Congress, which included many Republicans who were pro-New Deal. When you can afford to lose a dozen senators of your own party and nearly a 100 representatives in the House on a given piece of legislation, it’s relatively easy to get your way. That’s simply how our system works.

Apparently, the House Freedom Caucus doesn’t get this, even though many of its members love to sing the praises of the founders and the constitutional framework they gave us.

Not only does the GOP not control the Senate or the White House, it barely controls the House. When Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) leaves Congress this month, the Republicans will have only a two-seat majority (and really just a one-seat majority, because Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana will be away from Washington until next month because of medical treatment). And contrary to what House Freedom Caucus members shout on cable TV, you can’t dictate policy outcomes just because you’re angry — or right.

Arguments still matter, but the argument Republicans need to win is at the ballot box. It doesn’t matter that House Freedom Caucus members are in safe seats and won their elections. They need Republicans in competitive seats, and lots of them, to win. That’s because millions of Americans elected Democrats to oppose Republican policies. The idea that a weak House speaker with a tiny and sharply divided majority can simply overpower the Senate and the White House is childish nonsense.

But childish nonsense is all the rage on the right these days. Indeed, many of the Republicans demanding results that Johnson is powerless to achieve are the problem. They spend much of their time behaving in ways that make it harder for Republicans to win elections in competitive districts. Johnson himself did the same thing in 2020, when he pushed an unconstitutional and factually dishonest effort on behalf of Trump’s scheme to overturn the election. Such efforts cost the GOP winnable races in 2022. Johnson’s reward? They made him speaker.

Republicans would be fools to oust Johnson for this deal — which doesn’t mean they won’t. Replacing a speaker for not being able to do things he cannot do is like replacing your dog for refusing to play the piano. Your next dog will struggle at “Chopsticks” too.

Republican firebrands have always loved to denounce the perfidy of “RINOs” — Republicans in Name Only — who don’t vote for hard-line conservative policies. RINO is an even dumber epithet today, because it now means a Republican insufficiently loyal to Trump.

Either way, if the GOP wants to achieve a fraction of the things it claims to want, it’ll need a lot more RINOs to win elections. And that will require that Republicans end their childishness.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

She replied with a word-salad on freedom and the role of government while failing to mention the word “slavery” at all.

We don’t need to dwell on why it was a bad answer. The Civil War is a complicated topic, but the simple truth is it wouldn’t have occurred but for the issue of slavery.

I think she messed up for three interrelated reasons: She thought the question was a “gotcha” and overthought how to respond; she was relying on muscle memory from her days in South Carolina; and, last, because she was campaigning in New Hampshire, the “Live Free or Die” state, and was trying to cater to what she thought were the audience’s libertarian tendencies.

The timing was unfortunate. The gaffe occurred in the middle of the slowest of slow news weeks, providing the political class something to talk about as Haley was trying to convince Republican primary voters she’s the only candidate who can beat both Donald Trump, the runaway GOP front-runner, and Joe Biden. Rather than build on her recent momentum, she was forced to spend days explaining herself. (Disclosure: I know Haley through my wife, who worked as her speechwriter at the UN).

But the flub — which I think was fairly minor — stood out for another reason. Such missteps are rare for the most disciplined candidate in the race. More significantly, by obviously trying to cater to what the audience — and the questioner — wanted to hear, rather than just say what she believes, she fed the perception that she is nothing more than a politician.

And “politician” has become a dirty word in American politics, particularly on the right.

Of course, this is an old story. Many politicians have claimed their chief qualification for office is that they’re not a politician. Before Donald Trump won as a dealmaking businessman, that schtick was tried by Ross Perot, Mitt Romney, Carly Fiorina, Steve Forbes, Herman Cain, Wendell Willkie and Herbert Hoover (who also ran as “The Great Engineer”). Andrew Jackson and Dwight Eisenhower ran as outsider military men.

But the right’s obsessions today are qualitatively different. Drunk on anti-establishment, anti-“Deep State” rhetoric that borders on the paranoid, many on the right see being a good politician as a form of collaboration with the enemy. Some even think that “wins” should be achieved through raw will, not through compromise (a weird sentiment for those who celebrate what a great “dealmaker” Trump is).

It’s a strange form of cognitive dissonance. Americans want effective politicians but we don’t like truth in labeling. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were the two most effective politicians of my lifetime. But Reagan largely succeeded in avoiding the label, while Clinton’s political skills seemed to reflect a character deficiency. Still, say what you will of either man, they both understood that politics is about pursuing the politically possible by persuading voters, winning elections — not just for themselves but for their parties — and advancing policy goals through an inherently political process.

Nikki Haley is a good politician. She was the only politician who worked for the Trump administration to leave it with her reputation and popularity enhanced. I don’t like everything she’s done to maintain her viability as a presidential candidate among the various GOP factions and the broader electorate, but it’s hard to question the political skill she has long displayed. Her slavery gaffe stands out because she emerged as a top contender in the chaotic GOP debates.

While her slavery gaffe stands out because she’s not gaffe-prone, even her reflexive avoidance in talking about slavery is a vestige of her past political success. The South Carolina GOP is full of people who cling to “lost cause” and “war between the states” views of the Civil War. She had to navigate those waters as a daughter of Indian immigrants. That’s why the idea that her slavery stumble betrayed hidden racism is so lame. Appointing Tim Scott, the first African-American senator from South Carolina, in 2012 is not the act of a closet neo-Confederate.

Recall that she didn’t have the power to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds on her own in 2015. She had to persuade a lot of politicians and constituents passionately opposed to the idea. Haley’s success then was driven by conviction, but it was only possible because she’s a good politician. Grown-ups shouldn’t hold that against her.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

The term is often attributed to French author Jean-Pierre Faye‘s 1996 book “Le Siècle des idéologies” (“the century of ideologies”), but the concept is much older. It basically holds that the extreme right (“fascism”) and extreme left (“communism”) bend toward each other like the ends of a horseshoe.

While I’ve always thought totalitarian regimes — Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany — have more similarities than differences, I didn’t believe that the horseshoe theory mapped well in the American context. For starters, it depends heavily on the European understanding of the left-right ideological continuum (literally derived from the seating chart of the French National Assembly.) In contrast to the Anglo-American tradition, in the continental tradition, right vs. left fights were more about how to use state power, rather than how to limit it. Statism just wasn’t much of a dirty word for either side.

Meanwhile anti-statism, including an ornery passion for civil liberties — i.e. classical liberalism — has always been a core component of American exceptionalism. Indeed, left and right in U.S. politics often become less statist as they become more extreme. This is a familiar observation about the right. Wanting to abolish government agencies, privatize or deregulate state functions, was long a hallmark of the American right; it’s hard to see how becoming more libertarian makes you more “fascist.”

But the American left has an anti-statist streak, too. For instance, defunding the police, legalizing drugs, open borders, decriminalizing prostitution, abolishing the “prison industrial complex”: These are more anarchic ambitions than statist. True communists like their cops and prisons.

In short, while the American left and right have always had plenty of disagreements, they were usually hashed out within the framework of America’s deep-seated classical liberalism. But what happens when the extremes abandon that liberalism? They start looking awfully similar.

For instance, few extremists from either pole really oppose cancel culture or censorship, they just want the ability to cancel or censor people or ideas they don’t like. Donald Trump is a zealous advocate for his free speech rights, but holds nearly opposite views for his critics.

The left and right may see huge differences between left-wing identity politics and right-wing identity politics — and there are huge differences — but it’s still identity politics, and the notion that individuals should be judged by what groups they belong to is profoundly illiberal.

Perhaps the most discomforting convergence is over the Constitution. It may offend some of its detractors to hear it, but the Federalist Society, with its deeply conservative and passionate commitment to constitutional fidelity, has always been a bulwark of classical liberalism because the Constitution is a quintessentially liberal charter. Indeed, that’s why Trump has reportedly turned his back on disloyal Federalist Society lawyers, many of whom wouldn’t aid Trump’s effort to steal the election. He now favors MAGA pettifoggers happy to treat the Constitution like an illegitimate law they can help their client wiggle out of.

There’s even a new right-wing project called “ common good constitutionalism” which seeks to dethrone the Federalist Society and abandon constitutional originalism in favor of a results-driven approach to the law and the Constitution.

Some on the left might object, but from my perspective as a traditional conservative, that approach mirrors the left’s invocation of a “living constitution” to defeat constitutional interpretations it doesn’t like.

Of course, these trends predate 2023 by quite a bit. But what’s changed is how much more willing the political center is to let itself be defined by the logic and rhetoric of the extremes. The result is a kind of bipartisan consensus around the more European idea of fighting for control of the state, led by fairly mainstream politicians terrified of their party’s bases.

Why the rhetoric of the fringes has become mainstream probably has a lot to do with the changing media landscape and weakness of parties. But what remains constant is the importance of rhetoric itself, which, as the late literary critic Wayne Booth said, is “the art of probing what men believe they ought to believe.” And the loudest voices are bending the arc of our politics towards illiberalism.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

One piece of good news: The poll is pretty lousy, as Ilya Somin, author of “Democracy and Political Ignorance,” explained for Reason magazine. The poll combines two questions in one, asking people to agree to both the description of “Jews as a class” and how they should be treated and uses terms like “oppressor” which are fairly unfamiliar to people not plugged into campus-speak.

Even better news: the poll is an outlier. Surveys from respected outfits like the Pew Research Center find that American attitudes towards Jews are pretty favorable.

But this is where the supply of good news runs dry. Because even if Harvard’s findings exaggerate the problem, the problem still exists. Actually, there are several problems: rising antisemitism in the U.S., particularly among young people and, not unrelatedly, a depressing amount of both general ignorance and highly cultivated ignorance.

Given the horrific headlines since the Hamas attack, it’s not worth rehashing the evidence of antisemitism’s resurgence, both on college campuses and off. In October, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that antisemitism was reaching historic levels, with fully 60% of religious hate crimes being committed against 2.4% of the population.

As for general ignorance, a Economist/YouGov poll finds that one in five 18- to 29-year-olds believe the Holocaust is a myth. Another 30% said they don’t know if it is. One way to look at this is to just throw this on the pile with other depressing findings of widespread ignorance about things that have nothing to do with Jews. Half of Americans cannot name the three branches of the U.S. government.

Social media surely plays a big role. While it’s true that bad actors, at home and abroad, have been pumping antisemitic sewage onto kids’ screens for a while now, it’s worth keeping in mind that digital iconoclasm — tearing down any established truths — and conspiratorialism are rampant on the internet (a quarter of Europeans, and twice as many Russians, think the moon landing was faked. Nearly a fifth of young Americans agree).

Still, the Economist found that most older Americans know the Holocaust happened. In other words, young people are a particular problem.

Which brings us to the cultivated ignorance, i.e. the deliberate encouragement of anti-Jewish bigotry by various institutions and “influencers.”

The right has a well-publicized antisemitism problem. The GOP frontrunner famously dined with antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. Various new right and alt-right gargoyles indulge anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric from their internet perches.

That’s all grotesque, but those gargoyles don’t control the commanding heights of the culture the way the left does. The power of left-aligned academics and activists shouldn’t be underestimated. While groups like the Anti-Defamation League, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the various elite media outlets that rely on them as authoritative sources, have covered right-wing antisemitism zealously, they have allowed the intellectual poison of anti-colonial and anti-oppressor ideology to go unchecked. This ideology takes it as a given that Jews, Zionists, Israelis — pick your label — are indeed “oppressors.” This framing is seductive to young people who want to belong to a righteous, rebellious cause more than master basic facts.

For instance, University of California-Berkeley political scientist Ron Hassner recently conducted a small survey of college students on issues related to Israel. Most students (86%) supported the popular chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” But nearly half (47%) couldn’t name the river or the sea in the chant. Some guessed that the river was the Nile or Euphrates and that the sea was the Atlantic or Caribbean. Ten percent thought Yassir Arafat was the first prime minister of Israel.

It’s fine to condemn both sides (I do!). But the shock of decent liberals and progressives at the explosion of antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas attack is testament to the delinquency of the left-wing elites running academic and cultural institutions. When professors and students celebrate a pogrom and administrators find themselves tongue-tied about condemning murder or the harassment of Jews on their own campuses, the complacency becomes obvious.

One last piece of good news: When Hassner’s researchers explained basic facts to the students who enthusiastically embraced “from the river to the sea,” many of them changed their views. Yes, this survey illustrates the failures of the center-left. It also shows they can remedy them — if they want to.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

It’s also a well–established truism that populist politicians lie even more than conventional politicians. This is in part because populism requires fomenting, exploiting, or maintaining a high level of public anger. If you tell the crowd that an issue is complicated, that solutions come with trade-offs, or that your well-intentioned opponents make some fair points, there’s a danger the mob will grow bored and lose interest in you. But if you tell them the solutions are obvious and easy, and that your villainous enemies are stopping you from fixing everything, well, that’s more like it.

What gets less attention is how the deceptions of conventional politicians also create market opportunities for demagogues.

You probably heard that Donald Trump, Republican presidential frontrunner, recently said he’d be a “dictator” on day one of his presidency. Given the growing chatter about how a second Trump presidency would become a dictatorship, Trump’s comment threw the commentariat into a tizzy. And understandably so. Whether he was joking or deadly serious or something in between, saying you’ll be a dictator for any amount of time is no laughing matter, particularly for a former president who likes to test-drive real desires by pretending he’s joking.

Still, it’s worth paying attention to why Trump came up with a one-day dictatorship idea. To recap, Fox News’ Sean Hannity, trying to help Trump dispel the dictator talk, asked him to assure everyone he wouldn’t be one. Trump sidestepped his oft-repeated vow to punish his enemies and said he’d only be a dictator “on day one” of his presidency, for the purpose of “closing the border” and “drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

If you put aside the word dictator for a moment, this promise is sadly banal. Presidential candidates have a habit of dishonestly vowing they can do all manner of things unilaterally on “day one” of their presidencies. In 2020, for example, Kamala Harris repeatedly promised that if elected, she’d repeal Trump’s tax cuts on her first day, despite the fact that presidents cannot single-handedly repeal laws. No wonder voters think presidents have powers they don’t have.

But this isn’t just about presidential power. Consider Trump’s vow to issue some sort of day-one diktat on oil-drilling (we’ll save closing the border for another time). Trump is working from the widespread belief among many Republicans that, in the words of then-presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott, Biden “has shut down energy production in America.” Trump often says that a lack of drilling is what’s been driving “massive inflation.” “We’re going to drill, baby, drill, we’re going to bring down your energy costs,” he said at a rally last month. “We have the highest energy costs anywhere.”

By any measure, this is nonsense (To be sure, high gas prices contributed to inflation, but high inflation also helped drive up energy prices. This stuff is complicated).

Trump often boasts that gas prices were $1.87 per gallon when he left office. They weren’t, but they did get that low in April 2020, only partly thanks to his energy policies. The COVID-19 epidemic smothered demand for gas, thanks in part to his lockdowns.

Meanwhile, under Biden, domestic oil production has hit record highs, surpassing production under Trump and nearly doubling Saudi Arabia’s output. We’re the largest producer of natural gas by far, producing almost as much as the next three countries (Russia, Iran, China) combined.

Now one reason most people don’t know this is that the Biden administration doesn’t brag about surging fossil fuel production since Biden promised to wean the country off fossil fuels (also, much of this has nothing to do with Biden’s misguided energy policies anyway). But that’s part of the problem, too. Many Democrats want Biden’s “war on fossil fuels” rhetoric to be true as much as Republicans do. It’s easy for politicians to mislead when so many people want to be misled.

But the lie populist politicians spread most is that our problems are easy to solve and that sinister forces — “billionaires,” “special interests,” “globalists,” “big corporations,” even “Jewish financiers” or just “business as usual politicians” — are standing in the way. Steamroll these string-pullers and quislings, and everything will be great. That’s the language of demagogues and those who help pave the way for them.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

There’s not enough space here to recount all of the allegations against Santos, which include 23 federal charges, including fraud and identity theft. What seems clear is that Santos was a bit like Max Bialystock, the main character from “The Producers,” who thought he could bilk investors, or in Santos’ case donors, on the assumption that no one would inquire about what he did with their money if the Santos show bombed. But Santos won his Long Island congressional race, inviting scrutiny that should have been applied when he announced his run.

Still, some of those standing athwart Santo’s defenestration yelling “Stop!” — or at least, “think this through” — make good points. Dan McLaughlin in National Review and Byron York in the Washington Examiner both argue that expelling House members without a criminal conviction will have unintended consequences. And it’s not just conservatives. Adam Serwer, a liberal writer for The Atlantic, agrees that “Congress deciding for itself whether voters have made a mistake could lead to more members being expelled for things that they are only alleged to have done.”

It’s important to note that no serious person — at least that I can find — defends Santos on the merits. As York stipulates, “Santos had no business being in the House, and it was an embarrassment that he was elected in the first place.”

While their points are well-taken, I nonetheless dissent.

In almost any other institution — a business, a university, a newspaper, a law firm, etc. — the question of whether or not to fire someone doesn’t normally hinge on a criminal conviction. Say you’re a boss of an employee accused of myriad misdeeds, from making up his resume to criminal fraud. You wouldn’t fire the employee based on mere rumors. You’d conduct some kind of investigation. If that investigation provided evidence to your satisfaction, you’d fire that employee. You wouldn’t wait, possibly for years, for a criminal conviction.

Of course, Congress is different. Members don’t work for the House, they work for their constituents. “One advantage of holding off on expulsions is that a conviction provides a clear, neutral limiting principle,” the editors of the Wall Street Journal rightly note. “What’s the rule now?” they ask.

How about enough facts to satisfy two-thirds of the House? Which is what it took to oust Santos.

Expelling Santos was an act of political repair, not destruction. Yes, it violated a longstanding and defensible norm, but the decision was forced by the breakdown of other norms. For starters, Santos is a shameless fraud who, by word and deed, had no loyalty to norms of conduct. He also took advantage of the breakdown of basic notions of journalistic and partisan due diligence. If the natural biofilters of the political ecosystem aren’t working, Congress can and should change its standards when toxic sludge sluices into the chamber.

Congress, after all, is the supreme branch of government. (The idea that the three branches are “co-equal” is an invention of the Nixon era.) Congress writes the law, creates most courts and all executive agencies, and sets their salaries. Congress can fire members of the other two branches, while those branches cannot touch Congress. And it can fire its own members, too.

One of the great sources of dysfunction in American politics is the refusal of Congress to take itself seriously. Removing the unserious Santos is a small first step.

One of my biggest peeves about the impeachment debates of the last quarter-century centered on the same argument used to oppose Santos’ expulsion: that the only just standard for impeaching a president can be found in criminal law.

The idea that a president must be proved guilty of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt to be removed from office is a nonsensical standard. It’s also cowardly, because it allows members of Congress to abdicate all responsibility to apply their judgment. The presumption of innocence standard is right and proper for criminal cases, because the convicted can be deprived of life and liberty. But impeachment, like expulsion, merely deprives a politician of a privilege — to hold power. I’ll worry about the unintended consequences when someone undeserving loses that privilege.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

In other words, the elites who push the agenda of the Democratic Party actually believe that Biden is a fairly conservative, old-school centrist Democrat, while even most Democratic voters do not.

But don’t go by just one poll. In their new book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone,” the liberal intellectuals Ruy Teixeira and John Judis argue that the Democratic Party has been led astray by what they call a “shadow party” of very progressive activists that can’t see through the bubble they live in.

The book is partly a corrective to their hugely influential — and misunderstood — 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” in which they argued that demographic changes would give Democrats the building blocks for an enduring majority to replace the old dissipating FDR coalition. That book seemed prophetic in 2006 and 2008, when Democrats had massive success marshaling the “coalition of the ascendent.” Their prediction has not fared well since.

In 2010, Obama’s coalition evaporated. Democrats lost 63 House seats. Obama won reelection in 2012, but his coalition shrank from 2008 and the GOP held onto the House. In 2014, the Democrats lost nine Senate seats and 13 in the House. And in 2016? Well.

The key to these losses, Teixeira and Judis explain, was the steady exodus of the white working class. By believing in an iron version of “demography is destiny” — something Teixeira and Judis never argued — the shadow party felt liberated from the necessities of conventional politics, opting to prioritize issues mainstream voters either don’t care very much about or disdain.

It’s a very human response. If you think you’re going to win no matter what, why not indulge yourself?

Teixera and Judis focus on four issues that tend to turn off more voters than they attract — at least in the way Democrats frame them: race, immigration, transgenderism and other forms of what they call “sexual creationism,” and climate change.

None of this is to say Teixeira and Judis are conservatives on any of these issues. Their point is that by prioritizing extreme framing on these causes to the exclusion of the Democrats’ traditional economic populism led millions of white working-class voters to feel like the Democrats no longer cared about people like them. And now, there’s evidence that some of the non-white working class is going with them.

For instance, “defund the police” was a compelling idea to the shadow party, but it has little appeal to mainstream voters of any race, who may have problems with police abuses but have little tolerance for crime. Fewer than 1 in 5 African Americans supported the cause. Twice as many wanted increased spending on law enforcement.

Obsessed with the intraparty fight, waged largely in the media, Democratic activists tend to treat any issue “hyped” by the right as illegitimate. The border crisis may not be the threat Tucker Carlson describes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a crisis. And concern over illegal immigration doesn’t make you a racist or nativist.

I have profound disagreements with the economic program laid out by Teixeira and Judis. Unlike them, I’m no fan of FDR’s vision of economic rights. But they’re persuasive that a Democratic Party that tries to find common cause with the largest voting bloc(s) in America is going to be better for the party and the country than one that’s focused on identity politics and sloganeering about “white supremacy.” The fact is, non-college-educated white people make up about 44% of the electorate, and about two-thirds of registered voters are white.

There’s a lesson here for both parties, because both are institutionally weak and easily manipulated by their shadow parties. Convinced that their existing bases are all they need and any effort to broaden their appeal by watering down their agendas is capitulation to the enemy, they’ve concluded it’s better to rule with a narrow, vulnerable majority than to govern with a broad one.

But the surest way to ensure lasting political progress isn’t to win a single election, it’s to build a durable majority. That means serving voters’ interests, not dictating to them while insisting that anyone who disagrees with you is a racist — or as Donald Trump says, vermin.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

For instance, there are plenty of Americans with deeply personal investments in the plight of Israelis or Palestinians, due to familial or historic ties. But millions of Americans have no direct, personal connection. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t care about any of it, far from it. But the fact remains: A lot of the anger, vitriol and resentment in our country is often abstracted, symbolic, even theoretical.

Remember the 2019 brouhaha over the Covington High School students outside the Lincoln Memorial? Some kids in red MAGA hats were surrounded and harangued by demonstrators. A game of social media Rashomon ensued, with opposing culture war combatants going into bowel-stewing rage. A writer for Vox dubbed it, not implausibly, “the nation’s biggest story.”

The fact that demonstrators and counter-demonstrators have been yelling at each other for centuries, if not millennia, and that 99% of the people setting their hair on fire about it had no direct ties to the event seemed not to matter. America is full of people getting furious on behalf of other people.

To be fair this is not new, but thanks to social media and cable news, what were once occasional flare-ups, are now almost daily grist for a whole outrage industry, hungry for opportunities to tell us why we should be full of resentment and anger about things that directly affect them very little, if at all.

It’s not all symbolic. Many of our educational and cultural institutions are philosophically committed to fomenting grievance and entitlement. Lawyers constantly advertise for people to monetize their misfortunes. On the left and the right, we ask people to focus on their resentments. Our fiscal house is in shambles in part because we have normalized the belief that people are owed more than what they pay in taxes. Schools increasingly organize students by victimhood. The leading Republican candidate for president vows “retribution” against the “vermin” who have slighted him and therefore “you.”

Regardless, maybe this Thanksgiving everyone can take a break and concentrate on the good things in their lives? If only for a day? Thanksgiving is a day to “touch grass” and take stock.

Because it’s almost impossible to commercialize, unlike the holidays it’s sandwiched between, Thanksgiving commands less and less space in our culture and our hearts. Halloween displays and movie marathons switch seamlessly from candy sales and horror marathons to tinsel and endless replays of “Love Actually” and “Elf.”

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because, with roots that predate the founding and a rationale rooted in Providence, Thanksgiving is the only holiday that asks people to do among the simplest, albeit difficult, and most important things we can do: count their blessings and express gratitude for them. Everyone has something to be thankful for, starting with the fact they’re alive (and contrary to the gripers, this is actually a very good time to be alive and a wonderful country to live in). As Irving Berlin says, “Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I’d like to express my thanks — I’ve got the sun in the mornin’ and the moon at night.”

But most of us have reasons for gratitude beyond merely drawing breath. As Epicurus observed, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” Envy for what you don’t have or resentment for what you think others don’t deserve poisons the soul. Gratitude for what you do have opens the heart. These things aren’t simply material, they’re the people in your lives and the memories you’ve shared. “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy,” Proust advises, for “they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

The same goes for the people who made us happy. The family I grew up in is all gone, my mother being the last to go shortly before last Thanksgiving. I still grieve for the parents and brother I’ve lost, but Thanksgiving is the best time of year to dwell on the memories that make me grateful for them.

I detest the annual advice columns on how to argue with, or “handle,” family members at Thanksgiving because the premise is that the fights that dominate our “national conversation” are so important they deserve a place at the Thanksgiving table. They don’t. There are opportunities aplenty to get angry the other 364 days of the year.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

The public freak-out abated a bit after last week’s off-year elections in which Democrats scored some wins in Virginia, Kentucky and most importantly, Ohio. But in private, Democrats remain very worried. And they should be. If the election were held today, Biden would almost surely lose.

The good news for Biden is that the “if the election were held today” framing isn’t a particularly fruitful way of thinking about an election a year out. If Trump is the GOP nominee — still an “if,” but not that big of one — a tsunami of negative ads and negative coverage will quickly follow.

But will it work? It’s not like Trump coverage has been all that positive until now. Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report notes that Trump’s support in most battleground states is almost exactly his share of the vote in 2020. Trump hasn’t gained a lot of supporters, but he hasn’t lost many either. It’s Biden who has lost voters across the board. In 2020, Biden won the electoral college thanks to a mere 43,000 votes across Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. Trump now leads in two of those states.

Complicating things more: dissatisfaction with a Biden-Trump choice is inviting competition. As of now, I think a third-party run would be doomed. But it’s not hard to see how Cornel West, Jill Stein (running for the Green Party), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or potentially Joe Manchin as a No Labels candidate, could peel off more than enough voters to guarantee a Trump electoral college victory (though it’s very possible that Kennedy, an anti-vax crank, could take more votes from Trump than Biden).

I think Biden got himself into this mess in part because he made the very common mistake of overreading his 2020 victory and raising expectations for his presidency. Again, you’d think Biden wouldn’t have made this mistake and not just because of the whole “compare me to the alternative” schtick. The data were clear all along that large numbers of Biden voters voted against Trump, not for Biden. In a large Morning Consult 2020 survey of people who voted for Biden, 44% said that they cast their ballot as “more of a vote against Donald Trump” than for Joe Biden.

It should be noted that some number of those voters were not anti-Trump Republicans, swing-voting independents and moderates, as many analysts often assume. Some were well to his left. After all, it’s as easy to imagine a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren voter saying they were voting against Trump rather than for Biden as it is to imagine a Liz Cheney Republican saying it.

Biden’s dilemma — and his only path out — can be found in the fact that he’s lost support from both the anti-Trump forces and moderate Republicans. Significant numbers of young, Black and Latino Democrats have turned sour on Biden, and so have independents. In July 2021 — before the Afghanistan withdrawal — Biden had 61% support among independents. Now it’s 37%.

The response to these dismal numbers from Democrats — at least in public — is to point out that President Obama was also polling very badly during the same period in 2011, and yet Obama went on to beat his opponent, Sen. Mitt Romney, handily. Fair enough. But does anyone think Biden can campaign the way Obama did? Do they think he has the special bond with young and minority voters that Obama had? Because of Biden’s “age” — a catchall label for his chronological age but also his mental acuity and energy level — the Biden campaign is already contemplating a Rose Garden strategy to mirror his 2020 “basement” strategy. The difference between now and then is that Biden had COVID-19 to justify running from the basement in 2020. Now, avoiding the campaign trail will simply reinforce the idea that he doesn’t have the energy to hit the hustings.

The president’s only path is to solidify and expand the anti-Trump coalition, not the pro-Biden coalition, including newly energetic abortion-rights supporters. It’s very hard to see how he can manage to make a lot of Democrats very excited to vote for Joe Biden. But he can make them excited to vote against Donald Trump. So expect to hear “don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative” for the next year.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.