The Eternal Badness of Bad Ideas

Yahoo

18-04-2025

From the G-File on The Dispatch
Dear Reader (including those of you with pastel potatoes),
When you've been doing this (gestures toward millions of words under my byline on the internet and bookshelf) for so long, you don't just acquire opinions, you acquire whole intellectual set pieces. This is not unique to me—it's true of pretty much everyone I know in my line of work.
Think of the rhetorical invention of the Remnant podcast 'bingo card.' I've collected certain arguments—riffs, you might say—that are like building blocks of my worldview.
For example, when someone refers to the 'coequal branches of government,' longtime listeners know I'm going to give a few minutes—at least—to how this is Nixonian propaganda (TLDR: Tricky Dick didn't want to be henpecked by Congress or the courts, so he argued that as a 'coequal branch' the executive got to do what it wanted (sound familiar?). The problem, as Jay Cost lays out, is that the branches may have coequal 'status,' but they don't have coequal power. Congress is the boss of our system).
The point is that the longer you do this … stuff (gestures again) the more of these set pieces you acquire, like old, comfortable tools you've used so long they feel like an extension of your hands. Again, this isn't just true of me or my profession, it's true of pretty much everybody. How many baseball junkies do you know who will leap at the opportunity to explain—again!—that Ted Williams was better than Babe Ruth? 'His stats would be better but he enlisted in the Navy!'
The trick is to keep accumulating new set pieces. But there's a hitch: You have to be prepared to retire old ones when some new argument or new evidence causes you to change your mind (I don't want to dunk on anybody by name, but there are folks who just can't let go of old arguments because the task of retooling is too onerous, and the old arguments are so central to their identity.).
I've had to change my mind a few times. For instance, thanks to the work of Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, I've changed my mind about the validity of generational stereotyping. In short, the idea of 'event-driven' generational change (9/11, the Kennedy assassination, etc.) is still garbage, but changes in technology really do change cultures, and those changes manifest differently depending on your age. People who grew up after the advent of the automobile or the radio were different from those who grew up before. Kids who grow up with social media are different from people who grew up before Instagram or TikTok.
There is another hitch, one that works the other way. There are times when the zeitgeist zigs so suddenly, and large numbers of people zig with it, that staying on course looks like you're the one zagging. In my line of work, partisanship is the chief cause of this kind of thing. When people think it's your job to defend a party, in their eyes, refusing to go along makes you the outlier, the traitor, the zagger. That wouldn't be so annoying except for the fact that a lot of people conflate ideology with party affiliation. I get called left-wing every day by people who think the definition of right-wing is determined by what's good for the GOP, the president, or what they say is good for them. But if I think, say, free trade is better than protectionism, absent some new evidence or new argument, changing my view just because the GOP is now a protectionist party seems like an intellectually, even morally, cowardly thing to do.
The intellectually cowardly part should be pretty obvious. But the charge of moral cowardice deserves some explication. I don't make the charge as an insult. But if you believe that freer trade is better for—pick your beneficiary—American citizens, the poor (American or otherwise), the country, or the world, because it makes people richer (and reduces military conflict), reversing your position for the political benefit of a party means, as a matter of logic, that you want to make people poorer for the sake of partisanship.
A lot of—but sadly not all—pro-lifers understand this point. If you believe that abortion is akin to murder, changing your position for partisan advantage is—on your own terms—immoral. This is why I have such contempt for right-wing industrial complex—the Heritage Foundation, CPAC, various MAGAified media personalities, et al. They leave me feeling like Thomas More muttering 'but for Wales?'
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I'll get back to the above point in a minute. But first let's briefly discuss the latest fad on the intellectual new right.
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Kevin T. Dugan had an interesting piece titled 'Meet MAGA's Favorite Communist.' The communist in question is Antonio Gramsci. The most famous slogan associated with Gramsci —the 'long march through the institutions'—wasn't coined by Gramsci, but much later, in 1967, by a German socialist named Rudi Dutschke. The idea behind the long march referred to the idea that radicals should join the establishment—government, universities, etc.—in order to capture them and impose radical change from within. Amusingly, there's not much evidence that Dutschke knew anything about Gramsci. He was using the phrase 'the long march' as a nod to Mao's Long March.
But the idea is similar to Gramsci's 'war of position,' and in the 1970s Gramsci became a kind of star of the European communist left, and ultimately, the American left. Eventually, conservatives noticed that the left liked the term and the idea—and seemed to be putting it into practice—and started calling it out. Like 'the Frankfurt School' or 'cultural Marxism,' Gramscian ideas became fun ideas for right-wingers—most emphatically including yours truly—to deplore, debate, and condemn.
So, who was Antonio Gramsci? He was a Sardinian by birth who became a young leader of the Italian Communist Party. Initially Gramsci was a big fan of Mussolini—back when Mussolini was a revered leader of the Italian left (Mussolini first earned the title 'Il Duce,' 'the leader,' not as a Fascist but as the foremost Italian socialist). Gramsci was a heterodox Communist and Marxist. He became a pain in the ass to Mussolini after Mussolini broke with the Communists, first by supporting entry into the war, and ultimately by becoming a Fascist dictator. A loyal servant of Moscow, Gramsci led the Italian Communist opposition to Mussolini. In 1926, Mussolini got fed up with his criticisms and threw him in jail. At Gramsci's show trial, the prosecutor declared, 'For twenty years, we must stop this brain from functioning.'
They failed. In prison he became an impressive intellectual, more impressive than he would have been on the outside, because he could get away with writing stuff that would have gotten him thrown in jail by Stalin, if he'd written it in Russia. He developed all sorts of interesting ideas about how the Fascists consolidated power with the aid and consent of the bourgeois and capitalists. His various theories of Fascism—they changed over time—are all very Marxist and therefore, in my mind, analytically suspect. But they were interesting and they were compelling for a bunch of reasons. Marxists always like a self-serving explanation for why their b.s. isn't more popular and successful.
More relevant, Gramsci put a lot of emphasis on the importance of intellectuals and their power to shape ideas, and as a result wield power. Gramsci's ideas were a very intellectualized version of Saturday Night Live's Stuart Smalley character, played by Al Franken. Smalley's mantra was, 'You're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, people like you'—or they should. As Thomas Meaney writes, 'The belief that Gramsci somehow privileged the cultural domain over the political and economic helped justify the materialist allergies of at least two generations of professors, while keeping their nominal radicalism intact.'
Anyway, today's new right, or at least the faction led by Christopher Rufo, loves Gramsci. They find in his writings an explanation for how the new left of the 1960s took over the commanding heights of the culture and how the new right can retake them.
Yesterday, Ruffo tweeted out the Wall Street Journal article declaring, 'The Right is learning new political tactics. We are not going to indulge the fantasies of the 'classical liberals' who forfeited all of the institutions. We're going to fight tooth and nail to recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere. Get ready.'
I responded, 'Um. A *lot* of the idea of the right are classically liberal. Or at least they were considered to be for a century or so. Could you explicate which classically liberal ideas you think are 'fantasies'? Because I could swear a lot of your @ManhattanInst colleagues don't think they're fantastical.'
Ruffo responded here, and I responded to that here. You can read the whole exchange, but my most basic concern is that embracing a fundamentally and devoutly illiberal thinker as your political sherpa raises the possibility that you will also embrace the illiberalism central to his thought. I've watched—and written about—this exact dynamic playing out with the right's previous, and very similar, obsession with Saul Alinsky. Over the course of a decade, many on the right went from denouncing Alinsky to making him a kind of dashboard saint. Convinced that the left always wins—because they are Alinksyites—folks like Dinesh D'Souza and Steve Bannon decided the right needed to become right-wing Alinskyites in the spirit of fighting fire with fire. At the end of this process, D'Souza has become a conspiracy theorist and troll and Bannon has become an avowed Leninist.
Podcast April 18, 2025
Jonah Goldberg
Responding to Chris Rufo.
I am more open to a conservative 'long counter-march through the institutions' than some might think. But count me out of any effort that thinks the solution to left-wing illiberalism is right-wing illiberalism. Attacking the left's 'living constitution' garbage is good and useful. But replacing the left's version with a right-wing version of it is perverse. Denouncing left-wing cancel culture is necessary and right. Celebrating right-wing cancel culture in the spirit of 'retribution' or a Gramscian fearlessness or MAGA manliness, is grotesque, and not just because of the hypocrisy of it.
I've written a lot about that stuff and will undoubtedly again. But I want to make a different point. It is absolutely true that the left took over universities and other institutions and used their positions of power to push crappy ideas. It is also true that Gramsci (and Foucault) were inspirations for some of these efforts in the 1970s and 1980s. I think all of this can—and often is—wildly overstated, but there's truth here if you look for it.
But it doesn't seem to have occurred to many people that Gramsci was just wrong. He believed that liberalism was a spent force, a dying and discardable carapace to be shed by society as it evolves into mature Communism. As Gramsci put it in his 1924 essay, 'Neither Fascism Nor Liberalism: Sovietism!': 'Liberalism, even if inoculated with the glands of the reformist monkey, is powerless. It belongs to the past.'
(There are better quotes, but man, how can you not love 'glands of the reformist monkey'?)
His theories about Communism, capitalism, and democracy were wrong because—wait for it—Marxism is wrong. Its metaphysics are wrong. Its economic theory is wrong. Marx's Labor Theory of Value is smoldering garbage. Gramsci's analysis of fascism was wrong (don't get me started). And, not least importantly, even if Gramsci was right about the politics and power dynamics of 1920s and 1930s Italy—again, he wasn't—America isn't very much like Italy, then or now.
If Gramsci's theories of power were so successful and offered such a great blueprint for the new right today, why are so many new right bros pissing and moaning about 'neo-liberalism' and its hegemonic power?
One can concede that the tweedy tenured Marxists succeeded in their long march to take over the English department. But if Gramsci was right, the next step would have been to seize control of the state and the means of production. Instead, they spend their time bleating about the same 'neo-liberalism' that the new right gripes about. Their 'hegemony' pretty much stops at the faculty lounge, if even there.
Heck, if the lefties with all of this 'cultural hegemonic power' had remotely the power the new Gramscians of the right claim, Donald Trump wouldn't have won, sex assignment surgeries would be part of Medicare For All, and Chris Rufo would be writing his own manifesto from prison, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren read the latest wheat production quota reports from her dacha on Boston Harbor.
This whole fad stems from a misreading of 'what time it is.' We are not at the precipice of a left-wing social transformation of society, we are not in a state of war with the forces of cultural Marxism. We're a liberal society full of people with bad ideas contending for power. It has always been thus, and hopefully always will be. I don't say 'hopefully' because I like bad ideas, I say that because so long as we have classically liberal guardrails and checks on power, the bad ideas will ultimately lose.
When the people with bad ideas get power, the badness of their ideas becomes evident and people with better ideas start winning arguments and elections. As Edmund Burke tells us, 'Example is the school of mankind and will learn at no other.' This process can take way longer than I would like and I am all for making it easier for good ideas to prevail, but not if it comes at the expense of those classically liberal rules.
That's one of those set pieces I referred to above. I've spent my career inveighing against left-wing illiberalism. But the arguments against illiberalism don't change much if the issue is right-wing illiberalism. I don't think Rufo is illiberal. Or at least I don't think he thinks he is. But at a time when the president is pushing illiberalism all over the place, celebrating Trumpism arouses skepticism about his commitment to classical liberalism. He says he favors small-r republicanism. I love me some small r-republicanism, but the American vision of republicanism was grounded in classical liberalism. And healthy republican institutions dedicate themselves to the strengthening of explication of that liberalism.
If the new right wants to zig over there and wax tumescent over Communist intellectuals and their illiberal lust for power the way the new left did, I'm not going with them. If that makes me look like I'm the one zagging, so be it.
Speaking of set pieces, this tweet thread from the vice president has me reaching for the toolbox. Vance was beating up on Jesse Singal (a Dispatch contributing writer), responding to a zesty post from Singal about the administration's deportation policies:
I hate this smug, self-assured bullshit.
'I know I'm right, and people must be dumb or immoral to disagree with me.'
It's an easy way to go through life, because then you never have to think seriously about why your worldview is a justification for the mass invasion of the country my ancestors built with their bare hands.
Vance then followed up with:
None of these people can articulate a deportation standard that:
1) would satisfy left-wing critics of the administration's immigration policy;
2) would satisfy their intuitions about what 'due process' is required;
3) would be workable given resource constraints; and
4) would permit deportation of most of the illegal immigrants allowed under Joe Biden's administration. They want to nullify the results of a democratic election. It's that simple.
Now, I don't feel compelled to respond to all of this. But just so people don't think I'm dodging anything here. I find it laughable that Donald Trump's foremost fulltime defender is outraged by smug, self-assured b.s. or the belittling of political opponents. Redact the smug and self-assured b.s. out of his boss's public statements, and you'd be left with a few sentence fragments and proper names.
Also, whether or not Singal or anyone else can or cannot articulate a deportation or immigration standard that satisfies left-wing critics and their intuitions about due process is a red herring. The question is whether the administration can articulate a policy that comports with the law, the Constitution, and the courts. As Richard Reinsch replied to Vance, 'You are being asked to observe the US Constitution's provision for habeas corpus. It is not a relative question as you present it. Upholding one of the oldest grounds for limiting state power in our constitutional tradition is not a woke plot to undermine the Trump admin.'
Indeed, the fact that Vance—Yale Law School '13—puts 'due process' in scare quotes speaks volumes.
With that out of the way, let me address the two things he said that really set me off. I'll take the second one first: Vance says that people who object to the way the administration is handling deportation 'want to nullify the results of a democratic election. It's that simple.'
What Vance is saying here is that Trump ran on mass deportation (true!) and he won (also true!) and therefore he has a right to deport people anyway he chooses. And if you object, you're trying to 'nullify the results of a democratic election.'
Never mind that Vance's fastidiousness about the righteousness of democracy is awfully precious, given his defense of Trump's effort to steal (i.e. nullify) the 2020 election and his refusal to condemn it. And ignore his super–sophisticated aversion to condemning undemocratic nations as 'bad guys.'
If you want to say that the 2024 election was a referendum on mass deportation, I can live with it in a colloquial sense. But I don't agree with it in any rigorous sense. I personally know a lot of people who voted for Trump who assured themselves he wouldn't be able to do full-fledged mass deportation and all that would require. Nor do I think it was a more important issue for the majority-making voters, including many Hispanics, for whom the economy was front-of-mind. Lots of people voted for Trump despite his grotesque rhetoric about immigrants 'poisoning the blood' of America. Obviously, some people loved that talk. Though odds are good that they'd have voted for him anyway.
But that's beside the point. I think the concept of 'mandates' is anti-constitutional garbage. Again, I think I have to live with it as a colloquial thing. If by mandate you mean, 'He ran on this, so he should try to achieve it,' that's fine. But that's not how Trump and Vance conceive of it. They believe the democratic will of the people (i.e. the slight majority of people who voted for him or against Harris) gives them license to simply have their way. That's the anti-C\constitutional garbage. Going by the Constitution and nothing else, Trump has a single mandate: to be president for four years. That's it. The Constitution doesn't say jack about the popular will giving him extra authority to do anything. If it were otherwise, then you would have to believe that Trump could unilaterally declare war on Denmark and seize Greenland.
If he can't accomplish what he campaigned on, that's not nullifying the results of an election. That's just a president failing to fulfill a campaign promise. If Trump fails to get his 'no tax on tips' idea through Congress, that doesn't mean the election results will have been 'nullified.' He'll still be president. He'll just have failed to do something he promised to do. Elections are not referendums on everything a candidate campaigns on. And alleged electoral mandates are not a license to defy the Constitution.
Finally, there's Vance's invocation of his ancestors. Screw that noise. I have ancestors on my mom's side that go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They had calloused hands from building this country before the Vances set foot here. For all I know, they shook their heads as his people got off the boat, thinking, 'there goes the neighborhood.' Boom, do I win all of my arguments now?
This is right-wing identity politics and nothing more. By all means, deport illegal immigrants if you can figure out how to do it within the confines of the rule of law and the Constitution and basic human decency. But spare me this 'I know I'm right because my people were here first' b.s.
Canine Update: I gotta do this fast. The Dingo continues to rule the shotgun seat, but does on occasion make allowances for the Spaniel. We continue to pay the Chestergeld. Also, rare footage of Pippa demanding bellygeld. Mother Jones recently insisted that dogs were bad for Gaia. Pippa was unamused. I had to head up to that trade school in New Haven for a panel. When I returned, the Welcoming Committee was … welcoming. Pippa would like you to say hello to her little friend. Gracie is the best napper (though Pippa is no slouch). I was recently surveilled by a basset. And, while technically, only Dispatch subscribers can submit entries for Dispawtcher of the Week, I think we all should take a moment to appreciate the heroism of Buford!
Owner's Name: John Warburton
Why I'm a Dispatch Member: I had followed Steve and Jonah for years at National Review so joining The Dispatch right in the beginning was an easy decision. I love the balanced, no b.s. reporting and depend on The Dispatch for the truth.
Personal Details: I love sharing stories from The Dispatch with my three Friday breakfast friends: a hospice physician, a pediatrician, and an engineer. I'm the group meteorologist. We're all retired and call ourselves The Paleo Conservative Coalition of Lakewood Ranch, Florida.
Pet's Name: Henry
Pet's Breed: Cavalier King Charles Spaniel
Pet's Age: 1.5
Gotcha Story: We have always had beagles and lost our Mack three years ago to cancer. We knew we wanted another dog but put it off. We were searching the web one day and found Henry on a breeder's website. We instantly fell in love with his cute face and big eyes.
Pet's Likes: Henry loves mulch and has become an expert at grabbing a piece of it seemingly out of nowhere. He is very happy to be on someone's lap and loves to play ball. He also knows which neighbors always have treats in their pocket.
Pet's Dislikes: Henry is always on duty monitoring 'the perimeter' and quickly begins barking when neighborhood dogs walk by.
Pet's Proudest Moment: When he sneaks in with a prize hunk of mulch and we don't catch it.
Bad Pet: When he was joyfully running through a puddle after it rained and someone said he shouldn't get wet nor splash water on other dogs.
Do you have a quadruped you'd like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate.
ICYMI
—On tyranny and Alien
—Settling down
—Marmot malarkey
—Exorcizing
—Be careful what you wish for
—The ostrich maneuver
—Popular opinion
—Aptronymic olympics
—Walter White Sr.
—Ants in your pants
—Ding dong!
—Conquerors
—Missing the point
—Here we go again
—Old School 2