| Jonah Goldberg Goldberg is the founding editor of National Review Online and currently serves as its editor-at-large, where he writes “The Goldberg File.” He is also a nationally syndicated columnist and member of the board of contributors to USA Today. He currently lives in Washington D.C. with his wife, Jessica Gavora, their daughter, Lucy, and Cosmo the Wonderdog. |
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 The Way I See It #22"Everywhere, unthinking mobs of “independent thinkers” wield tired clichés like cudgels, pummeling those who dare question “enlightened” dogma. If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them."  Jonah, did you have any other specific “tired clichés” in mind when you wrote your cup? Sure. In addition to the ones I mentioned, I can’t stand it when people say “give peace a chance” as if this was some great insight or suggestion. Imagine you’re sitting around the table in the Situation Room at the White House trying to figure out what to do about, say, China invading Taiwan. Generals are suggesting putting our ships on an intercept course. Diplomats are demanding we go to the Security Council for a resolution. The CIA is insisting there isn’t time as the People’s Liberation Army is already on the move. And some guy yells, “Wait, wait I got it!” Everyone turns to him for a helpful suggestion and he offers “Give peace a chance!” Another cliché at the top of my list: “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Uh, thanks. But who really cares. |
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 Do you really feel that way? Isn’t a willingness to listen and respectfully “agree to disagree” a good thing? Sure, it’s a good thing. Absolutely. I love arguments; I think democracy is all about disagreement, not agreement. But my point is that people usually say they’d defend my right to speak as way to avoid having an argument. It’s a cop-out. In other words, it’s non-responsive and irrelevant but it sounds bold and principled. You could just as easily say, “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will fight side by side with you when the Romulans attack.” |
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You’re an editor at one of the country’s leading conservative journals. Was your quote intended as a critique of contemporary liberal thinking? Do you think there’s more original thinking coming from the Right? Yes. That doesn’t mean there aren’t terrible steak-heads and bores on the Right or that I think there aren’t very innovative minds on the Left. But as a whole, I think liberalism is rusty and atrophied. Liberalism – by which I mean the political Left in America and not “real liberalism” or classical liberalism – has very little to offer. All of its ideas revolve around protecting, extending or tinkering with government programs and entitlements. In a sense what we call liberalism in America is small-c conservative, even reactionary. It’s based on a knee-jerk desire to defend the status quo. A few years ago Teddy Kennedy took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to denounce government scholarships (a.k.a. “vouchers”) for poor black kids to go to private school. Why? Because Kennedy’s idea of liberalism is whatever reliable liberal interest groups say it is. Liberalism began as a philosophy of limited government. Now what we call liberalism is instinct for the expansion of government at every turn. Meanwhile, on the cultural front, liberalism seems obsessed with finding hypocrisy in its enemies. This strikes me as a form of philosophical and political surrender because it represents an unwillingness to stand for actual moral judgments. For example, when Rush Limbaugh was accused of drug abuse almost no prominent liberal was willing to condemn the behavior itself. They had to condemn the alleged “hypocrisy.” That’s fine, as far as it goes. But pointing out how others inconsistently apply their own principles is not a substitute for having principles of your own. |
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If there’s been a reversal between what it means to be a small-c conservative or small-l liberal thinker, then when did things invert? How did the Right become associated with change and new ideas? It’s strange. The words conservative and liberal are obviously very old, but their meaning has drifted over the years. As late as the 1950s even most conservatives spoke favorably of the word “liberal” – including Senators Robert Taft and Joe McCarthy. Meanwhile, conservatism wasn’t really a political outlook at all – as we understand these things – until the fifties. Before that, liberalism’s meaning was in flux and I’m not sure this is the venue to get into all of that. I think the Right became associated with change for the fairly simple reason that the liberal pendulum went about as far as America wanted it to. Somewhere C.S. Lewis writes about how a man who takes a wrong turn in the road is not “progressing” by continuing in the wrong direction. Hence, a man who walks backward to where he took the wrong turn is in fact heading in a “progressive” direction. It’s a limited metaphor because life isn’t nearly so static. But conservatives are on the side of change because they are the ones who understand that heading in the wrong direction isn’t progress. |
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Sticking to your pendulum metaphor, is there a possibility that things will tip too far the other way? Are there some “tired clichés” the Right would be better off retiring now? Sure. Remember, I don’t think clichés are wrong. In fact, as a conservative, I think clichés represent some profound human insights which get passed from one generation to another. Obviously, there’s merit to the sentiment of giving peace a chance or defending free speech. What bothers me is when these sentiments or attitudes end the debate rather than frame it. So on the Right, I think we too often fall into the trap of defending big business on the grounds of free enterprise, when big businesses are often not particularly concerned with free enterprise themselves. I find it difficult to defend businesses as bastions of capitalism when they show no reluctance to shake down taxpayers for all matter of subsidies. Also, I think conservatives let their admirable attraction to ideas distract them from other sources of change. Many conservatives like to blame all of our modern ills on those horrible ideas that escaped German laboratories at the beginning of the 20th century and then mutated in French cafés. And while I think nihilism, moral relativism, existentialism, etc. have had serious consequences for society, it’s impossible to deny that the automobile, birth control pill and the telephone have done more to unsettle traditional arrangements than anything Heidegger ever wrote or said. The problem is that it’s easy to argue with Heidegger (or his writing); it’s really hard to argue with a Buick. |
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I know you think a certain Bill Murray movie is a powerful antidote to nihilism, moral relativism and existentialism. Why do you think Groundhog Day is one of the best movies of the last 40 years? I think it will probably join It’s a Wonderful Life as a classic American film for many generations to come. As for why I think so, well because it’s nearly perfectly made. It reminds me a bit of The Old Man and the Sea, which is a great book for readers young and old. If you want to take it as a superficial story, that’s fine. Have a good time. But the more you watch it and pay attention, you realize everything you’re looking at are iceberg tips. There’s a deeper meaning, sometimes several deeper meanings, which extend backward from the page and the screen. People smarter than me have found Nietzsche, Aristotle, Buddha and a lot more in what at first appears to be a movie that may be only slightly less funny than Meatballs or Caddyshack, two Murray classics with no larger philosophical import. Groundhog Day is a profoundly morally sophisticated movie that also happens to have Bill Murray telling a huge rodent, “Don’t drive angry.” What more could you want? |
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