Words matter. These are the best Jonah Goldberg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I’d rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.
But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.
I would also say Barack Obama has spent much, much, much, much more money than the Republicans.
But you’re never taught in schools – we don’t teach anyone in public schools that government is the problem. We don’t teach anyone in college that government is the problem – except maybe a handful of sort of unique, conservative schools. But mainstream media never talks as if government is the problem.
If we say that anyone who ‘moralizes’ must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.
There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn’t exist.
The premise of my book is that everyone is a bit ideological to some extent. Everyone comes from a ideological perspective.
Our country, if you read the ‘Federalist Papers,’ is about disagreement. It’s about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob – not the mob itself.
If you spend any time in Washington you’ll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.
Republican politics have been off-kilter for several years now because a large segment of the conservative base does not look back fondly on the Bush presidency.
The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster – especially if some nations are not democracies.
Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.
We are a species that must try to impose and find systems – systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.
The main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are honest about it. We’re kind of dorks about it. We are kind of like Dungeons and Dragons geeks.
I think as – all in all, it’s better to have a cool president than a not cool president.
You can make a very good argument that society would be much worse off if you let 10 rapists and murderers free rather than put one poor, wrongly accused accountant in prison. And so my only point on that is that it should open up an argument. It should not sort of settle one, because nobody disagrees with it.
Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.
If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.
