The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

This weekend’s edition of the Ruminant is a little bit like Christopher Hitchens’ D.C. apartment: a little bit of one thing right next to a little bit of the complete opposite thing. There’s a lot of ground covered in this, a practically record-breaking long episode of the podcast in which Jonah discusses his dad’s work for the wonderfully-acronymed NANA (North American Newspaper Alliance), dynami...

Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution joins us for the first time. She and Jonah stray from pure rank punditry to instead discuss intra-party politics of primaries, the Democratic Party, and Elaine’s innate skepticism of the Electoral College. Jonah pushes back by saying that “When you start to dig under the surface, most people who oppose the Electoral College are really just saying that th...

In an effort to explain the current state of the economy as well as the political ramifications of some parts of the Biden agenda coming down the pipeline, Jonah invited Michael Strain, his colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, for a return appearance. Strain explains complicated issues without confusing the plebeians among us who can’t look at numbers for very long before developing a h...

Jonah joins us on a feature-length Relaxed Fit™ episode of the Ruminant in which he discusses his innate wish to continue speaking as a conservative without the sacrifice of genuinely-held principles. An important trait for a moment where that simply doesn’t happen often. In the first half, Jonah also addresses the “autoimmune problem” (both literal and figurative) of American youth as they contin...

Fellow Dispatcher Declan Garvey joins Jonah on today’s program, wherein they discuss the parallels between the GOP’s current identity crisis and the last time that Americans witnessed a similar party realignment (the Whigs vs. Jacksonian Democrats). The guys discuss the prospects for a theoretically ascendant third party - “The people I spoke to said, ‘Yeah, I’d be happy to belong to a party that...

Today, we confirm that Dispatch contributing editor Chris Stirewalt has indeed surpassed our gold jacket threshold while engaging in the rankest of punditry. Chris and Jonah discuss how Biden’s “poison pills” (Neera Tanden’s potential confirmation, a dogmatic insistence on a $15 minimum wage policy, et al) are quickly becoming … well, pills, simply put. While the administration continues to add pr...

Jonah welcomes Kevin Williamson to discuss their shared status as Americans trapped within the final layer of Dante’s Hell (aka, Texas in the midst of a large-scale winter weather disaster). From the corporatism on display to the “stunning lack of entrepreneurialism” in response to the issues the state is currently facing, to every issue in between - such as the pointless populism being proffered...

This week, Jonah brings The Remnant to you from the ice-wracked void of Austin, Texas. His guest is Stephanie Slade, the managing editor of Reason magazine. Stephanie and Jonah provide some helpful explanations of what the oldest coalition of modern conservatism (i.e. “fusionism”) really is, who its members were, and what its political motivations were. Then, in an instance of “violent agreement,”...

In this weekend’s Ruminant, Jonah figures that it is his duty to do what he can to clean the gigantic metaphorical Augean Stable that is Washington D.C. as recompense for missing a G-File. Thus, this is an episode filled with only the rankest of punditry: Grifters abound, both within Congress and in the fundraising and activism apparatchiks of both the right and the left. Not only is it the case t...

This podcast is for those of us who feel like the state of our political parties makes us want a drink, or at least some reliable recommendations about what we should be drinking. Jonah is joined by AEI colleague Kevin Kosar, who writes on how Congress is failing to do its job - not simply because of populism and polarization, but also because “its smaller numbers of staffers mean that Congress is...

Astute listeners may remember Europe’s immigration crisis circa 2015, in which more than 1 million people, many of them refugees, made their way to the continent. Today, Jonah is joined by one of the most informed public intellectuals on the matter, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In addition to her first-hand account of leaving Somalia for the West, she also comes loded with information from her new book, Prey,...

Go down the rabbit hole of conservative eggheadiness on this weekend’s Ruminant, where Jonah discusses both the validity of “Trumpism” as an ideological construct as well as how that plays with the idea of conservatism as the “negation of an ideology.” Jonah also explains how we are seeing the ratcheting effect of increased government authority take place in real time, why Chris Stirewalt is the g...

Given the state of… things (imagine us gesturing wildly as we say this) as they currently are, Jonah figured that this might be an apropos time to bring back a popular guest for his second showing: Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist and professor at the University of Miami specializing in how conspiracy theories spread. Buckle up for the discussion of Jewish space lasers, QAnon, Frazzledrip, a...

Thanks to international supply chains, Scott Lincicome’s Five Timer gold jacket is in the mail today as he joins Jonah to discuss a whole panoply of economic trends. Scott and Jonah talk about some of his observations from his posts as a fellow Dispatch-er with his Capitolism newsletter, as well as through his role at Cato where he has just put out a ton of research refuting the too-clever-by-half...

On this Ruminant, Jonah explicates the sadly prominent “antisemitism in the gaps” theory of political history on both the left and right, his proud status as an ideologue of the lukewarmist school, and the GOP’s inability to take “yes” for an answer on winning cultural issues against the American left. He also touches on how the GameStop kerfuffle is really just a case where “the market should be...

Will Saletan of Slate returns to discuss the looming possibility of a political conflict between the Biden administration and the public sector teachers’ unions who nominally support him, the ways in which the pandemic has shifted labor back into the private sphere of the American household, why both parties should be aiming to present themselves as “the ‘not crazy’ party” (and why they both seem...

A.B. Stoddard rejoins the show for the three-timer award, as well as to talk, well, politics of all things. What can we expect from Senate Republicans at the start of the new Biden administration. Especially with a vote on whether to convict Donald Trump in the pipeline? We also get some more chronicles in the saga of Mitch McConnell: Machiavellian, principled, or both? And what about the recent f...

The days of the 2012 GOP “autopsy” are long behind us. Listen as Jonah ruminates on the struggles of protecting serious conservatism at a time of supreme unreflectiveness among many adherents of the movement as to how it has been led astray. Jonah also expresses his optimism at the revitalized raison d’être of The Dispatch in a post-Trump America. Additionally, Jonah even previews a forthcoming id...

Join Jonah and special guest Jack Butler, his former research assistant for the tricentennial episode. It’s the best of both worlds as the program recalls its greatest hits (conspiracies about the Soviets, Bigfoot Erotica, The Episode that Shall Not be Named, and, of course, Jokes at Jack’s expense) while also breaking into new territory. The guys talk about the conflict between college Republican...

In an exercise of “dealing with liberalism’s best arguments,” Jonah plays host to returning guest Mo Elleithee, a Democratic political strategist. They talk about the first day of the Biden administration and many of the coming political realignments. Would Democrats relish the thought of a “Patriot Party” rising up in opposition to the GOP, or would they reel in horror? Are Americans cautiously o...

On this weekend’s Ruminant, Jonah discusses how the essence of conservatism in all its variety has been distilled down to a single oversimplistic metric: The more one likes Trump, and the more libs one owns, the more conservative one is assumed to be. “If you agree with Donald Trump, you’re a conservative, and if you defend Trump at all costs, you’re a good conservative.” Jonah then talks about ho...

Today, AEI’s Yuval Levin returns, and Jonah asks him something more important than “What happens next?” Rather, they try to think about “What should we do next?” They talk about what Congress’ institutional responsibility is in regards to impeachment. They also discuss the 10 Republican representatives who voted for impeachment (“Look, I’m Jewish: 10 is better than zero.”), and their hopes to move...

What is to be made of the concerns – practical or philosophical – about a second impeachment of Donald Trump? Keith Whittington of Princeton returns to The Remnant to encourage us not to take such concerns too rigidly. Since, as we got used to hearing, impeachment is a political process and not a legal remedy, the ability to get through an impeachment quickly – say, before January 20 – is “purely...

On today’s Ruminant, Jonah takes care to push through the natural inclination to simply, well, be appalled at this past Wednesday’s “events” on Capitol Hill, and manages to talk about both the lead-up to them and their ramifications. He talks about how the rioters display all of the soul-sickness that conservatives normally only talk about in regard to far-left activists, and that while conservati...

As The Remnant kicks back into gear, we figured it would be best to let Jonah make his trek back to D.C. and instead treat you to a secret artifact from a few days after the election. This is a conversation between Jonah and AEI emeritus scholar Charles Murray on the state of libertarianism and liberalism (both of the “small-l” variants) in the aftermath of November 2020. Murray explains why he’s...