210 Quotes by Jonah Goldberg

In Europe and America alike, voters increasingly recognize that the benefits of the green revolution aren’t worth the costs, particularly when the revolutionaries don’t have a clue what they’re doing.

If we say that anyone who ‘moralizes’ must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.

Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified.

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.

American Progressivism – the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent – is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler.

Fascism isn’t a libertarian doctrine! It just isn’t, never will be and it can’t be cast as one.

Tribalism is natural, but it can also be manufactured. Manufactured tribalism is the very essence of identity politics, the heart of aristocracy, and the soul of nationalism. “Identity politics” may be a modern term, but it is an ancient idea. Embracing it is not a step forward but a retreat to the past.

Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.

The Constitution is a paper manifestation of a deeper cultural commitment to liberty and limited government, in the same way a marriage certificate is a physical and legalistic representation of something far deeper, mysterious, and complicated. When the marriage fails, the marriage certificate won’t save it. And when the American people lose their love of liberty, the Constitution will not save us either.