If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, the political thesis of conservative columnist and author Jonah Goldberg (b. 1969) identifies the correct human impulses but prescribes an impossible cure.
Goldberg’s major work, Suicide of the West, centers on what he calls “the Miracle”—the accidental, historical breakthrough of Enlightenment liberalism, capitalism, and individual rights that lifted humanity out of the historical muck of poverty and war. Goldberg argues that human nature is naturally tribal, envious, and primitive, and that the Miracle is an artificial garden that requires constant weeding, gratitude, and intellectual defense. For Goldberg, the rise of modern populism, identity politics, and nationalism represents human nature striking back against this fragile liberal order.
Mearsheimer’s framework in The Great Delusion agrees with Goldberg’s premise that human nature is fundamentally tribal, but it entirely rejects his solution.
First, Goldberg argues that we can preserve the Miracle by choosing to transcend our tribal instincts through ideas, dogmatic gratitude, and a renewal of liberal civic education. He treats liberalism as a set of ideas that autonomous individuals can choose to defend. Mearsheimer’s anthropology counters that this level of individualistic self-determination is a fiction. Because of the long human childhood, individuals undergo an intense value infusion from their primary social group long before their critical faculties form. Reason is the least important way preferences are determined. A society cannot simply teach its way out of tribalism because the very institutions doing the teaching—schools, media outlets, and political parties—inevitably split into competing tribal factions.
Second, Goldberg views the return of tribalism as a preventable “suicide”—a failure of intellectual will and gratitude among elites and citizens. Mearsheimer’s logic suggests that what Goldberg calls suicide is actually the inevitable operation of structural gravity. Liberalism, by prioritizing individual rights and treating citizens as atomistic actors, fails to provide the deep, collective meaning and security that social beings require. When a liberal state pushes its universalist project too far, it strips away the local, traditional protective structures that people rely on for survival. The rebirth of nationalism and identity politics is not a malicious choice to destroy democracy; it is the natural, defensive reaction of human beings seeking the safety of a functional tribe when an atomistic system leaves them exposed.
Finally, Goldberg’s own professional trajectory illustrates Mearsheimer’s tribal logic. As a co-founder of The Dispatch and a prominent independent conservative voice, Goldberg broke away from the dominant populist turn of the Republican Party, positioning himself as a defender of traditional constitutional principles over partisan fealty.A liberal analysis frames this as a triumph of individual conscience and independent reason. Under Mearsheimer’s lens, Goldberg did not escape to an island of pure autonomy. He remained deeply loyal to his original ideological tribe—the conservative establishment network that values institutional norms, regular order, and Reagan-era internationalism. When the broader conservative coalition shifted its boundaries, Goldberg defended the specific value infusion he received during his early career. What appears to be an isolated stand for abstract principles is an act of deep allegiance to a specific, institutional community.
If Mearsheimer is right, the Miracle cannot be maintained through Goldberg’s call for individual gratitude and philosophical commitment. The tribal nature of man is not a weed to be managed by liberal gardeners; it is the soil itself. A system built on the assumption that individuals can permanently override their primary group attachments is unstable from the start, making the decline of universalist liberalism an inevitability rather than a suicide.
If David Pinsof is right, the political commentary, books, and career of Jonah Goldberg represent a highly calculated strategy to secure elite status within a fractured media ecosystem, rather than a principled crusade to defend classical liberalism and institutional norms. His prominent role as an anti-populist conservative commentator—spanning decades at National Review, his columns, and his launch of The Dispatch—serves as an exceptionally rational engine for navigating the zero-sum attention marketplace.
In books like Suicide of the West, Goldberg argues that modern political polarization and populist movements are the result of tribalism, identity politics, and a collective failure to appreciate the “Miracle” of liberal capitalism and the rule of law. He treats the populist revolt as a massive psychological regression—essentially, a civilizational brain-fart where voters have forgotten the values that made Western society prosperous. From a standard intellectual view, his work is a vital warning, suggesting that if we can correct these cognitive errors and remind people of institutional virtues, we can save the republic.
A Pinsofian analysis strips away this high-status mission statement. The voters and politicians driving right-wing populism or progressive identity politics are not suffering from a historical misunderstanding or a cognitive malfunction. Factions are locked in a zero-sum competition over the coercive apparatus of the state. The populists Goldberg critiques are deploying ingroup solidarity, anti-elite rhetoric, and intense coalitional loyalty as highly functional weapons to seize state power, redirect resources to their allies, and derogate their rivals. They understand their incentives perfectly.
Goldberg’s decision to break away from populist-aligned conservative media and establish The Dispatch follows a clear strategic logic. By positioning himself as a defender of traditional norms, intellectual rigor, and institutional health against the “tribalism” of the masses, he adopts a powerful high-status mission statement. This stance provides an elite subscription base and institutional donors with exactly what they want to buy: a platform that allows them to signal immense moral and intellectual superiority over the populist factions of both major parties.
His ongoing warnings about the dangers of political tribalism function as a classic moral panic. He does not correct a public misunderstanding. He operates within an attention economy that rewards keeping readers alarmed about the irrationality of their political opponents. Goldberg understands his incentives, satisfies his distinct media market, and uses highly polished, respectable arguments as strategic levers to secure a high-prestige, influential position within the elite media hierarchy, proving that even the defense of institutional neutrality is a way to win the game.
Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945) wrote an essay called “Isaiah’s Job,” and Jonah Goldberg (b. 1969) named a podcast after one word in it. God sends Isaiah to preach to a people who will not listen. The prophet asks what good it does. God answers that the mass will ignore him, but a Remnant will hear. Isaiah does not get to know who they are. He cannot count them, cannot rally them, cannot raise money off them. He leaves the words where the Remnant might find them and trusts the right men to pick them up.
Goldberg put that word on his masthead. He records the show in a home office in the Washington suburbs, two dogs and a cat underfoot, an American Enterprise Institute title behind his name that reads Asness Chair in Applied Liberty after the hedge-fund quant who endowed it. The room is comfortable. The doctrine he broadcasts from it is not. A man tells you what he fears by the comfort he reaches for, and Goldberg reaches, again and again, for a story in which the cause loses and the preaching goes on anyway.
A hero system is the project a man builds to make his life count against death and against the suspicion that nothing he does means anything. Ernest Becker said every culture hands out such projects the way a state hands out passports, and that the man who lives inside one rarely sees the walls. Goldberg sees his walls. That is the first thing to understand about him, and it changes how everything else reads.
Two terrors hold up his world.
The first is the jungle. Goldberg has a word for the order he loves, and he capitalizes it. The Miracle is his name for the arrival, sometime around 1700, of a way of living that human beings had never managed before: rights that hold against kings, markets that reward strangers, courts that bind the strong, an argument settled by counting heads instead of cracking them. He thinks none of this is natural. Human nature is the jungle, tribal and grasping and warm only to kin. The Miracle is a garden planted on top of the jungle, and the jungle never stops pushing up through the soil. Let the gardeners quit and the weeds return inside a generation. So the terror is not that an enemy storms the wall. The terror is that the men inside the wall forget the garden was ever planted, assume the food grows on its own, and stop tending. Reversion. The slow unlearning of the only good luck the species ever had.
The second terror is smaller and lives closer to the bone. It is the dread of becoming a hack. For a man who sells his judgment, judgment is the soul, and the way that soul dies is by degrees: a softened verdict here to keep an advertiser, a swallowed objection there to keep a seat at the table, a flattery of the audience that pays. The courtier still writes, still talks, still draws a check. He has died at his desk and the column comes out on schedule. Goldberg watched men he respected make that trade after 2016, and he resigned from a Fox News contract in November 2021 over a Tucker Carlson film he called conspiracy-mongering, walking away from the money rather than sit beside it. The second terror is the first terror grown small enough to fit inside one career. The jungle can grow back inside your own paragraph.
Most hero systems run a subtraction story. Strip away the lies, the priests, the false gods, the bourgeois sentiment, and what remains is our truth, the real that was always there. Goldberg runs the story backward. Strip away the Miracle and what remains is not truth but the jungle, the human default, the thing that was always there and always ugly. His sacred order is the addition, the fluke, the thing that had to be built and has to be argued for every morning because nothing in the blood argues for it. This inverts the usual shape of worship. The Randian says the trader and the rational mind are what you find when you subtract mysticism. Goldberg says you find a chimp with a spear. The garden is not discovered. It is maintained or it is lost.
That inversion explains why his cardinal virtue is gratitude, and why gratitude carries his whole weight.
Walk the word through the rooms of other men and you watch it change shape. For Goldberg, gratitude is civic discipline. You did not earn the Miracle. You inherited it from men who are dead, and the entitled forgetting of that debt is what breeds the tribalism that pulls the garden down. Gratitude is the daily refusal to treat the gift as wages.
Carry the same word into a Benedictine novice’s cell and it points the other way, upward instead of backward. The monk owes his existence to God each morning, and gratitude is the posture of the creature who knows he made none of this and keeps none of it. The debt runs vertical, not historical.
Carry it into a barrio organizer’s storefront in Caracas and the word turns to poison in his mouth. To him gratitude is the sedative the patron feeds the dependent, the smile the landlord wants from the tenant, a virtue invented by the comfortable to keep the poor quiet and thankful for scraps. He does not preach gratitude. He preaches reclamation. The thing Goldberg calls a gift the organizer calls a theft with good manners.
Carry it to a volunteer in a nationalist morning drill, swinging clubs in a dusty field at dawn for the motherland. He has gratitude in surplus, but its object is soil and ancestors and blood, not a procedural order of rights and courts. He owes the nation, and the nation is older than any constitution and answers to none. Goldberg’s gratitude flows to a contract. The volunteer’s flows to a people. Same word. Different god underneath it.
Liberty splits the same way. Goldberg means ordered liberty, the old fusionist bargain, freedom braided to law so that the individual stands protected from the state on one side and the mob on the other. Take that word to a software founder who talks in acceleration and exit, and liberty means optionality, the right to build without asking, the right to leave. Take it to a Salafi reformer and liberty means submission, freedom from the tyranny of your own appetites and from the rule of men, and the Western version looks to him like slavery dressed as choice. Take it to a Quebec sovereigntist and liberty is collective before it is anything, the survival of a tongue and a people, never the lone man’s menu. Four men say liberty. Four hero systems answer.
This is the move Goldberg’s enemies make against him, and they make it best when they keep his vocabulary.
The post-liberals are his sharpest rivals because they sound like him. Patrick Deneen (b. 1964), Adrian Vermeule (b. 1968), Sohrab Ahmari (b. 1985), the men who argue liberalism failed not by accident but by design. They use his sacred words. Virtue. Tradition. The West. The good. And they reach the opposite verdict. To them the Miracle is no garden. It is a slow acid. The same liberal logic that frees the individual dissolves the family, empties the church, scatters the town, and leaves a lonely, choosing self with nothing left to choose among. They look at Goldberg’s gratitude and call it gratitude toward the disease. They do not want the garden maintained. They want it pulled up and replaced with a substantive vision of the good, backed by power, the kind of power Goldberg’s whole order exists to fence in. He argues with them more carefully than he argues with anyone, because they have taken his hymnal and changed the tune, and a man can stand an enemy who burns the book. The enemy who sings the same words to a different god unsettles him more.
The national populists do not bother with his hymnal. Carlson (b. 1969), and behind him Trump (b. 1946), look at the Miracle talk and hear an alibi. To them, institutions means the people who sneered at you and did fine while your town died. Norms means the rules that bind you and never them. The garden, in their telling, has a wall, and the wall has a guard, and the guard has been keeping you out while lecturing you on gratitude. Their live virtue is loyalty, to the tribe, the nation, the man at the top, and they read Goldberg’s proceduralism as a refusal to fight for his own side. He thinks they are inviting the jungle in through the front gate and calling it the will of the people. They think he would lose a war rather than win it dirty.
Goldberg knows the shape of his own cage better than most subjects do. He jokes about his hackery before anyone can accuse him of it. He names his priors out loud. He built The Dispatch in 2019 with Steve Hayes around subscriptions instead of advertising, a business arranged so that he answers to readers who pay to be told the truth rather than to sponsors who pay for comfort, which is to say he engineered his working life against the second terror. Few men construct an institution as a fence around their own integrity. He did.
The honest accounting runs here, and he would half-agree with it. His gratitude is gratitude for an order that has been good to men like him, the credentialed maker of arguments, and his confidence that the garden serves everyone inside the wall passes lightly over the question of who laid the wall and who stands outside it. He sees the gardener with great clarity. He is less curious about the groundskeeper’s wages, or about the man for whom the garden was always somebody else’s lawn. The populists exploit that blind spot dishonestly. They did not invent it.
Three coordinates locate the man.
The hero is the gardener, and the worship is vigilance. He guards an inheritance he insists no one earned and treats the guarding as the whole of the work. Where other heroes claim their order is natural and therefore safe, he claims his order is a fluke and therefore doomed without him, and he has made a life out of refusing to treat the fluke as permanent. The faith is dark and the labor is daily and there is no harvest, only the holding of ground.
The unnamed rival is not Deneen and not Carlson. It is the man who feels no terror at all. The reader for whom the Miracle is just the weather, permanent, free, owed, a thing that was always going to be here and always will. A hero system can survive men who hate the garden, because hatred at least believes the garden is real and worth attacking. It cannot survive an audience that cannot picture the jungle. Indifference is the one enemy gratitude has no answer for, because you cannot be grateful for what you cannot imagine losing, and Goldberg’s whole project assumes a listener who can still be frightened. Most cannot. That is the rival he does not name, because to name it is to admit the sermon may be falling on a people who feel safe.
The cost the ledger cannot price is the Remnant. He chose to keep his judgment and the movement kept the name. He has the subscribers and the chair and the dogs and a good living, and a smaller country than the one he was raised to inherit, the one with Buckley (1925-2008) in it and a magazine that felt like a home. Nock told him this would be the deal. The intellectual leaves the words where the right few will find them and never learns their faces. The consolation and the wound are one sentence. The Remnant hears you, and you will never know who they are.
