Jeffrey Mark Goldberg was born in Brooklyn in 1965 and raised in Malverne, a Long Island suburb he later described as Catholic. His parents Daniel and Ellen Goldberg sent him to public school. His grandfather had come from Leova, a shtetl in what is now Moldova. Goldberg grew up with the standard inheritance of postwar American Jews. Holocaust memory close at hand, secular professional ambition, suburban comfort, and a faint sense of standing outside the dominant Christian culture of his town.
The trip to Israel at thirteen reset him. He came home a Zionist in the strong sense. He read Herzl, Jabotinsky, Begin, the founding generation. By the time he arrived at the University of Pennsylvania, he had already decided that the Jewish question was his question. He edited The Daily Pennsylvanian. He left Penn before graduating. He moved to Israel, took dual citizenship, and enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces.
The IDF placed him at Ktzi’ot prison in the Negev during the First Intifada. Ktzi’ot held thousands of Palestinian detainees. Goldberg guarded them. The work was bureaucratic, hot, and morally compromising. He met a detainee named Rafiq Hijazi, a math teacher and PLO functionary from a Gaza refugee camp. They argued. They kept arguing for years, by letter, in person, across borders. Hijazi became the central human relationship of Goldberg’s later book Prisoners and the central case study in his evolving thinking about the conflict.
That experience set the terms of his work. He did not arrive at Israel-Palestine as an outside observer who later acquired a moral stake. He arrived already committed and then watched the commitment complicate. The man on the other side of the wire was not an abstraction. The man on his own side was not always righteous. Goldberg’s later writing carries this doubling. He defends Israel. He records its failures. He keeps the friendship with Hijazi as a private rebuke against any temptation to make either side disappear.
He came back to the United States and started over as a reporter. He began at The Washington Post on the police beat, the most pedestrian apprenticeship in American journalism. He moved to The Forward, the venerable English-language Jewish paper, where he served as New York bureau chief from 1992 to 1998. The Forward years gave him a base in American Jewish intellectual life. He learned the names, the feuds, the publications, the older generation of Yiddishist socialists giving way to younger neoconservatives and liberals. He wrote for New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine. By the late 1990s he had a reputation as a young Middle East hand with literary range.
The New Yorker hired him in 2000 as Middle East correspondent. He produced the 2002 piece “In the Party of God,” a deep report on Hezbollah that won the National Magazine Award. The Hezbollah work showed his method. He embeds. He talks to fighters and clerics. He reads the doctrinal texts. He returns with a long narrative that tries to render the organization as it understands itself while also making moral claims about what it does. The piece treated Hezbollah as a serious ideological actor, not a generic terror group, and that seriousness gave the moral judgments more weight.
The Iraq War period damaged him and left him standing. In 2002 he published a long New Yorker piece arguing that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al-Qaeda and was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. The article moved through Washington at speed. Cheney cited it. Other journalists picked up its claims. The ties Goldberg reported did not survive the postwar inquiry. The WMD program was a fiction. Goldberg later acknowledged that parts of the reporting did not hold up. He did not retract everything. He did not become a vocal critic of the war on its own terms. He absorbed the criticism, narrowed his claims, and kept working.
The Iraq episode is the hinge of his career. A young reporter who had broken less prestigiously might have been ruined. Goldberg was not. He had relationships, awards, the New Yorker imprimatur, and an editor at The Atlantic who wanted him. David Bradley courted him for years, sending gifts, including ponies for his children. Goldberg moved to The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent.
At The Atlantic he wrote the long pieces that defined his second act. The Obama interviews are the most important. He sat with Barack Obama repeatedly across the presidency. The 2016 cover story “The Obama Doctrine” gave the president a venue to articulate his foreign policy in his own categories. Obama on Syria, on Saudi free riders, on the limits of American power, on the temperament of allies. The piece is unusual in modern presidential coverage. It is neither hagiography nor adversarial probe. It is an extended self-presentation, edited and framed by a journalist Obama trusted to take him seriously.
That trust is the asset Goldberg has built. He does not break sources. He understands what they want to communicate. He gives their best version room to breathe. Critics call this access journalism. The label captures something but not everything. The deeper trade is interpretive. Goldberg helps officials make sense of themselves to a public they cannot address directly. In return he gets material no one else gets.
The Trump years sharpened his oppositional posture. In September 2020 he published “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.'” The story relied on anonymous sources who described Trump’s private contempt for fallen soldiers. The piece was contested. Trump denied it. Some sources later went on the record, others did not. The story landed because of what it confirmed about a president many of Goldberg’s readers already distrusted, and because of where Goldberg sat. He was not a partisan blogger. He was the editor of The Atlantic. The story had institutional weight.
He followed it with a longer book, On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump. The book argues that the senior military officers of the Trump period held the line against an authoritarian president and that their restraint amounts to civic virtue. The argument is sincere. It also serves the officer corps Goldberg has spent two decades cultivating as sources. Mark Milley in particular emerges as the central figure, the chairman of the joint chiefs who maneuvered to keep the military out of domestic politics during a chaotic transition. Goldberg’s relationship with Milley is as close as a journalist-source relationship gets without crossing the line.
In March 2025 he published a story that was both a scoop and an embarrassment for the Trump administration. National security advisor Mike Waltz inadvertently added Goldberg to a Signal group chat where senior officials, including the secretary of defense, the vice president, and the director of national intelligence, discussed imminent strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. Goldberg watched the discussion unfold in real time. He left the group, verified the strikes occurred as described, and published. The story exposed a lapse in operational security at the highest level. It also showed how thin the membrane between elite journalism and the national security state has become. The accident was possible only because Goldberg’s number sat in the contacts of an official who thought he was adding someone else with a similar name.
He took over The Atlantic as editor in chief in 2016. The magazine under his direction has become the dominant American venue for long-form essayistic journalism aimed at the educated professional class. The Pulitzer Prizes started arriving. The National Magazine Awards for General Excellence came in 2022, 2023, and 2024. The subscription numbers grew. The voices he elevated define what counts as serious commentary in centrist American letters. Anne Applebaum on authoritarianism. George Packer on the unmaking of America. Ta-Nehisi Coates on race, until the falling out over Coates’s 2024 book on Israel-Palestine. Caitlin Flanagan on the manners of the professional class. Adam Serwer on the politics of cruelty. The roster carries a recognizable politics. It is liberal, internationalist, suspicious of populism, attentive to institutional decay, and committed to the proposition that long magazine pieces still shape the political conversation.
Goldberg’s editorial taste runs conservative in a literary sense. He likes the long narrative essay. He likes reporting that ends with a moral. He likes prose that takes itself seriously. He does not run the magazine as a debate club. The Atlantic under his direction has a house view, even when it publishes a range of writers. The view is that liberal democracy is fragile, that elites have specific responsibilities to defend it, and that the work of explanation and persuasion is part of that defense. Critics call this a class project. The description is not wrong. Goldberg might say the project is also correct.
His thinking on Israel has shifted across the decades, though the underlying commitment has not. He became a liberal Zionist in his youth and remains one. The content of liberal Zionism has changed around him. In the early 2000s he was a hawk on Iran, suspicious of Palestinian leadership, defensive of the Israeli mainstream. As Israeli politics shifted right, as the Likud governments of Netanyahu locked in settlement expansion and weakened the prospects for a Palestinian state, Goldberg’s tone changed. The 2014 Obama interview, where the president warned that Israel risked international isolation, was Goldberg helping to deliver a message from the American liberal establishment to its Israeli counterparts. The message was that the old arrangement was fraying. He renounced his Israeli citizenship in 2013. The gesture was symbolic. He kept the moral stake but withdrew the legal one.
The Gaza war that began in October 2023 has tested his position more than any prior episode. He has condemned Hamas in absolute terms. He has criticized the Netanyahu government with growing sharpness. He has published writers including Peter Beinart and Franklin Foer who occupy different points on the liberal Zionist spectrum. He has not gone where some of his former readers have gone, into open anti-Zionism. He has not gone where the right wants him to go, into uncritical defense of the Israeli campaign. He occupies a position that critics on both sides find inadequate. The position might also be the position of a substantial portion of American Jews of his generation.
His prose has identifiable habits. He writes in a confident first person when the story calls for it. He uses the conventions of the New Yorker school: the scene-setting opening, the embedded character study, the gradual unfolding of a moral question. He is not a stylist of the highest order. His sentences do not turn. His paragraphs do not surprise. The work earns its weight through reporting and access, not through prose. He knows this. He hires writers who can do what he cannot.
His sources of intellectual authority are mostly American Jewish, mostly liberal, mostly attached to the older institutions of American letters and policy. Leon Wieseltier shaped him at New Republic distance. Martin Peretz hovered in the background of liberal Zionist debate. Bernard Lewis on the Middle East. Walter Russell Mead on grand strategy in a more conservative key. He has read the European Jewish tradition: Arendt, Berlin, Trilling at one remove. He is not a theorist. He is a working journalist whose ideas come from immersion rather than reading. The reading supplements the immersion.
He has now added Washington Week with The Atlantic to his portfolio. Since August 2023 he has moderated the PBS roundtable that has been the central television forum for Beltway journalism since Paul Duke launched it in 1967. The merger of the program with The Atlantic brand consummates his curatorial position. He picks the panel. He sets the questions. He decides which stories the educated public will hear treated as serious. The print magazine, the television program, and his own continuing reporting form a single platform. No other journalist of his generation occupies an equivalent perch.
His personal life runs steady. He has been married since 1993 to Pamela Ress Reeves. They have three children. They live in Washington, D.C. He is observant in the cultural Jewish sense rather than the religious. He talks about God rarely in his published writing. The seriousness of his Jewish identity is ethical and historical. The Holocaust shapes him. Israel shapes him. The American Jewish community of his generation, with its compromises and its successes, shapes him.
What does he believe? He believes that American power, used with restraint and self-knowledge, can do good in the world. He believes that liberal democracy is more fragile than it looks. He believes that journalism at its best is civic responsibility. He believes that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state and that the right does not absolve Israel of obligations to Palestinians or to itself. He believes that public life requires courage and that most people in public life do not have it. He believes that the institutions of mid-century American liberalism, including the magazines he has edited and written for, are worth preserving.
Critics dispute these beliefs from different directions. The right reads him as the smiling face of an establishment liberalism that lectures the country while losing it. Parts of the left read him as a hawk in remission, the Iraq War reporter who failed upward, the editor who polices the boundaries of acceptable criticism of Israel. The Palestinian intellectual tradition has never trusted him, though some of its writers respect his seriousness. The Israeli right despises him. The Israeli left finds him useful. The American Jewish establishment treats him as one of its own.
He is now sixty. He has been editing The Atlantic for almost a decade. He has more authority than any editor of the magazine since the era of Edward Weeks in the mid-twentieth century. His next decade will determine whether the platform he has built outlasts the political conditions that produced it. The educated professional class that subscribes to his magazine, watches his television program, and reads his essays is itself under pressure. The conditions that allowed a young man from Malverne to guard prisoners in the Negev, write for The New Yorker, and edit The Atlantic are not permanent. Goldberg has spent a career interpreting other people’s institutions. He now runs one.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
David Pinsof argues that intellectuals flatter themselves with one perfect story. Everything wrong in the world comes from misunderstanding. Polarization is misunderstanding. Bigotry is misunderstanding. Misinformation is misunderstanding. War is misunderstanding. The story is perfect because it places the people whose job is understanding at the center of every solution. The intellectual saves the world by doing what he was already doing.
Jeffrey Goldberg has built a career as the case study Pinsof did not name. The Atlantic under Goldberg runs the misunderstanding myth at industrial scale. His house view comes down to one proposition: the public has been misled, and a better-informed public would behave better. Trumpism is misinformation. Vaccine resistance is misinformation. Skepticism of foreign policy elites is misinformation. The rise of the Israeli right is a failure of moral imagination. The fragility of liberal democracy is a problem of civic education. The solution in every case is more long-form journalism by people like Goldberg.
Pinsof’s lens reads this differently. The voters Goldberg’s writers diagnose as misinformed understand their incentives well. They support the politicians who advance their coalition’s interests against the coalition Goldberg represents. They distrust the institutions Goldberg’s class controls because those institutions have, from their perspective, sold them out repeatedly across forty years. They know what they are doing. Calling them confused is a coalition move, not a diagnosis.
Take Goldberg’s signature treatment of polarization. The Atlantic produces essays grieving the loss of a shared American story, the breakdown of trust, the retreat into tribal media. The framing assumes that polarization is pathological, a wound to be healed. Pinsof’s response: partisans hate each other because they compete for control of the coercive apparatus of the state, and the stakes are prison, taxes, schools, borders, free speech, military force. In a high-stakes contest, demonization is a weapon, not a brain-fart. Goldberg’s coalition demonizes the other side every week. It then publishes pieces lamenting that the other side demonizes them. The asymmetry stays invisible from inside the magazine because the magazine’s demonization wears the costume of moral seriousness.
Take “disinformation,” the term that has organized so much of Goldberg’s editorial output. Pinsof points out that the broad definition swallows nearly all political communication, including the framing produced by The Atlantic. The narrow definition catches little that is new or particularly threatening. Either way the term does political work. It marks some speech as a public health hazard requiring intervention while exempting the speech of the people doing the marking. Goldberg’s magazine has run pieces calling for platform moderation, for media literacy programs, for elite gatekeeping over what counts as legitimate information. The proposed remedies all enhance the authority of the class Goldberg leads. Pinsof’s reading: the disinformation panic is not an error in Goldberg’s reasoning. It is a successful jurisdictional claim.
Take the foreign policy failures. Goldberg supported aspects of the Iraq War. His pre-war reporting on Saddam Hussein’s supposed ties to Al-Qaeda contributed to the climate that made invasion seem reasonable to educated readers. The reporting did not survive. Goldberg absorbed the criticism, narrowed his claims, and kept working. The professional consequences were minimal. Pinsof’s framework predicts this. The failure was shared across the coalition. Punishing Goldberg would have implicated everyone. The ecosystem metabolizes errors that align with shared priors and expels errors that violate them. Goldberg made a coalition-aligned mistake. He paid coalition-aligned costs, which is to say almost none.
The same logic explains the rebound. Goldberg returned to interpret later wars and later presidencies as if his earlier interpretive failures had been minor stumbles in a long career of careful judgment. The “Obama Doctrine” piece in 2016 is the high expression of this. Goldberg sat with Obama and helped him narrate his foreign policy to the educated American public. The piece reads as understanding produced. Pinsof might call it alliance maintenance. Obama got his worldview transmitted in flattering form. Goldberg got the prestige of access. The reader got a story that confirmed the moral seriousness of the people in charge. No one in the chain had an incentive to disrupt the others.
The 2020 “losers and suckers” story and the 2025 Signal chat incident showcase the same machinery. In the first case, sources inside the national security establishment chose Goldberg as the vehicle for damaging Trump. In the second case, a Trump official added Goldberg to the chat because Goldberg’s number sat in the elite contact list. Both episodes treat Goldberg as the trusted recipient. Pinsof’s lens makes sense of why. Goldberg has built a long reputation as the journalist who reliably translates elite communications in ways the elite recognize as fair. He does not betray his sources. He does not break the frame. He produces interpretations that flatter the coalition while seeming to challenge it. The reward for that pattern is more access. The access produces more interpretation. The interpretation produces more access.
Take Goldberg’s Israel work. He presents himself as a liberal Zionist whose criticisms of Israeli right-wing governments come from love and concern. His position has shifted as Israeli politics moved right. Pinsof’s reading: the position has shifted because Goldberg’s coalition has shifted. American liberal Jews face a coalition crisis when Israeli policy makes the alliance with American progressivism uncomfortable. Goldberg’s job is to keep that alliance viable by performing distance from Israeli excesses while preserving the underlying commitment to Israel as a Jewish state. The renunciation of Israeli citizenship in 2013 is the perfect symbolic gesture. It signals a moral refusal that costs almost nothing. The intricate balancing act is not a man wrestling with hard truths in public. It is a man managing a coalition in difficulty.
Take the bridging-divides project. Goldberg hosts conferences on disinformation and the erosion of democracy. The Atlantic publishes pieces on civil discourse, on listening across differences, on the vanishing center. The events feature Republicans and Democrats who agree on what counts as serious thought, which is the same as agreeing on who counts as a serious thinker. The dissident Republicans on these stages are dissidents because they share Goldberg’s framework. The dissident Democrats are dissidents in the same direction. The supposed bridging is a ritual where the same coalition celebrates its own breadth. Pinsof’s framework predicts this. Bridging-divides events do not bridge divides. They are status displays where elites perform the virtue of openness while excluding the people whose openness might cost them something.
Take the military-honor work. Goldberg’s book on McCain, Milley, and Mattis frames the senior officer corps as the guardrail against authoritarian excess. The argument is sincere. It also delivers extraordinary value to the military leadership Goldberg has cultivated as sources. The officers come out as principled men. Goldberg comes out as their chronicler. The educated American public comes out reassured that the institutions of power can be trusted in the right hands. Pinsof’s reading: this is a triple win for the coalition. The military protects its prestige against right-wing populist attacks. Goldberg protects his access. The reader protects his sense that the world has serious adults somewhere doing serious work. None of this requires any of the parties to be lying. Pinsof says sincerity is part of how the system runs. The intellectuals believe their own copy.
The harshest application of Pinsof concerns Goldberg’s stated mission against his actual function. Goldberg says his work serves understanding, civic life, the soul of democracy, the integrity of public discourse. Judge him by deeds. The Atlantic under his leadership has become a clearinghouse for elite anxiety addressed to elites. Its readers are richer than the average American by a wide margin, more credentialed, more concentrated in coastal metro areas, more aligned with the Democratic Party. Its writers come from a thin slice of the American intellectual class. Its arguments tend to flatter that slice. Its diagnoses of the country’s problems put the people who buy the magazine in the role of misunderstood victims and the people who do not in the role of misinformed villains. Pinsof might say this is the function the magazine performs because the function pays. The mission statement is decoration.
The Pinsof reading does not require Goldberg to be a fraud. It requires him to be a normal human animal who has found a niche and worked it well. He believes the things he says. He believes them harder because believing them serves him. He cannot easily think his way out of the framework because the framework is what produces his salary, his prestige, his marriage circle, his invitations, his television show. His self-deception is functional. His sincerity is real. Both run together because evolution gave us minds that align belief with interest without our noticing.
What does Goldberg get wrong, in Pinsof’s framework? He gets wrong the proposition that the world’s troubles trace to a shortage of good information. The American public has access to more information than any public in history. The decline of trust in institutions has tracked the rise of access to information about how those institutions actually behave. The polarization Goldberg laments has grown alongside the proliferation of magazines, books, podcasts, and television programs aimed at explanation. Pinsof’s diagnosis: the misunderstanding myth has been falsified by the experiment. More understanding has not produced less conflict. More understanding has produced sharper conflict because the public now sees more clearly what the various coalitions want and what they will do to get it. Goldberg responds to this by demanding more understanding, which is to say more Goldberg. The hawk’s eye is in fine working order. It just sees what it has incentive to see.
Liberal readers of The Atlantic will find this conclusion uncomfortable. Goldberg succeeds at his stated mission only insofar as the stated mission was always cover for the actual one. The country does not have a misunderstanding problem. The educated professional class and the rest of the country want different things and compete for the same instruments of state power. Goldberg dresses the competition in the language of understanding so that one side can fight without admitting it fights. Pinsof closes his essay with the proposition that the only misunderstanding is the belief there has been a misunderstanding. Goldberg’s career sets that proposition in marble.
Alliance Theory
Jeffrey Goldberg’s career sits at the junction of two coalitions whose members are increasingly rivals with each other, and his editorial output is the long record of his attempt to keep them aligned.
Coalition one is the American liberal establishment. Educated professionals, mainstream journalists, centrist Democrats, the national security state in its post-Trump configuration, university administrators, foundation officers, the institutional elite of the Acela corridor. Coalition two is American liberal Zionism. The committed Jewish defense network, AIPAC’s reformist wing, Israeli centrists, the diaspora institutions that fund and defend Israel through the framework of liberal democratic legitimacy.
These coalitions overlap heavily and have done so for two generations. American Jews have been disproportionate participants in the liberal establishment, and the liberal establishment has been the main American sponsor of Israel through Cold War alignment, AIPAC’s bipartisan operation, and the human rights vocabulary that frames Israel as a fellow democracy. The overlap has eroded across the past decade. Younger progressives within Goldberg’s primary coalition have moved against Israel through BDS, anti-colonial frameworks, and a generational redefinition of Jews as White Americans rather than as a vulnerable minority. October 7 accelerated the realignment. Goldberg now sits at the friction point.
The propagandistic biases run cleanly when applied to Israel and the Jewish coalition.
Victim biases. The 2015 cover story “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?” framed European antisemitism as existential. The piece named Muslim immigration as a primary driver, a framing the broader liberal coalition resists. Goldberg published it because the Jewish coalition required the framing. The Atlantic’s post-October 7 coverage has emphasized Hamas’s atrocities, Iranian-backed terror, hostage suffering, and the surge of campus antisemitism with the moral weight Alliance Theory predicts for in-group victimhood. Mitigating frames go unused. Root-cause arguments that might implicate the broader liberal coalition do not appear. The victim narrative stays clean.
Perpetrator biases. Goldberg has called Netanyahu the worst prime minister in Israel’s history. He has criticized settlement expansion, judicial reform, and the conduct of the Gaza campaign. None of this constitutes attacking the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. The criticism stays inside the coalition’s frame. Israel might be governed badly. Israel deserves to exist, deserves to defend itself, and deserves moral standing inside the family of democracies. Critics outside the coalition who attack the legitimacy receive a different treatment. They are antisemites, anti-Zionists, useful idiots for Iran and Hamas. The line between acceptable criticism and unacceptable attack runs along the coalition boundary.
Attributional biases. Israeli failures are attributed to specific bad actors. Bibi. The settler movement. The right-wing coalition. Israeli successes are attributed to deeper civilizational achievements. The startup economy. The military’s capabilities. The democratic institutions. American Jewish achievement is internal. American Jewish victimization is external, the work of antisemites operating without provocation. Hamas’s atrocities are internal to Hamas. Israeli military errors are external pressures, fog of war, the impossible asymmetric situation.
The same biases run when applied to the primary coalition.
Trump and the MAGA movement are treated with the moral intensity Alliance Theory predicts for an existential rival. The 2020 “losers and suckers” story did not require unanimous source agreement to land. It required only that it confirm what the coalition already knew. Trump’s record on Israel was disregarded as a transitivity problem. The standard rule says the friend of my ally is my friend. Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, brokered the Abraham Accords, and presided over the most pro-Israel American administration in decades. None of that updated his position in Goldberg’s framework. The coalition logic ranks the threat to the liberal establishment higher than the gain for Israel. Transitivity defers to the primary alliance.
Mark Milley travels in the opposite direction. Milley is a four-star general, a member of an institution Goldberg’s coalition spent the 1960s and 1970s holding in suspicion. He becomes a hero in Goldberg’s reporting because he is positioned against Trump. The military’s coalition standing has reversed. It now belongs to the liberal alliance because its leadership has aligned against the coalition’s primary rival. Goldberg’s book on McCain, Milley, and Mattis is the literary expression of that realignment. The intelligence agencies travel the same path. The CIA and FBI were villains of the New Left in Goldberg’s youth. They became allies once they aligned against Trump. The biases tracked the alliance shift, not any change in what the agencies do.
Mainstream Democrats receive perpetrator-bias treatment. Joe Biden’s Gaza ceasefire failures, the Afghanistan withdrawal, the abandonment of allies in Kabul, the inflation crisis, the Hunter Biden corruption questions all receive the contextualized treatment Alliance Theory predicts for in-group failures. Tradeoffs, constraints, the impossibility of the situation, the better of two bad options. Republican failures get internalized to character and intent.
The bridging alliance produces strange bedfellows. Goldberg is allied with intelligence officials who broke laws his coalition condemned in the Bush years. He is allied with corporate media executives whose institutions his coalition critiques as oligarchic. He is allied with progressive activists who view Israel as a colonial project. He is allied with Israeli centrists whose own coalition partners include settler-aligned politicians. The contradictions do not register as contradictions because the alliance does its work. The narrative produced by Goldberg’s editorial position smooths the contradictions through selective emphasis and asymmetric framing.
Iraq is the test case for how alliance updating works. In 2002 Goldberg was inside a hawkish coalition that produced the case for invasion. His New Yorker piece on Saddam-Al Qaeda links was central to that coalition’s argument. The coalition collapsed when the war went badly. Goldberg did not collapse with it. He repositioned within the liberal internationalist successor coalition, which emphasized restraint without abandoning American leadership. The biases ran in the new direction. Bush’s failures were internal to Bush, the neoconservatives, the bad intelligence community of that period. Obama’s failures were external to Obama, products of the impossible situation he inherited. The same Goldberg, the same prose register, the same moral seriousness. The coalition shifted, the biases shifted, the writing tracked the shift.
Pinsof and his coauthors insist that alliance contents are historically contingent. Small accidents of biography lock people into coalitions that determine what their belief systems will look like. Goldberg’s case is exemplary. He went to Israel at thirteen. He served in the IDF during the First Intifada. He guarded Palestinian prisoners and built a friendship with one of them. He came of professional age inside American Jewish journalism in the 1990s, then graduated to The New Yorker, then to The Atlantic. None of that biography forced any particular set of policy commitments. It locked him into a coalition through similarity, interdependence, and transitivity, and the policy commitments followed. Had he grown up in Lebanon and served in Hezbollah’s youth wing, he might be writing the mirror image of his current work with the same moral conviction.
Alliance Theory predicts that elites are more skilled at coalition narrative production, not more principled in their commitments. Goldberg fits the prediction. He runs the bridging alliance with more sophistication than the average partisan. He acknowledges complications the partisan ignores. He admits errors the partisan denies. He criticizes his own side at calibrated intervals. The acknowledgments, admissions, and criticisms all fall safely within the coalition boundary. He does not adopt the framings that would cost him his position. He does not say that American Jews are a privileged White ethnic group whose attachment to Israel functions as colonial soft power. He does not say that Hamas’s grievances reflect material conditions Israel created. He does not say that the liberal establishment has earned the populist contempt it now receives. He stays inside the lines.
What Alliance Theory does not predict, and Goldberg does not provide, is principled coherence. His positions read as a coherent worldview only from inside the bridging alliance. Strong on Trump’s authoritarianism, soft on the Bush administration’s security state. Strong on antisemitism from the right, slower to publish on antisemitism from the left until the coalition could no longer ignore it. Strong on Israel’s right to defend itself, soft on Israel’s right to govern Palestinians. Strong on civic norms when populists violate them, quieter when intelligence officials and military leaders bend them in coalition-aligned directions. The pattern is the signature of bridging-alliance maintenance, the predictable output of human alliance psychology operating at the commanding heights of American media.
The Great Delusion
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer’s argument in The Great Delusion cuts against The Atlantic’s editorial program. He says liberalism rests on a false anthropology. Humans are not atomistic actors who reason their way to universal principles. They are tribal animals socialized into particular value systems before reason begins to operate. The universalism that follows from the liberal premise is not a discovery about human nature but a parochial doctrine of a specific Western intellectual class, dressed in the language of universal truth.
Goldberg is a clean specimen of the doctrine Mearsheimer attacks. He treats liberal democracy, human rights, and the rules-based international order as universal aspirations any reasonable person might endorse if properly informed. His writing on Trump, Putin, populism, antisemitism, and Israeli politics rests on the assumption that the right values are available to anyone willing to think clearly. The only question is why so many people fail to think clearly.
Mearsheimer says the question is wrong. People reach the conclusions their socialization produces. Goldberg’s universalism is a product of socialization. The New York Jewish liberal milieu, the elite media training of The New Yorker and The Atlantic, the Acela corridor’s late-imperial cosmopolitanism, the post-Holocaust American Jewish synthesis of liberal universalism with particularist Jewish defense. Had Goldberg grown up inside a different value infusion, he might hold different views with the same certainty.
The implication that bites first is that his universalism is tribal in disguise. The Atlantic’s editorial program presents itself as the voice of humane reason against atavistic forces. Mearsheimer reads the same program as the value system of a specific class with tribal interests in maintaining its position. The “rules-based order” benefits the educated professionals who staff its institutions. The “human rights” framework gives American power a moral vocabulary. The “liberal democracy” defense protects the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. None of these are universal in the sense Goldberg implies. They are particular, contingent, and rooted in the survival interests of a specific tribe.
The contradiction inside Goldberg’s own commitments tightens the point. His strongest personal attachments are to Jewish peoplehood, Israeli security, and the post-Holocaust covenant of mutual defense among Jews. These are explicit tribal commitments, more particularist than anything in his political opponents’ platforms. Mearsheimer’s framework forces a question Goldberg avoids. If tribal commitment is legitimate for Jews, on what grounds is it illegitimate for Americans, Palestinians, Iranians, Hungarians, Russians, or any other people? Goldberg writes as if Jewish tribalism is moral seriousness and other tribalism is pathology. The asymmetry holds inside his coalition. It does not survive Mearsheimer’s anthropology.
Iraq becomes legible through the same lens. Mearsheimer was the leading academic critic of the war and of the broader liberal interventionist project. His argument was that you cannot impose liberal democracy on people whose socialization has produced incompatible values. The values of Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities were not waiting beneath a thin layer of Saddam’s tyranny to emerge as Jeffersonian republicanism. They were the durable products of centuries of socialization, and they might reassert themselves as soon as the imposed structure came down. They did. Goldberg’s reporting on Saddam-Al Qaeda links contributed to the intellectual case for invasion. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicted the war would fail. Goldberg’s anthropology was blind to the variables that drove the outcome.
Trump becomes legible too. Goldberg treats Trump’s rise as a misinformation problem, an authoritarian temptation, a failure of civic education, a virus to be vaccinated against. Mearsheimer’s framework reads Trump’s rise as the predictable response of Americans whose socialization gave them tribal attachments to nation, place, and inherited culture, and who watched the liberal universalist project erode each of those attachments across forty years. The Trump voter functions normally. He follows the human design Mearsheimer describes. Goldberg cannot see this because his framework rules out the possibility of legitimate national sentiment. Anything that looks like national sentiment must be coded as racism, ignorance, or manipulation.
The bridging-divides project collapses under Mearsheimer’s premise. The Atlantic hosts conferences and publishes essays aimed at bridging American political divides through better discourse. Mearsheimer’s argument predicts the project will fail. The divides do not come from misunderstanding. They come from different socializations producing different values. The progressive Manhattan editor and the small-town Trump voter have not received the same value infusion. They do not argue inside a shared moral frame. The bridging effort presupposes the anthropology Mearsheimer rejects.
Behind all of this is Mearsheimer’s claim about reason. He says reason is the least important of the three forces shaping human preferences. Innate sentiments come first. Socialization comes second. Reason comes third, and operates on material the first two have already provided. Goldberg’s editorial program treats reason as the engine of moral progress. Better arguments produce better citizens. Better journalism produces better politics. Better discourse produces better outcomes. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says this is backwards. The arguments do not change the socialization. They emerge from it.
Goldberg presents himself as a careful thinker who follows arguments wherever they lead. Mearsheimer says no such thinker exists. The arguments lead where the socialization has prepared them to lead. What Goldberg calls intellectual integrity is the consistency between his conclusions and his tribe’s interests. The conclusions track because the reasoning had no place else to go. He could not write himself out of his class even if he tried, and he has no incentive to try.
The defense of liberal democracy becomes the defense of a specific value system held by a specific tribe in specific places at a specific time. Not universal. Not the natural endpoint of human moral development. One set of arrangements that has worked for one set of people in particular conditions. Goldberg writes as if the defense of these arrangements is the defense of humanity. Mearsheimer says it is the defense of a corner of humanity, important to its members, indifferent or hostile to most of the species. The grandeur of the project drains away.
The Israel question is the test case for whether Goldberg can absorb the argument. Goldberg defends Jewish particularism with full Mearsheimerian conviction. Tribal attachment. Historical memory. Ancestral loyalty. Defense of the in-group against existential threats. He treats American particularism, European particularism, and Russian particularism as if the same impulses, operating in non-Jewish populations, were diseases. The contradiction is invisible from inside the coalition because the coalition does not require him to resolve it. From inside Mearsheimer’s framework the contradiction is the central feature of his work.
What Goldberg cannot say, and Mearsheimer can, is that The Atlantic is the in-house journal of the educated American liberal class, doing the work all such publications do for all such classes throughout history. Defending the class’s interests. Narrating its self-image. Derogating its rivals. Recruiting talent. Signaling boundaries. Stabilizing morale. Goldberg is its editor in the sense that he is its tribal storyteller. His individual gifts are real, but they operate inside a function the magazine performs whether he edits it or another competent person does.
The implication that bites hardest is this. Goldberg’s career rests on the proposition that liberal universalism is true. If Mearsheimer is right, the proposition is false. The career then rests on a category error, mistaking the values of a particular tribe in a particular moment for the values of humanity. Better journalism cannot fix the error. The error sits in the premise the journalism rests on. Goldberg cannot edit his way out of it any more than the medieval cleric could edit his way out of Christendom’s claim to universal civilization. He is the chronicler of a parochial faith that experiences itself as the truth about everyone.
That is the cost of serious membership in any value tribe. You see your own commitments as universal because socialization works that way. Mearsheimer’s claim is that escape is impossible. The honest move for a serious thinker is to name the tribe that holds him.
Charisma and Social Paradoxes
The first paradox Goldberg executes is the embedded-but-independent paradox. The paradox runs as follows. Goldberg has explicit commitments to Zionism and to the Atlantic’s centrist-establishment positioning. He has held these commitments openly. He served in the IDF as a young man. He has written extensively about his Jewish identity and his Zionist commitments. He does not pretend to be a neutral observer of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The paradox is that the commitments coexist with his role as a journalist whose authority depends on being read as having access that produces independent judgment. The audience needs Goldberg to be embedded enough to produce the access. The audience also needs him to be independent enough to produce judgment that exceeds the embedment. Both halves operate at once. The commitments are visible. The independence is also visible. The paradox holds because the audience that reads Goldberg participates in maintaining both halves at once.
Pinsof’s framework treats this kind of paradox as the social paradox in his exact technical sense. The reader knows about the commitments. The reader also reads the work as having authority that exceeds the commitments. The two readings are kept simultaneously through a particular kind of attention that does not collapse them into each other. The paradox stays stable as long as the reader does not insist on choosing between the two readings. Most Atlantic readers do not insist. They benefit from the paradox. The paradox lets them read sophisticated reporting on Israel and the Middle East from a writer whose commitments they share or at least respect. The shared commitment is part of what makes the reading possible. The reading would be different if the commitments were not shared. The paradox lets the audience experience the reading as independent journalism while drawing the comfort that comes from the writer’s coalition alignment.
The cue-to-signal-to-negative-cue trajectory applies to Goldberg’s career in unusually visible ways. The early work in the late 1990s and early 2000s read as honest cue. The Hezbollah reporting from Lebanon, the Saddam Hussein profiling, the access journalism in the Middle East all read as the work of a reporter who was actually doing the work. The work was real. The cues were honest. By the mid-2000s the cues had become signals. Goldberg’s October 2002 New Yorker piece on the supposed Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, which helped make the case for the Iraq war, was the inflection point. The piece was reported journalism in form. It was also coalition production in function. It supplied the case for war that the Bush administration needed and that a substantial part of the American foreign-policy establishment wanted to be true. The piece’s empirical claims have not held up. The connection it asserted between Saddam and Al Qaeda was not established by the subsequent record. The piece was wrong in ways that mattered.
The wrongness is interesting for the framework because it shows how signal can override cue when the coalition function is strong enough. The reporting standards that should have caught the empirical weakness did not catch it because the coalition that wanted the piece to be true included most of the people who would otherwise have caught the weakness. The piece sailed through the editorial process at the New Yorker. It was widely cited. The pushback came from outside the coalition the piece served. The framework treats this as the standard pattern. Cues become signals when the coalition needs the signals enough to override the cue function. The cue function is what produces accuracy. The signal function is what produces coalition coordination. The two compete. Coalitions select for signals when the coordination matters more than the accuracy.
Goldberg has acknowledged in subsequent years that the Iraq reporting was wrong. The acknowledgment matters for the framework because it shows what happens after a coalition signal collides with empirical reality that contradicts it. The acknowledgment does not dissolve the paradox. It accommodates the paradox to the new evidence. Goldberg continued at the New Yorker, moved to the Atlantic, became editor in chief. The institution that produced the wrong piece absorbed the acknowledgment without dissolving the institutional position that had produced the piece. The framework predicts this. Coalitions absorb errors. The absorption is what coalition stability looks like. The errors do not destroy the coalition. They produce localized adjustments that preserve the larger structure.
The second paradox is the access-as-evidence paradox. Goldberg has unusual access. He has interviewed Obama, Netanyahu, multiple American presidents and Israeli prime ministers, Iranian leaders, Syrian opposition figures, and a wide range of intelligence and military officials. The access is real. The pieces that emerge from the access have authority because the access could not be faked. The paradox is that access of this kind is granted because the grantor expects something in return. The expectation does not have to be explicit. The grantor knows what kind of piece the writer produces. The writer would not get repeat access if the pieces did not serve the grantor’s purposes. The arrangement is symbiotic. The access produces authority for the writer. The writer’s pieces produce framing for the grantor. Both sides benefit. Both sides need the strategic dimensions of the arrangement to stay concealed because acknowledging the arrangement would compromise it.
The Obama interviews on the Iran deal in 2015 and 2016 are the cleanest case for this paradox in Goldberg’s career. Obama gave Goldberg extensive access for The Obama Doctrine, a long piece that helped frame Obama’s foreign policy legacy. The access was generous. The framing was favorable to Obama in important respects. The piece was widely read as sympathetic but rigorous. Pinsof’s framework would say the piece operated as classic social paradox. Goldberg presented as a serious journalist asking serious questions. Obama presented as a serious president giving serious answers. The audience read the piece as serious journalism on serious topics. All three readings were partly true. The fourth reading, that the piece was also coalition production for an administration that needed favorable framing of a controversial policy, was equally true and stayed mostly invisible because none of the three primary participants benefited from making it visible.
The Trump-era national security reporting compounds the access paradox. Goldberg has reported extensively on Trump’s interactions with the military, including the famous “suckers and losers” piece in September 2020 about Trump’s reported comments on American war dead. The piece used anonymous sources. It was contested at the time. Some sources later corroborated parts of it. Other parts remain disputed. The framework would treat this as the standard pattern of access journalism in highly polarized contexts. The piece confirmed what one coalition wanted to be true and was disputed by the other coalition. The disputed status of the piece does not damage Goldberg’s standing within the coalition that wanted it to be true. The disputed status reinforces the position of the coalition that wanted it to be false. The piece produces value for both sides. The producing-value-for-both-sides quality is what gives access journalism its durability in polarized contexts. Whichever side wins the political battle, the journalist who produced the piece is positioned to continue producing similar pieces.
The third paradox is the editor-as-curator-of-truth paradox. Since 2016 Goldberg has been the Atlantic’s editor in chief. The position lets him shape what the magazine publishes, what the magazine attacks, what the magazine ignores. The magazine has become more politically engaged under his editorship. It has published the Trump-suckers-losers piece, the Caitlin Flanagan pieces, the Anne Applebaum pieces on authoritarianism, the Yoni Appelbaum pieces on housing, the Adam Serwer pieces on cruelty as politics. The magazine’s positioning has been broadly anti-Trump and broadly pro-establishment-liberal-internationalist, with occasional contrarian moves to maintain the appearance of editorial independence. The paradox is that an editor who curates a coalition position presents the curation as truth-seeking. The audience reads the magazine’s contents as serious journalism. The magazine’s contents are also instruments of coalition coordination. Both readings are partly true. The paradox lets the audience experience the curation as truth-seeking while the curation does the coalition work the audience also wants it to do.
Pinsof’s framework would highlight the recursive structure here. Goldberg the writer operates inside paradoxes that his audience helps maintain. Goldberg the editor maintains paradoxes that the magazine’s larger audience helps sustain. The two operations interact. The editor’s selection of writers and topics shapes the paradoxes the magazine produces. The writers’ production of paradoxes shapes the magazine’s brand. The brand attracts readers who participate in the paradoxes. The cycle reinforces itself. Each layer requires the layers above and below it to stay stable. The layers stay stable as long as the participants benefit from the arrangement.
The Signal-chat-leak story in March 2025 is the most recent case worth examining through the framework. Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal group chat where Trump administration national security officials including Hegseth and Waltz discussed plans for strikes on Yemen. Goldberg watched the conversation unfold, eventually disclosed the leak, and produced a piece for the Atlantic that documented the security failure. The piece was a major story. It demonstrated serious lapses in operational security at the highest levels of the new administration. The story was largely accurate. It was also coalition production in function. It served the anti-Trump coalition’s interest in showing the new administration as reckless and incompetent. It served the Atlantic’s interest in maintaining its position as a source of definitive Trump-era reporting. It served Goldberg’s interest in continuing to be the journalist Trump-administration figures cannot avoid taking seriously. All three coalition functions are real. The story is also genuinely a story about a serious security failure. Both readings hold simultaneously. The paradox is what lets both readings hold.
The interesting feature of the Signal story for the framework is the Trump administration’s response. Hegseth and others attacked Goldberg personally rather than addressing the underlying security failure. The attacks attempted to delegitimize the messenger to deflect attention from the message. The framework would treat the attacks as a coalition response to a paradox the Trump coalition could not afford to let stand. The paradox required the messenger to have authority. The attacks tried to dissolve the authority. The attempt mostly failed because Goldberg’s institutional position at the Atlantic and his cumulative track record protected him in ways that direct denials could not overcome. The framework predicts this. Institutional positions protect paradoxes more effectively than individual reputations do. The paradox sustains because the institution sustains it.
The deepest paradox in the Goldberg case is the I-have-seen-the-evil paradox. Goldberg’s career arc has involved repeated proximity to figures and events that have moral charge in his audience’s framework. He served in the IDF prison camp at Ketziot during the First Intifada. The memoir Prisoners documented the experience and his complicated feelings about it. He has profiled Hezbollah leaders, Syrian dictators, Iranian officials, American presidents whose decisions he has questioned. The cumulative effect is a writer whose authority comes from having been close to the things he writes about. The paradox is that the closeness should have changed him in ways that compromise the framework his work operates inside. The framework’s authority requires that he not have been changed in those ways. He has to have seen the evil and remained committed to the framework that identifies it as evil. If the seeing changed the framework, the framework’s authority dissolves. If the seeing did not change the framework, the seeing did not produce the depth of understanding the framework’s authority requires.
Pinsof’s framework treats this as a paradox of compromised purity that runs through most successful access journalism. The reporter has to be close enough to know. The reporter has to be uncontaminated enough to be trusted. The reconciliation is the recoil performance Marantz also executes, but in Goldberg’s case the recoil performance has more weight because the proximity has been more sustained. Prisoners is the most explicit version of the recoil performance. The book documents the proximity and renders the recoil simultaneously. The book is partly a confession of having participated in something he came to question. The book is also a credential that authorizes his subsequent writing on related topics. The credential requires the confession. The confession produces the credential. Both functions operate at once. Neither cancels the other.
The Pinsof social paradoxes paper would emphasize that Goldberg’s audience benefits from this arrangement specifically. The audience wants a writer who has been close enough to the IDF and to its prison apparatus to know how it operates while also being morally compromised enough by the proximity that the writer’s eventual judgments carry weight. A writer who had no proximity could not produce the judgments. A writer with no recoil could not be trusted to produce them. The paradox lets the audience read Goldberg as someone whose proximity and recoil have produced judgments more reliable than those a pure outsider or a pure insider could produce. The paradox is what makes the writer specifically valuable. The arrangement is symbiotic. The audience needs the paradox. The writer’s career depends on it. The paradox stays stable as long as the audience continues to read it the way both sides need it to be read.
The cue-to-signal-to-negative-cue trajectory applies here too with particular force. Prisoners in 2006 read as honest cue. The book was a sustained engagement with personal moral complexity around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The complexity was real. The book did not produce easy resolutions. By the late 2010s the IDF-veteran-with-complicated-feelings positioning had hardened into signal. Goldberg’s pieces on Israel-Palestine since the Gaza war began in October 2023 read as deployments of the credential rather than as continued explorations of the complexity Prisoners documented. The framing has become predictable. The audience knows what a Goldberg Atlantic piece on the Gaza war will conclude before reading it. The conclusion will affirm Israel’s right to defend itself, will register concern about specific tactical excesses, will frame Hamas as the primary moral cause of the conflict, will treat the broader Zionist project as defensible, and will avoid the framings that would alienate the magazine’s primary audience. The framing is defensible on its own terms. It is also coalition production. The fact that it is both is what the paradox requires.
For readers outside the magazine’s coalition, the signal has flipped into negative cue. The same Goldberg piece that reads as nuanced engagement to the Atlantic’s primary audience reads as predictable Zionist apologetics dressed in liberal-establishment prose to readers in left-wing or pro-Palestinian coalitions. The negative cue reading explains things the cue reading cannot easily explain. It explains why Goldberg’s complexity does not extend to questioning the legitimacy of the Zionist project. It explains why the recoil performance does not include recoil from the Israeli state’s existence as such. It explains why his Israel-Palestine coverage clusters predictably on coalition lines despite the appearance of nuanced engagement. The negative-cue reading is parsimonious. The cue reading requires more elaborate interpretive work to sustain.
The Atlantic’s institutional structure gives Goldberg paradox-stability that Cofnas does not have. The magazine’s editorial process disciplines individual pieces. The magazine’s brand absorbs and reframes the pieces into a larger reputation. The magazine’s audience has been trained across decades to read the magazine’s conventions as substance. The paradoxes Goldberg operates inside are protected by the institutional infrastructure in ways the dissident-Substack writer cannot match. The framework predicts that this institutional protection allows Goldberg’s paradoxes to remain mostly invisible to him in ways that more institutionally exposed writers cannot afford. The institutional protection is also what removes the pressure that might otherwise produce visibility. Goldberg can continue operating the paradoxes for as long as the magazine continues to thrive and as long as his audience continues to subscribe.
A particular feature of Goldberg’s case worth flagging is the political-establishment-versus-counter-establishment dimension. Cofnas operates from outside the establishment and his paradoxes have to attract a counter-establishment audience that the establishment institutions have not absorbed. Marantz operates inside an establishment institution and his paradoxes serve audiences that the institution has cultivated. Goldberg operates at the apex of one specific establishment formation, the centrist-Atlanticist-Zionist-liberal-internationalist establishment that has been one of the dominant coalitions in American journalism since the 1990s. His paradoxes serve this coalition’s needs. The coalition has resources, institutions, audiences, and political access that few competing coalitions can match. Goldberg’s paradoxes are unusually durable because the coalition that benefits from them is unusually well resourced.
The framework’s prediction for Goldberg is that the paradoxes continue as long as the coalition continues. The Atlantic’s positioning may shift if the political environment shifts dramatically enough. Goldberg may eventually retire. The magazine may eventually find new editors who maintain the position differently. The paradox structure will not dissolve unless the coalition that needs it dissolves. The coalition is unlikely to dissolve in the foreseeable future because it is too well institutionalized to dissolve quickly. Cofnas’s paradoxes are brittler because the coalition that supports them is smaller and less well institutionalized. Marantz’s paradoxes are more durable than Cofnas’s but less durable than Goldberg’s because the New Yorker is institutionally important but not at the center of the coalition Marantz serves in the way the Atlantic is at the center of the coalition Goldberg serves.
The deepest application of the social paradoxes framework to Goldberg involves the question of moral seriousness. Goldberg presents as a morally serious figure. The presentation is real in the sense that he engages moral questions, has revised his positions on at least some issues, has produced work that has moral weight. The presentation is also a coalition asset. The morally-serious Zionist-liberal-internationalist editor is a particular kind of figure that the coalition needs. The figure has to embody moral seriousness without arriving at conclusions that would compromise the coalition’s commitments. The combination is what makes the position powerful. The paradox is that genuine moral seriousness, applied without limit, would compromise the coalition. Genuine moral seriousness, applied with the limits the coalition requires, is exactly what the position needs.
Pinsof’s framework would not say Goldberg is insincere. The framework would say his sincerity operates inside the limits the coalition position allows. The limits are not visible from inside because seeing them would require looking past the coalition’s commitments, which is what the position prevents. Goldberg can write seriously about Israeli excesses in Gaza while not writing seriously about whether the project of which those excesses are an expression is legitimate. The not-writing about the latter is what the coalition position requires. The writing about the former is what the coalition position permits. The combination operates as moral seriousness within coalition limits. The combination is sincere. It is also strategically effective.
Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma
Goldberg performs the construction work for two distinct trauma narratives, and the strain of carrying both at once is the central problem of his late career.
The first is the liberal-establishment trauma about Trump. The pain is the violation of democratic norms by a president who treats public office as personal property. The victim is the republic itself, sometimes the Constitution, sometimes the civilian-military compact, sometimes the war dead. The connection to a wider audience runs through universalizing language about decency, sacrifice, and the rule of law, which lets readers across party lines see themselves as co-sufferers. The responsibility falls on Trump and on the officeholders who normalize him. Goldberg’s Trump-era output is a sustained construction of this trauma. The 2020 Atlantic story “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers'” is the textbook case. It takes private words spoken by a politician and elevates them to a profanation of national sacred objects. The story is not primarily about what Trump said. It is about the symbolic violation of the fallen soldier, the most charged sacred figure in American civil religion. Goldberg’s later book On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump extends the construction. The military officer corps becomes the priestly class that holds the line against profanation. The argument is sincere. It also serves the officer corps Goldberg has spent two decades cultivating as sources.
The second trauma narrative is liberal Zionism’s. The pain is the post-October 7 collapse of liberal Western sympathy for Israel and the parallel rise of Jewish vulnerability across elite institutions. The victim is Israel and the Jewish people, but more precisely the liberal Zionist project that holds democracy and Jewish nationhood together. The connection to a wider audience runs through anyone who values both Jewish safety and liberal democratic norms. The responsibility falls on Hamas, on Iran, on the campus left that minimizes Jewish suffering, and on the post-liberal right that hijacks Jewish defense for its own purposes. Goldberg’s earlier book Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide by Jeffrey Goldberg constructed the personal version of this trauma decades ago, using his own service as a Jewish guard at Ketziot prison and his friendship with a Palestinian prisoner to dramatize the possibility of mutual recognition that history keeps undoing.
The two trauma narratives fit together cleanly when liberal Democrats are pro-Israel and Republicans are mixed. They strain when the Democratic coalition turns against Israel and a Republican president becomes the most pro-Israel in modern history. Goldberg sits at the convergence point. He must keep both narratives alive without letting either collapse the other. That is the symbolic management problem his Atlantic editorship solves through curation. He hires writers who carry one or both narratives. He commissions pieces that hold the seam together. The roster is the strategy.
Now Alexander’s naturalistic fallacy. The fallacy says people mistake constructed traumas for natural responses to events. The reverse problem also exists: events that should generate trauma claims sometimes fail to, because no carrier group constructs them. Goldberg’s pre-Iraq War reporting in The New Yorker on alleged Saddam-Qaeda links is the case in point. The reporting helped sell a war that killed hundreds of thousands. If trauma were natural to events, this episode might have ended his career. It did not. The coalition that might have constructed his Iraq journalism as polluting failed to do so, partly because too many of its members were themselves complicit, partly because the liberal-internationalist class needed to forget rather than narrate. Goldberg’s ascent through the 2010s rests on this non-construction. Alexander predicts exactly this outcome. Trauma requires a carrier group with motive and means. When the natural carriers are themselves implicated, the trauma claim does not get made, and the events recede into background noise.
Now switch to the Watergate frame. Alexander argues that Watergate transformed from minor crime to constitutional crisis through a specific ritual sequence. The break-in of June 1972 registered as ordinary politics for fifteen months. Eighty percent of Americans did not care. What changed was not the facts but the symbolic context. Five conditions had to align: social consensus that the event was polluting, perception that the pollution threatened the center of society, activation of institutional social controls, mobilization of differentiated elites who formed countercenters, and effective ritual and purification through which the symbolic distinction between pure and impure was enforced. The televised Senate hearings of 1973 supplied the central ritual. They opened liminal space, a time outside ordinary politics, where senators performed as priests of civic religion and witnesses were compelled to speak the language of sacred values. The Saturday Night Massacre transferred pollution to the structural center.
Goldberg’s Atlantic performs the ritual function in print form. The long Trump-era cover stories operate as liminal documents. They suspend ordinary political analysis and compel the reader into the language of civic sacredness. The Mattis profile, the Milley pieces, the suckers-and-losers story, the analyses of January 6: these are not partisan polemics. They are ritual performances that generalize political conflict upward to the deepest values of the republic. Alexander would recognize the structure immediately. The Atlantic during these years operates as a kind of permanent Senate Watergate Committee in serial form, repeatedly attempting the upward generalization that turned a break-in into a crisis.
The trouble is that the ritual no longer completes. Alexander noted that Watergate succeeded because the polarization of the 1960s had subsided, allowing a national consensus to form around the meaning of the pollution. The current polarization deepens rather than subsides. Goldberg performs the ritual for half the country. The other half reads the same performance as profanation, an instance of liberal media presuming to speak for the sacred while serving partisan ends. The five Alexander conditions never align. Consensus does not form. The countercenter does not differentiate from the center. The institutional controls do not activate. The purification does not occur. The Atlantic stages the ritual. The audience for the ritual is half the audience the ritual needs.
The Signal chat episode of March 2025 is the cleanest test. Mike Waltz inadvertently added Goldberg to a Signal group where senior officials, including the secretary of defense and the vice president, discussed imminent strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. Goldberg watched in real time. He left, verified, and published. By Watergate logic this is the central scene of a constitutional drama. Operational security at the highest level fails. Lives might have been lost. The polluting event sits at the structural center of national power. The story should have generalized upward through the five conditions to a moment of civic crisis. It did not. There were no televised hearings. No senatorial priesthood emerged. The administration absorbed the embarrassment, blamed Goldberg for being where he had been placed, and moved on. The story ran one news cycle hot and then dissipated.
What Alexander’s framework explains is why. The five conditions did not align because the polarized field of the 2020s no longer permits the upward generalization that 1973 permitted. Goldberg got the scoop. He could not get the ritual. The structure that converted Watergate from political event into civic crisis is no longer available, and the Atlantic’s editor cannot manufacture it through reporting alone. The carrier group requires an audience whose members will speak the same sacred language, and that audience has fragmented past the point at which a single liturgy reaches it.
Read together, the two Alexander frames give a precise account of Goldberg’s late career. He is a ritual specialist working in a period when the ritual no longer completes. He is a carrier of two trauma narratives that strain against each other under post-October 7 conditions. He runs a magazine that performs civic religion for an audience whose share of the country shrinks. The performance remains beautiful. The Obama interviews still read as priestly ceremonies of liberal-internationalist self-explanation. The Milley material still constructs the officer-priest defending the sacred against the polluter-king. The Suckers and Losers story still does what it did in September 2020. What changes is the field around the performance. The shared sense of a civic center that ritual purification might restore has thinned past the point where Alexander’s Watergate sequence can run.
The Prisoners book closes the loop. Goldberg’s earliest trauma construction was personal. He took the experience of being a Jewish guard at Ketziot during the first intifada and built it into a redemptive narrative about the possibility of friendship across the divide. The book is itself trauma work in Alexander’s exact sense: it answers the four questions, identifies victim and perpetrator, and connects the personal pain to a wider audience of readers who want to believe coexistence remains possible. The career that follows is the institutional version of the same move. Goldberg converts proximity into meaning, encounter into civic significance, private access into public ritual. The Atlantic is the venue. The educated professional class is the congregation. Civil religion is the genre.
Goldberg understands what he does. He has spent his career interpreting other people’s institutions. He now runs one. The institution he runs performs Alexander’s two functions at once and meets, in the present field, the limit of both. The wars are real. So, possibly, is what the combatants are fighting about.
Interaction Ritual Chains by Randall Collins
Jeffrey Goldberg sits at the editor’s desk of The Atlantic. He breaks stories that move presidential politics. He moves between Washington dinner parties, Aspen Ideas Festival panels, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the green rooms of Sunday morning shows. The chain has been running for thirty years. The yield has been substantial.
Run him through Collins.
Goldberg’s foundational ritual is not the courtroom or the lecture hall. It is the interview. He learned the format young. He grew up in Long Island, took an early interest in journalism, and by his twenties had moved to Israel where he served briefly as a guard at a military prison during the First Intifada. He returned to the United States and built a career on access journalism: long-form interviews with hard-to-reach figures, often in conflict zones or in positions of state power. He profiled Hezbollah operatives. He profiled Hamas leaders. He profiled Saudi princes. He profiled American presidents.
Each interview is a Collins ritual. Two men in a room. Mutual focus. Mood synchronization. Sometimes a meal involved, sometimes a long walk, sometimes a sequence of meetings across days. The interview produces collective effervescence in miniature, a charged dyad. The journalist comes away with material. The subject comes away with the sense of having been heard. Both come away with emotional energy attached to the encounter.
Goldberg’s particular skill is the ability to charge these dyads with hard-to-reach figures. He gets the access. The access generates the material. The material generates the article. The article charges symbols in the larger ritual chain of American magazine journalism. The cumulative effect across thirty years has built him into a figure who can ask any current or former president for an interview and reasonably expect to get one.
The Atlantic editorship, which he has held since 2016, is the second major ritual chain. The editor of a major magazine sits at the center of a different kind of ritual setting. He runs the morning meeting. He decides which stories run. He shapes the cover. He selects the writers. He charges the symbols of the magazine’s brand: serious, liberal, internationalist, pro-democracy, anti-Trump, broadly aligned with the American foreign policy establishment. The brand is itself a charged object. The Atlantic under Goldberg has positioned itself as the premier venue for a particular kind of educated liberal anxiety about the state of American democracy. Goldberg charges that brand week by week.
The third chain is the Washington social ritual. The Aspen Ideas Festival panel. The Council on Foreign Relations dinner. The off-the-record gathering at someone’s home in Georgetown. The Renaissance Weekend retreat. The Saban Forum. These are face-to-face ritual settings where the city’s foreign policy elite gathers to charge a shared set of symbols: the importance of American leadership, the dangers of autocracy, the seriousness of the threat from Russia and China and Iran, the moral weight of the transatlantic alliance, the indispensability of NATO, the centrality of the Israeli-American relationship. Goldberg is a regular at these gatherings. He arrives with the credential of the editorship. He charges the symbols the room wants charged. He receives in return the social position of an insider whose presence at the dinner is itself a marker of the dinner’s importance.
The fourth chain is the source relationship. Goldberg has cultivated a small set of high-value sources over decades. Ehud Barak. Benjamin Netanyahu, before the relationship soured. Various senior American national security officials across administrations. Senior Israeli intelligence figures. James Mattis. The relationships are built through the same ritual as the interview, but extended over time. Repeated encounters. Mutual obligation accumulating. The source feeds the journalist. The journalist publishes pieces that serve the source’s interests, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. The relationship charges the symbols both men want charged. The relationship pays both men in emotional energy and in concrete career terms.
Now look at what these chains have charged.
The master symbol set Goldberg carries is the moral weight of the American-led liberal order, with the State of Israel as a charged secondary symbol nested inside the larger one. The order is real, in his account. The order is good, in his account. The order is threatened, in his account, and the threats come from autocrats abroad and from populists at home. The journalist’s role is to defend the order by exposing the threats. Goldberg has charged this symbol set in every ritual setting he has run for three decades.
The Hezbollah and Hamas profiles in the late 1990s and early 2000s charged the symbol of the journalist as someone willing to enter dangerous spaces to bring back hard truths. The 2002 piece in The New Yorker connecting Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, which fed into the case for the Iraq War, charged the symbol of the journalist as a serious player in foreign policy debate. The piece was wrong on its central claims. The chain did not punish the wrongness. The chain rewarded the access and the seriousness. He moved on. The career continued.
Collins notes that successful ritual chains have a way of metabolizing their participants’ errors without breaking the chain. The Iraq piece is a clear case. A journalist whose Iraq work had been cleanly correct would have ridden that to the same career outcomes. A journalist whose Iraq work had been spectacularly wrong, but in a way that flattered the prevailing direction of the foreign policy ritual chain at the time, also rode it to the same career outcomes. The chain rewarded the participation more than the correctness.
The Obama relationship was the next major chain. Goldberg conducted a long series of interviews with Obama across both terms and after. The 2016 Atlantic piece The Obama Doctrine by Jeffrey Goldberg ran to nearly twenty thousand words. The piece is the cleanest example of how the access ritual works at the highest level. Goldberg got hours with the president. The president used the access to shape his foreign policy legacy in his own preferred frame. Goldberg used the access to charge his own symbol of seriousness and to publish a piece that drew enormous attention. Both men served the ritual. Both men came away charged.
The Trump-era ritual chain shifted Goldberg’s symbols sharply. The 2020 piece Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are Losers and Suckers by Jeffrey Goldberg charged the symbol of Trump as morally unfit. The piece was based on anonymous sources. It was denied by named sources who had been in the relevant rooms. It was contested. The chain did not punish the contestation. The chain rewarded the piece’s alignment with the prevailing direction of the elite anti-Trump ritual chain in 2020. Goldberg had aligned his magazine with that chain. The piece served the chain’s needs. The chain repaid him.
Collins is precise about what is happening here. The piece’s truth value matters less than the piece’s ritual fit. A piece that fits the chain charges the chain’s symbols and pays the participants. A piece that does not fit the chain has a hard time getting traction even if accurate. Goldberg has internalized the chain’s needs across decades. He produces what the chain wants produced. The instinct is real. The instinct is also the chain talking through him.
The 2025 Signal chat episode is a useful case. Goldberg was inadvertently added to a Signal group in which senior Trump administration officials were discussing operational details of an upcoming military strike on Houthi targets in Yemen. He published the story. The story dominated news cycles for a week. It charged a long list of symbols at once: the carelessness of Trump administration officials, the seriousness of the journalist as someone who had access to such material even by accident, the importance of The Atlantic as the venue, the recurring pattern of Trump-era operational sloppiness, the implicit contrast with the seriousness of pre-Trump national security practice. Every one of these symbols was already charged in Goldberg’s chain. The Signal episode added another deposit to symbols he had been charging for years.
Run the Iran interview pattern. Goldberg has interviewed nearly every major Israeli prime minister of the past three decades. He has profiled Iranian officials when access was available. He has written extensively on the Iranian nuclear program. The frame of his Iran coverage has been steady: Iran as the central regional threat, the Iranian regime as a serious danger, the diplomatic management of the threat as a defining problem of American foreign policy. The frame fits the broader frame of his chain. The frame has shaped a generation of educated American liberal opinion on Iran. The frame has also been wrong in significant ways across that period, in particular in the years leading up to the 2015 nuclear deal, when his coverage helped sustain a narrative the deal partially dismantled. He adjusted to the deal when it came. He adjusted again when the Trump administration withdrew from it. The chain absorbed each adjustment without break.
The Israel coverage has run through the same pattern. Goldberg’s relationship with the Israeli political and security establishment has been close for decades. His profile of Netanyahu in 2010 in The Atlantic, The Point of No Return by Jeffrey Goldberg, charged the symbol of an imminent Israeli strike on Iran. The strike did not come. The chain did not punish him. He continued covering the relationship. His Netanyahu coverage soured during the Trump alignment with Netanyahu. He pivoted. The pivot was not principled in any way the chain visibly registered. It was the chain reorienting around a new alignment of symbols. Netanyahu had moved into the Trump symbol cluster. Goldberg’s chain was now opposed to the Trump symbol cluster. The pivot followed.
His coverage of the Gaza war since October 2023 has been the most exposed test of the chain. The chain’s symbols include both the moral weight of Israeli security and the moral weight of liberal humanitarian concern. The two have been in tension. Goldberg’s coverage has mostly held the Israeli security frame, with humanitarian concern visible but secondary. He has not moved with the parts of the chain, particularly its younger and more progressive nodes, that have shifted to a sharper critique of the Israeli campaign. The result has been a noticeable strain inside The Atlantic and inside the broader chain. Younger writers have left or pushed back. The magazine has lost some standing with parts of its former audience. The chain has rewarded Goldberg for holding the older frame, with older sources and older readers, while costing him with newer ones.
This is the Collins prediction in a sharp form. The man holds the symbols the chain that built him has charged. He cannot easily release them. Releasing them would cost him his standing in the chain that pays him. Holding them costs him standing in newer chains that he was never inside. The cost is asymmetric. He holds the older frame because the older frame is where his career sits.
A few specific features of Goldberg’s work resolve through this lens.
His prose style is the prose style of the access journalist. The pieces foreground the encounter, the room, the meal, the exact words the subject used. The reader is brought into the dyad. The reader becomes a third participant in the original ritual. The technique generates emotional energy in the reader by reproducing some of the charge the original encounter produced. The technique is effective. It is also limiting. It centers the figures who grant access and marginalizes the figures who do not. Hezbollah operatives who would meet with him appear as figures of complex humanity in his work. The Lebanese, Palestinian, or Iranian figures who would not meet with him appear as abstractions or villains. The chain rewards the access. The access shapes the picture.
His relationship to his sources is closer than the standard journalistic norm allows but not closer than the chain rewards. The Mattis relationship in particular has run for years. Mattis figures in the 2020 Losers and Suckers piece. Mattis figures in subsequent reporting. Mattis is a charged source for Goldberg. The relationship serves both men. Mattis’s reputation gets shaped by the framing in The Atlantic. Goldberg’s pieces get the weight of Mattis’s involvement. The chain rewards the relationship. The chain does not punish the closeness.
His public persona is part of the ritual. He gives interviews himself. He goes on podcasts. He appears on cable. He defends his work in public when challenged. The defense is part of the ritual. He does not back down from contested pieces. The non-backing-down is itself a charged move that strengthens his position with his audience. A journalist who retracted often would not hold the chain’s high position. Goldberg almost never retracts. He stands by the work. The standing is the ritual. The chain pays him for the standing.
Goldberg’s self-account is that he is a journalist following the story wherever it leads, applying serious craft to important questions, holding power accountable. The self-account is sincere. The chain requires it to be sincere. A journalist who saw himself primarily as a charged node in a Washington-Aspen-Atlantic ritual chain would be less effective as a journalist. The self-deception is functional in Trivers’ sense. It allows the chain to work through him without his having to register that the chain is working through him.
From inside the self-account, his Iran coverage was rigorous. His Iraq piece was a good-faith effort with what he had. His Trump pieces were hard-hitting truth-telling. His Gaza coverage is balanced and fair. The self-account treats each judgment as the product of the journalist’s craft applied to the material.
From outside, the pattern shows a different shape. The pieces that fit the chain’s prevailing direction got published, got traction, and got rewarded. The pieces that did not fit either did not get written or did not get the same treatment. The chain shaped the work more than the work shaped the chain. Goldberg’s role was to be the man through whom the chain produced its premier products in this niche, the access-driven foreign policy and political profile aimed at educated liberal readers.
The alignment is not primarily ideological. It is ritual. It runs through the body, through the meals, through the synchronization of mood across thousands of encounters in the rooms where the chain meets. The journalist is shaped by the rooms he eats in, the panels he sits on, the editors who hire him, the sources who return his calls. The shaping is mostly invisible to him. He experiences his views as his own. They are his own. They are also the deposit of the rooms.
A prediction the frame supports. Goldberg will continue producing work in the frame his chain has built him into. The frame may evolve as the chain evolves. The chain is currently evolving in unstable ways. The educated liberal foreign policy consensus that The Atlantic under Goldberg has represented is under pressure from above and below. From above, the foreign policy establishment itself is fragmenting, with realists, restrainers, and cold warriors no longer holding the same ground. From below, the magazine’s own younger writers and readers are pulling toward positions Goldberg’s chain does not naturally accommodate. The chain will either reorganize, with Goldberg adjusting or being adjusted out, or it will hold its current shape and lose ground. Goldberg is in his early sixties. He has another decade of high-yield ritual settings ahead of him at current rates if the chain holds.
The credential and the manner do not settle the underlying claims. Goldberg as the editor of The Atlantic writing about a leaked Signal chat has done the work the chain rewards. The work may also be accurate, important, and well-executed journalism. The two judgments are separate. The reader who treats the credential as evidence of accuracy is making the mistake the credential is designed to allow him to make. The credential is the chain’s product. The accuracy of any particular piece has to be evaluated on its own merits, against standards the chain does not enforce. The chain enforces ritual fit. The reader has to enforce the rest.
Goldberg as Pseudoargument: A Pinsof Reading
Goldberg has produced different kinds of writing across his career, and the different kinds answer the Pinsof diagnostic in different ways. The interesting case is the body of Middle East reporting and commentary, particularly the work on Iraq before the 2003 war, on Iran’s nuclear program through the 2000s and 2010s, and on Israeli-Palestinian questions across the full period.
Begin with the format. Goldberg writes long-form magazine journalism, a few books, and editorial commentary. The long-form work appears in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, publications that carry the reputational weight of the most prestigious American magazine journalism. The work is fact-checked, edited, and framed within institutional conventions that present themselves as inquiry. The reporting includes embedded access to sources at the highest levels of the American, Israeli, and broader Middle Eastern political and security establishments. Goldberg is among the most institutionally connected American journalists working on the region, and his access has been a defining feature of his career.
The first thing Pinsof’s framework registers is that the format presents itself as inquiry while operating with structural features that complicate the inquiry function. Access journalism of the kind Goldberg practices depends on relationships with sources who provide information on terms the journalist accepts. The terms typically include framing concessions that the journalist would not accept from sources he held at greater distance. The framing concessions become structural features of the work, not because the journalist is dishonest, but because access journalism cannot continue if the framings the sources prefer are repeatedly rejected. Pinsof’s framework reads this kind of structural pressure as one of the conditions under which the form of journalism drifts from inquiry toward something that performs inquiry while serving other functions.
The most important test case is the pre-2003 Iraq reporting. Goldberg’s March 2002 New Yorker article “The Great Terror” presented an extended argument that Saddam Hussein’s regime had connections to al-Qaeda and that Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs posed an immediate threat. The article was widely cited by Bush administration officials in the months before the invasion. Vice President Cheney recommended it publicly. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld discussed it in interviews. The article became part of the public case for the war, and the war’s premises turned out to be wrong. No operational al-Qaeda connection existed. The biological and chemical weapons programs at the scale described did not exist. The nuclear program at the scale described did not exist. The article’s central factual claims did not survive the war they helped enable.
Pinsof’s framework does not classify the article as pseudoargument simply because its claims turned out to be wrong. Real argument can be wrong. The framework’s diagnostic is structural rather than retrospective. The relevant question is whether the form of the article fit the function of inquiry that the article claimed for itself. The structural diagnostic produces a clear finding. The article engaged sources who were known by other journalists to be unreliable, including Iraqi defectors associated with the Iraqi National Congress whose claims were already being disputed by intelligence professionals. The article presented these sources without the qualifications that the disputes within the intelligence community would have warranted. The article did not engage the strongest versions of the opposing analysis, which held that the Iraqi WMD programs had largely been dismantled after 1991 and that no operational al-Qaeda connection existed. The opposing analysis was being made by analysts inside the CIA, by United Nations weapons inspectors, and by some journalists at other publications. The article did not represent these analysts at their strongest, and it did not give the reader the materials he would have needed to evaluate the case on the merits.
This is the pattern Pinsof’s framework identifies as pseudoargument. The form does not fit the function of persuasion, because persuasion requires engagement with the strongest opposing case. The form fits the function of coalition consolidation around an analysis the coalition wanted ratified. The coalition in this instance included the Bush administration, the broader American foreign-policy establishment that supported confrontation with Iraq, and the segment of American Jewish opinion that saw the removal of the Iraqi regime as a strategic priority for Israel. The article performed the function of providing a respectable intellectual framing for the war the coalition was preparing to fight. That the article also performed the function of advancing Goldberg’s career and his standing within the access-journalism ecosystem is consistent with the framework’s predictions about how pseudoargument operations distribute benefits to their practitioners.
A complication is worth dwelling on. Goldberg has acknowledged elements of the article’s failure. He has not claimed that the war was a success or that the WMD claims were vindicated. The acknowledgment is partial and has been delivered in registers that minimize its impact on his standing, but it is not absent. Pinsof’s framework allows for partial acknowledgment without changing the structural diagnosis. The diagnosis applies to what the article was doing at the time of its publication, and what it was doing at the time was supplying the materials for a coalition decision that the coalition had largely already made. Subsequent acknowledgment that the materials were faulty does not change what the article was doing when it appeared.
The Iran reporting from the same period and through the following decade shows similar patterns. Goldberg’s writing on Iran’s nuclear program advanced framings that aligned with Israeli and American hawk positions on the urgency of the threat and the limited time available for non-military responses. The framings were presented as the conclusions of careful inquiry, with extensive reporting and high-level access. The framings served the function of providing intellectual cover for policy positions the relevant coalitions were advancing. Predictions about Iranian nuclear timelines made in this body of work have largely failed to materialize on the schedules suggested. The failure has not produced the kind of retrospective accounting that real argument would require. The work has continued in adjacent registers without the foundational reckoning that the failed predictions would warrant.
Pinsof’s framework reads this pattern as a sign that the function of the work was not inquiry. Inquiry requires accountability to the world. Predictions that fail produce revisions to the framework that generated them. The framework reads continued operation without revision as a marker that the work was performing functions other than inquiry, and that the other functions did not depend on predictive accuracy.
The Israeli-Palestinian writing across Goldberg’s career shows the framework’s diagnostic operating across a longer time horizon. Goldberg writes from a position. He served in the IDF. His friendship with a Palestinian prisoner is the subject of his book. His reporting has presented Palestinian sources sympathetically in some pieces and Israeli sources sympathetically in others. The framings vary by piece. What is consistent across the body of work is the framing of the Israeli-Palestinian question within parameters that the American Jewish liberal Zionist coalition has set. The two-state solution as the horizon of legitimate aspiration. The Israeli security establishment as a legitimate authority on the threats Israel faces. The various Palestinian political formations as actors whose legitimacy depends on their acceptance of the parameters the coalition has set.
The framings are not invented by Goldberg. They are the framings of the coalition his journalism serves. Pinsof’s framework does not require that journalists invent the framings their work advances. It requires that the form of the work fit the function of inquiry the work claims for itself. The structural diagnostic produces consistent findings across the body of Israeli-Palestinian writing. The strongest versions of Palestinian critiques of Israeli policy are not engaged at their strongest. The strongest versions of Israeli critiques of the peace-process framing are not engaged at their strongest. The strongest versions of analysts who have argued that the two-state solution is no longer feasible are not engaged at their strongest. The strongest versions of analysts who have argued that American support for Israel has produced strategic costs the United States has not adequately reckoned with are not engaged at their strongest. The work performs inquiry on questions inside the coalition’s parameters. It does not perform inquiry on the parameters themselves.
This is the pattern Pinsof’s framework identifies as pseudoargument operating at the highest level of journalistic craft. The form is sophisticated. The reporting is real. The access is unusual. The prose is accomplished. The work passes the institutional standards of the publications in which it appears. What it does not do is engage the questions that would test the coalition’s parameters. The questions that would test the parameters are precisely the questions the framework predicts pseudoargument will avoid, because engaging them would require the work to perform a function the work is not built to perform.
The Signal chat article from March 2024 is worth examining as a separate case, because its function differs from the function of the Middle East reporting. The article presented a story in which Goldberg himself was the protagonist, having been added to a Signal chat in which Trump administration officials discussed military strikes on the Houthis. The story was a substantial scoop, and the reporting on the contents of the chat was straightforward. The article performed inquiry on a specific factual question about the conduct of the Trump national-security team. Pinsof’s framework reads this kind of work as closer to real argument than the Middle East reporting, because the structural pressures are different. The story did not depend on access to sources who could pull access if their preferred framings were not advanced. The story emerged from an inadvertent disclosure, and the reporting on it could proceed on terms the journalist set. The article’s framing of the disclosure as evidence of operational sloppiness in the Trump administration was a framing the article supported with the documentary record it had obtained. The framing was a framing Goldberg’s coalition would welcome, but the framing was also a framing the documentary record actually warranted. The form fit the function more cleanly in this case than in the Middle East reporting.
The Signal article also performed status operations of the kind Pinsof’s framework identifies. The article elevated Goldberg as the figure who had been entrusted, however inadvertently, with information of national-security significance, and who had handled the situation with the discretion and seriousness the situation required. The status elevation was real, but the framework allows status elevation to coexist with real argument when the underlying work meets the inquiry standard. The Signal article meets the standard more cleanly than the Iraq or Iran work, because the underlying factual question was straightforward and the documentary record settled most of the disputable points.
Now stand back and look at the full picture. Goldberg’s body of work is heterogeneous in a way that the bodies of work of Duke, Jones, or Marantz are not. Some pieces operate as access journalism within institutional pressures that produce pseudoargument outputs. Other pieces operate on factual questions where the documentary record is sufficient to settle the dispute and where the form can fit the function of inquiry. The variation is the same kind of variation Cofnas’s case shows across registers, though with Goldberg the variation occurs within the same register depending on the structural features of each story.
The dominant pattern, however, is the pattern of access journalism on contested political questions, and on this dominant pattern the framework’s diagnostic produces a clear pseudoargument verdict. The Iraq reporting fits the diagnostic. The Iran reporting fits the diagnostic. The Israeli-Palestinian writing fits the diagnostic. The framework reads these bodies of work as performing the functions of coalition consolidation, rationalization of coalition policy preferences, status defense for the coalition’s institutional positions, and concealment of all of the above under the conventions of careful magazine journalism. The work does not engage the strongest opposing views, does not display the markers of inquiry that real argument requires, does not track its predictions and revise its framework when predictions fail, and does not examine the parameters within which it conducts its discussions.
Several Pinsof diagnostics check out across the dominant pattern.
The work treats opposition as confirmation. When critics from outside the coalition Goldberg’s work serves have raised objections, the objections have been engaged in registers that minimize their force. Critics who pointed out the failure of the Iraq predictions have been treated as figures whose criticisms reflect predictable political positions rather than as figures whose criticisms might require fundamental revision of the framework that produced the failed predictions. The structure closes the system. Pinsof’s framework reads this as a status-defense operation performing tribal inoculation.
The work shows little curiosity about counterexamples that would complicate the coalition’s framings. Israeli policies that the coalition has supported have been treated with a charity that policies of comparable severity by other states would not receive. Palestinian political formations have been evaluated against criteria that other national movements with comparable historical experiences would not meet. The asymmetries are not addressed within the work. They are features the work proceeds within rather than questions the work engages.
The work performs sustained status attack on figures the coalition treats as enemies. Iranian leaders, Palestinian leaders perceived as obstacles to the coalition’s preferred framings, and American political figures whose foreign-policy positions diverge from the coalition’s positions are subjects of unflattering portraits across the body of work. The portraits are achieved through the conventions of magazine journalism rather than through crude polemic, but the cumulative effect is the lowering of the targeted figures’ standing in the eyes of the readership the magazines serve. Pinsof’s framework reads this as a standard pseudoargument operation performed at unusually high craft.
The work performs sustained status defense for the coalition’s institutional figures. Israeli prime ministers, American national-security officials aligned with the coalition’s preferences, and Jewish institutional leaders are presented in ways that emphasize their seriousness, their constraints, and their good faith. Critics of these figures are presented in ways that emphasize their unreasonableness, their political motivations, or their misunderstanding of the constraints the figures operate within. The asymmetric treatment is structural rather than incidental.
The concealment function operates through the conventions of magazine journalism. Goldberg presents himself as a journalist following the story, not as a coalition combatant rendering opposing coalitions for the consumption of his own. The presentation is necessary because, as Pinsof points out, overt tribal performance loses status and effectiveness. The work has to present itself as inquiry to do its rallying and rationalizing work. The conventions of The Atlantic and The New Yorker, with their fact-checking apparatus and their reputation for careful work, supply the credentials the concealment function requires. The credentials are real. The fact-checking is real. The framings the credentials support are framings the coalition has set, and the framings do work the credentials cannot vindicate independently.
A point of contrast with the Marantz case clarifies what is distinctive about Goldberg. Marantz’s work renders one coalition for another coalition’s consumption from within the conventions of magazine journalism. Goldberg’s work renders foreign actors and contested international questions for one coalition’s consumption from within the same conventions. The Marantz operation is more visible to readers who notice that they are being given a tribal portrait, because the subjects are figures the readership does not know personally and can evaluate the portrait against. The Goldberg operation is less visible, because the subjects are foreign actors and complex international situations the readership cannot evaluate the portraits against. The reader has to trust the journalist’s framings, and the framings the journalist supplies are the framings the coalition has set. The structural pressures on Goldberg’s work are heavier than the structural pressures on Marantz’s work, because the access economy in foreign-policy journalism is tighter than the access economy in domestic political journalism, and the readership’s ability to check the framings is weaker.
The framework also illuminates why responses to Goldberg from outside his coalition have largely failed to dent the work’s standing within the coalition. Critics from realist, dissident-right, and dissident-left positions have answered Goldberg’s work on its own terms, treating it as journalism that has gotten the analysis wrong, and providing counter-analyses that emphasize different evidence. The strategy is reasonable but partial. If the work is pseudoargument, then disputing its analytical claims does not address what the work is doing. The work’s function is coalition consolidation for The Atlantic’s readership and the broader American Jewish liberal Zionist coalition the readership overlaps with. That function is not defeated by counter-analyses, because the readership does not consume the counter-analyses in the first place. The function is defeated, when it is defeated at all, by exposure of the function. Showing what the work is doing as an activity is more damaging to the work than showing that any particular analysis within it is mistaken.
The qualification that has applied to the previous cases applies here as well. Pinsof’s framework does not require that pseudoargument be conscious. Goldberg might believe he is engaged in journalism aimed at understanding the questions he covers. The function of an activity is not always transparent to the actor. What the framework requires is that the form fail to fit the claimed function and that the actual function become visible when the form is examined. Goldberg’s work passes that test on the dominant pattern of his Middle East writing, even if the Signal article and a few other pieces sit closer to the inquiry standard. The dominant pattern performs the operations Pinsof describes, and it performs them with a craft that explains the work’s standing in its target readership for nearly three decades.
The applied verdict is that Goldberg’s body of Middle East reporting and commentary is pseudoargument of unusual journalistic craft. The reporting, the high-level access, the fact-checked endnotes, the polished prose, and the air of careful observation are all parts of a cover story for operations that perform coalition consolidation rather than inquiry into the questions the work claims to address. The operations are tribal. The tribe is the American Jewish liberal Zionist coalition and the broader foreign-policy establishment that has set the parameters within which Goldberg’s work operates. The work rallies, rationalizes, attacks the coalition’s enemies, defends the coalition’s institutional figures, and conceals all of the above under the conventions of magazine journalism. It does each competently enough that the cover has held within its target readership across multiple major events, including events on which the work’s framings have failed badly.
The proper response, on Pinsof’s account, is recognition rather than rejection. The work has value within its function. It gives its readership a coherent framing of complex international questions that the readership uses for political and social purposes. What the work cannot do is what it claims to do, which is to provide an inquiry into the questions it addresses that a reader could use to understand those questions on their own terms. A reader who wants that kind of understanding has to read the analysts the work does not engage, in their strongest forms, and to evaluate their arguments directly. Goldberg’s work cannot substitute for this evaluation, because Goldberg’s work was not built to perform it. It was built to perform a different function, and on the dominant pattern of his career, it has performed that function with the institutional skill the function requires.
Essentialism
Stephen Turner attacks the habit of positing a shared inner essence and then using it to explain behavior. To say a regime acts as it does because of its essence explains nothing. It names the outcome and projects it backward as a cause. Goldberg’s foreign-affairs journalism runs on exactly this move. His 2002 New Yorker piece built a case that Saddam Hussein (1937-2006) had ties to al-Qaeda by reading the nature of the Baathist state, its character, what it was at bottom. The reading was wrong. Turner would say the error sits inside the method. There was no Baathist essence to read. There were men with incentives, fears, and local histories, and Goldberg supplied a hidden disposition that felt like access and forecast nothing. The authority of the piece came from sounding like a man who had touched the essence of the thing. That is the trick Turner spent his life dismantling.
The same logic runs through Goldberg’s writing on Iran, on Hamas, on Israeli purpose. He tells readers what these actors are. Turner answers that “what they are” is a distribution of individual habits and pressures, not a substance shared across members and transmitted intact. The collective noun does the work, and the work is illusion. Goldberg is good at making the noun feel solid. Solidity sells.
His book Prisoners (2006) is the place where the essentialism strains and partly breaks. The book is about his friendship with a Palestinian he guarded at Ketziot. Two men, one relationship, against the categories. Turner would notice that the drama only lands if “Israeli” and “Palestinian” name real essences for the friendship to cross. The book leans on the categories even as it complicates them. That tension is the honest core of Goldberg, and it shows he half-knows the essences are thinner than his geopolitical writing pretends.
The Atlantic he edits sells essence at scale. The brand runs a 168-year continuous identity from Emerson and Longfellow down to the current masthead, an unbroken American idea. Turner would cut through it. Nothing essential travels from 1857 to now. Successive staffs hold different habits and serve different readers. The continuity is a useful fiction, and Goldberg’s editorship trades on it. He inherited an essence to market and he markets it well, past a million subscribers.
Explaining the Normative
In Explaining the Normative, Stephen Turner refuses the normativist trick. The normative does not name a separate realm of facts that float free of causal processes. When a man invokes a norm, a rule, a standard, or a moral fact, Turner asks what causal work the invocation does and what trained responses sit beneath it. The normative names a projection participants make onto patterns of trained response. The premium people claim by appealing to it, the extra authority, the moral seriousness, the access to standards above custom, has no backing apart from the practice that produces it.
Goldberg trades in normative pronouncements as his daily work. As editor of The Atlantic, and before that as a reporter at The New Yorker, he ranks figures by their seriousness. He sorts criticism of Israel into legitimate and illegitimate piles. He names what counts as antisemitic and what does not. He decides which intelligence officials count as credible. He does not present these as expressions of preference or position. He presents them as discernment of standards.
Turner asks what happens when Goldberg discerns.
Goldberg reaches no separate realm of moral facts. He trained in a formation. Penn, brief service in the IDF, The Jerusalem Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic. He moves through a network of intelligence officials, Israeli policy figures, donors, and editors who share habits of response. When he calls a thing dangerous or unserious, he makes a move his network recognizes and rewards. The recognition is the standard. No standard sits above the recognition.
Press him for the rules and he cannot give them. He has trained reactions. A pitch arrives, a name comes up, a story breaks, and he knows where to place it. The knowing comes fast and resists challenge from outside. Inside the formation it reads as judgment. He offers cases, examples, instances of bad judgment by others and good judgment by men he respects. The criteria stay in his head and in the heads of his peers. A verdict no outsider can cross-check is a verdict, not a finding. That unreviewability is what Turner suspects.
His verdicts lean on invoked entities. The bipartisan consensus on Israel. Responsible journalism. The line between criticism and antisemitism. These carry no force apart from the trained responses of the men who invoke them. Strip the responses and the entities vanish. Strip the entities and the responses remain and keep working.
The Signal episode of March 2025 shows the pattern under strain. Senior Trump officials added Goldberg by accident to a chat planning strikes on the Houthis in Yemen. Goldberg published. Whether this counted as a scandal, who bore responsibility, what the norms of national security communication required, the norms settled none of it. The positions of the actors did. Goldberg’s framing won in some quarters and lost in others. The norm adjudicated nothing. It named what the winners’ habits had ratified.
Goldberg claims, by his position and his performance, to detect standards. The claim earns him deference, access, sources, influence. Turner’s question is whether anything gets detected. A trained sensibility produces verdicts. Other trained sensibilities ratify them. The verdicts become the standards against which fresh cases get judged. The circle closes. No fact outside the circle does the work the circle pretends to track.
Turner on the Tacit
In The Social Theory of Practices, Stephen Turner takes the idea of tacit knowledge and turns it against the theorists who lean on it. The idea comes from Polanyi. A man knows more than he can tell. He learns a craft, a way of seeing, and the knowing sits below the rules he could write down. Turner grants this at the level of the single man. He denies the next step, the one social theory wants, where the tacit turns into a shared thing, a common stock of background many heads hold together. Tacit knowledge cannot pass between heads in explicit form. That is what makes it tacit. So no shared tacit content gets transmitted. Each man builds his own habits through his own training. When two men respond alike, the likeness is an overlap of separate histories, not a draw on one common store.
Goldberg’s work runs on the tacit. He knows a story when he sees one. He knows which sentence carries a piece and which sentence sinks it, which writer to send at a subject, when a draft is done. The knowing comes fast. Ask him for the rule and he cannot give it. He learned the craft on a long road. Police reporter at the Washington Post, the Jerusalem Post, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic. The road laid down trained reactions he runs on every day and cannot fully say.
So far Turner agrees. The trouble starts where Goldberg’s authority rests on a shared tacit knowledge he supposedly carries with other serious editors. News judgment. The craft of the editor. The Atlantic house standard handed down across a hundred and sixty-eight years. Turner dissolves all of it. There is no common body of editorial tacit knowledge sitting above the men and feeding into each one. There are many editors, each with his own habituation, trained in overlapping circuits, reacting in overlapping ways. The overlap looks like a shared possession to an observer who needs one. Nothing shared does the work. Separate histories that ran through the same few magazines produce verdicts that resemble one another, and the resemblance gets named a standard.
Watch what happens when Goldberg edits a young writer. The common picture says he transmits his judgment, pours his tacit craft into the writer’s head. Turner says that cannot happen, because the tacit will not move in explicit form. Goldberg marks up the copy, sends it back, marks it again. The writer builds his own habits against Goldberg’s reactions. After a year the writer’s judgment resembles Goldberg’s. Nothing passed between them. The writer trained himself against a stimulus until his habits matched. The newsroom habituates. It does not transmit.
The Signal episode of March 2025 shows the individual grain of the tacit. Senior Trump officials added Goldberg by accident to a chat planning strikes on the Houthis in Yemen. He read it, recognized what he held, and published. He ran no explicit procedure. He knew. The knowing came from decades of the work, his work, his history. Put another editor in the chat and the response splits. One sits on it. One calls a lawyer first. One never grasps what he is holding. If a single shared body of journalistic tacit knowledge stood behind all of them, the responses would converge. They scatter. The scatter is the proof. Each man brings his own trained reaction, built on his own road, articulable to none of them, and shared with no one.
