Some Good Basic Questions Stirred Up by Rufo and Goldberg

Update and correction: I am informed by a reader that James Lindsay has recently repudiated atheism, and is now considering himself an agnostic. That affects my second paragraph, so please factor that in accordingly. I stand corrected, and please pray for Lindsay.

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Introduction

I was put on to an important interaction between Jonah Goldberg and Christopher Rufo by Meg Basham—for which, please see below—but as I read through it I found myself wanting to say a few things. But then that led to the moment when I slapped my forehead (metaphorically of course) and said to myself, “Wait. I have a blog.”

Somewhere along the line James Lindsay entered the discussion by saying that it was all quite simple really. All we have to do is not be Marxist. But Lindsay’s atheism means that he is much closer to Marxism than any of the other folks he is worried about. It boils down to this—if there is no God above the state, then the state is god. I know that Lindsay wants to have a high view of our constitutional order, but if there is no God, then the Constitution is just so much paper. And that means that if there is no God above the Constitution, then what Lindsay has is a paper God . . . and Marx uses way more paper. But let us not get distracted, as much fun as that would be—I really want to get on to some of the issues that I think are preventing Goldberg from hearing Rufo.

The Exchange, Conveniently Linked for You

This entire exchange between Rufo and Jonah Goldberg well worth reading. What it comes down to is that we reached a point of national devolution where a new generation of conservatives represented by Rufo realized that the beautiful losers model of the respectable Right, which… https://t.co/wgRSqI5Ltk

— Megan Basham (@megbasham) April 19, 2025

Tactics and Principles

The exchange began when Rufo responded to an essay that claimed that Rufo, that pesky conservative activist, was actually being a communist because he was taking a page from the playbook of Antonio Gramsci. But this really represents a fundamental confusion—in a war, both sides are fighting for different causes, obviously. But both sides can use the same kinds of weapons—bows and arrows and slings, in ancient times, and howitzers and aircraft carriers in modern times.

They can also use the same principles in the pursuit of their respective war aims. Both sides need to maintain their supply lines (communication), both sides should want to astonish the enemy (surprise), both sides should have a defined purpose in the war (objective), and both sides need to move swiftly (mobility). But the fact that Japanese destroyers wanted to move fast at the battle of Midway, just like the American destroyers wanted to, did not mean that their respective causes were the same. The Americans were not fighting for the rising sun, and the Japanese were not fighting for Jeffersonian democracy. And the same realities would hold true even though both sides had destroyers.

So Saul Alinsky wrote a book called Rules for Radicals, a book that showed that he was a very shrewd strategist. And the first part of my book, Rules for Reformers, takes and reapplies a number of his doctrines, while rejecting other things he said as godless. For example, Alinsky was absolutely willing to fight dirty. “In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt” (RFR, pp. 129-130). Obviously that is not a principle for Christians to pick up and use. But who could object to his third principle? “Whenever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.” That is simply tactical wisdom. The central problem with Alinsky was who he thought the enemy was, and not his competence in fighting. There is absolutely no mission drift going on if the Roman generals learned a thing or two from studying Hannibal, or if the Allies gained tactical wisdom from watching Rommel.

Now if you have been a conservative for the last fifty years, as I have, and you had to judge from the behavior of the conservative egghead class, you might be forgiven for thinking that a deep commitment to “losing slowly” was an essential conservative principle. As one wit put it, if the Democrats made a move to burn down the Capitol, the Republicans would counter with a proposal to do it over three years. But losing slowly on purpose is not a conservative principle at all. Mark it well. There is no shame in losing, and therefore no shame in losing slowly. The shame lies in the halfheartedness. The shame lies in abandoning hope before you have any right to.

So a decision to fight with the goal of defeating the enemy is not the same thing as adopting his principles.

The Use of Power

In the course of their exchange, Jonah said this:

This represents a confusion pretty similar to the one already addressed. Applied strictly, it means that every true classical liberal order needs to be pacifist. What did the battle of Gettysburg do if not impose Lincoln’s idea of perpetual union through raw power? Would Jonah be willing to say that Lincoln was “pretty illiberal”? I would say that, but would Jonah?

So let’s move to a conflict that Jonah and I would probably agree on. Did we win our independence from Britain by diplomatic means? Or did the French fleet sitting off Yorktown have anything to do with it?

We need to remember Clausewitz’s famous maxim: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Those other means do not consist of getting a bill through a committee, or over-riding a president’s veto, or maintaining a filibuster, or getting the requisite number of states to ratify an amendment to the Constitution.

If there is room in your mental budget for war, then there is room for illiberal means.

I hasten to add, as an advocate of Augustinian just war theory, that the arrival of war should not be the arrival of moral anarchy. I am just observing that fierce battles do not get moved, seconded, approved, and entered into the minutes.

Because this point seems so obvious to me, it strikes me that the real difference is over whether or not the times that we are in are desperate enough for this sort of “warfare.” Jonah thinks that we can get ourselves out of the fix we are in by liberal means, which also means that things must not really be all that bad. The constitutional republic of the Founders is still functioning, and all we have to do is work a bit harder. But the movement that Rufo represents believes that the constitutional order of the Founders is a shell of its former self, and that we must fight like Picts painted blue to get any of it back.

So What Time Is It, Actually?

I need to set this point up, if you will give me just a moment.

I would divide the conservative establishment into two categories. The first would be those who are not genuinely conservative at all. They may have been conservative at one time, but then they went demented by Trump’s bad manners, or they succumbed to the lure of grifting, or the cancerous ramifications of “propositional nationhood” finally got up into their brains. These people have essentially gone over to the other side. As Richard Weaver taught us, ideas have consequences. And because “America is an idea” is itself an idea with very bad consequences, it is worth inquiring what some of those consequences might be. Propositions can be exported, and some of the consequences there would be endless nation-building wars. And propositions can also lie behind the desire to import the world, which lies beneath the willingness to flood our country with immigrants from elsewhere—with globalist Republicans willing to import aliens at alarming levels, and the Democrats doing it at deranged levels.

But it turns out that there is an enormous number of Americans who think of their country with the same kind of affection that you would have for a regular old country, and not for a proposition, and they fiercely resented what was being done to their people. Not to the propositions they had heard voiced from time to time in essays, but to their people. Their customs, their mores, their neighborhoods, their laws, their jobs, their schools, were all being thrown into the food mixer with a huge “proposition paddle,” and then Biden set the whole thing on “high.”

And the fact that some people think that the results of the 2024 election were a mystery . . . is a mystery to me.

Now the other half of the conservative establishment is where I would locate Jonah. One of the very best books I have ever read on American political history was Jonah’s Liberal Fascism. Rufo points to this fact; “I am confident that you know, or used to know, much of this.” That book was, and remains, a cogent description of America’s battle with cancer, stages 1 through 3. But we are now at stage 4, and all the best doctors think we should do something radical . . . either send to Mexico for the juju bean treatments, or go on hospice. But Jonah just hates the juju bean approach, and he is in denial about the need for hospice. This only means he should read his own book again. If we took Jonah’s name off that book, and used it for training young men who are now manning the barricades, it would serve us very well.

An astute person should have been able to read Liberal Fascism went it came out, and then predict the crisis we are currently in. And some of us did so.

What Do We Mean, Free Speech?

Another issue is one where we need to learn how to be deaf to the disingenuous arguments and redefinitions of the left.

I agree with Jonah completely here, but issues of definition still remain.

I have said for years that all our cultural war clashes are battles over editorial control of the dictionary. What I mean by “free speech, freedom of association, free markets, due process, and individual rights” can be found if we resort to the world inhabited by Noah Webster. What the left means can be found if we track down the Red Queen from Alice and get her to talk.

The commies and conservatives have very different definitions of, say, free speech. A conservative would say that a person has free speech when he can criticize the government openly without fear of reprisals. For a good example of our commitment to actual free speech, the kind the Founders had in mind, I would point to the fact that our local Stickergate controversy is now on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If you have a moment, our prayer request would be that they would agree to take up the case.

But the left defines free speech as the government funding whatever it is that they want to say, not to mention penalizing those who are guilty of saying hateful things. And from their well-funded platforms, they get to define what “hateful” means.

Conservatives want their speech to be free. Progressives want their speech to be funded.

So it is not an assault on free speech if DOGE discovers that we were pouring millions of dollars into a series of theater productions about teens discovering they were trans, and the terrible difficulties they faced in their Bible belt home state when they decided to come out. I am making this example up, but you should know that if this happened, and if the DOGE discovery meant that the funding got cut, cut, cut, we can have a moral certainty that the left would shriek that this was censorship and an assault on free speech. Why? Because the funding stopped.

But what do we say when the government declines to fund an artist on the schlock right—you know, the kind who gives us crushed velvet pictures of Trump riding on the back of giant bald eagles, the Constitution in his right hand and an AR-15 in his left? We shrug and leave him to the vicissitudes of the free market . . . which unfortunately means that in certain parts of the country he will do quite well. But you can’t have everything.

Then a “Yeah, But” for Rufo

As regular readers of this blog know, I am fond of saying that it is “Christ or chaos.” One place where I would lean away from Rufo’s way of putting it has to do with Machiavelli.

Rufo rightly notes that Samuel Adams, the last Puritan, knew how to play hardball, but I would much prefer to describe this as Machiavellian tactics . . . not ethics. Ethics (in order to be ethics) must be grounded in a transcendent reality, and not in the observations of a shrewd Italian hard man. I don’t want deontological ethics either, if they are made out of pressure-treated four-by-fours, but I do want a commitment to scriptural norms. A simple commitment to “good consequences” really would lead to the end justifying more means than we ought to be comfortable with. I don’t blame Jonah for being jumpy here.

But to be fair to him, I think Rufo might have been pointing in that direction when he says this:

I would argue that that “something” has to be from outside the world. That means God the Father, and His Son, Jesus Christ. Without a Christian consensus, without a religious revival that restores a Christian consensus, this is all going to end badly.

Without Christ, the reactionary right will spiral down into a state that will once again reinforce what Calvinism teaches about total depravity.

And without Christ, the current husk of our former order will continue on with its charades and pretenses—acting as though we were still a free and virtuous people . . . as though a genuinely free people would ever slaughter millions of their own children, to take just one example of our national iniquity.

And without Christ, the left will take us all down into their totalitarian sinkhole. It really is Christ or chaos.

And as for the proceduralism that Rufo mentioned, I would echo Jeremy Carl’s comment.

“I also want to remember that the procedural values you list are not ultimate values—that is, they have to point toward *something,* which is precisely what many "classical liberals have forgotten.”

💯

The left loves proceduralalism because it creates the outcomes they want.

— Jeremy Carl (@realJeremyCarl) April 18, 2025

Don’t Forget the Moronic Right

In the meantime, I do want to reassure Jonah Goldberg about something else important. For a number of decades now the left has demonized as racist anything whatever that threatened to cross them, or to interfere with their purposes. Remember how the Tea Party rose up in favor of basic accounting math, and they were tarred as a racist movement? So the jibe holds true . . . a racist is anyone winning an argument with a liberal.

Now because of this radical devaluation of the currency, the term racist has now been emptied of almost all of its meaning—except with those few conservatives who are still trying to hang on to some of the norms they grew up with. This has given a golden opportunity to those who actually do treasure rancid sentiments about ethnicity, at least on X. They mock the ethnic ethics vibe put out by the Cliff Huxtable family, which to my mind is fair enough, but then their premises force them to go on to reject and mock the books of Acts, Galatians, and Colossians—or anyone who believes the books of Acts, Galatians, and Colossians.

A certain perverse kind of ethnic harmony really was a post-war value, twisted in favor of a globalist homogeneity, and then suspended from a gigantic invisible Kantian sky hook. But ethnic harmony in Christ—and please follow me closely here—has nothing whatever to do with the Second World War or the secular liberal establishment.

So I would encourage Jonah to understand that there is a marked difference between Christian nationalism and what folks are calling ethno-nationalism. One of the differences is that Christian nationalists actually understand the range of meanings that the biblical word ethnos conveys.

Put simply, “American” is an ethnos. And “white” isn’t.