Jonah Goldberg to Conservatives: ‘Just Because Being Rude is Politically Incorrect’ Doesn’t Mean It’s Good
National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg appeared on The Daily Show to promote his new book Suicide of the West.
His book tackles the harmful effects of tribalism, nationalism, populism, and identity politics. Goldberg said that there’s “nothing wrong” with a little of them. He links the appropriate amount to a “pinch of salt” and that having way too much is “literally poisonous.”
“This drives me crazy about my own side these days where I talk to young conservative activists, college students and say ‘Look by all means, fight political correctness if that’s what you want to do.’ But just because being rude is politically incorrect doesn’t mean being rude is good,” Goldberg told Trevor Noah. “And so much of what’s happening I think on both sides of the political aisle is this idea that you can do almost any horrible thing if it annoys the right people. And that’s a huge part of the defense of Donald Trump, which I just find intellectually bankrupt, which is ‘Well, he’s got the right enemies’ or ‘He’s making the right people upset.’ Well, you have to look at what is actually upsetting them.”
The conservative commentator specifically spoke about the downside of identity politics, which he argued reduces “whole categories of people to an abstraction” and that people should be more focused on “core values.”
“All civilization is is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves,” Goldberg elaborated, “and one of the reason why Martin Luther King was so persuasive was he was appealing to the best ideals of White America and saying you should take people as you find them.”
Watch the clip above, via Comedy Central.
