Jonah Goldberg Quotes
Whenever a Republican gets in office, all of a sudden progressives realize that federalism and state's rights aren't necessarily only about defending slavery or Jim Crow. They're actually about maximizing freedom.
Goldberg, Jonah. "Fair-Weather Federalists." National Review, 2017.
Ironically, many Republican leaders give lip service to decentralized government but they fight hard for centralized national government making. Many want Congress to make laws governing abortion and other family planning techniques. Some want the state to decide, but almost no Republicans want to leave these personal decisions to the local government much less the family and women involved. In business regulation as well, republican fight tooth and nail to have Federal legislation prempt state and local government about tort liability for defective products, and they always prefer that the Federal SEC make all the rules and regulations about selling stocks and bonds and do not want state or local government to “interfere”. Likewise, they have emasculated the state governments when it comes to authority over the state militias where virtually all the controls and promotions are decided by Congress and the Department of Defense and not by Governors or local politicians. Ther are many other examples. In most of the solid Republican Southern States, the local school boards cannot even select the textbooks that schools will use and the Republicans centralize this with the State government and state legislatures which they control. Democrats also are generally opposed to decentralization except for large cities having control along with the Federal government but otherwise they too do not want decentralization. For national political parties, what is the point of winning national elections of the big decisions are made locally?
After the Truman defeat of Republican candidate Thomas Dewey in 1948, Republicans were searching for ways to overcome the poor image that they had with many Americans, and one of the then preeminent advertising companies was assigned the task of analyzing the 1948 failure and making recommendations. This quotation comes from that report. This recommendation defined the Republican approach for the next decades.
Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American conservative syndicated columnist, author, political analyst, and commentator. The founding editor of National Review Online, from 1998 until 2019 he was an editor at National Review. Goldberg writes a weekly column about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times.In October 2019, Goldberg became founding editor of the online opinion and news publication The Dispatch. Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism, which became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller shortly after its release in January 2008; The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, released in 2012; and Suicide of the West, which was published in April 2018 and also became a New York Times bestseller, reaching No. 5 on the list the following month.
