# Jonah Goldberg Conservative columnist, author, and podcaster who spent 21 years at *[[National Review]]* before co-founding the center-right subscription publication **The Dispatch** in 2019, where he is editor-in-chief. Goldberg is one of the most prominent voices of the **"Never Trump"** wing of conservatism — a movement-conservative who broke with the populist-nationalist turn of the Republican Party and built an institutional home for anti-Trump conservatives. He also holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the [[American Enterprise Institute]] and hosts *The Remnant*, a long-form interview podcast. ## National Review and the Rise Goldberg made his name at *[[National Review]]*, where he was a founding editor of National Review Online and became one of the magazine's most widely syndicated columnists. He operated squarely within the **fusionist** tradition — the Buckley-era synthesis of free-market economics, social conservatism, and anti-communism/hawkish foreign policy — and his commentary helped carry that framework into the blog-and-cable era of the 2000s. ## Liberal Fascism His signature book is *[[Liberal Fascism]]* (2008), a #1 *New York Times* bestseller arguing that fascism's intellectual roots lie on the political *left* rather than the right — tracing a lineage from Woodrow Wilson's wartime statism and Progressive-era technocracy through the [[New Deal]] to modern American liberalism. The book was commercially enormous and politically influential on the right, supplying a rhetorical inversion that Tea Party-era conservatives deployed widely. It was also sharply contested: many academic historians dismissed it as polemic rather than scholarship, criticizing its definitional looseness and selective lineage. In a 2022 *Dispatch* retrospective ("What I Got Wrong About Fascism"), Goldberg revisited the book — conceding some points while standing by much of it, and arguing that his critique of [[Woodrow Wilson]]'s nativism, racism, and authoritarianism had since become closer to conventional wisdom across the spectrum. His other books include *The Tyranny of Clichés* (2012) and *Suicide of [[the West]]* (2018), also a *Times* bestseller. ## The Dispatch and Never Trump In 2019 Goldberg left *National Review* to co-found **The Dispatch** with Stephen F. Hayes — a subscription-based, explicitly anti-populist conservative outlet positioned against the Trump-aligned drift of much of the right-wing media ecosystem. The Dispatch became one of the central institutional homes of the Never Trump movement: conservative in policy, but committed to opposing Trump and defending liberal-democratic norms, fact-based reporting, and the older fusionist consensus. Goldberg's trajectory is a useful counter-case in this KB. Where the [[Tea Party Movement]] hub argues that movement conservatism's fiscal-libertarian framework was largely a vehicle that the base abandoned for Trump-era cultural populism, Goldberg represents the *faction that refused to make that trade* — the movement-conservative intellectuals who treated the populist turn as a betrayal of principle rather than a fulfillment of it. His ideas (especially the producer-versus-parasite framing in [[Liberal Fascism]] and his defense of classical liberalism) sit upstream of the [[Makers and Takers]] tradition even as he became a critic of the movement that tradition helped produce. ## See Also - [[Liberal Fascism]] — His signature, contested bestseller - [[National Review]] — His longtime institutional home - [[American Enterprise Institute]] — Current academic affiliation - [[Makers and Takers]] — Adjacent ideological frame - [[Tea Party Movement]] — The movement whose Trump-era turn he rejected