A New York Times columnist offering pointers for “Pitchfork Pat” Buchanan-type populists on “the isolationist right who thought Trump shared his views” might seem akin to a mad scientist named Frankenstein offering a road map to a pitchforks-and-torches peasant mob.  Yet Michelle Goldberg does just that in “The President Was Never Antiwar” (March 2).

While maintaining that Donald Trump was indeed the embodiment through which “the once marginalized politics of Patrick Buchanan became a dominant force in the Republican Party,” Goldberg insists that “Trump was never Buchanan’s heir when it came to foreign policy.”   While “it is true that he broke with key elements of neoconservative ideology,” he hasn’t distanced himself from even “the most fanatical of neoconservatives,” preferring instead to discard the ideology’s “notion that American power should ever be constrained by a veneer of idealism.”  The end result is “less a repudiation of neoconservatism than a mutation of it.”

Trump might, as Goldberg suggests, be “attracted to right-wing cranks of all stripes.” But “paleoconservatives who are skeptical of foreign entanglements” can trace their views back to Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams.  As Franklin Foer highlighted in The New York Times, during another rash Republican administration garnering “fierce loyalty from conservatives” to the point where rightist “backlash against the war may seem unexpected,” the Buchanan who “vociferously opposed Bush’s campaign against Saddam Hussein, just like he had opposed the one waged by Bush’s father” was drawing on a tendency that included Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy, “not just angry farmers and protofascists.”

If none of those four forefathers were that peaceful as presidents, neither were they real-life versions of the reactionary rule of Charles Lindbergh as imagined by Philip Roth in The Plot Against America (what was for Foer in 2004 a “new counterfactual novel” dramatizing a dystopia of paleocon precursors).  Contemporary conservatives who “bemoan feminism, immigration and multiculturalism” have given up hope of a USA unshaped by such movements to the point where “they see no point in exporting its values abroad.”

By contrast, Goldberg points out that Trump being “anti-immigrant, hostile to free trade and given to John Birch Society-style conspiracy theorizing” is taken to show that he will cut off military maneuvering at the borders as well.  That doesn’t just ignore the longstanding observation by laissez-faire radicals that voluntary relations across state lines tend to defuse rather than fuel international tensions.  It’s almost as if Perseus didn’t bother with his painstaking tracking and taming of the mythological winged horse Pegasus in Clash of the Titans, but was satisfied with a particularly malodorous pile of manure.

Goldberg is on to something in noting how Trump’s persona evolved in an environment with “no real cost to his belligerence” … not even mentioning his 2000 interview in The Advocate magazine defining his politics in opposition to, not imitation of, “the things [Buchanan] had written about Hitler, Jews, blacks, gays, and Mexicans.” As Herculean as the task may seem, we don’t need a Greek demigod to clean up the political horse race.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Neo-Trumpers: The Next Mutation?” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, March 9, 2026

When David Brooks claims that his preferred “moderate conservative political philosophy” is in 2026 “so fantastically successful … that moderate Republicans are now the dominant force in American politics,” his intentional sarcasm is clear before the fourth paragraph of his final New York Times column (“Time to Say Goodbye,” February 1): “I’m kidding.”

Even if a reader missed out on the decades of Brooks’s commentary as resolutely as literally-frozen-in-time Futurama protagonist Philip J. Fry, its remainder would beg for the response of Fry’s snarky robotic sidekick Bender: “Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.”

The very next paragraph, Brooks sees “a weird market failure” failing to provide programs addressing “the fundamental questions of life” (like Cosmos and Star Trek?) and asking “Does America still have a unifying national narrative?” without specifying when one ever existed.

To Brooks, the 2003 of his earliest op-eds was a time before widespread suspicions “that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people.”  He should have heeded the line in The Matrix Reloaded, as applicable to those thronging theaters that year as its in-universe insurgents, on how “we well know that the reason most of us are here is because of our affinity for disobedience.”  A “faith that capitalism when left alone would produce broad and stable prosperity” would have had to explain the long-burst dot-com bubble well before the housing bubble followed (both inflated by the political patronage implied to have left it alone).

The twentieth century is at least distant enough by now to understand how Brooks’s non-total recall pigeonholes the Sixties counterculture as one “less conformist … more creative than the one that came before, though also one that was more atomized” — not one that Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker could quip “gave us both drum solos and drum circles.”

It’s even easier to recount the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Progressives moving beyond the nineteenth’s supposed “social Darwinist culture, with its individualistic, survival-of-the-fittest emphasis” that would eventually recur in “four decades of hyperindividualism” culminating in the “nihilism personified” of Donald Trump.  After all, even most historians of the period ignore how many of the Progressives, rather than seeking Brooks’s “antidote to nihilism,” remained advocates of the Henry George for whom “all that is necessary for social regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian patriots sometimes called Nihilists—’Land and Liberty!'” Both sides of Georgism derived from the Herbert Spencer who insisted that far from endorsing or excusing “the rebarbarizing effects of the struggle for existence carried on by brute force,” he “had chosen the expression ‘survival of the fittest’ rather than survival of the best because the latter phrase did not cover the facts.”

Brooks acknowledges that “the Iraq war shattered America’s confidence in its own power” (while omitting his role in promoting it).  Cynics who seek not “permission to embrace brutality” but what the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism’s Tim Madigan calls “an enjoyment of worldly pleasures, and a disdain for worldly power” could warn future pundits about similar blunders.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Bon Voyage, David Brooks (and Let Laissez-Faire Come Back!)”
   by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], February 9, 2026

Zohran Mamdani’s promise to bring “the resurgent flame of hope” to “the January chill” as mayor of a literally frozen New York City during his January 1 inaugural address got the cold shoulder from conservative commentators.

Despite his vow to move the city to unity past “a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor” and highlighting constituents “who supported President Trump a year before they voted for me,” some just aren’t buying Mamdani’s narrative. At most, reactions to lines such as the pledge to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism” in City Journal or The Wall Street Journal don’t go quite as far as National Review‘s Noah Rothman in invoking “the warmth generated by torchlit marches, book burnings, and crematoria.”

Yet those red-baiting Mamdani’s “Red Apple” could stand to scratch the surface and see how much the gilded apple of Trump Tower pokes through — and not just because he won’t be able to “deliver universal childcare for the many by taxing the wealthiest few” if those fat cats pull up stakes.

Mamdani at least acknowledges that Bill de Blasio took office via the same winning “tale of two cities” rhetoric in 2014 — and the precedents of David Dinkins and Fiorello La Guardia, both memory-holed by the subtitle of Run Zohran Run! Inside Zohran Mamdani’s Sensational Campaign to Become New York City’s First Democratic Socialist Mayor. The contrast to such predecessors as former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and election competitor Andrew Cuomo is left unsaid.

Yet Mamdani’s assertion that subsidies for rents and rides are “not simply about the costs we make free, but the lives we fill with freedom” parallels Giuliani’s infamous line about how “freedom is about authority.” Rudy’s concomitant qualms about using such authority to “solve problems that government in America was designed not to solve” are nullified by certitude that “there is no need too small to be met” by statism — itself an echo of Cuomo’s confidence that in the New York state he then governed “there is no small solution to big problems.”

Mamdani assures us that his administration is one for which “no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power” in the face of “those who insist that the era of big government is over.” He doesn’t specify whether their ranks include the husband of former United States Senator Hillary Clinton who originated that phrase, but it’s not that far from William Jefferson Clinton’s anti-Jeffersonian claim to find “nothing patriotic about … pretending that you can love your country but despise your Government.”

For New Yorkers who love their city despite its government, that’s not the result of what Mamdani dubs “decades of apathy” but of understanding reality.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “OPINION: Humanitarianism is the warmest place to hide” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina], January 6, 2026
2. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, October 4, 2024
3. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Williamston, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
4. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
5. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Ledger News [Oxford,
   North Carolina], October 4, 2024
6. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
7. “Humanitarianism is the warmest place to hide” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], January 7, 2026
8. “Humanitarianism is the Warmest Place to Hide” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, January 8, 2026