The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg · The Dispatch

Edmund Burke Was Not a Romantic | Interview: Yuval Levin

March 18, 2026·1 hr 13 min·5 clips

Yuval Levin explains why Burke's famous line about human nature demolishes the idea that pure reason can govern politics.

The opening is classic Remnant housekeeping. Goldberg moves through a warm, self mocking intro, placing Yuval Levin at Sea Island, AEI, and inside the show's usual orbit. Then the conversation gets more serious. The question is whether a public shaped by TikTok sized attention and meme ready anger can still handle the slow deliberation republican government needs. Goldberg treats technology as something that changes culture, not just a pile of gadgets. He points to the president's social media campaign around a war as command turned into game language, with textures borrowed from Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty. That is the warning sign. The problem is not only that people behave badly online. It is that the reward system favors quick passions over minority protection and serious judgment. Levin takes the institutional route. He answers through Madison's old argument that slowness and distance give public passions time to cool before they harden into action. Speed is the pressure point. Technologies that collapse distance and shorten time make the old design look less like quaint procedure and more like a needed brake. The exchange has some bite without turning performative. Goldberg keeps pressing, not because outrage is the point, but because he wants to know whether the system can still leave room for deliberation while outrage is everywhere. Levin gets the space to build the answer properly. That shape matters. The answer is not a slogan; it depends on remembering why republican forms were built to resist immediacy in the first place. There is still banter around the edges. The close drifts back to show notes, a public event at LSU, dinner at Megan McArdle's house, birthday jokes, and the Dispatch subscription nudge. But the argument sticks. For a conversation that avoids theatrical panic, this one still sounds honestly uneasy about whether our tools are moving faster than our institutions.

As heard by us

A serious conservative conversation about technology, passion, and whether republican self-government still has room to think.

Jonah Goldberg brings Yuval Levin onto The Remnant for a conservative argument about Burke, republican government, and the way modern technology strains political deliberation.

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Why you'd press play

The argument you want when the news cycle makes you wonder whether the system was always this fragile.

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