Lockard writes regularly for The Courier and has published several short stories and poetry.
In history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial, 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Sun in 1897, asking for a definitive answer as to whether there is a Santa Claus. While Virginia’s letter questioned the existence of a mythical figure, it showed more political acumen than a thousand politicians and analysts could spew out. It has to do with the spirit of humanity and, when applied to our country, the spirit of our nation.
So let me offer a modified response: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And yes, Virginia – and our other 49 states –there is a United States of America.”
Of course, there are ample issues for disagreement and dissension in the United States, often intensified by a political system embracing extremes. Human rights issues, racial equality, gun legislation or the lack thereof, abortion, how our children are taught, even how we define an individual – all fodder for argument. Families not speaking, friends on the outs, right’s violations and accusations, injustice. Not to mention controversial or bungled alarms raising more questions about our country’s leadership role in the world. The left going further to the left, the right veering further right. And every person absolutely believing he or she, or they, are right! We have all been affected by the “skepticism of a skeptical age.” (To quote from the Sun’s response to Virginia.)
Santa Claus and the United States have much more in common than at first glance. That “jolly old elf” and our nation both started as a dream, the embodiment of an idea. And both are sustained by that dream. They may have morphed into skinny mall Santa or been corrupted by contentious claims of “this land is my land and only mine,” but both exist through belief. As Virginia wondered about Santa over a century ago, this holiday season many are wondering about our country. But the core of the United States is much more intangible than its Constitution and laws. Its strength is the underlying belief in it, and that requires defending.
We all love stories. It is the real “story behind the story” when we immerse ourselves in the power of belief. So, who brings the gifts?
Is it not more important to recognize them? And not just our own gifts, but the whole array our families and communities possess through our citizenship? How much better to abide by that most old-fashioned of sentiments and believe we are “blessed” to live in this country.
Santa Claus and our nation have also this in common:. No matter how many letters we send to the North Pole or how many expletives we spew about what is wrong with the country, neither will act as “Amazon’s Wish Fulfillment Center” on steroids. Getting everything we want under the tree is impossible, as impossible as pleasing all of the people all of the time in our vast and diverse country.
Francis Pharcellus Church, the veteran newsman at the “Sun” who answered Virginia’s letter, wrote: “[T]here is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man ... could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance ... push aside that curtain ... to the beauty and glory beyond.”
Don’t we all love patriotic anthems and holiday carols for their hopeful message of belief in something bigger, whether it is our country or Santa Claus or God? The strength of our nation is not embodied in its headlines and “breaking news.” It is in the hearts of its people. Which is exactly what Church wrote, assuring Virginia of the truth of her belief: “In all this world there is nothing else so real and abiding.”
What’s wrong with the United States? Plenty.
But what’s right with it? Plenty more.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.