Tucker Carlson joins Ben Shapiro to discuss his new book, Ship of Fools, detailing his 49-year political evolution from pro-choice to conservative while critiquing the left's redefinition of "E pluribus unum." They debate societal hierarchy, attribute rural fatherlessness to wage disparities where men earn less than women, and oppose driverless trucks that could eliminate ten million jobs. Carlson argues against the Iraq War, citing it as a mistake empowering Iran, and concludes that legislation cannot fix spiritual malaise, insisting humans must balance shareholder concerns with the real needs of ordinary people rather than serving economic systems. [Automatically generated summary]
I am super excited to be joined by Tucker Carlson, and we're going to jump into his brand new book, Ship of Fools, which is already a massive bestseller on the New York Times charts and on charts that are more reputable than the New York Times charts.
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Okay, so let's start off with this.
A lot of people don't know your actual background, like where you came from, because, you know, folks sort of exist in the immediate ecosystem.
Yes, they do.
Where did you come from?
Where did you grow up?
How did you become Tucker Carlson, the biggest host on cable news?
Right here in Los Angeles, very close to where we are right now.
I actually went to first grade in this town and then I moved to La Jolla and then I went to high school and college on the east coast and kind of stayed in Washington where my family had moved to work for the Reagan administration.
And I've been there ever since, and I've had a series of jobs mostly in print, magazines, newspaper, and then website, and then worked at CNN, MSNBC, PBS, ABC, and Fox.
So I've just kind of been always in the world that I occupy now with varying degrees of success based partly on the amount of effort I was exerting in the job I was in, and also based on luck and things you can't control.
So what sort of shaped where you are politically right now?
Because if I look at your political career, you were much more aggressive on foreign policy in the early 2000s, for example, and now you're much more isolationist on foreign policy.
Yeah, I mean, I have always tried to be much more than right.
I've tried to be evidence-based.
I don't, especially as I age, I believe less in theories or constructs, and I believe more in results.
And I also believe in honesty.
And so if you think that the policy that you're proposing will reach a certain conclusion, produce a certain result, and it doesn't, I think you should acknowledge that, and I think you ought to change your views based on the evidence.
And so, to bottom line it, in a sentence, America has changed so dramatically.
In the 49 years that I've been here, that, like, why wouldn't my politics change?
They've changed completely on all kinds of different issues.
I mean, I was once pretty stridently pro-choice and for the death penalty, and now I have, you know, very strong feelings in the opposite direction.
I mean, I've supported all kinds of things that turned out to be wrong, but that's the point.
They turned out to be wrong.
So you should reassess!
And what drives me insane Living in Washington for, you know, 35 years is watching people make these grand decisions with the best intentions, by the way.
I think most of our policymakers have good motives.
I do think that.
I know them.
But they watch their policies fail.
They don't acknowledge that they have failed.
To the extent they do, they blame the population for their failure.
And then they repeat the mistake.
I have a bunch of children.
I'm never surprised when they make a bad decision, ever, because people do.
They're human.
I am, too.
What I require is that they acknowledge that they've made a mistake, that they say sorry, and that they try better based on what they've learned from that mistake.
And that's exactly what doesn't happen in Washington, and that's why I'm mad.
So when it comes to ideology, so I actually am a stronger believer in ideology than you are.
One of the reasons being, it seems to me that the way that we determine whether an appropriate metric for success has been achieved is ideologically based, meaning that we can both look at the same policy, and I can say that its goal was achieved, and if you're using a different ideology, then maybe its goal has not been achieved.
So, I guess I move by instinct increasingly, again, as I age.
Your view changes, I think.
Mine has.
The way you measure things changes.
I increasingly distrust complexity in worldview.
So, I start with where I want to end up.
What's the goal?
What kind of society do you want to live in?
You want to live in a place where the family is basically unmolested, where the human conscience is totally unmolested.
Where you acknowledge you can control people's behavior.
You can tell people, you know, you can't do that.
We all have to live together.
You can't sleep in a crosswalk.
Sorry, it's not allowed.
But what you never do is try to control or mandate what people believe.
That that is a kind of, you know, that's a sphere that you would never violate.
And so, in the end, you want to live, if you're in a democracy, any democracy, you want to live in a country where the middle class, normal people, you know, with 100 IQs, making 80 grand a year, can lead You know, productive, meaningful lives, unbothered by the people in power, and they have the hope, at least, that their kids can do slightly better than they have.
That was kind of the rule for a lot of the, certainly the post-war period in this country, and it no longer is.
So my question always is not, like, what party wins?
Or, you know, is my economic theory validated or not?
It's, can we get back to that?
Or can we get as close to that as we possibly can?
Well, so where I agree with you is that, you know, while, as I noted, I am distrustful of complex ideologies, I do think that you need to start with certain things that you believe are true and act on them if you want to get to the place you deserve to be.
So, what I just noticed, just as an American, and I'm not an intellectual, I'm a talk show host, so this is a very obvious thing, That our national motto has been redefined to its mirror image.
So of course it was, out of many, one.
And now it is diversity is our strength.
So I think it's fair if you, without asking my consent, replace the core principle of our country.
It's fair for me to ask if that principle is worth organizing a country around.
So I'll just ask the obvious question, is diversity our strength?
And of course, like so much they say, it's not only untrue, it's the opposite of what is true.
It is never true that diversity is our strength.
I'm for all kinds of diversity, but they're not our strengths.
In other words, is it true in your marriage?
The less you have in common with your wife, the stronger your marriage is.
We don't even speak the same language.
That's why we love each other so much.
Is it true in your business?
We don't know what we're all doing here.
Is it true in the military?
No, it's insane, actually.
It's the opposite, once again, of what is true, what is observably true.
So I just noted that.
And by the way, at the same time I noted it, as I did, you know, 50 nights in the past 200 nights, I made the case explicitly against racism, which is you are not responsible for your immutable qualities.
You can't control your height, your hair color, your DNA, what your parents did.
None of that is your fault and you should not be punished for it or rewarded for it.
That is an argument against racism.
Explicitly!
And so for that, I'm a racist!
It's like, no, you don't understand.
I'm arguing against all kinds of racism.
I think it's a really dangerous way to see the world.
And anyway, whatever.
They don't mean anything they say.
They throw at you the very things that they are doing in order to silence you.
And I just happen for this brief window of my life to have the freedom to say what I think is true, and I'm going to.
But, you know, there's a lot of talk these days about political realignment.
And I wonder if it's not really political realignment that's taking place, but a hunkering down of the far left into the diversity politics, identity politics, and then just the backlash to that.
Because it seems to me that was the real dividing line between Obama and Trump.
It's not even on economics, where in some areas there's actually some sort of populist agreement.
But it's really on these sort of cultural divisions where President Obama was was basically saying, you know, we can be divided into various ethnic groups, all of whom have been victimized by America.
And then we can create a coalition of the dispossessed to come back in and sweep into power.
And the new demographic shift will will basically buoy our boat all the way to victory from now until the end of time.
And then the backlash to that was, well, wait a second.
You know, you guys don't get to do identity politics when you've been saying that identity politics is what's wrong with America for generations, correctly.
Well, as a practical matter, it just doesn't work.
I mean, countries don't hang together by accident, particularly large, diverse ones that don't have a majority in any category.
So there's no—if you don't even have a shared language or history or culture, You know, why would you remain united as a country?
And the answer, which I actually believe in, is that you could hang together around a common idea, a common set of beliefs.
You know, here's what we're all for.
But our ruling class, and I do think this is the least responsible, the most reckless thing they have done, is they have not only failed to come up with what that set of common beliefs is, they have argued against the fact That it should exist.
And so like, what they're doing clearly is, I mean, it's not complicated.
They're dividing in order to rule, of course, what the British did in India.
I mean, I guess I'd start with the Bill of Rights.
I mean, that's not hard.
Do you know what I mean?
Since it is a founding document, it's the foundational document.
And I think, look, You'll notice the book is long on diagnostics and short on solutions because that reflects who I am and what I do.
I'm not a policymaker at all.
I'm an observer.
I'm not a deep systematic thinker.
Again, I'm a talk show host.
So I'm pretty good at telling you what I think is wrong.
It's not as clear how you fix it other than go back to the obvious things.
Like, demand that everybody who comes to this country for economic opportunity, for example, or for the safety of our rule of law, also buy into the things that make all of us Americans.
Like, it's not complicated, really.
So yeah, I would start with the Bill of Rights.
You have an absolute right, as defined in 1967 by the Supreme Court, but also by centuries of tradition here in this country, which we inherited from another culture across the ocean, to believe what you believe.
Unmolested, period.
It's an absolute right.
You can't violate my conscience.
And that right is under assault, not by a political party, but by, in effect, a secular evangelical faith, which we're calling progressive or liberal or whatever, but it's not.
It's a species of religion that seeks to convert by force.
And that is deeply anguished and concerned that other people disagree.
So, like, I doubt you go home tonight and fret at any length over the idea that somewhere in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, someone disagrees with you on an issue.
But I can promise you somewhere in Williamsburg, right now, someone is lying in a studio apartment fretting that in the, you know, the far reaches of red clay Alabama, someone's not fully on board with the bathroom program.
I'm really bothered by that, and they need to do something about it.
So actually it's an asymmetrical contest between one group that wants to affect policy outcomes and the other group that wants to convert by the sword.
And when I talk about elites, what I've really tried to do is distinguish elites from elitists because elites to me are folks who very often, you have elite in every field.
You have elite in the NBA because they're the best basketball players.
You have elite economically, many times because they went to a good school and because they have generated some sort of service or good that a lot of people want to buy into.
And then you have elitists, who are, in my opinion, the people who are really the problem, the folks who think that they ought to be able to cram down their values on somebody else.
I'm not here to give you the view from coal country.
I'm here to give you the view from the world I grew up in and have lived in always, which is the world of the people making a disproportionate number of the key decisions in our country, economic.
Political, cultural.
Determine, you know, like, who makes the most money.
There will always be people who are making more decisions than other people, who are making more money than other people.
They are the people at the top of your society.
What has changed?
From previous generations is not simply the magnitude of the concentration of wealth and power, though I do think, like, measurably that is more disproportionate than ever.
But that's not really what's changed.
What's actually changed is the mindset of the people in charge.
They no longer acknowledge they're in charge.
And they no longer acknowledge that they have a responsibility to the people whose lives they influence.
So the robber barons who we learned, you know, Carnegie and Rockefeller and Phipps and all the people that we learned to hate in ninth grade, those people, you know, had a lot of flaws.
And I do think the concentrations of their wealth was a threat that did justify what Teddy Roosevelt did.
You know what I mean?
Breaking up the trust was really important to allow capitalism to continue.
But one thing I would say in their defense is they knew they were in charge.
They admitted it, and they understood that it came with obligations, because it always does.
If you're a parent, you know.
You're in complete control of your children.
You can do whatever you want to them.
You can make them wear funny hats, dance on one foot.
You can make them speak a different language.
You can do whatever you want.
They're your kids.
You're God.
But with those rights, your rights as a parent, come obligations to take care of.
The people over whom you have control.
And that is what has been lost.
And so Travis, the teenage billionaire who ran Uber, founded it, oversaw the second biggest workforce, employee workforce in the world, and yet he didn't claim them as employees.
He didn't pay their health insurance.
One third of them lost money working for him.
Now, you could say, well, it's the free market.
Okay, fine.
But it doesn't absolve him of his core responsibility.
If you're creating a hierarchy of responsibilities, first is to the people closest to you, and that would include your children, your spouse, your employees, and then to the world.
They've inverted that.
So Travis was always lecturing the rest of us about police brutality or Black Lives Matter or global warming or whatever.
What he was doing was displacing his responsibility from the real and the tangible to the theoretical and cost free.
So I would get these notices on my Uber app being like, let's pause for a moment to remember the victims of police violence, which, you know, that's fine.
But before you start lecturing me about my moral inadequacies and about how you care more than I do, maybe you could pay for the health insurance of your freaking employees, pal, Mr. Teenage Billionaire Guy.
Like, so this is actually part of a much larger syndrome that grows out of the meritocracy the SAT created 60 years ago that has convinced the people in charge that everything that, and trust me, this is the world I'm from, has convinced them that, of course, they're richer and better educated and, by the way, more attractive.
than the people in the great middle of the country, in the medieval parts of the country.
Okay, that's all true.
But they're convinced that they're succeeding because they're better.
This is where I think we come to the second half where we disagree.
So I talked about bifurcating sort of the conversation into elite control of your life in terms of family life and everything else with the economic suggestion that the meritocracy itself is deeply flawed and that the meritocracy can only survive if the people on the top of the meritocracy start to essentially give things away to a certain extent.
So the Uber suggestion that you make, for example, The reason that Uber operates with a bunch of independent contractors is obviously because it's less costly.
It's because it's less costly that Uber is able to have an extraordinarily profitable enterprise that allows them to have all these independent contractors in the first place.
If you have employees, then basically you have a taxi medallion company.
And that restricts supply.
Obviously, that leads to increased pricing, which leads to more competitiveness with the taxi companies, the worst product for consumers.
So the question is, when it comes to this idea that the meritocracy itself is deeply flawed, I want to read a quote from your book because it struck me, because it's obviously a really well-written book, and it makes some arguments that struck me as actually very much in sync with, for example, some of the things that Bernie Sanders says.
I just think that policymakers never should avert their gaze from the goal, which is a stable society.
Stability is underrated.
It's underrated because we've always had it.
So it's almost like, you know, you don't appreciate a friend until he dies, and you're like, oh man, I wish I'd, you know, told him I loved him or whatever.
We've had, with a four-year exception, almost continuous Social stability, the strata upon which we build our economy and our civil society, all of that was possible because we had a stable society.
We had a middle class that was the majority.
And now we don't.
And so we're not thinking clearly about what's going to happen unless and until we regain that stability.
And the core factor driving it is expanding inequality, not just the fact that our ruling class is richer than it's ever been, including me.
But that the rest of the country is going in the other direction.
Life expectancy for huge parts of the country is in decline.
Like, that's the most... So I guess I would just say the problem with the meritocracy is not that the idea of a meritocracy is bad.
I'm completely for it.
I'm from Southern California.
I mean, talk about a region predicated on meritocracy.
Nobody cares where you're from.
You know what I mean?
It's like, what can you do?
That is a core belief of mine.
I'm merely saying that if you have an economy that suddenly Makes labor valueless, physical labor valueless, and rewards dramatically, I'm not going to say disproportionately, dramatically cognitive ability.
What you're really saying is we have a class system based on IQ.
Now, Charles Murray wrote a book on this 25 years ago that included a very controversial race chapter, which he never should have included, because it obscured the core point of the book, which is what I just said.
People are moving less, however, than they have in the past 30 years.
So, the real question is, you mentioned the suicide rate.
It seems to me that your explanation of a lot of the social discontent in the United States is economically based.
Yes!
And for me, I think that a lot of that social discontent is less economically based than spiritually based.
But I think they're more related.
I'm doubtful, actually.
And the reason that I'm doubtful is because we are, as a society, more prosperous than any society in the history of humanity, including the people at the lower end of the spectrum.
And that's not to say that there aren't people suffering.
But by comparison to any other time in human history, it's not close.
But isn't the way that, at least the founders thought of this, that the way to prevent the elites, you know, an elite class from controlling other people's lives is to restrict the inherent power of government to control everybody's life.
When you suggested before that the goal of the society should be stability, Everyone wants a stable society, but there are lots of different... I mean, you say this in the book.
There are lots of different types of stable societies.
I mean, there are monarchies that are stable societies.
There are communist regimes that are... Monarchies are the most stable societies.
Right, exactly.
There are dictatorships that are incredibly... North Korea is a very stable society.
Because... Well, they often do, and that's an incisive question, and you're exactly right.
And I would say to narrow the goal down to a single thing, as I did, is probably stupid.
Stability makes a lot of other things that you want possible.
But I would say within the American context, what you want is a country where the average person, again with an IQ of 100 and an income of 90 grand a year and three kids, can sort of live the life that people lived under those circumstances in 1950.
You want the average person to feel like he's vested in a society, that he can have a stable family, Without, you know, by the way, let me just say, the economic impetus behind family destruction is totally underappreciated by conservatives.
So they looked at the landscape of inner-city America for 50 years and they're like, nope, you know, family formation's gone.
Like, the overwhelming majority of kids grow up without a father.
That's a cultural problem.
Yeah, well, okay, yeah, it is a cultural problem.
There's one way to describe it.
But what's its root?
Why did it happen?
Well, look at rural America now.
Where you're seeing the incidence of fatherlessness like spike.
It's unknown in my neighborhood.
I live in a rich neighborhood, I'm sure you do too.
Everyone's married, okay?
There's no divorce where I live.
In rural America, divorce among white people is now the rule out of what like births and a lot of zip codes are the majority.
Why did that happen?
Because the men make less than the women.
Then there's so much social science on this.
Nobody wants to say it out loud because you're violating some unspoken rule of, like, unhappy feminism or something.
I don't care.
It's true.
Study after longitudinal study has shown that when men make less, women don't want to marry them.
Now, maybe they should.
Ask, ask, I have three daughters.
Ask them.
And they're not ideological at all.
They're totally open-minded.
They're young people.
Would you want to marry a man who makes less than you?
Do you think that's because of structural changes in the American economy or the counter-argument, which would be the welfare state, which is when you start to see all of this begin to spike?
Of course, it plays a huge role in this, but I'm talking employed people.
So when manufacturing dies, what's left?
Well, in a lot of parts of the country, huge swaths of rural America, you have two main employers, the schools and the hospitals.
Those are the full-time, year-round employers.
And those are traditionally female, not exclusively, there are many exceptions to all of this and there are plenty of women who are happy to marry a man who makes less than they do.
But I'm saying across large populations that is true and it's been shown to be true.
So when male wages decline below those of females, marriage formation declines along with it.
Childbirth does not.
In other words, we're sort of hardwired to impregnate, okay?
That continues.
So what the net effect is you have no families and more kids, especially boys, growing up in fatherless homes, which all but guarantees that you repeat the process.
So like, you have the disintegration of the family because of an economic factor.
But I'm saying conservatives go on and have for generations about how important the family, they don't mean it at all.
I live in DC, where the entire conservative non-profit infrastructure lives, okay?
And I know what their priorities are, and they're lowering marginal tax rates, which I'm for, by the way, as someone who pays the majority of his income in taxes.
Of course I'm for that.
But the goal, if the goal is preserving the family as the core building block of any successful society, and it's got to be that goal, because it has all kinds of effects that we want, And it's just inherently good.
I don't need to explain it, but I could.
But the point is, if that's the goal, what are you doing about it?
If you wake up one morning and you find yourself in a society where 23-year-olds with four-year college degrees and, like, initiative, who aren't smoking weed every day, if they can't make enough to buy a car, much less a home, much less get married, much less have children, then why should you be surprised when half of them say they prefer socialism?
And you make specific reference to truck driving and the fact that there are going to be automated cars on the roads.
So would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favor of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to sort of artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?
In other words, if I were president when I say to DOT, Department of Transportation, we're not letting driverless trucks on the road.
Period.
Why?
Really simple.
Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school educated men in this country, in all 50 states.
By the way, that's the same group whose wages have gone down by 11% over the past 30 years.
The social cost of eliminating their jobs in a 10-year span, 5-year span, 30-year span is so high That it's not sustainable.
So the greater good is protecting your citizens from... Look, capitalism is the best economic system I can think of, I think, that anyone's ever thought of.
But that doesn't mean that it's a religion and everything about it is good.
There's no niacin creed of capitalism that I have to buy into.
What I care about is living in a country where, you know, decent people can live happy lives, actually.
And so no, I would say immediately, no, are you joking?
And I maybe would make up some pretext for public consumption like, oh, they're dangerous.
The technology is not quite finessed.
No, no.
But the truth would be, I don't want to put 10 million men out of work because you're going to have 10 million dead families and the cascading effect from that will wreck your country.
So I'm going to ask about the limiting principle there in just a second.
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So, back to the technology question.
So, it's fascinating to me that you're so willing to restrict technology in this particular area, not because it's not a justifiable policy.
You know, I'll guarantee I'll live way longer than my great-grandparents.
I get it.
I'm for machines, okay?
I'm just saying that there was a cost.
Half the world was enslaved for 70 years under Bolshevism because those countries didn't manage, I would argue, The transition from an agrarian economy into an industrial one.
That's what that was, okay?
So we're on the cusp of a completely transformative revolution, as or more transformative as the industrial revolution.
And no one is trying to take control of it at all, or figure out how to channel these forces into an outcome that we want to live with realistically.
And because they're not, you're going to see reactions, and you're already seeing reactions against this stuff that are flat-out extreme.
So the model again is Teddy Roosevelt, who was a capitalist, a patriot, a man of deep faith.
He was not anti-business, and yet he restrained American businesses.
He broke them up and was hated for doing it in the service of a higher goal, which was a stable, happy country where the traditions could be preserved.
If he didn't do that, you know, there's no telling, like, what would have happened to the IWW or whatever.
We could have gone in a totally different direction.
I mean, so I will admit, I'm not a Teddy Roosevelt fan, and I would have opposed the trust busting, but when it comes to the sort of politics we're talking about, I guess my major question is, is it a contributing factor to societal unrest to tell people that politics is to blame for the problem?
Are we edging on political messianism, the idea that if we just change a couple of policies here or there, then we'll be able to fix everything, when the reality is that, as you talk about a little bit in the book, What we may be suffering from is an actual spiritual malaise, and maybe economics has something to do with it.
I would argue that it has a lot more to do with a generalized move away from social fabric driven by all of the factors that used to exist in churches and all of these things, and that if we are going to maintain both freedom and stability, You know, the John Adams formulation was that this Constitution was only built for moral and virtuous people.
And to answer your initial question, anyone who argues that any of this is going to be fixed by a person or a bill that makes its way through Congress or a new Supreme Court justice is lying to you.
That's a grotesque and dishonest oversimplification of the sort that politicians and, by the way, talk show hosts specialize in.
And so to the extent I played a role in lying about that, I'm sorry.
I never want to be that guy.
I always want to acknowledge how complex and multifaceted all of these problems are because they are.
I'm merely making a couple of very obvious observations.
Now they must be balanced against the concerns of shareholders and lots of other concerns.
But to say that, you know, if it's more efficient to have you move to some crappy suburb to serve some douchey company because that's what, you know, is best to increase value, it's like, it's okay for me to stand up and say, you know, there are other concerns here, actually.
And there's a social cost to doing that.
Anyway, this all used to be obvious.
These things were actually debated during the Industrial Revolution.
The Luddites are used for propaganda purposes to make the other side seem ludicrous.
You're literally smashing machines!
You're a dummy!
You're an animal!
You know what I mean?
But actually, the concern is totally real.
If you spend, I don't know, just like roughly 5,000 years In one kind of economy that changes incrementally over time, but basically living from what you grow, living with your family and working a hundred yards away for thousands of years, and then in the space of, I don't know, a hundred years after the steam engine is invented, everything is completely different.
That's a lot.
It doesn't mean that you should stop it or smash the machines with a hammer, but it means you should be thoughtful in the way you channel these awesome forces, these awesome economic forces.
You are not a servant to them.
They are tools that thoughtful people use to increase the goodness of their society.
So I guess I'm just so struck by, like, if I would ever talk to liberals or conservatives, market fundamentalists in Washington, they're like, well, we can't stop.
This is technology.
It's inexorable.
Like, we have really no role in it other than to try to benefit from it.
Increasing prosperity across all of humankind, which has really been the result of free market capitalism over the past 40 years, and redistribution of the benefits, because the benefits obviously fall upon people deeply unequal.
I'm not exactly, I mean, yeah, a lot of regulations are unbelievably stupid, and they benefit, you know, certain categories of rent seeker at the expense of everyone else.
Like, I'm very aware, I live among it, I know.
And a lot of this is totally corrupt and counterproductive, okay?
For sure.
On the other hand, we have an obligation to think deeply about what's best for normal people.
That's all I'm saying.
That's it.
That's all I'm saying.
And we are not powerless in the face of these forces.
And if we decide that we are powerless in the face of them, we're all just along for the ride, we're not the authors of history, we're merely just flotsam floating atop it.
Whoa, that's a totally different way of thinking about it that's really bad.
And as we go through these changes, the people benefiting most, to whom much is given, much is expected.
They should feel an obligation to those beneath them in the way you feel to your children and your employees.
They should, you know, we underestimate, to your point, and I think we're basically in agreement on almost everything, especially on this, That your moral code determines how you behave and how you live.
And so the robber barons were deeply fraught and guilty in some ways about their success, because they were like guilty wasps.
They were Protestants.
Like, I get it.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, they're my people, so I know exactly what they used to think, which was, you know, Not everything I've achieved is the result of choices that I made.
They were Calvinist on some level.
Like, they understood that there are other things, providence, grace, luck, whatever you want to call it, that determine the outcome.
So, like, the people now in charge, your average private equity guy, and I know a million of them and like them, okay, but they believe that they're rich because they're better.
Because they made good choices, and you're not because you didn't.
And by the way, speaking of complicated, I mean, this stuff is complicated.
And the one thing that is unknowable is the outcome.
You can only guess at its outlines, and often you're wrong.
But you need to approach all of these questions with deep humility, understanding that, you know, you think that X will produce Y, but it could produce K. Like, you don't really know.
If you do that, it doesn't mean you won't make mistakes.
Of course you will, but you'll make fewer mistakes, less profound mistakes.
Hubris guarantees disaster every single time.
You know, in every context.
I mean, it shafted David, it will shaft you, and me, and the whole country.
When you start thinking that you're God, you know, you are going to fall from great heights.
And so, the problem is not, these are very human problems, and they're long-standing problems, they're eternal problems, but when you have an entire city full of policymakers who don't acknowledge these problems, That's when you want... Look, I supported the war in Iraq.
It made sense to me, sort of.
And I was certainly willing to go on faith.
And then I went to Iraq and I was like, wait.
Very soon after, actually, in the winter of 2003.
And I was like, this is not at all what I thought.
And we don't actually have control of this country.
We're not good colonialists.
Because we're not willing to admit we have an empire.
The British were very effective and they could absorb losses, like their loss in Afghanistan, because they were honest about what they were doing.
It was a colonial power that existed for the benefit Primarily of Great Britain, also for the edification of the peoples over whom they ruled.
Like, there was a component to that.
There's a Christian component, an evangelical component to British colonialism.
But basically, it was we're acting in the interest of civilization, which we run.
We are totally unwilling, as a ruling class is more broadly, unwilling to admit we're in charge.
So we're not going to ever be good at it.
So your choices are do you continue being bad at it or do you stop doing it?
So again, that goes back to the metrics of success.
So is the metric of success, let's take an obvious example where opinion is pretty fraught.
So take the intervention in Syria.
So I am not pro-intervention in Syria.
I know you're not pro-intervention in Syria.
By the same token, you look at the human carnage that has taken place in Syria.
What's in America's interest there?
Do our Are we judging that in terms of dollars and cents?
Are we judging that in terms of what we would have to sacrifice in order to stop the carnage?
Are we justifying that in terms of immigration?
As you say, it's very complex.
It's very complex.
And Syria is maybe more complex than in certain other situations.
Let me take a different example.
So World War II, when we look at World War II, pretty much all Americans agree we should have been involved.
We were attacked by Japan.
Germany declared war on us.
You have no choice.
When you look in retrospect at how we justify our involvement in World War II, most Americans, if asked why we were involved in World War II, would probably not say Pearl Harbor.
They would point to ending the Holocaust and defeating Hitler as a moral matter, that these were evil regimes that needed to be defeated.
But yeah, life expectancy in post-colonial Africa has gone down, so how's that working for you?
But anyway, so I understand that impulse and I admire it, and I think this is not only the most prosperous, but the best country in human history, so like, I get it, I get it.
But you balance those impulses against what's actually achievable, and always and everywhere the threat that you will unintentionally make things worse, which is a very real, present threat, always.
Americans have no appreciation of that at all.
One thing that does bug me about My own people, is they don't have much imagination for how things could be worse.
So you're always hearing Americans say, how could it be worse?
Okay, travel a little bit, okay?
And you will see that almost always it can be worse.
So will you make it worse by trying to make it better?
That's a real question, never a concern.
But more broadly, I mean, a lot of this is situational.
A lot of life is situational.
But the main theme is that your foreign policy exists For the behalf of your own country.
To make your country stronger, better, safer, more insulated, happier, right?
Richer.
That's the point of it.
And if there's an ancillary benefit of helping other people, of course I'm totally for that.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the kind of distinctions when it comes to the philosophy of intervention.
Because we've talked about morality has to be a component.
I agree.
We've talked about the need to back American interests, which is obviously first and foremost, with which I also agree.
To take the Max Boot, for devil's advocate purposes, take the Max Boot Bill Kristol position for a moment.
Their argument on the war on terror or interventionism is that, as you say, there are counterfactuals that we can't actually assume.
So let's say that we don't intervene in Afghanistan after 9-11 or we go in with a pinprick strike or something.
Or let's say that we don't go into Iraq.
And let's say that two years later, there's another 9-11 style attack.
We would never know that because it never happened.
There's been a decrease in the number of at least mass attacks in the United States over time.
So their argument would be, this is where I was getting at with the metrics question at the beginning.
By your metrics, the war in Iraq is a disaster, the war in Afghanistan has turned out to be basically a disaster.
By their metrics, these have both been successes to the extent that it has prevented casualties on American soil, assuming there would have been more casualties on American soil.
And one of the problems with Trying to, you know, assess these issues in a looking forward fashion.
Like, you talk in the book about American intervention with regard to the mujahideen in Afghanistan under Reagan, and you point out that this was an instrumental factor in the fall of the Soviet Union.
These are judgment calls made under pressure at the time, under public scrutiny often.
They're hard decisions to make.
I, thank heaven, don't have to make them.
So I have deep empathy for people who make the wrong decision.
What I have contempt for is people who won't acknowledge having made the wrong decision.
And so there are many things that we can't know.
Hypotheticals.
You know, are by definition unknowable.
But I think any fair person assessing the aftermath of the Iraq war would have to say deposing Saddam empowered Iran.
This was his main regional rival, okay?
Obviously.
And if you believe that Iran is the single greatest threat to the West, and I don't believe that, but many people do.
Everyone I know does.
All people of good faith.
Then you can't say the Iraq war, by that one standard, that one measure, which seems to be at the center of people's foreign policy understanding right now, was a good idea.
You just can't.
So look, I get it.
There are a lot of things we didn't expect, though I think we should have anticipated that.
You take out someone's chief rival, you empower him by definition.
But whatever, we didn't.
But what I can't stand, what actually grates on me, is the self-righteousness with which they proceed forward as if that never happened.
So it's like, really?
If you're not for this intervention or that intervention, you just don't have a heart.
You just don't care.
You're just not a good person.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
These are big decisions that we can make without reference to my personal moral values or yours.
We can just try to do the best thing for the country.
But you should at least acknowledge You, the guy who's telling me that we need to go to war with Iran now, that the decision that you helped make created the problem that you now tell me we need to solve.
You should at least admit that, or else you're a liar!