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Nov. 18, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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Stephen Harper | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 28
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One of the reasons we are Democrats is that how people think and feel and react actually matters as opposed to just our blueprint view of the world.
Well, here we are on the Sunday special with former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has a brand new book out.
We'll be talking all about that.
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Well, Prime Minister Harper, thanks so much for stopping by.
Oh, thanks for having me.
I've been looking forward to this.
Well, the very first time that I met you, I knew who you are, you didn't know who I was, but I was up in Canada to cover the American election for Sun News back in 2012.
And we met, and at the time Barack Obama was president, so in the interest of full disclosure, I do have to admit that I did ask you to invade the United States at the time, to which you responded, isn't that treason?
And then I replied, well, it isn't if you win.
So, the good news is that was not necessary.
You didn't actually have to invade the United States, but with that said, now you're on this book tour.
You have a brand new book out right here, right now, Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption.
It really is all about populism.
I want to start by talking a little bit about your personal political journey.
So, were you always conservative?
How did you find yourself?
So, long story.
When I was, you know, kind of a bright, eager, gold-medalist high school student, I came out of Conventional public education with left-liberal, conventional left-liberal views.
I had a big sea change when I was in my early 20s.
I was working in the oil industry and the government of then Pierre Trudeau brought in something called the National Energy Program in which they tried to socialize and re-engineer the entire industry.
They drove the unemployment rate from 3% to 13% in six months.
Not to mention what they did to taxes and the deficit and ultimately a national recession.
And so that really transformed my political thinking and then I worked in politics and kind of went from there, went from being a, I kind of went to the right, became a then conventional, more centrist conservative.
Became more, as I watched the, in 1984 we elected a conservative government that I went and worked for.
Turned out not to be very conservative and kind of But kind of had the effect of making me more philosophically conservative.
Long story after that, I left the government.
I ended up getting involved in the founding of a populist Conservative Party, the Reform Party of Canada, that eventually morphed into, through various mergers, morphed into the new Conservative Party of Canada that I founded.
And so that's kind of my background.
So I've been a conservative since I was in my early 20s.
And I've been kind of had a populist conservative bent since my late 20s when I kind of got exposure to that stream of conservatism and I'm also an economist by training so that obviously helped to further my conservative viewpoint.
So who are your sort of chief ideological influences like books that you'd read or folks that you watch and you thought okay well that that person is expositing a sort of conservatism that I find attractive?
Yeah, I don't know that I can point to any one.
I always liked the classical economists, you know, from Adam Smith forward.
I tended to like, you know, Friedman people.
People kind of had a, what I would call, practical applied conservatism.
I was always a bit distrustful of the extreme kind of abstraction of modern rational expectations or these sorts of schools.
But, and of course, in terms of the political arena, I mean, I guess my hero of all time would be Winston Churchill, but I was, you know, I think of my own personal experiences.
Truth of the matter, the one individual who probably had the most influence on my own political thinking was Preston Manning, who was the founder of the Reform Party.
Even though we don't always see eye to eye, he probably had more influence of any living person on my philosophy than anybody.
Where do you draw the line between what you call populist conservatism and other forms of conservatism?
Because the book is largely about that, you know, what is populism?
I'd always maintain that populism is more of a style than it is necessarily an ideology, just because you've got populist folks in the United States, populist folks like Bernie Sanders, and you have populist folks like Donald Trump, and it seems like the only common thing between them is just saying that they stand for the people.
Yeah, look, I agree with that.
I think populism is actually a pretty thin ideology.
Now, it has a history and a particular meaning I think is interesting, but leaving that aside in its modern manifestations, it is a thin ideology and it tends to be often more about style.
But, you know, I would argue that real conservatism is actually populist conservatism.
It's non-theoretical and it is targeted towards kind of the interests of ordinary people and their concerns.
And that's what I would argue populist conservatism is.
So there are a lot of folks on the right who they hear something like non-ideological and more pragmatic, and what they hear is government.
Because typically when folks say, I'm a pragmatic conservative, it sounds like John Kasich in Ohio, what I really want is to expand Medicare.
What I really want is to ensure that everybody is taken care of by the government.
Where do you think the distinctions are?
That's a great question, because often you'll see the same thing happen in Canada.
I'm a pragmatist or I'm a centrist.
And of course, coming from a mouth of a conservative, it often means actually they're left of center, but somehow want to be in a conservative party.
I mean, I'm talking firmly about conservative values, belief in markets, belief in, you know, traditions, family, faith, the flag, etc.
But applied to real world problems.
The problem I had when I talk about, you know, theoretical abstract conservatives is the kind of conservatism that, you know, has an agenda that was written by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
and we should follow this kind of regardless of circumstances.
I'm talking about applying real conservative ideas to contemporary problems that actually need to be fixed in the interests of ordinary people.
That's different than just watering down your principles.
It's applying your principles to real world situations.
- Do you see any distinction between sort of Canadian conservatism and American conservatism, or is it basically two branches of the same tree? - No, I think they're distinct.
I think actually what makes conservatism distinct, as opposed to philosophies on the left, is because conservatism is empirical and fundamentally cultural.
Conservatism actually does differ to some degree in various entities, whereas liberalism and socialism and the realisms are kind of They're kind of belief systems regardless.
You've got to transform whatever society it is into that.
So Canadian conservatism is different.
It's, I would say, several differences that are discernible.
It is more communitarian, less individualistic.
Not to say it's not individualistic, but sort of, if you see conservatism as a balance of liberty and order, it's more on the order side than on the liberty side.
It's also, of course, conservatism in Canada, Historically and presently means support for the institution of the crown, which of course in the United States, conservatism is based on opposition to the crown.
And there's kind of values that go along with this.
These are things at the margin.
It's not like a Canadian conservative, an American conservative would not have very similar views on most issues.
But unlike a liberal or a socialist, their views would not be identical.
Mm-hmm.
And how do you think that manifests in terms of policy?
So, for example, I just spent some time up in Vancouver.
It seems like right, left, and center, there's a lot of support for the health system in Canada.
Of course, you say health system in Canada, to conservatives in the United States, we run screaming into a tree.
Where does conservatism in Canada sort of stand on the status of the nationalized healthcare system in the country?
Well, look, I never really had to tackle that in a meaningful way.
We call it a national health system, but in fact, the health systems are run by the provinces, not by the federal government.
And, you know, there's fundamental agreement around the core principle of You know, medical, necessary medical care should not be based on whether you can or cannot pay for it.
That, I think, is a principle that, frankly, people across the spectrum would agree on.
There'd be differences in agreement about how that has to be delivered.
To what degree does the delivery have to be public versus private?
Or could there be options or competition?
And the fact is, you know, we go on stereotypes here.
I mean, the fact is that much of Canadian health care is private.
There are a lot of uninsured services.
There's lots of extra services you get through and, you know, pharmaceuticals, etc., that you can obtain through private insurance in Canada.
Likewise, in the United States, every senior citizen is under socialized medicine.
So the difference is not as radical as people sometimes think.
Okay, so when it comes to populist conservatism, you talk about some areas where this would be distinguishable, specifically from sort of a libertarian perspective, on a variety of issues.
Let's start with sort of the perspective on nationalism.
So there's been a big debate in the wake of President Trump about nationalism on the right.
Like Jonah Goldberg, I think I would count myself in this camp, who are very attached to the idea of patriotism, but not nationalism.
There are a lot of folks like Rich Lowry at National Review, again, one of our colleagues there, who's very attached to nationalism as distinct from patriotism.
Do you see a distinction between nationalism and patriotism?
Not really.
So I argue in the book that a healthy nationalism is part of a healthy society.
You know, I think the kind of the Germanys of the world where nationalism, for historical reasons, become kind of inherently Suspicious is frankly just wrong and wrong for conservatives.
Now, in that sense, as I say, I'm using patriotism and nationalism as virtually interchangeable.
I would agree that if you get kind of far-right nationalism that's essentially ethnic or racial in character, it could become a different kind of beast.
But frankly, conservatives don't advocate that kind of nationalism.
Right, okay, so where do you stand on immigration?
So in the United States, obviously, this has become a massive question, considering President Trump's position on the border, and there are a variety of positions.
We've got sort of the libertarian position that says, you want to come in and work, come on in and work, but you don't necessarily get citizenship.
You've got the kind of far left and now mainstream left position, come on in no matter what, we'll try and give you citizenship, you don't have to assimilate.
You've got the hard right restrictionist position, which is, You're undercutting our labor base.
Don't come in at all.
We don't want you here.
Where do you come down on that?
What do you think conservatism wants to come down on?
Well, elements of a couple of those things.
First of all, the Conservative Party of Canada is one of the few right-of-center parties in the world that gets a large percentage and sometimes an outright majority of the immigrant vote.
So we're very distinct that way, in a way that's very positive.
I'm fundamentally pro-immigration.
I think one of the things that has made Canada, the United States, and our society successful is that we embrace newcomers who often, you know, frankly, who are often conservatives.
They're entrepreneurial, they're ambitious, they're aspirational, they believe in family, they believe in faith, they're opposed to crime, etc.
So I actually think, properly done, immigrants should be a really great base for A conservative party.
But first and foremost, immigration has to be legal.
Immigration is not a right.
Immigration is something granted by the citizens of the country through law.
I have no time for illegal immigration.
And as I've told other leaders in other countries, no illegal immigration system or phenomenon will ever be popular with a mass of people.
It just will not.
Obviously, in modern day and age, the immigration system should be scoped primarily around the country's economic needs.
There can be humanitarian and family considerations, but it's fundamentally about the economy and about building our society.
It's what I say about so much in the book.
I'm fundamentally pro-immigration, just like I'm fundamentally pro-trade, pro-markets, but that doesn't mean that Immigration is good no matter what.
That having, you know, caravans of people invading the country would be a good thing.
Or that you can live, frankly, what I would consider the libertarian delusion that people will come into the country, but somehow they will have no access to social services.
It's just never going to happen.
So, you know, it's got to be a policy rooted in what we have seen to be successful over the decades.
Well, one of the arguments that's happened sort of inside the Republican Party here has been an argument between, I would say, sort of the Tom Cotton wing of the Republican Party on immigration and maybe the Ted Cruz wing.
Ted Cruz is very much in favor of, for example, what we call H-1B visas, people coming in for high-tech jobs.
Right.
And he says, OK, well, you know, you want to bring talent in?
Well, I think that's an empirical question.
Folks can work here, it makes our economy more competitive.
Tom Cotton says those are jobs that are being taken away from people who live in the United States.
We should restrict immigration along those lines.
Where do you stand on that in terms of economics? - Well, I think that's an empirical question.
I think the truth is that, you know, certainly if you look at the Canadian labor market, I would suspect the same thing is true in the American labor market, that you have lots of jobs and occupation where the economy has needs right away and there simply aren't the kind of numbers to fulfill them.
And bringing into the country people who are educated, are going to fit in with a job right away and be productive citizens, that's a positive thing.
Obviously, and this is a big problem I have with American immigration policy today, the fact is that American immigration policy, through family connections, through illegal immigration, is often bringing in low-skilled labor.
Tons of low-skilled labor at the very time in history where we know there's in fact never been a time in history where low-skilled labor is under more pressure, downward pressure on its wages and its living standards and its opportunities because of the evolution of economy.
Why would you bring in that kind of labor as opposed to the kind of labor?
the economy needs.
So as I say, I think it's an empirical question.
I would really doubt that there's an argument to say the U.S. has no need for immigrants and that there's no immigrants who could possibly help build the American economy.
I think that's a nonsensical position.
But what's happened in the United States, and this is what happens where you have unpopular or illegal immigration, public opinion turns against all immigration.
And that's what I say a good conservative approach would seek to avoid.
Well, in a second, I want to ask you about the trade policy that you would like to see pursued under sort of a populist conservative Rubric.
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All right, so let's go to trade, because we actually may have some differences of opinion on trade.
So President Trump has been quite anti-trade in his rhetoric, in policy less so, because I think he's been moderated by a lot of members of his own administration.
A populist conservatism, the question is whether that's going to be a pro-trade conservatism.
You talk about how you're pro-free trade.
There are certain areas, however, where you're a lot more restrictionist on trade, particularly with regard to China.
So where do you fall down on sort of the trade divide?
First of all, just my background.
The government I led negotiated virtually all of Canada's contemporary trade agreements, except for NAFTA, except for then obviously the new USMCA.
So I think, in fact, I probably have a record of signing more trade deals than just about any leader in the free world alive today.
So I don't have much trouble saying that I'm pro-trade.
But look, President Trump came along.
I remember when we had this debate in the election, he came along and he started talking about good deals and bad deals.
And people went, oh, you know, some some quote economists started saying, oh, wow, he's a protectionist, bad deals.
He could be a protectionist.
But can you have a bad trade deal?
Absolutely.
You can have a bad trade deal.
I mean, when when companies let's forget about governments.
When companies do a commercial deal with another company, why do they have dozens of analysts and lawyers and accountants working over these deals?
Because any deal would be a good deal?
I mean, seriously, you have to really know what you're talking about when you negotiate something as complex as a trade deal.
The United States, when the United States allowed China to enter the WTO, we set up a situation, Canada's in the same boat, where the Chinese have wide-ranging unfettered access to almost all of our economy and we can only sell to the Chinese when, where and in what quantity and for how long they say we can.
And obviously In that kind of situation, what have we seen?
We have seen massive imbalances.
Imbalances, by the way, yeah, you know, economists will say a poor country like China is bound to have a trade surplus with the United States, but it's not bound to get bigger as China gets more wealthy, which is what is happening.
This is because you have a bad deal that provides grossly unequal access and the consequence has been the outflow of millions of jobs from the United States, from Canada to China, with no discernible benefits to our working population.
So as a populist conservative, or frankly I would say as a conservative, you don't sign deals like that.
You sign deals where you know that overall your economy is going to benefit and that lots of people in your economy are going to benefit.
The countervailing case that's been made by particularly libertarians on trade has been why would you tax your own citizens by essentially tariffing Chinese products in order to punish the Chinese?
I mean is the goal to have them lower their own tariffs or is the goal to cut them out of the market because they're quote-unquote sucking our jobs out?
The fact is that we've gotten a lot of cheap products out of China and people tend to see that as a bad thing but the fact is that consumer prices have been going down in the United States consistently on a variety of levels.
But that's a terrible argument.
You know, it's a terrible argument.
First of all, the question of whether the tariff policy is effective is a different question.
But the argument made by the apologist for the current Chinese trade relationship is, look, yeah, so we've lost all these jobs, so we've lost, you know, all these factories and everything and moved to China, but we get cheap products.
But you know what?
I get to sell stuff to you and you get to buy it?
That's not a trade relationship.
That's a purchase.
And that's not the justification for trade.
These libertarians will jump up and quote David Ricardo and classical economists.
David Ricardo didn't say it would be a good idea for Britain to open its markets if it couldn't sell its goods anywhere else.
He made the argument for reciprocal trade.
And that is the core of the argument for reciprocal trade and the idea that a trade relationship, no matter how badly structured, is somehow good for you.
Losing jobs, losing well-paying jobs by the millions to get cheap products, which by the way in most cases you could get from places other than China, is not an argument for the kind of trade imbalance we have seen and the kind of economic outflows we've seen.
That's by the way, you know, obviously there's a separate question about China being a geopolitical and strategic rival.
But even leaving that aside, that's not a good economic relationship.
And the president, my view, the president not only is right, the president deserves a lot of credit as the first president willing to take on this.
The current trade relationship with China is beneficial to a few well-connected American corporations who get to operate in China.
But it's not beneficial to the economy as a whole and something has to be done about that.
Or we are going to see a situation where the Chinese is the largest, China's economy is the largest in the world, with a grossly unequal trade access to the United States, and that's not in anybody's interest.
Well, I mean, the fact is, again, if they have a grossly unequal trade access to the United States, we still are, you know, getting cheap products much cheaper than they were 30 years ago.
With a 3 to 400, well, now a close to 400 billion dollar outflow.
Right, well, again, they're capital account surpluses.
I mean, that money has to go somewhere.
And presumably it's going into buying all of the debt that we're selling them.
So, you know, I just think it's a nonsensical argument.
It's contrary to common sense.
Contrary to common sense.
I mean, are trade deficits always bad?
No, trade deficits are not always bad.
And trade deficits under many circumstances would be expected.
We know as, you know, I know as an economist, it's likely the poor country will have a trade surplus with a richer country simply because a richer country can buy more goods.
It's also, you know, I would argue the case of Canada.
Canada in the last few years has tended to have a small trade surplus with the United States.
Why?
Because of the energy trade, a vital commodity that the United States has a special, has had a special need for.
But is a trade, is a trade deficit in and of itself nothing to worry about?
Look, anybody who thinks that trade surpluses don't matter, Both.
is far forgotten to tell the Chinese because they are building their economy into a powerhouse through a deliberate strategy of running trade surpluses with Western countries.
- So I guess this is the real question.
Do you think they're building their economy into a powerhouse or are they building themselves into a military geopolitical powerhouse with that extra cash?
- Both.
- Meaning it seems to me that their economic plans Subsidizing certain industries and cutting out other industries as a result is not a sustainable path for any country that wishes to be growing into the future and actually developing into the future.
But it is a good path for centralizing capital right now and then using that capital in order to expand your military dominance in the region.
So look, I would say there's aspects of Chinese economic policy are not sustainable over the long term.
And they're building empty cities.
Well, not entirely.
I've been to all those cities.
They're pretty full.
The fact of the matter is these, you know, they've created tens of millions of jobs, and some of those tens of millions of jobs have been created through, not through direct subsidy, and some of it's direct subsidy, some of it's intellectual property theft, but some of it's just by having access to a market and restricting access to their own market, keeping cash in China and bringing more cash into China.
So the idea that we should never worry about a surplus, no matter what the circumstances, I just think defies economic logic.
If tariffs are that good, why aren't we using them?
Meaning that if China can... Every country uses tariffs all the time.
I mean, to the extent that the Chinese are.
So meaning that China is obviously tariffing American products, you say to centralize... Yeah, but it's more than... I think the real problem in China is greater than the tariff.
The real problem in China is that the Chinese government basically sanctions entry into your market.
With or without a tariff, unless the government says you can sell in the market and you can continue to sell, you cannot sell, period.
Which, by the way, I think is where the Trump administration is likely to head over time if they can't get the Chinese market more open.
I think they're basically going to establish a managed trade relationship with China where they say, OK, if we can't enter into your market, some of your products are just not going to enter into our market.
And you're starting to see that in some of the technology space.
So do you think that the end goal should be to get the Chinese to get rid of these tariffs on our products?
No, the end goal should be for China to have its market more open.
Not just tariffs down, but have a more open marketplace.
There's no reason, for instance, that American and Canadian consumer product agencies shouldn't be able to sell freely on Alibaba, which they can't today.
Right.
No reason that should be prevented.
And by the way, and we're arguing about this being economic logic, it's not that the Chinese don't want these products.
Right.
They'll pay a premium for these products.
They want our products.
So we should have an opportunity there.
So yeah, obviously I would never support, don't get me wrong, I would never support the idea of the administration pursuing any kind of trade war with protectionism as the goal.
But the goal to be reciprocal market opening is completely reasonable.
I think the challenge, Ben, is that the whole nature of the Chinese economic structure and the nature of the government's role in the economy Raises questions as to whether they can really truly open their markets in the way we're expecting or whether they always reserve the right to just shut them at their drop of a hat.
And this does raise the question of security risks.
So it seems to me that if you're going to direct trade policy for the United States or for any other Western country with regard to China, that as you say, there should be a couple of goals.
And this has sort of been Larry Kudlow's point inside the trade relationship that he's basically running trade for Trump.
Trump keeps saying he likes protectionism and then Kudlow says, no, what he really means is what he really means that he wants to use our trade policy in order to lower tariffs and trade barriers in other places, which seems correct.
And then that seems, I think in fairness, I mean, I've been like you, I've been critical of many things about Donald Trump, especially during his run.
for the presidency.
I think if you look on balance, his record to date would indicate that he is a guy using protectionist measures to open markets rather than to pursue protectionism.
But I think the jury's still out on some aspects.
No, I think that's right.
I think that whether he intends to or not, that's what he is doing, meaning that I think that in his head, from everything that he says, he sounds like a guy who doesn't actually get basic Ricardian economics, but his trade people do.
And so they're able to- He is also a businessman.
That's true too.
So he gets the practical issues of whether it matters that you can actually sell products as opposed to the theoretical arguments about trade.
So it seems to me that, so possibility one, you use those measures in order to lower the trade barriers in places like China.
And possibility number two is that he actually- As many of his advisors do, he sees China as a geopolitical threat.
And he feels like helping them grow their economy is actually a geopolitical problem.
That the goal shouldn't be necessarily opening up the Chinese market to American goods and creating a better reciprocal trade relationship.
Maybe the goal should actually be to curb Chinese power in the region.
And so when he says national security is a rationale for trade policy, he actually means it.
He actually means it.
Well, look, here is, I discuss this issue in my book.
I think the history with the United States, it really stems from post-World War II and the Marshall Plan.
American policy essentially has become, we promote, you know, since the Marshall Plan, we promote open trade and open markets.
Because, first of all, even if we give unequal access, we're the United States, and the relationship, we're the bigger guy, it benefits us anyway.
And secondly, the effect of open trade and open markets is to produce open and democratic societies that end up being American friends or allies.
Now, I think that theory is really being tested with China, because here you have a country that could conceptually be, in fact, probably will be a bigger economy than the United States.
But furthermore, the entire practice of its economic policy is explicitly for the purpose of not opening up the governing structures of the country.
It is, in fact, to preserve the constitutional, the authoritative monopoly of the Communist Party and its method of governance.
And, I would argue, to be a strategic rival of the United States.
Certainly, if you believe Xi Jinping, that's exactly what they intend.
So, I think these things get mixed up.
Now, would I say that it's... I would still be in the Henry Kissinger school that if you can engage in a genuine relationship that opens up China, in time that is bound to make China even a much bigger China, a society more like Western democracies and more friendly and less confrontational with Western democracies.
But that's a theory, and that theory isn't panning out real well at the moment.
Exactly.
Well, let's talk a little bit.
I know we're jumping around a fair bit in terms of geography.
That's what you do, Ben.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's talk a little bit about the situation in Europe, because what we've been told, I mean, since we're talking about populism, we'd be remiss not to talk about the rise of populist movements in Europe.
Yeah, the reason I wrote the book is not just the United States.
Virtually every Western country, except Canada, has seen the rise of a populist movement. - And do you think that all those populisms are similar?
Meaning that Donald Trump's populism, do you see that as similar to the rise of populist movements in places like Germany or France or Austria or the Nordic countries, or is it of a different kind? - So none of these populisms are identical.
Some I would call, I think the Trump phenomenon, certainly the Brexit movement in the UK, these would be fundamentally kind of center-right populist movements.
Obviously in Italy, five-star movement, clearly on the left.
There are left-wing populist movements.
And there are populist movements in Europe that would be anti-market, the kind of visceral ethnic nationalism you're talking about that would be of a totally different nature, more extreme right type.
So these movements can be different.
But I would say that a lot of them have commonalities, and the commonalities they've tended to have in this era is raising questions about the functioning of market economies, questioning trade and trade agreements, questioning globalization, certainly, and European Union and Europe as a form of certainly, and European Union and Europe as a form of that, and questioning immigration.
Now, the way they question the types of solutions they advocate, I think, distinguishes them, but those are the common threads.
And so what do you make of the argument that's made by a lot of folks, There's something specifically threatening about the rise of these populist movements, that it's not just reaction toward conservatism, you know, a movement away from the left and toward conservatism in reaction to open borders Leftism or globalization based leftism, but that this has led to this dangerous rise in xenophobia.
It's led to the rise far right.
I think it's a really an overgeneralization.
First of all, I guess I argue that fundamentally most of these populist movements today, they're largely on the right.
And where I think they should attract our attention is in many cases they're garnering what would have been considered mainstream center-right or even center-left voters.
And that's what should concern us.
I tend to think, and I think this would be a surprising conclusion as a guy who ran a government that was pro-market, pro-trade, pro-globalization, pro-immigration, I said if you actually look at the complaints of these populist movements and you look at the facts, The facts actually tend to bear out that they have legitimate grievances.
I think it is in the solutions that we can sometimes get concerned.
And the reason I wrote the book is I consider these things today more wake-up calls than dangers.
You may not like Trump, you may not like Brexit, but these are people, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, these are people fundamentally trying to fix what they see ailing democratic capitalist societies.
That is very different than the Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyns that want to destroy democratic capitalist societies.
And that's where I draw the line.
So where I tend to look at these so-called populist movements or nationalist movements in Europe, Are they movements that are responding to kind of genuine concerns about how the European Union functions or how ordinary people are doing versus countries that are kind of demanding a form of ethnic right-wing socialism, which I think is an entirely different beast.
And that is, I think, the big question right now.
So I remember during the 2016 election, there were a lot of arguments about this because President Trump talked about populism.
He wasn't super clear about what he meant by that.
And so this created a serious rift between sort of the conservative side of the Republican Party and the populist side.
I want to talk about that and whether that is America specific or whether you think that that is breaking out in other places too.
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Well, back to a serious topic.
So, So the gap that we've seen in the Republican election base, this was a fight that I had with a lot of people who considered themselves populists, is that I looked at Europe and I said, I don't want the American Republican Party turning into a European far-right party, because it seems like there is actually a distinction.
And you obviously being from Canada, maybe you can either tell me whether this is correct or not.
That American conservatism is of a slightly different brand than conservatism in Europe or in other countries.
In that, based on the idea of God-given rights protected by a limited government, the essential assumption is that if something comes up, it is not the government's job.
And populism sort of suggests there's a problem, and now it is the government's job.
And so, if there's a problem in your town and you've lost jobs in that town, now it's the government's job to step in and fix it.
Well, if the government caused it, it is.
Particularly.
And look, so we can debate whether certain movements in Europe are far right or they're just kind of populist conservatives or are they actually far right.
I think it's the wrong question.
The question is, are they being fueled by legitimate grievances?
And I guess I would argue, and I say I argue this as someone who ran the largest per capita immigration program in the world, I would argue that when you are letting hundreds of thousands of people illegally or irregularly overrun your borders, that is a legitimate grievance.
And if you get any kind of a movement out of that, including a far-right one, don't point the finger at the people for voting for it, point the finger at the policymakers who allowed such a crazy policy to bring about that outcome and fix the policy.
You know, the one thing I would say that when people, you know, it's easy to condemn.
In fact, I had a rule in my, you know, I united the conservative movement in Canada, been divided into historically two parties and various factions.
But I always said, you know, if I got one or two percent on the right of me, that's fine.
But when you get 5% or 10% or 20% or infamously with Hillary Clinton, 45, 46% and you're calling them fringe, there's something wrong with you.
We live in a democratic society.
You can't start condemning large segments of the population as fringe.
If they're voting for that, you've got to address their concerns.
And especially, as I say, if their concerns are legitimate.
So you can complain about the policies of those, quote, far-right parties, but offer an alternative.
Don't pretend they don't have a legitimate issue.
When do you see a situation in which we may have to tell people that their concerns are not legitimate?
So it seems like the word legitimate gives us a little bit of wiggle room, meaning that it seems to me that most concerns that you're talking about are fully legitimate.
I think folks who are worried about an influx of immigration from countries that don't share our values, who are worried about an undercutting of our labor base, for example, like these are legitimate concerns.
But I feel like there are certain concerns that are fundamentally illegitimate.
So, for example, people who believe that it's the government's job to protect their job in a dying industry.
It's an industry that's being outcompeted or technologies replace the job or they're in a dying town.
And the populist movement, whether it's right or left, basically lies to these.
these folks and says, government is going to step in and it's going to save your job.
It's going to make everything all better.
When is it appropriate, do you think, to say?
So look, I go back.
I don't think in a democratic society, in fairness, regardless of what our particular philosophical leanings are, you can actually say to large numbers of people, your concerns are not legitimate.
What you can say to them is you don't think that the solutions that you're proposing are realistic.
And here are realistic solutions that could actually address your problem.
Greater education, labor mobility, etc.
But I think you're on, you know, it's just fundamental.
The concept of a democratic society is that the people's views are fundamentally legitimate.
And that is the job of rulers to address them.
See, this is why I'm so glad I'm a commentator, because I frequently tell people their concerns are completely illegitimate.
So I have an easy job.
I get to sit here and say... This is where this... Sorry, I would say you asked me about my political history.
This got beaten out of me because, you know, I became, as I said, in my early 20s, I became a conservative, got disappointed by seeing a centrist conservative government kind of pursue ineffective, watered-down policies.
And then I helped found a new party.
Well, the new party was fundamentally populist because we had no support from the corporate sector or very little.
We were fundamentally built on ordinary working middle class people.
And the only way you could raise money was by getting them to give small amounts of money and getting them to donate their time.
So you very quickly realize that as in any other form of activity, you're essentially in a marketplace, in a business.
And if you don't address the concerns of your market, it's you who is not legitimate, not them.
I mean, that may be true, you know, in terms of marketing, but in terms of morality, I mean, when I raise my kids, there are some times where my kids have a completely illegitimate grievance.
In fact, it happens on a fairly regular basis.
There are grievances that, you know, they want candy and they can't have it, or they don't want to brush their teeth as my daughter did not last night, and she needs to brush her teeth or she's going to get cavities.
You know, there's certain... When is it possible to give people...
Just like you, like you, I'm a man of faith.
So, you know, as a man of faith, you believe there are certain things... My God is constantly telling people... There are certain things that are morally right and certain things that are morally wrong.
But I guess what I'd argue as a more pragmatic politician is that most things that are morally wrong are actually pragmatically bad for you over time.
And that's why we as conservatives don't advocate them.
We advocate instead solutions that may not always be what people want to hear.
But they've got to be things that at least address their concerns.
When somebody says, let me give a practical example from the last campaign of why Donald Trump won.
When somebody says, you know, we've had de-industrialization of my entire region.
My kids have no economic opportunities, no jobs, et cetera.
And your response to them is, well, I'll cut the high marginal rate on taxes.
That doesn't really address anything they're worried about.
So you've got to come up with policies that address their concerns.
And that's where I talk about the pragmatism.
Right.
And this is where I get worried a little bit.
And can you?
No.
Would I promise, well, move your factory back?
No, because I know I can't do that.
But could I make sure you don't face competition that would cause your factory to leave when it doesn't have to?
You know, the problem with some of the traditional Center right, some of our traditional conservative friends' arguments is they'll come in and they say, well, this loss of this was obvious or inevitable because of automation.
Yeah, except that I know my factory is actually in Mexico right now.
So it actually didn't get automated.
That's a practical problem.
How many problems do you believe are brought about by individual decision-making?
So, in a free country, it seems to me that, you know, for example, there's a Brookings Institute study.
It basically says that if you do not want to be in permanent poverty in the United States, you need to do three things.
You need to finish high school, you need to get married before you have babies, and you need to get a job, any job, anywhere, basically, and hold it down.
And you won't be in permanent poverty in the United States.
And a lot of the folks who are having problems have made one of these three mistakes, at the very least.
And we are now seeing folks who seem to be using They're using the excuse that, not even consciously, they're using the excuse that this is a very rich country and so they are owed something.
And so I'm not going to move, I'm not going to go to North Dakota where there's a fracking job.
I'm going to stay in my dying town in Ohio and be angry that my factory went to Mexico, for example.
Yeah, look, Ben, there's no doubt that in, there is no doubt that, you know, in our democratic societies there's often, and this does concern me, often a rhetoric that kind of seems to absolve everybody of responsibility.
Not just anyone from a worker who's lost his job, but all the way to a kind of a mass murderer.
It somehow wasn't their fault.
And look, I have a problem with that.
But it's not as if policies don't make a difference and don't really affect people's lives.
And let me once again go back to the example of trade with China.
You know, people say, well, this was inevitable.
Well, first of all, it was not inevitable that our market would be widely open to Chinese competition.
That was a policy decision.
But even more importantly, it was certainly not inevitable that we would open it in a way that did not provide our workers with the opportunity of selling products they would make into China.
But that's what happened, and that's a legitimate complaint.
And that has resulted in the loss of millions of jobs.
That kind of decision.
Now, does that absolve the individual from You're not being educated or not trying to find opportunities in and of him or herself.
But look, we shouldn't.
You know, we shouldn't.
At the same time, when you're an elected person, you can't belittle people.
I mean, people have real challenges, real problems.
Not everybody has the ability to make their own life from scratch.
You know, we do depend on family and community and sometimes from government assistance.
That's not all terrible or all something we should not expect to some degree.
So let's talk a little bit about the problems on the left.
We've spent a lot of time talking about sort of the internecine philosophical battles on the right.
Look, I would actually argue on the left what I actually would say in my book.
And if you look around the world, the rise of this populism is actually proving to be much more problematic on the left than on the right.
Because what you had in the post-globalization world is, you know, once we kind of developed the basic underpinnings of a market economy, and we kind of accepted that in principle after the fall of the Soviet Union, You had, you know, these new wave liberals come along, the Tony Blairs and the Bill Clintons, many of whom I know and like, and they kind of propounded a more kind of elite, corporatist, market-friendly economics and program.
Well, what's happening now with the rise of populist economics, those coalitions are being pulled asunder and sometimes in ways that are just, you know, Socialist Party in France, Social Democrats in Germany, you've got people, you know, people are sticking to that kind of Kind of elite liberal market-oriented policy.
People are going back to traditional socialism and then those who are attracted by kind of right-wing conservative social values combined with protectionism.
So you've got those parties shattering in three directions.
So this is actually a much bigger problem on the left than it's actually on the right.
And it seems like it's leading to a tremendous radicalization of the left.
left?
I mean, the left is getting more left faster than the right is getting more right.
Well, what's happening, it depends on the country.
So I think you see certainly the extreme example would be the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, which is turning into a Marxist party, which is now purging anyone who's, you know, not far left, anyone who's Jewish, by the way, like literally you've kind of Stalinist type purges as it makes itself into an extreme vehicle.
In other cases, like, you know, Socialist Party in France or Social Democrats in Germany, they're being just reduced to being a kind of a rump party of kind of center left liberal elites with kind of no mass following anymore.
I think the Democratic Party looks to be more headed down the Corbyn route, but time will tell.
So it's different things are happening.
In some cases, these parties are being eclipsed by more radical parties on the left.
And in other party cases, they're being taken over.
Do you think this is going to lead to, you know, even more kind of partisan polarization?
Because this obviously has led to tremendous kind of political unrest in the United States, to the point of near violence, or in some cases violence, as the left splinters and moves to the left, and as the right reacts to that.
The fundamental point I make in my book is that these things are being driven.
The reason these things are happening, we're seeing a radicalization of the electorate in virtually every election in the last three years.
And the reason they're happening, it's not a mystery.
For a very long period of time, the material lives of large percentages of the middle and working class have been getting poorer.
And when people's lives get poorer, and in particular when their hopes begin to fade, which is what data really shows about some of these working class groups that have lost their jobs or their traditional work, what happens is that politics gets angrier, politics gets more difficult.
I say that you can't blame that.
In my point, there's no point blaming that on the policy or on the individual politicians.
As a center-right conservative who's supposed to believe in traditions and common sense, etc., you find common sense solutions that address those real problems.
If I could just maybe back up one point, Ben, on kind of absolving people of responsibility.
When I think it's unfair to just say, well, it's kind of your fault.
Let's remember something that happened in the United States and most other Western democracies in 2008-2009, not Canada.
When the elite and the wealthy got in trouble, the government came in and bailed them out.
And they all wanted to bail out.
They all expected to bail out.
So it's kind of hard to turn around and say to the ordinary auto worker or the ordinary guy working in the Midwest who's just lost his factory job, somehow it's all your responsibility to fix your life.
But by the way, if it's General Motors or if it's, you know, a major bank, somehow that's the government's responsibility.
So I think we're kind of past that point where it's kind of hard to make that argument now that the government doesn't bear some responsibility to ordinary people for their problems when the government is prepared to bail out the most wealthy and powerful members of society.
So I actually agree with that, but I think the problem is that it's possible to double down in the wrong direction, meaning that I oppose the bailouts specifically because of this.
It creates moral hazard.
People think that they can depend on the government, and it seems like, okay, so we did the wrong thing in 2007-2008.
Maybe it was the necessary thing, but it was still the morally wrong thing.
And extending that mentality to folks leads to this kind of overarching utopian belief that the government is always there to help you out.
But it's, you know, this is where I'm not a libertarian.
It's not because I don't believe in the efficacy of free markets or I don't believe in the idea of individual rights.
It's because libertarianism runs counter to data.
And the fact of the matter is these things happened.
And you can't just wish them not to have happened and pretend that they have no influence on how people see the world or their expectations about the world.
And, you know, the bailouts.
Look, I was right there when this all happened.
I was running a G7 country when we did all this.
I bailed out the auto sector.
Now, why did I bail out the auto sector on my 50th birthday?
You know, I wrote a multi-billion dollar check to the biggest, what had been some of the richest companies in Canada.
Some of my caucus and cabinet resisted it to the end.
Why did I do it?
I did it because I had to do it.
I had to do it because the United States had decided that this integrated industry would be bailed out.
And if Canada did not participate in that bailout, a half a million jobs would have been moved across the border in less than a year to the United States.
I could not risk that.
That was not a realistic choice for me.
So the choice was, if the United States, which owned 83% of the industry, was going to bail out the industry, Governor Canada would have to bail out its portion.
That's just the reality.
Doesn't that incentive structure exist in virtually every industry, though?
I mean, everybody is subsidizing someone.
So where do you decide to draw the line as far as, okay, these jobs deserve to be saved.
These jobs don't deserve to be saved.
This industry deserves to be bailed out.
This one does not.
So generally speaking, I didn't do a lot of bailouts and I don't like bailouts.
Generally speaking, you want the market to kind of work out who's going to grow and who's going to fail.
The problem in that case was, as I said, I faced the reality that due to actions of another government beyond my control, I was going to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs in Canada if I did not act that way.
And you can say, well, then the real problem was in the U.S.
The U.S.
should not have bailed out the industry.
The U.S.
should have let Chapter 11 bankruptcy take over, except that that was a theoretical possibility when the entire financial system was not functioning.
So you can say if the financial system were functioning properly, I think you could have made an argument in the United States.
Yes, you could have made an argument, let the marketplace sort this out and probably would have.
But in late 2008, early 2009, there was no possibility of that happening.
So as I say, as a conservative, you deal with the world as it is.
Does some of this offend my idea of what is ideal economic policy?
Absolutely.
But you have to play the cards you're given and you just can't wish them away.
Well, it seems like, obviously, in exigent circumstances, you're gonna have to do what you're gonna have to do, but in non-exigent circumstances, so right now, we're not experiencing exigent circumstances, right?
Now we have a very solidly growing economy, particularly in the United States.
We have wage growth for the first time in a long time.
It seems like now would be a good time to sort of fundamentally restructure people's understanding of what it is the government is supposed to do for them, and fundamentally restructure in a legal way what bailouts are available to companies.
As I say, it's just tough when people knew that things were really bad and you bail out the wealthy to tell them now the rest of the time.
I know, the problem is that at some point the ration only works in one direction, right?
So look, as I say, you know, you expect, we obviously can't have a society where nobody's responsible for any aspect of their lives.
That society will fail.
It will inevitably fail no matter how wealthy we are.
And that worries me.
On the other hand, I don't think it's realistic.
Given the nature of a modern economy, how complex it is, what that does to the underlying social and family dynamics to expect that government will not be involved in anything, won't help you with your education, it won't help you with mobility, it won't help you with anything else, it won't provide you tax incentives, anything to help you in your life.
I just think that's not a realistic option either.
So it sort of feels like it's difficult to draw lines.
That's about what being a conservative is.
The reality as a conservative is that you recognize that reality is really complicated.
I know when I see it.
Yeah.
So how much is too much government interventionism and how much is not?
That's about what being a conservative is.
The reality as a conservative is that you recognize that reality is really complicated.
I mean, one of the reasons we like a market, we like markets because markets can deal with a lot of complicated, complex micro decisions in ways that government can't.
But the reality is that reality is extremely complicated.
And we have broad, as conservatives, I think we share some broad social and economic values.
But the fact of the matter is we'll find different cases where different policies are appropriate.
And that's not just based, the important thing is that's not based on political expediency.
That's based on dealing with the reality of the economic and political situation and social situation in front of you.
I mean, to a certain extent, aren't those the same thing, though?
I mean, political expediency being, you know, dealing with the situation in front of you in the best possible way, meaning that... Well, they can be, but they don't have to be.
You know, look, theoretically, I guess, in 2009, 2008, 2009, I could have said, I'm not bailing out the auto industry.
It only operates in one part of the country.
The rest of the country will cheer.
The problem is that I knew, forget about the loss of political votes from some people and the gain from others, the problem is I knew that the outcome of that decision would be very bad for the economy as a whole and I think probably everybody would eventually have hated me making that decision.
So you can call that political expediency, but that's actually reality.
I mean, this is one of the reasons Right.
we are Democrats, right?
One of the reasons we are Democrats is that how people think and feel and react actually matters as opposed to just our blueprint view of the world.
Right.
And this is one of the reasons why I'm very much on board with the founding father's vision of democracy is, you know, got to check it so that it didn't just mob rule.
Because obviously there is a line to be drawn between the passions of the public and what is legitimate policy and invasion of rights.
Let's talk for a second about foreign policy, because some of the most controversial decisions you made when you were prime minister had to do with foreign policy.
And we are seeing, when we talk about splits in foreign policy in terms of left and right, nowhere are we seeing this more broadly than on foreign policy grounds right now.
Why do you think it is that the left has moved so far in one direction on foreign policy?
I don't just mean with regard to sort of open borders immigration, but with regard to the Iran deal, with regard to, with regard to Middle Eastern policy.
It seems like you're, you're in the, obviously as a, as a Jew, I was very familiar with your record on Israel as Prime Minister of Canada, very grateful for it as well.
But why do you think it is that the left has moved so far in the anti-Israel direction?
So that's a good question.
And there were many things that caused me to gravitate from being a kind of a liberal guy when I was really young to a conservative as an adult.
And it wasn't all the experiences of a national energy program.
You know, my father would have been considered a liberal in his era.
You know, he was a He was a vocal opponent of anti-Semitism when anti-Semitism was extremely common in Canada.
He was a vocal supporter of what we would now call civil rights, the movements of blacks and others to have voting and other rights.
He would be very vocal as a young man.
But I think by the time I became kind of him, by the 1980s, I started to detect that the modern liberalism or modern left side of the spectrum, even in the center, was going in a different direction.
It was no longer about, you know, actually empowering people who had been downtrodden.
It started to become more fundamentally kind of a hatred of our own society.
What I call alienism, the opposite of nationalism.
Our culture's wrong.
Our values are wrong.
The other guy's always right.
And so I support Israel.
Take the Israel situation.
I support Israel.
I tell people my views are not religious in nature and it's not a biblical interpretation.
I support Israel because I see Israel as part of the Western Democratic Society of Nations, a vital ally in the most dangerous part of the world.
And I see a retreat Us retreating or abandoning Israel in that position of the world is detrimental long-term to our own basic national self-interest.
I think it is critical that Western countries support Israel.
I think it is incredibly myopic and dangerous politicians who for various other political expediency reasons want to abandon Israel.
But I think the reason you see so much antipathy to Israel on the left is for precisely the same reason they see in Israel a society like ours And they want to blame it for all the problems of the region, which is nonsense.
And, you know, there's this deep dislike of our society, of the United States, of the West, and they see Israel as a manifestation of that.
So that's the part, and I just, and I know I'm not going to say every liberal thinks like this, but I see this, you know, and we can point to extreme examples of this.
Extreme examples, but examples that are common.
You know, a perfect example is, I saw it recently on one of your TV shows, a liberal talk radio host talking about, you know, supporting the right of Muslim women to cover their face because no man should tell a woman how to dress.
Well, what do you think that is?
That is a man telling a woman how to dress.
But you know, you choose in your liberal mindset to see that as the valid manifestation of some other culture, just because it's another culture.
And somehow it then becomes a good thing that you see as Western feminism instead of as Islamic, as kind of extreme form of the anti-women aspect of Islamism.
But you see this all the time.
And so this is the part of the modern left, and you see it all through foreign policy.
We are always to blame.
We are always at fault.
And we have nothing but to kind of beg forgiveness and learn from other societies.
And I have a very different view, and I'm not going to say Western society or Canadian society has been or is faultless, but these are the most successful, freest, prosperous societies in the world.
And they've also been the most dynamic, resilient and adaptable societies, also the ones most likely to admit and correct error.
And the idea that we should somehow be ashamed of our societies, or that we should kind of go out into the world with perpetual self-doubt and flagellation, I just think is an aspect of modern liberalism I can't accept.
I think it's very fundamental to all of the foreign policy.
I mean, I obviously agree.
And what's kind of fascinating, though, is you actually do see this strain in some elements of American libertarianism, and even in populism, this sort of isolationist, withdrawal-from-the-world mentality.
What do you make of that?
And why do you think that there's this sort of horseshoe effect, that you go far enough in one direction, you end up back at this isolationist center?
Yeah, I see less isolationism in kind of what's happened with Trump and kind of American populism than some.
I think it's more accurately described as unilateralism.
than isolationism.
It's very different.
And I don't think it's not without concerns.
I don't, on the other hand, I don't think it's always the case that multilateral institutions have been working really well for the United States or even for the West as a whole.
So I do think a new balance needs to be struck.
But, you know, look, it's still important.
The United States, let me tell people, I'm very pro-American, as you know, The United States is the most powerful and important country in the world, and certainly to Canada, it is the most important and powerful country in the world.
But that doesn't mean the United States can go into the world with no allies and no friends and expect to prosper in the long term.
I do think unilateralism in the extreme is as bad as multilateralism in the extreme.
Well, Prime Minister Harper, I do have one more question for you.
I want you to grade President Trump.
But if you want to hear Prime Minister Harper's answer, you have to go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
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Well, it was such a pleasure to have Prime Minister Harper here.
His new book is right here, right now, Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption.
Prime Minister, thank you so much for stopping by.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
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The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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