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Feb. 17, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:31
Daniel Krauthammer | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 38
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My father had an accident when he was a young man.
He said, look, everyone has their burden to bear in life, and the key is not being defined by those.
It's overcoming them, it's turning your own path, deciding what you want your life to be, and you live it out. - Hi, and welcome to the Sunday special.
I'm eager to welcome to the program our guest Daniel Krauthammer, the son of Charles Krauthammer.
Now, reminder, there will be one question at the end, a very special question.
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So we're going to jump into our interview in just one second.
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All right, Daniel.
Thanks so much for joining the show.
I really appreciate you being here.
No, thank you, Ben, for having me.
It's good to be with you, and I appreciate you having me on.
Well, I want to lead off by, number one, expressing my condolences for the loss of your father, who was an icon in the conservative movement and also somebody who I really grew up reading and trying to hone myself after.
I wrote a eulogy after he passed away in which I talked about how in my early career, you're 17, you're 18, you're looking at which writers do I want to be like.
And early on, I was thinking, how about like Ann Coulter, right?
She has a lot of funny lines and she hits people really hard.
And then as I got older, I realized that the writer that I most wanted to be like was your dad because he actually considered issues incredibly deeply.
I realized that as news broke, he was usually the opinion I was looking to first for what's a reason take on the issues.
And so I think there are a lot of conservatives who are my age, older conservatives too, who are very grateful that your dad was there to provide that sort of guidepost.
Before we get into the book and talking about your dad, first why don't we talk about you.
What's your background?
What do you do?
Yeah, so my own life has been on a bit of hold these last 18 months now since my father got ill.
I spent 10 months with him in hospital and then in all the time since then committed myself to finishing the book for him and launching the book and making sure his legacy was secured.
My own background is in political science and economics and business.
I did a lot of work in policy and wrote quite a bit on political issues myself.
The last several years, I went to business school, worked in technology and startups.
And to a degree, I'm really still figuring out what my my full path in life will be.
And so this has been the number one priority in my life for all this time.
But now that I'll finally be able to get back to my own life, I'll take a breath and figure out where I can best contribute going forward.
It's a beautifully edited book, and you've done an amazing job of it.
You were telling me off the air that you've also been paying tribute to your dad by going around and saying Kaddish on a daily basis at various synagogues.
I was wondering if you might want to talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, I mean, it's a very, you know, personal, private thing that is not, you know, something I've talked about or made a big deal of.
But, you know, it's a Jewish tradition that you say the morner's Kaddish, which is a prayer for close family who have passed, and that you do that for a full year after the passing of a parent.
And it's something I started doing and just felt to me like a very meaningful way to connect with my father.
And being, neither of us were or are very religious or kind of believers in the literal sense, but being Jewish was incredibly core and important to who my father was and his whole identity and is to me as well.
And so connecting through that has been an important and meaningful thing for me.
So I think for a lot of conservatives who listen to the show and who know my work, they know that I've considered your father the formative conservative thinker, probably since the 1980s at the very least.
But there are a lot of folks who are listening who may not know your father's biography.
They may not know actually sort of the timeline of your father's life.
And it's really an incredible story of perseverance and tragedy and triumph.
And I was wondering if you might be able to tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, sure.
I guess, you know, one element I think you're referencing in there is that my father had an accident when he was a young man, a diving accident, where he severed his spinal cord and left him in a wheelchair.
And that's something he, I think, you know, overcame and really didn't let define his life in any important way.
And that was really his commitment to himself and how he lived his life.
And he did live the life that he wanted to.
And, you know, on that note, one of the most incredible things he said about it, that I only discovered after his passing actually, was he said, look, everyone has their burden to bear in life.
Everyone has their cross to bear.
Some of those are more visible, and some of those aren't.
Some of those are burdens you carry on the inside and no one ever knows about.
But everyone has these travails, these slings and arrows that life throws at you, and the key is not being defined by those.
It's overcoming them, it's turning your own path, deciding what you want your life to be, and you live it out.
And that was something that I think comes through in the book and in his writing, and it's just part of who he was in an amazing way.
And the way he lived out that life and the way he found his meaning and his calling was in politics and writing.
And it took him a while to find that, actually.
He was always interested in politics and studied it as an undergraduate and a graduate student, but he was studying political philosophy at Oxford, actually, and had this bit of a crisis of conscience, is how he described it, and thought that he was getting kind of spiraling out into this world of theory, and it was detached from the world, and he wanted to make sure he did something that mattered, that would have a concrete difference and impact.
And so he switched paths and went to medical school, and actually left Oxford in the middle of his program to go to Harvard for that.
And he ended up going into psychiatry, which he thought would be As he described it, kind of this middle path between the world of theory and thought and hard evidence and science and medicine.
And went to Harvard, went through there, did his residency at Mass General, became chief resident there, so was a practicing doctor for many years, but came to a point where he realized this isn't what he was supposed to be doing.
He felt still he was always thinking and talking about politics and that he thought he regretted having let that go.
And really with at my mother's encouragement, mainly is how he always talked about it, decided, OK, I'm going to reorient my life and do what I feel I should be doing.
There's a lot of interesting twists and turns of the story, but he managed to get a job while still working in medicine in D.C., so moved to D.C., where he figured, okay, that's where they do politics, so once I get there, I'll meet people and figure it out.
He started writing, submitting samples, got a few things published.
Through that, applied for and got a job as a speechwriter for Walter Mondale, actually, which surprises a whole lot of people, especially conservatives.
Uh, and, uh, worked for Mondale in 1980, and then Carter lost the election, and, uh, the day Reagan was sworn in actually was my father's first day, uh, of his, the rest of his career as a journalist.
He started working at the New Republic.
Magazine, which is where he worked in the early 80s, won the National Magazine Award there, and then started writing his column for the Washington Post in 1985, I think it was, yes, which is also when I was born.
Won the Pulitzer Prize for his writing there in 87, and it just kind of went from there.
His column was syndicated and gradually grew to more and more papers, eventually about 400.
Uh, was what it was, um, when he passed.
Uh, he did, started doing TV appearances, uh, eventually in the 90s, uh, through the 2000s, was on a, a PBS and locally syndicated show called Inside Washington.
Uh, in the 2000s, he started doing appearances on Fox, uh, and, uh, then became essentially a nightly panelist on Special Report, uh, first with Brit Hume and then Bret Baier.
And, you know, really, his writing career, I think, in many ways was, You know, his thoughts were very constant, and I think the build in those who read him, those who followed him, was also very constantly growing and solidifying base over decades, really.
And so, by the time he passed, he left behind an incredible corpus of work, and as you say, a legacy that so many people read him over so many years.
I mean, I had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of times.
Once, actually, when I was working at Breitbart, and we went to his office, and what was hilarious about it is that I expected that he was going to be ensconced in the news, that he was going to be having the TVs on, and it wasn't any of that.
He was just sitting there reading, and then we came in and he wanted to talk baseball.
And I'll get to baseball in a little bit.
The second time I met him, it was maybe a couple of years ago.
He was doing a video for Prager University, and we were talking about healthcare, and he started asking me very specific questions about the differences between, for example, the Australian healthcare system and the Canadian healthcare system.
For a second, I thought he was testing me, and then I realized he actually wanted to know the answers because that was the kind of person that he was.
When I think of him as a conservative, there are two ways in which I think of him as a conservative.
One is in terms of his values, and one is in terms of sort of his manners, that kind of Russell Kirk conservatism, where he was somebody who seemed gradualistic in his pursuit of change.
He wasn't a radical.
He wasn't somebody who was interested in tearing things out by the roots.
He was very considered.
He was very polite.
And maybe that wasn't enough for some people in the conservative movement.
But I wonder if you could talk about each of those in turn.
Number one, sort of his conservative manner.
And then also, what do you think were sort of his unifying core political values?
Sure.
So yeah, Manor, I think, I mean, I guess, yeah, to your point you could consider some of that conservative.
I think to a degree it was just innately who he was.
He was, you know, he was a very kind and thoughtful and curious person.
You know, he was very outwardly focused.
He didn't make a big deal of himself.
He didn't focus on himself in his writing or his life that much.
And he was genuinely interested in people, like when he met you and when he wanted to ask you what your thoughts were or your opinions were or a subject he discovered that he didn't know anything about before.
And he had this across a variety of topics, both political and otherwise.
I mean, one thing I remember when I was young is he was always so interested in physics and astrophysics and cosmology.
He actually enrolled in his 40s in a physics course at Georgetown University just so he could bone up on his linear algebra and multivariable calculus so he could kind of re-envolve Read some of the most recent physics theory a little more in depth.
But I think that always that kind of really thinking about what mattered, taking a step back and considering the bigger questions in life gave him a perspective of, of course, why would you not be kind and interested to someone?
Why would you be histrionic in your attitude when you're talking about politics?
Why would you make it personal either that I'm always right or that you are bad because we disagree?
I think he was a very ideas-focused person, and that's what brought him to that life.
That's why he left medicine, because he cared about these ideas deeply.
But it was about the ideas, not about the people advocating them or arguing against them, and I think he always had that.
sense of let's put the ideas out there, let's argue about them, and through that we'll get to a better sense of the truth.
And I think that informed his approach personally, and also, to your second point, to his core political philosophy.
You know, there's both a very core strain of classical liberalism, to my father's beliefs, of 19th century enlightenment and 18th century enlightenment thinking, of free thought, of the argumentation of best ideas in competition of the argumentation of best ideas in competition to discover the best truths, the best way of doing things.
You know, he, He was a student of John Stuart Mill.
I would say it's probably his favorite political philosopher.
He was actually writing his dissertation at Oxford about John Stuart Mill when he left to go into medicine.
And I think he always held that at the very core of his political thinking, of what politics should be built upon is the idea of the free and autonomous individual and how we build a society that we remain free, that we have the open exchange of ideas, we have a pluralism, pluralistic society that's tolerant, that is diverse in terms of thought, and where individuals are free to interact, create associations with each other,
And on their own free from the interference of a government that forces Anything thought or otherwise so that that core idea of?
classical liberalism and pluralism I think underlay everything that he he really thought about what the right and the good kind of politics were and to him the American experiment was the greatest incarnation of that in human history and the luckiest and one that we should be grateful for that it took These geniuses in the 18th century that built this system that endured because it saw that we're imperfect people.
It was a government built for men, not angels.
And realized that we would have to take our faults into account in constructing our politics to balance our sins against our virtues.
And my father had such a deep appreciation for that.
And I think that appreciation connected to what you identified of, you know, a real conservatism to his thinking too, in that he had incredible respect and gratitude for the wisdom of the past.
That I think in his experience through life, he saw many times the kind of enthusiasms or romanticisms of whatever the political ideology of the time was, saying that, oh, we have found the truth, the new thing that makes all the other knowledge from before obsolete.
We know what is virtuous and good.
And that, A, usually leads to a A totalitarianism of some kind or other, of, well, if you're against the new utopia we've discovered, you must be a bad person, you must be wrong and evil.
And that undercuts pluralist and free society.
And secondly, who are you to think that you have discovered some truth, that mankind, in all its wisdom, in all the sages and thinkers and theologians we've had over the centuries, We're unable to figure out that why are you so confident that you have just discovered this truth and they didn't know what they were talking about.
And so I think my father saw that incredible value of continuity over time, of maintaining the best from the past.
And he talks about this in the book.
there's a commencement speech he gave at McGill, actually, where he talks about this and he has this line, he says, "Save the best.
"Look to the past for the wisdom "and what we can preserve and keep that works." And that doesn't mean everything stays static, it doesn't mean that we don't change, it doesn't mean that our thinking doesn't evolve, and it doesn't mean that there are injustices and bad ideas we inherit from the past.
But you have to look at everything skeptically.
You have to think, you know, if it comes from the past and it survived, at least there's some evidence that it's not self-destructive.
You know, it has survived.
We can analyze it.
We can use history as a guide, as kind of the empirical evidence for how this works.
And if you have a brand new idea, well, by definition, you don't have the empirical evidence yet.
It hasn't been tested.
And so you should look at it just as you look at anything new.
You want to test it out.
You want to see how it actually works in the world.
And so I think a lot of Just what you said, the idea of gradualism, I think, is a very good match for how my dad approached a lot of these questions.
He wasn't against change, but he said, look, let's take this slow.
Let's have respect for the values that we've inherited from the past, and let's think about these things very carefully.
Just last week I was giving a talk about my dad in the book and I was thinking about just these ideas and it occurred to me, I remembered William Buckley's line about the conservative is someone who stands athwart history and yells, stop.
And I was thinking, you know, that doesn't, that's not who my dad was, but I, but it, I was thinking a variation on that, that, you know, my father, I imagine standing at Fort History and yelling, think.
So I'd, you know, I guess there's a lot in there, but I think he, he had, you know, these very core, very thought out political principles that he always looked to whenever he was arguing whatever the political You know, controversial idea of the day was, and so that was something I noticed in putting the book together and reading all his things and his pieces, articles from decades, that it could always connect back to this deep philosophical core.
And, you know, I think he held that with him his whole life, and that was what mattered to him about his vocation, about writing, about politics.
And I think that's one of the things that people felt so much, even if You know, they didn't see it every single day.
I think these really core ideas, this sense of commitment to principles and being honest about them and following through on your own, you know, the logic of your own thinking to the end point, wherever those chips may fall, whatever the ideas end up being without regard for yourself or your party or, you know, what team you're on, so to speak.
I think that really defined my dad as a thinker.
So in a second, I want to ask you about some of the controversies surrounding him, particularly on the foreign policy side.
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All right, so I want to ask you about the controversy surrounding your father.
So I think that your father was not a man made for the Twitter age, particularly, because he did consider ideas deeply.
And because, I mean, even in what I read of how he would write, you know, having to go through columns over and over to get the perfect wording.
I mean, I wish I had that sort of commitment to my own writing.
I'm too busy with Churn.
But he didn't seem like he was made for the Twitterverse, per se.
And after his passing, there were a number of folks on the left who immediately decided they were going to recast his legacy as entirely about the Iraq War and suggest that he was a warmongering neocon.
I was wondering, what were the kind of unifying principles behind his foreign policy?
Because that became the most controversial part of his legacy.
Yeah.
Well, he wrote about foreign policy and cared about it deeply.
That was, I think, one of the areas where he read the most, thought the most, and really put forth some of the most original and powerful arguments.
And there's a lot of it in the book.
And his thinking, as with so many things, I discovered, stayed incredibly consistent over the whole four decades of his career.
That there's articles in the book all the way back from the 80s lining out principles that he laid out that stayed the same.
And there's one in the book, I think, that speaks very much to this in a general sense.
It's called When to Intervene.
You know, this is the question, as you say, that, you know, he was criticized a lot for and, you know, a big debate, an important debate on how involved America should be overseas, what its role should be.
And in this piece, as well as others, my father always argued for a strong American foreign policy, one that's active in the world.
But he was also extremely careful and thoughtful about where America should be actually taking action.
That would be a commitment of blood and treasure, because that he saw as a sacred trust to commit that among your citizens.
But be something that America does not have unlimited power.
It can't do everything everywhere all the time.
And so it is important to choose where it really counts.
And the criteria he laid out were A, that any...
Intervention be morally justified by our values of being against genocide, tyranny, wanton aggression on the part of dictatorships, that it be for open societies, free societies, freeing captive populations, and B, that it be strategically necessary for the United States, that we can't just be
They have a foreign policy of doing charity for the world, that we can't intervene everywhere, that there's an injustice being done, and that we have to gird our power, maintain that, and make sure that we can uphold really the superstructure of the international world of, sorry, international and make sure that we can uphold really the superstructure of the international world of, sorry, international order of open sea lanes, of a world where borders are respected, where dictators
And so, you know, there are examples throughout the 90s and the 2000s where he was for several of the interventions that we engaged in against several of the interventions we engaged in.
Which ones is he against?
If you go back and read his columns on the intervention in the Balkans and Kosovo, I don't want to step too far, but he had a lot of criticism of how those were engaged in.
There were arguments in the 2000s about intervening in several African countries.
in Darfur, in Liberia, I think it was, in Libya, the intervention there.
He was very critical of how that happened and that we went in kind of without regard for the strategic plan.
So, you know, he had very complex and considered thinking on all of these.
And And, uh, but through it all he, he thought that America had a special role to play in the world.
That we can, you know, he was a very realistic thinker, and I think in foreign policy that ...exhibit itself as being very realistic about how the world worked.
And the way he said it is, look, the international arena is a Hobbesian world.
It's dog-eat-dog.
It's, you know, it's a wild jungle.
No law.
There's no authority to appeal to.
And, you know, what holds the peace of the world together and has held it together since World War II?
It's been American power.
That was his argument, that we have upheld, you know, through our alliances, through our deterrent action against would-be aggressors, we have held the longest period of major power peace in modern history.
I mean, in modern in terms of centuries, not just You know, the last decades.
And that that's not an accident.
It's not coincidence that this period has aligned with the period when America has been the world's major power and has explicitly tried to uphold an open order that is peaceful and that we are kind of the ultimate account holders for.
And we can wish that we lived in a world that would be peaceful and stable if we withdrew and didn't uphold this and spend the resources and the time and energy that it requires.
But that world simply doesn't exist.
And that he saw a lot of, I would say, the objections to his point of view, both on the right and the left, of kind of withdrawing American forces.
Whether it's because you think America is acting unjustly in the world, which perhaps the left would think, or that the world doesn't deserve our efforts, which perhaps someone on the right would think.
He would say, I think he often viewed those as misguided in their philosophy, but also in their realistic appraisal of the world.
That you can wish that we can be safe and that America can prosper in a world that we withdraw from, but history has shown us otherwise.
And it would be unwise for us to give up all that we've built in terms of that international order that both maintains our safety and creates a world that is largely aligned with our most dearly held values.
How did he feel about the flip inside the Republican Party, particularly over the Iraq War, which is, again, the major sticking point for so many people who criticize your father?
Inside the Republican Party, there seemed to be a shift from universal sympathy for the Iraq War to, as things went more poorly for a while, a turn against the Iraq War, particularly in the aftermath of finding no stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction to the point where the 2016 nominee was a man who legitimately got on stage and called President Bush a war criminal and suggested that we never should have invaded Iraq except to take the oil.
How do you feel about sort of the evolution inside the conservative movement in the Republican Party concerning the Iraq War?
You know, to be honest, I don't know specifically how he felt about that development within the Republican Party as differentiated from, you know, a general trend.
But, There are several columns in the book about this, too, because it was an important thing that he wrote about.
a lot of considered arguments on.
But there's one where he talks about, I think a lot of the points you're saying.
And at this point, it wasn't just the Republican Party, it was 70% supporting the war and most major Democrats also voting for it.
So a lot of the country shifted on this.
And this was a long debate of, was it a mistake?
Was it not?
And, you know, my father always said about that, you know, it's somewhat a, he somewhat rejected the premise of the question that, you know, if you knew then, what would you have said?
And, you know, his argument in the book is, well, I mean, the debate would have not come up the way it did if we knew then.
And there's legitimate, you know, he wrestled with and argued really on the level of people who said it at the time before the war actually, too, it's not worth it strategically speaking.
And that's something he said, you know, reasonable people of goodwill can absolutely disagree on this.
And he was critical at different points, too.
The initial invasion, he was very critical during the occupation and a lot of what he saw as mistakes that were made.
He was very supportive of the surge and really by the end of the surge had said, and in several articles, that we have gotten Iraq to a stable place.
This is not mistakes were made and this shouldn't have been on this course necessarily, but we're at a place where we've committed all this blood and treasure and Iraq is now a strategic asset.
And he saw the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 as a huge mistake.
So, you know, there were, as he described it, there were many stages to that war.
And so the ultimate endpoint depends on a lot of those different decisions at different times.
And so he was always, you know, again, very thoughtful and considered on looking at where we are at any given point in time and saying, you know, what is the best thing for America to do now?
What's the strategically and values-wise the right choice to make at this point in history rather than, you know, replaying Okay, so in just a second, I want to ask you, what is the point of it all?
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Okay, Daniel, so I know, big question.
The title of the book is the point of it all.
When I read — your father wrote one of the most beautiful notes I've ever read in the last thing that he ever published about his impending death, and talking about how he felt that he had lived a fulfilled life.
In fact, I thought it was such a moving piece of writing that I quoted it at length in my new book, because my new book is all about how the West has sort of lost its purpose.
And I use your father as an example of somebody who clearly had lifelong purpose to the point where he could stare death in the face and write something that beautiful and brave about it.
What did your father think was actually the point of it all?
So yeah, it's a big question and obviously it's not a narrow focus in the title.
It was one that my mother came up with actually, the title of the book.
She came up with the title to his last book as well.
But really it struck me as exactly right, because I think what he saw as the point of it all, and he writes about this in several different places, Is really to find your own meaning in life.
That there's not one overriding truth that anyone gets to define.
That everyone must follow their own loves, their own passions, discover what moves them in family, in their job, in their passions and pastimes.
And he saw that, I think, the point of it all is a diversity of things that people can and must figure out for themselves.
And The key thing that I thought made it such a perfect title for the book was that he found his own life's purpose in his professional life as supporting and arguing for and maintaining the politics that allowed that to take place.
He saw that individual freedom to choose, to chart your own path and find that own point as the most precious and valuable thing that we have.
And that it's not something that's existed for a lot of human history.
that we have had mostly regimes and politics that enforce a view of what the point of life is, that give you the point of life, and that define it for you.
And that was something he saw as anathema to the kind of the pluralist open politics that he cared about so much, that no one should have the power to dictate to someone else what the point of their lives should be, and that it's really and that it's really the journey in living out one's own inner voice that must be each and every person's own individual point.
And yet he wasn't a moral relativist.
He wasn't somebody who believed that you could define your own morality.
I always hearken back to President Obama's second inaugural address, where he had what I thought was legitimately the worst line I've ever read in an inaugural address, where he said that the job of each person is to define liberty in their own way.
And I thought, well, no, that's pretty much the one thing we sort of have to agree on if we're going to have a civilized society.
So while you talk about people finding happiness in a variety of pursuits, the reality is that we do have to share that common framework.
No, and I think that's exactly his connection in my father's philosophy of the personal life to the political and the communal.
That in order for the individual to have that freedom, you have to have a politics that stays out of it.
And how do you do that?
You have to have agreed upon rules of free speech, of free association, of the autonomy of the individual.
And that, to your point, is a political agreement.
And that really is My father wrote in the book quite a bit about how Mill approached this, how Isaiah Berlin approached this question of, you know, it does come to a philosophical butting of heads, potentially, with moral relativism, as you say, but the core value you have to adopt is that agreement on openness.
There has to be the bedrock.
The idea of the free individual and how we respect that, and that is the definition of liberty.
That's, you know, that is John Stuart Mill on liberty.
It's so many of the, I think really my father's favorite political philosophers that he followed were the ones who kind of interpreted that classical liberal enlightenment philosophy for the modern age.
Now, one of the things that I want to ask about is specifically with regard to that, because there's a debate that's broken out, and it's kind of an interesting debate.
I've been having it rather openly with folks like Jonah Goldberg, specifically about that Enlightenment thought.
My suggestion is that a lot of the common values that undergird Enlightenment thought have a lot deeper roots in Judeo-Christianity, the value of the individual.
I mean, you mentioned the free individual, and my belief is that in a scientific materialist world, it's very difficult to make the case For the rights of the free individual capable of making independent decisions.
I mean, for Spinoza's ball of meat wandering through the universe, believing we're self-willed but not really self-willed, then none of these things exist.
It's hard to build a political system on the basis of that.
I was wondering what your dad's religious philosophy was, because he obviously wasn't a religious person.
I don't think he was an atheist.
I think he called himself an agnostic.
Is that correct?
Yeah, he had a, I would describe it as a complex and subtle sense of religiosity.
And he grew up actually in an Orthodox Jewish household, so he was very religious when he was young.
And he left that to a degree, but never rejected it totally.
And he talked about this quite a bit, and there's quite a bit in the book too, particularly about How he maintained a sense of Jewish identity, and not just in the cultural sense, but in the sense of the philosophical heritage of the Jewish tradition, of all the arguments of the rabbis going back centuries, and to the Bible, and to those core ideas built into it.
And he, you know, as he described it, he wasn't a believer in the literal sense.
He didn't feel there was a You know, an anthropomorphized God who involves himself in our daily lives.
But he did have a very strong belief that there was something greater out there and that, as he described it, he thought atheism was the least believable of all theologies.
That was the phrase he used.
And he, you know, he had an incredible respect for the limitations on our own knowledge and understanding of ourselves and of the universe.
That this was, you know, I mentioned he was so interested in physics and cosmology.
This was the root of a lot of it.
He loved thinking about the universe and cosmology and the history of everything back to the very beginning.
And he loved investigating that, but he also, I think, drew from that a sense that we're never going to know the final answers to a lot of this stuff.
That he liked to use, there was a phrase I think it was Newton used that he, when he was trying to kind of discern some of these universal laws, he said, you know, I feel like a snail on the shores of an ocean trying to understand how the tides work.
A snail is never going to understand that.
It is beyond the innate capacity.
My father talked about this in terms of us, that there are things we'll never understand and we should have a certain respect and awe for that.
There are forces and powers and things beyond us that we shouldn't assume we can ever know, particularly don't exist, or claim to have the one true knowledge of where it comes from.
But from that I think he had an incredible respect and gratitude for religious tradition in general.
He had great respect for religious people.
His father was an incredibly religious person.
And in a historical sense as well, which you kind of touched on, he saw the values inculcated by the world's great religions, in particular his own, and the Judeo-Christian tradition as getting us to a better understanding of our own human nature, of discovering some real You know, important truths about us that allowed, you know, historically allowed us to get to where we are.
So I, you know, I don't want to wade too far into the debate I know that you've had on this topic, because I don't want to speak for my dad beyond what I know he wrote.
But I would say there was both a personal sense of awe that I think some would see as a spirituality, or at the very least an agnosticism at the most, a kind of religiosity, and...
And in a political sense, a real respect for the history of where these ideas came from.
So what was it like growing up in your house?
I mean, we know a lot about your dad.
Your dad was a public figure.
What's your mother like, and how was it to be growing up in a house where all of this was on the table, apparently, all the time?
Yeah, well, I wouldn't say—yeah, I think I'm giving a kind of skewed perception, if that's how you're reading it, of growing up.
You know, as with everyone, I think you grow up the way you grow up and that's what you know.
But, you know, we did talk about politics and big ideas and we enjoyed doing that.
And, but it was never kind of, you know, pointed debates or, you know, some kind of structured environment.
And, you know, we, you know, there's everything else from my childhood stands out in a lot of ways.
Just, you know, fun things like Baseball games, and we loved movies and saw those all the time together, going on long car trips together.
But, you know, obviously a lot of this thought and thinking, he didn't so much teach me as he opened up the world for me, is how I would put it.
that he always tried to present all this wealth of knowledge he had, but without telling me how to think about it.
And, you know, that was a wonderful gift he gave me.
But, you know, I would say much more important is just the relationship, as with anyone, just that you have with your dad.
It's the same with my mom.
I'm an only child, very close with both my parents, and we're very tight, kind of, you know, a little trio.
And that's really, I think, just such a core part of who I think of when I think of who am I and what am I. You know, I'm Charles and Robin's son.
And that feeling of just being of them and from them and connected to them is an immense part of who I feel that I am.
So your father was famously a huge baseball fan.
Are you a big baseball fan the same way that your father was?
I am, but not to his degree.
I think it would be hard to top that.
But, you know, I grew up playing baseball and when I was a kid I was an Orioles fan because Washington didn't have a team when I was growing up.
But when the Nats did come to DC, my dad just fell in love with them.
Actually, there's an article in the book about how he literally tried to resist, but could not not fall in love with the Nats.
But I'd go to him with games whenever I went back home to visit, and that was certainly one of our great fun things that we did together.
So what was his general take on sort of the modern state of philosophy?
So we've been talking about kind of deep ideas.
Your dad, I think, is more of a political philosopher, really, than is just a columnist.
A couple of his columns pop to mind in this vein.
The column that he wrote about stem cell research is still, I think, one of the best pieces of writing on public policy and personalized public policy I've ever read, because obviously of his medical condition, and then his statements about how you separate out from that to try and make the moral distinctions between stem cell lines and all of that.
But so much of politics is not that.
So much of politics is the battle of personalities, the slap fight that really has magnified in the last couple of years.
And he stopped writing publicly in, what, mid-2017?
Yeah.
Something like that.
So did he talk politics with you between that and the time he passed away?
Yeah, a little bit.
We were dealing with a lot more important things, but we'd turn on the news from time to time.
I think he shared some of the same frustrations that I have, and I'm sure you have, of just what you're saying.
Some of the more histrionic kind of personalized and really divorced from ideas, politics of kind of just two teams fighting each other for the sake of it.
But I think I do get asked this a lot, and again, not to speak for him, but I think in his own career, I think in his own career, he was often pleasantly surprised at his own popularity and how widely he was read and how much he was watched on Fox and recognized wherever he went.
It's not something I think he ever expected or thought he necessarily deserved to have.
It was just he was doing what he thought he could best contribute by putting his ideas out there.
But the fact that It was received so widely and so well, I think, gave him some hope of, you know, people do want to hear thoughtful, reasoned arguments.
And that's exactly what people would say that they read him for.
So, I mean, I think he, you know, he always saw that there's room for that argument out there.
And if you give it to people in the right way, they'll be glad for it.
And he also had A real deep and inbuilt sense of optimism, which covers this topic, I think, as well as many others.
Conservatives often aren't the most optimistic people.
There's often a sense of, oh, things are going downhill.
We're losing the values of the past, et cetera, et cetera.
And while my father was extremely realistic, He was not pessimistic.
He didn't, you know, think that we're all going to hell in a handbasket or that, you know, we're losing our core sense of ourselves.
He definitely saw the dangers.
He, you know, he saw that there were a lot of things wrong with how we're practicing politics today.
Just a lot of things, dangers in the world beyond our own politics to deal with.
But he had a true sense of Optimism, and he even used the word faith in America in particular to figure things out and to get it right.
There's probably my favorite piece in the book is one called Constitutions, Conservatism, and the Genius of the Founders.
And, you know, he talks about his political philosophy and limited government in particular.
But at the end there's a section where he kind of draws back even more and talks about just his own personal sense of America and American history.
And the incredible unlikeliness that these political geniuses, as he put it, just appeared in this colonial backwater in the 18th century and managed to put together what's still the most lasting, best-functioning form of government that humanity has yet come across.
And they got so much right, and also had the foresight to know that they weren't perfect, to build in mechanisms to change over time, to build in
And he saw that gift from the past along with what he described as the core decency of the American people, that he saw that as something he really just believed in, that we would figure it out, that we had the capacity and showed again and again in our history the way he put it was that we redeem the mistakes of our past and find ways to inspire each other.
And it's something that actually when I discovered it, and it's something, he'd said things like this in quite a few places, it really, it gave me some hope and faith.
And I sometimes look back to it when I'm feeling particularly pessimistic or distraught about the state of things and puts a smile on my face.
So, you know, it's not, sometimes you do have to take a leap of faith and trust in people to figure out the right thing.
You mentioned that your father was an optimist That came through a lot in his writing.
I always like to call myself a pessimist, just because it means I'm always right eventually.
But did he see any trends where he was deeply troubled by certain trends in sort of latter-day America, like what we've seen in the past 10 years particularly?
I would hesitate to say he was kind of completely pessimistic about anything, but I would say where he certainly had great worries and he often focused his attention of trying to combat what he saw as bad trends were in the You know, where he saw that the pluralist, open, liberal democracy that he thought was the core of what made our politics work so well was gradually being chipped away at.
And I'd say, you know, thinking particularly what's in the book and some of the pieces I found and that he chose that point this out, most of all I'd maybe put them into two I mean two fields just for the sake of this answer.
One, a little more on the kind of economic side of things of a state that gradually grows and grows and provides more services and and crowds out more and more of the private sector and more and more of civil society and voluntary groups and free and free associations.
That that he saw as a A creeping threat and one that's difficult to fight back to.
Once you grant an entitlement, as he put it, it's very hard to take it away.
And so this was a lot of what he argued with the left about, of how big government programs should be and healthcare.
Uh, and a variety of other areas where he saw, look, if, you know, you can make arguments for them, but in the big picture, you're going to take away some of the core things that matter most in our system and to the American freeway.
And secondly, I'd say perhaps on the Kind of the thought police, you know, political correctness angle that he, you know, again back to his core political philosophy, believed that the core most important thing perhaps was free and open debate and ideas competing with each other so that the best could win.
And there's columns in the book where he focuses on this, too, of certain trends he saw, particularly on the left, of the effort to shut down debate before even getting to that argument.
And of saying that, oh, the debate is closed on this.
We're not going to talk about it.
We're going to call you names and not even let you publish this.
And that's something that I think he saw in a few different areas of debate.
And, you know, it's not the end of the world where perhaps this issue goes here or there.
But I think that general trend he saw is, you know, it's very important not to let that continue, that we have to uphold above all the free and open exchange of ideas and not let our politics define what we can talk about.
So you're a political thinker in your own right.
You've done a fair bit of writing about politics.
Are there any specific areas where you feel like you really differ from from your father's political viewpoints, either in policy or in philosophy?
Yeah, I mean, there are certainly things we disagreed on.
And, you know, a lot of the stuff we we, you know, we didn't debate every single issue under the sun.
So, you know, as I actually went back and read a lot of his old pieces for for completing this book came across things that I I didn't always agree with.
I'd say the most important things and the core things I agreed with him and generally in line there, but I'd say on a lot of Economic issues, domestic policy issues, we differ a little bit on something like climate change.
I'd say we're at kind of different points on the spectrum.
But, you know, I think the way I describe it, and I kind of wish our politics in general worked a little more like this, is On these things, it wasn't, you know, like he was on one side, I was on the other, and we had some debate where he argued it out.
A, that's kind of not, you know, not how I talk with my dad.
But B, you know, most issues are not just there's one side and another side, and let's see which one wins.
There's on a lot of things, particularly when it comes to, you know, a lot of domestic policy choices, you know, there's a spectrum.
You have an extreme on one end, an extreme on the other, and there's a lot of different policy options and decisions on where moral balance lies in between.
And I'd say there are points where he'd be at one point, and I would say, well, I wouldn't necessarily say I disagree with him, but I'd be a few clicks over on that spectrum.
And, you know, it's another question I've been asked quite a bit lately, and I always thought, you know, I kind of wish more people who disagreed publicly would do so the way my dad and I did.
Just say, oh, that's interesting.
Well, why do you think that?
And, you know, if you debate it out and say, what's the reasoning behind why you're there instead of here, maybe you'll actually get both to a better point or a better understanding of where you lie.
So you mentioned John Stuart Mill.
I'm wondering just for the sake of my own knowledge, what were some of the other sort of political philosophers, other books that he really counted on or admired that were formational for him?
Yeah, I mean he really went back to kind of the canon of kind of Enlightenment thoughts.
So John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Isaiah Berlin, in the book he actually writes an article about him describing him as one of the best modern interpreter of that classical liberal tradition.
Also, I'd say on the founders as well, Madison, Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, and moving a little more towards, let's say, that kind of conservative side of the philosophy we talked about to Burke and Chesterton.
And these are all figures, actually, that he mentions in the book and talks about as either explicitly people who inspired him or whose ideas he still holds core and think are very important.
Were there any thinkers on the left that he particularly enjoyed going back and forth with or people he enjoyed reading?
I mean, I know he did.
We didn't talk a lot about... I guess I didn't talk a lot of shop, so to speak, with my dad.
When we did talk about it, it was more about the ideas, I'd say.
But he did a lot of speeches and debates as well, not on TV, just for events that are hosted by trade associations or what have you.
And he really enjoyed a lot of those when he was with someone who he disagreed with, but who was very smart and thoughtful.
He loved it.
And I think he, obviously, he liked winning, so to speak.
But I think there was nothing more frustrating to him than an argument that you're just, I have my side, you have yours, and we're just going to yell at each other for an hour.
He saw that as, what's the point of this?
His vocation, as he saw it, was not to be a cheerleader or an advocate and just say, this point, this point, this point.
I think he really saw his role as, I'm here to make an argument, and if I can't convince someone, then what am I doing here?
And he always, when he made an argument, always trying to take into account the other side's assumptions and working from those backwards to his own point.
Because as he said, if you just are arguing core assumptions, you're very unlikely to get anywhere.
And so trying to have, I would call it maybe a kind of intellectual generosity to the other side to actually try to convince them and not just beat them, you know, It doesn't mean you don't make a very sharp and pointed and full argument, which he always did.
But I think he always held that core to what it meant to be an honest critic, as he said, to fully argue out from his own principles and try to convince those on the other side that what the ideas he was putting out there really were good and better.
Because otherwise, what was he doing?
How's this experience of putting together the book and touring around with it?
How's that been for you personally?
Because it must be, I imagine, on one hand difficult and on the other hand, it must be something.
Yeah, no, you're right.
It's a very two-handed experience.
It's, on the one hand, been, to be honest, very hard, having gone through this, focusing on this, you know, completely with kind of every fiber of my being, and particularly actually Going out and talking about all this stuff so publicly and also trying to represent my father as best I can but not pretending to speak for him because I don't want to do that.
I want to represent what he wrote and what I know that he thought.
He has his views and he's his own person and I'm not going to speak for what he would say today.
So it's been emotionally, you know, not the easiest thing.
But on the other hand, it's been incredibly rewarding and gratifying to be able to do this.
And it was incredibly important to me to finish this for him.
That he asked me to do it, he entrusted it to me, and I wanted to make sure that it was done As he deserved and up to the standards that he had set.
And I'm very grateful that I had the opportunity to do this.
And not, you know, not everyone who loses a parent can do something like this for their parent.
And so it's, you know, I think as with so many things all these last months, it's very difficult, but there's something I think more deeply rewarding and important that I've been able to do by going through this process.
I mean, not to get too biblical, but obviously what you've been doing is an incredible example of kippurava aim.
It's an incredible example of respect for your father.
And I think that we're all grateful that you did that.
I do have one final question for you.
I want to ask you to do your best.
I know it's difficult to sort of sum up what you think your father's legacy should be for folks who've never read him, for folks who didn't spend years following him.
And we'll get that answer in just a second.
But if you want to hear Daniel Krauthammer's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, go to dailywire.com, click the subscribe button, and you can hear the end of our conversation there.
Well, thank you so much for your time, and thanks so much for all the work that you've been doing.
It means a lot to, I know, everyone in our audience.
It means a lot to me, and I'm sure that his legacy will certainly carry on.
So thank you so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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