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Nov. 3, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:59
Peter Robinson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 75
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This is this pet peeve of mine.
We're not allowed to say that our side won the Cold War.
It just ended.
Well, let me point out one thing.
The United States is still here, and the Soviet Union went defunct.
We won.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
We are pleased to welcome today Peter Robinson.
He is the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institute, and he knows like everything about Reagan and history and America.
Well, Peter, thanks so much for stopping by.
Ben, it's a pleasure.
It's a pleasure.
I'm an admirer, but I have three sons who are Ben Shapiro fanatics.
So it's a double pleasure.
Well, thank you.
It's a pleasure to have you on, and I'm glad that your sons will finally watch something that you produce.
That's very exciting.
So let's start with, for folks who don't know your resume, your sort of most famous resume points that you wrote down in the Tear Down This Wall speech at the Berlin Wall for President Reagan.
So how exactly did you come up with that phraseology?
How did that speech come about?
Oh, well, there's a story there.
1987, spring of 1987, Berlin is celebrating some 800th anniversary.
Gorbachev is going to visit, the Queen of England is going to visit, and the West German government—remember, it was West Germany and East Germany in those days—the West German government asked President Reagan to make a visit.
I got assigned the speech and flew to Berlin before—oh, this would be six weeks or so before the president was to speak there—to do some research.
I went to the wall.
I went to the place where the president was going to be delivering the speech.
It's all gone now.
But the wall was there, the Reichstag, which was still pocked with shell marks from the bombing at the final battle of Berlin.
And behind me was West Berlin, modern city, color, life, movement, recent model cars.
And then you look over the wall.
And there was almost no motion.
Guards marching back and forth.
It was as though the color had been leached out of it.
Everything was gray, brown.
The buildings even looked dilapidated.
So this was a place where you could feel the weight of history.
Communism there.
Capitalism here.
This was the place where the Soviet advance stopped at the end of the Second World War.
This was the place where the Americans and the British had taken over.
So, at that moment, I was a young speechwriter in trouble because what could I write that would equal what you felt there, the felt weight of history?
Several other stops in Berlin, including one to the ranking American diplomat who was full of ideas about what Ronald Reagan should not say.
West Berlin is surrounded by East Germany.
The people who live here are very sensitive to the nuance and subtlety necessary for East-West relations.
Don't have Ronald Reagan sound like an anti-communist cowboy.
And by the way, don't have him make a big deal about the wall.
They've all gotten used to it.
And that evening, I went to a dinner party West Berliners whom I had not met, but we had mutual friends back in Washington.
And so they put together a sort of a buffet for me, 15 or so people, different walks of life, a professor, a couple of students, and my host and hostess were lovely retired people.
He had worked at the World Bank in Washington and retired back to West Berlin.
And I asked the question, I said, I've been told by the American diplomat that you've all gotten used to the wall by now.
And there was a silence.
And I thought, I've made just the gaffe that the diplomat doesn't want Ronald Reagan to make.
But then one man raised his arm and pointed and said, my sister lives just a few kilometers in that direction, but I haven't seen her in more than 20 years.
How do you think we feel about that wall?
And they went around the room.
They'd stopped talking about it.
They had not stopped caring about it.
They had not stopped hating it.
And each person told... One man talked about walking to work each morning, and each morning he would walk under a guard tower where there was an East German soldier with a rifle over his shoulder who would peer down at him with binoculars.
And the man said, We share the same history, we speak the same language, but one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal, and I have never been able to decide which was which.
And then our hostess, a lovely woman called Ingeborg Eltz, who just died a couple of years ago.
She must have been younger then than I am now.
She was perhaps in her early fifties.
She was a very gracious woman.
She'd been charming throughout the dinner party, but now she became angry.
And she said, if this man Gorbachev – she smacked her, made a ball of one fist and smacked it into the palm of her other hand – if this man Gorbachev is serious with this glasnost, this perestroika, he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of that wall.
And that went into my notebook, because the moment she said that, I knew that if Ronald Reagan had been there in my place, he would have responded to that remark.
The simplicity, the dignity, and the power of that remark.
So the answer, that's a long way around to get to the answer to your question, but if the question is, where did that phrase come from?
The answer is it started with a German woman who lived behind the wall herself.
So obviously you're the author of some of the most memorable words in American history to emerge from the mouth of a president of the United States.
Right.
And there's been this kind of take on presidents.
May I derail that question right away?
This is a slightly complicated point to make, but it's important to make.
I'm not the author.
I wrote it.
But all I was trying to do when I was in Berlin was listen as Ronald Reagan would have listened, respond as Ronald Reagan would have responded, and write a speech for him.
Now, so I had worked for Vice President George H.W.
Bush, a man whom I liked very much, whom in all kinds of ways I revere.
I would never have written that speech for him, nor would he ever have given it.
We could come to this if you'd like to, but there was a big fight over the speech.
The National Security Council, the State Department, tried to squelch that line, tear down this wall.
And Ronald Reagan alone insisted on delivering that speech as I had written it.
So it is true that as a speechwriter in the White House, I put the words on the paper.
But the deeper truth is the author of that speech, the man who called it into being, and the man who insisted on it, and the man who delivered it in a way that remains, I think permanently fixed in hundreds of thousands of memories, is Ronald Reagan.
So, speaking of that sort of rhetoric, one of the things that's happened in modern American politics is this debate now over the value of presidential rhetoric.
So you saw it a lot from the pro-rhetoric side when Barack Obama was president.
President Obama was very mellifluous, that he spoke with great beauty and he was a great orator.
He was overrated in my opinion.
Well, I want to get your take on that.
But the idea was that if he had policy shortcomings, they were fulfilled by the fact that he was this wonderfully great orator with a gift.
And then you have President Trump.
And most of his defenders will say, okay, well, don't pay any attention to anything that he says.
It's what he does that matters.
It's not his rhetoric that matters.
It's the stuff that he does because, you know, there's teleprompter Trump and then there's non-teleprompter Trump.
So how seriously should we take a president's rhetoric?
What percentage of the job of the presidency do you think is related to rhetoric and how much is related to policy?
When you've got it right, and I would argue that Ronald Reagan had it right almost all the time.
When you've got it right, there's no distance between the president and the rhetoric.
So that's why, as you just heard me say, I had Ronald Reagan in my mind by the time Reagan became president.
Don't forget, he'd been speaking in public since at least the 1940s.
He'd campaigned for Harry Truman for president in 1948 as part of, what was it, Hollywood for Truman.
Now, his views change.
By 1964, he endorses Barry Goldwater's run.
By 1964, Reagan is a conservative.
But Ronald Reagan is speaking in public, writing his own speeches.
He comes to the White House fully formed as a speaker.
Also, by then, he's thoroughly conservative.
He's fully formed in his policy viewpoints.
And the reason there was a fight over the Berlin Wall speech, the reason there were fights over quite a few of President Reagan's speeches, is that the entire administration understood That giving speeches was, perhaps more than any other, the central instrument of governance to Ronald Reagan.
He talked to the American people.
There's one instance after, I can remember 1986, tax reform.
We don't have the votes in the Senate.
And the President goes, one of the problems is a Republican Senator called Robert Kastenbaum from Wisconsin.
And the President goes, President Reagan, goes and spends a day in Wisconsin.
I remember that because I wrote the speech he gave in Oshkosh.
He speaks in Milwaukee and I wrote the speech he gave in Oshkosh.
And there's a day of press before he gets there, local press for the President of the United States.
Then he gives the speeches.
And three or four days later, Robert Kasten changed his mind and decided to support the 1986 tax reform.
So Reagan is working the landscape of the American people.
And he's using speeches to enunciate policy and to move opinion outside the beltway.
He is president by addressing the American people And letting the beltway fall into line, fall into place afterwards.
Okay.
Barack Obama, I took a shot at Barack Obama's rhetoric.
When he was speaking to a large crowd and he was in the mode of the African American church, He was capable of speaking beautifully and movingly, but that's only one mode.
And there were a lot of speeches that he gave, Rose Garden speeches, straightforward addresses that were pretty clunky and really not all that surprisingly badly written, in my humble opinion.
And you sort of wonder, Is this Barack Obama or is it one of the 20 really smart people he has working around him?
Okay.
And then we come to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump, as I'm sure... Am I sure you'll agree?
Well, I'll see what you say.
I'll see what you say to this.
Donald Trump has given at least half a dozen really good speeches.
The speech he delivered in Saudi Arabia was an impressive thing.
His State of the Union address, the first speech he gave to a joint session after becoming president, was beautifully written and pretty darned well delivered.
He gave a very impressive speech in Vietnam.
In my judgment, the finest speech he delivered was in Warsaw, where he said, you remember this speech?
The defense of Western civilization.
Exactly!
The question of our time is whether Western civilization can defend itself.
You can build an entire administration around that.
You can build a four-year and indeed an eight-year agenda in foreign policy and domestic policy on the defense of the values of the West.
And he gave the speech.
And then tweeted something else, and tweeted something else, and tweeted something else.
And so the press doesn't take those big speeches seriously when they're by Donald Trump, and in some way neither does anybody else because everybody knows that wasn't really him.
That was some very gifted speechwriters.
That's not ideal.
So again, I repeat the point.
There's a little trap here.
I so revered Ronald Reagan.
And to me, he got so many things right.
But I don't want to let this very clever young man who graduated from Harvard Law School maneuver me into sounding like a dinosaur.
Nevertheless, young man, nevertheless, my boy, study up on Ronald Reagan.
That's where you get it right, where there's no distance.
Reagan worked very carefully.
This is another point about Ronald Reagan.
He went over, he took the speeches seriously.
You'd finish a speech, it'd go to the chief speechwriter, there'd be editing back and forth and so forth.
And we owed our drafts to the president, typically 48 hours before he delivered them.
And he would take the speeches with him to the residence in the evening and they'd come back the next morning marked up by Ronald Reagan.
He read every line of every speech and edited those things.
I can recall one time coming into the office, for some reason this stays in my mind, it was a six-page speech.
And no changes on the first page, no changes.
And I thought, oh, for once, he just decided to watch TV and forget about the speech.
And then on the last page, on the second to last line, he had changed one word.
And in some ways, that was almost more effective than anything else he might have done.
Because you remember, the president is reading every word we write.
And if it's not just right, he'll change it.
So by the time he delivered a speech, it was really and truly He had in some way internalized it.
You get no feeling of a distance between Reagan and his text.
So I want to ask you about the, do some myth busting with regard to the Reagan administration, because now we're 40 years past the initiation of the Reagan administration, and people have built up.
Excuse me while I rub my back.
But people have built up this sort of weird myth in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan that invariably cuts to the detriment of today's Republicans.
Yes.
To take a quick example, there's this weird idea that Ronald Reagan and Democrats worked hand in glove, that they were best friends, that Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan were just like, they worked beautifully together as opposed to Democrats and George W. Bush or Democrats and Donald Trump.
And if only we were back in the days of Reagan with a politician like Reagan, everything would be all better.
How much of that is true and how much of that is myth?
Almost none of it is true, but there's a kernel of it that is true.
Now, when I say almost none of it is true, the back and forth on domestic policy, but also on all kinds of aspects of foreign policy.
Ronald Reagan, as you will recall, wanted to give aid to the Contras in Nicaragua and Could not get that through the House of Representatives, or the Iran-Contra hearings.
Congress was vicious on Ronald Reagan.
Tip O'Neill was a tough, seasoned Paul, and he viewed it as his job to take down Ronald Reagan any way he could.
It was actually very rough.
Here are the differences.
In the old days in Washington, this is little commented on, but I actually think it's very important.
In the old days in Washington, members of Congress and Senate lived in town.
I remember Tip O'Neill showed up for Mass at the same Catholic church that I attended.
He was there on weekends.
He'd show up, he'd go up for communion, he'd chat with people.
They knew each other.
They played, they coached Little League.
They got to know each other.
So there's, that takes some of the edge off.
And then here, this is a story which is, this is what people are getting at, I think.
And I believe this isn't actually all that well known.
Ronald Reagan, there's an assassination attempt, as you know.
And I heard this from somebody who saw it happen.
It's late at night.
There's no family around.
And Tip O'Neill shows up.
And Mrs. Reagan has left very strict orders about who's permitted to get in to see the president and who isn't.
And the Secret Service really have no idea what to do, but he is the Speaker of the House, and in he goes.
And he drops to his knees and prays.
That's inconceivable today.
And of course, by the time Reagan recovered, they're back at it again.
So there's some fundamental respect for each other.
I'll give you one other.
As long as you've got me going on the old, you know, I'm going to pay a cameraman to put sugar in your gas tank before this is over.
Bill Sapphire, columnist for the New York Times, great man, brilliant writer.
He was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, and he formed a club for all presidential speechwriters.
And when I started attending the meetings of that club, there were people who had written for Harry Truman who would show up.
And what was striking about it was from The Truman administration right through to George H.W.
Bush's administration, it ended with Clinton and it was really over by the time the Obama speechwriters started coming.
But from Truman all the way through to George H.W.
Bush, everybody understood that their president and their administration had in one way or another been engaged in the same project, and that was the defense of the republic during the Cold War.
The Cold War was serious.
And we may have had our differences, Carter to Ford and Carter to Reagan, and so...
But everybody was engaged in the defense of the republic.
One overarching cause that united every administration for four and a half decades.
That was still going on in the 1980s.
And again, that tempered That prevented them from becoming vicious with each other.
In one fundamental sense, everybody was on the same side.
So this is actually what I want to ask you about next.
I want to ask you about the post-Cold War era and how the end of the Cold War has shaped American politics.
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As somebody who was five when the Berlin Wall speech was spoken, the impression that was left in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the communist regime in the USSR, is that it was the end of history, that now everybody was friends again.
I mean, even if you watch Terminator 2, you have characters saying to each other, why did the Russians have missiles pointed at us?
We're friends now.
And there's this great feeling that arises in America that basically it's all over.
And it seems as though we've sort of turned our guns on each other as opposed to the existential threat that used to exist out there.
Maybe that was temporarily lifted for a brief moment in time after September 11th, but we're certainly back at it to an excessive degree right now.
Do you think that Americans have enough in common now to actually hold each other accountable?
To see each other as non-enemies in the absence of an existential threat like the Soviet Union.
I do.
I do believe so.
I also believe we have to work at what we have in common.
So, I'm trying to say something, I'm trying to put this in a way that gives it some sort of edge or some sort of interest, because this is the kind of thing that you say on the radio every single day, and God bless you for saying it, but I didn't come here just to agree with you.
On the other hand, I will.
Identity politics, the politics of dividing Americans, that's not only wrong, that approaches, in my mind, that comes close to a kind of wickedness.
Because, why is it, think about this, immigration is a problem, we have to, blah, blah, blah, all that is true.
But why is it that a Mexican who just crosses that border, Within a few months finds himself in a position to better the lot of his not just his family but his village back in Mexico.
What is it about this country that permits remittances back to Mexico of almost 30 billion dollars a year?
Why is it that one of the first things that Chinese do Chinese who, since 1979, when Deng Xiaoping had his opening to markets, and now there are lots of people in China who are rich.
What do they do?
They try to buy real estate, right here in Southern California.
They try to invest their money in this country.
What is going... And the answer, of course, is that the United States of America is a miracle.
And it needs to be cherished and sustained and nurtured in every way we can.
People who come here... I'm trying to think... Back... Now, Ronald Reagan didn't live to see the kind of uncontrolled immigration that we have witnessed since he left office.
And so he was fundamentally pretty relaxed about immigration.
But what he always understood, what people of that generation always understood, was that people come here to become American.
So the idea that it is in the interest of certain politicians, you and I, I'm sure, could go off and do a whole show on the problems with California, this spectacular state, so blessed in so many ways, so beautiful, so filled with enterprising and talented people.
And the homeless.
And, yes, okay.
The problem with California is the government of California, in whose interest it now is to colonize certain groups or communities of people when they come here for political purposes and try to trap them in a certain kind of mindset instead of permitting them to enter into the fullness of American life.
That's just wrong.
It is just wrong.
So, the answer is, yes, I do believe we have enough in common.
We have our ideals.
We have American history.
The resources of American history From the Revolutionary War, where you see, it seems providential, the way Washington is able to escape from Brooklyn across to Manhattan.
The wind blows it the right way at just the right time.
The courage to stand up to what was then the greatest empire on earth.
The Civil War.
Lincoln, this martyr, giving his life To hold the Union together and to abolish slavery, the greatest generation in the Second World War.
I would argue that the Cold War, which is a bipartisan project, it begins with Harry Truman, it ends with George H.W.
Bush and in between Intellectuals behave, by and large, pretty badly, really, during the Cold War.
But it's ordinary American people who continue to vote, to sustain the politicians who want to spend the money to do what we need to do, that this country is able to sustain that kind of a project across four and a half years, four and a half decades rather, until communism collapses and the Soviet... By the way, this is a pet peeve of mine.
It is now, we're not allowed to say, That our side won the Cold War, it just ended.
Nobody won, nobody lost, it just ended.
Well, let me point out one thing.
The United States is still here and the Soviet Union went defunct.
We won.
So, the resources of American history, the ideals that we have, the ability, this is, well, your book on the right side of history.
The astonishing thing about the Western civilization is not that it's Western.
It's that it consists of permanent truths which are open to anyone from anywhere.
And the greatest exemplar of that tradition in the world today is the United States.
Yes, of course we have enough resources.
If we choose to sustain them.
Well, that is the next question.
Do you think that we are going to choose to sustain them?
So what I've seen is that the left-right divide in the United States right now seems to be breaking down into two views of American history.
One is the American history that you just described, that America was based on fundamentally true, eternally good principles that we have strayed from, that we have tried to perfect our performance of, and that America is a story of us trying to and striving to live up to the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution.
And then there's the alternative story.
That's the correct one.
Let's hear it.
Then there's the alternative story, which is the story that the New York Times wishes to paint, which is that all institutions in America were rooted in slavery, that all of the American history was rooted in sexism and homophobia and bigotry, and that all of the grand ideals of the Declaration of Independence were basically just people making excuses for their own bigotry to enshrine their own economic power in the view of people like Charles Beard, or to try and enshrine their own Superiority ethnically in the view of perhaps Ta-Nehisi Coates.
So, if you don't have a common history, it seems difficult to see what exactly can sustain us.
Because it used to be that when you described a nation, a group of people who at least were going to live together, you had to at least have a few things in common.
You have to have a common language, which is also being discarded because we can't even decide on what he and she mean anymore.
We used to be able to have common religious principles and we broadened that out to be Judeo-Christian, not just Christian.
And now the United States has become increasingly fragmentary and secular in its religious pursuits.
We used to have a common history, but that's been Howard-zinified, and so a huge percentage of the population now believes that American history is an unalloyed record of bad punctuated by beautiful moments of good, which then immediately recede back into the muck.
So do you think that we, I mean, the resources are there.
Do you think that we are going to take advantage of those resources?
I don't know.
I mentioned a moment ago about the resources of American history, these tremendously moving stories.
Every one of those was a close-run thing.
Marx was wrong.
History is not predetermined.
It's a question of – we are human beings.
One of the tenets of what you and I both hold, the Judeo-Christian tradition, is free will.
We as individuals have free will.
We as a nation have free will.
We can certainly choose to let it all go if we wish to do so.
And we can, by contrast, choose to hold it all together and cherish it if we wish to do that.
I honestly don't know.
I cannot say.
I hope so.
I will fight for it.
I congratulate you for fighting for it.
Actually, I do congratulate you.
There are easier ways for somebody who graduated from Harvard Law School to make money, Ben, than by waging war against Ben.
Ah, doc review didn't sound all that great.
Really, paginations and all of that.
Okay.
But let's...
So the answer is, I don't know.
Which is in some ways a statement of the basic truth.
Human will.
We have free will.
History is not predetermined.
I don't know.
For conservatives, and I say conservatives, not Republicans, because I really don't care about party affiliation as much as I do about the ideas that undergird some of that party affiliation.
For conservatives, this puts them in sort of a weird spot, because if you're trying to re-enshrine respect for American history, if you're trying to re-establish an American unity that's based on fundamental principle, How do you think the Trump administration plays into this?
So I was obviously deeply uneasy about Trump's election in 2016.
I didn't vote for either of the major candidates, specifically because I had significant fears that President Trump was going to toxify an entire generation of young people to conservatism because he is personally so divisive and polarizing.
Yeah, I obviously underestimated how conservative he would be in office.
I thought he wasn't going to be particularly conservative based on his prior record.
And then he turned out to be quite conservative, at least on everything except for spending, which no Republican apparently is conservative in practice on.
But the question of how we unify Americans around conservative principles or really just around basic American history.
That question is very much open from the right side of the aisle, given how polarizing Trump is.
So how exactly should conservatives deal with Trump?
Is he an asset in this effort?
Is he a detriment to the effort or an obstacle?
Where do you think that stands?
Donald Trump will be gone in one year or five.
And I have lived long enough, this again, to tell you that even five years isn't that long.
So conservatives should be planning, should be thinking, should be sorting out policy.
And planning on what happens after Donald Trump leaves.
As for Donald Trump himself, I quite often get asked the question, what would Ronald Reagan have made of Donald Trump?
Well, of course, there are obvious points that the bad language, the indiscipline, the inability to seem to give a speech and stick with the agenda laid out in the speech, Ronald Reagan would have found all of that very distasteful.
On the other hand, Ronald Reagan was a practical man and a working politician.
The most perceptive, insightful political scientist I've ever read was the old vaudeville comedian Henny Youngman.
And here is the basis for all truly useful political analysis.
It's a Henny Youngman gag.
Question, how's your wife?
Answer, compared to what?
Alright, so the question about Donald Trump is compared to what?
And compared to Hillary Clinton?
Trump.
Compared to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Trump, Trump.
This may be half crazy, but I almost think when I consider Donald Trump, I remember the way the teachers used to tell us to look at a solar eclipse when we were little kids.
Don't look at it.
You can look at the shadow on the ground, you can look at the effects, but you mustn't look at the object itself.
So if you put your hand over Donald Trump, here's what you see.
A growing economy, growing more robustly than it has in more than a decade.
You see unemployment rates at historic lows.
Among African Americans and Hispanics, the lowest unemployment rates ever recorded.
What does that mean?
That means that millions of Americans, not the press corps that can't stand Donald Trump Millions of ordinary Americans, and especially those toward the bottom of the economic distribution, are leading better lives in this economy.
People have come off welfare rolls.
They've come off food stamps.
They're able to provide for themselves and their families.
That's an achievement.
Don't look at that man.
But it's an achievement all the same.
And so it goes with Donald Trump, the appointments to the federal bench.
The never-Trumper refrain, so Gorsuch?
Yeah, so Gorsuch!
And now so Kavanaugh.
The Constitution of the United States has been saved for another 20 years.
Again, don't look at him, but that's the effect of it.
Foreign policy, I was disconcerted to see John Bolton.
Leave the White House, just as I was disconcerted to see General Mattis step down as Secretary of Defense, or H.R.
McMaster as National Security Council before John Bolton.
All that, and yet at the same time, Putin annexed Crimea under Obama.
He moved into Ukraine proper again under Obama.
He complains all the time about NATO, and yet we have troops now, part of a NATO exercise, we have troops in Poland, right on the Russian border.
According to the Prime Minister of Israel, Israel is feeling as though it needs the United States and is relying on the Trump administration.
You have a three-year-old son.
You don't want to say to your son, son, one day I'd like you to grow up to be just like Donald Trump.
That would be a mistake.
I would talk you out of that, Ben.
But on the other hand, Him, over what the Democrats are trying to look as though they're going to nominate?
Yes, him.
So, I fully agree with the analysis in the versus measure.
I do wonder about the long-term view.
Like, let's telegraph this eight years down the line, or four years down the line, or maybe two years down the line, depending on where these elections go.
I'm going to ask you to do that in just one second.
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So let's talk about not the immediate election, because I agree with your analysis, which is, if I'm made to choose between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, or Donald Trump and Joe Biden, that's not a very difficult choice.
I mean, the fact is that Donald Trump, on a political level, has given me most of the things I want, even while I have serious reservations about his character and the things that he says, as I think most people do.
My concern is, as somebody who speaks to millennials and people who are younger than millennials, is that Trump as a character, the things that he says actually have a long-term impact on how people vote.
What we're seeing from some of the polling data is that people are not living by the Supposed Churchill Maxim that that you know you're liberal when you're 20 and you're conservative when you're 40 that that's not actually what's happening.
The people are voting to the left and then they're largely staying to the left as they get older and this is increasing with each generation that that transition happened more with the greatest generation than it happened with baby boomers a little bit less and then it's happened with the Millennials a lot less and then it's happening with Gen Z Who can't even vote yet, most of them, but Gen Z, it's going to happen a lot, is sort of the prevailing sentiment.
Right.
So, with that said, that puts conservatives in this bizarre position, because on the one hand, you want Trump to win in 2020, and that's led a lot of people that I know, and I feel the pressure all the time, that never say a bad word about Trump, because if you say a bad word about Trump... Oh, no, no, you have to tell the truth about him.
Yes, OK.
But the idea is that anything you say about Trump from one side is inherently damaging to him and may lead to the election of a Democrat.
Something that I don't actually agree with.
I think that you can critique a politician and Trump has proved himself to be strong enough to take that.
He's taken enormous amounts of abuse.
Then there is the other side, which is the sort of Bill Kristol side.
And I hesitate to mention names, but it's too late, it's been said.
Bill and I are friends.
I mean, I like Bill Kristol too, but Bill's take seems to be that anything that is good for Trump is bad for conservatism because Trump himself is bad for conservatism.
So any small victory for Trump is actually leading to the ascent of a destructive force within conservatism.
So even if you like the judges, if you say you like the judges, then you are actually giving effect to a man who is carving the heart out of Conservatism's future, I think.
If I had to put a logic on Bill, I think that's probably what he's trying to say.
What is the middle road in that debate?
How should conservatives treat Trump?
Well, on the voters, if you want to scare me to death, I'll let you do it.
But here's what I'm consoling myself with.
And again, if you want to scare me to death, you just say, Peter, yet again, that's dated.
But here is also some electoral data.
The cohort that most strongly supported Ronald Reagan was the youngest cohort.
And that remained in effect for five, six, seven years after he left office, that young people tended to be Republican.
Reagan begins to draw people into the Republican Party and there's a golden moment, it didn't last long, it's only a moment, but there's a golden moment when the Republican Party achieved parity, roughly achieved parity, within a percentage point or two with the Democratic Party, sometime around the presidency, as I recall, of George H.W.
Bush.
Then it all slid away.
The point I'm trying to make is that political preferences are actually pretty malleable.
Now, if you want to say to me that's changing and it's changing against The Republican side, you may be right.
All I can say is that the Reagan era wasn't all that long ago in historical terms, and as recently as then, political preferences were malleable.
Donald, it also seems to me, here's where Bill Kristol is right, for sure, there's nobody like Donald Trump.
Now, that means that when Donald Trump leaves the stage, whatever happens, it's going to seem a lot more normal than Donald Trump.
So, I just keep the argument, there's some merit to this, I have good friends, my friend Andy Ferguson, who's one of the most beautiful writers I know and one of the finest people I know, and he keeps saying, The Trump presidency is corrosive of American character.
All I can say is that seems to me vague and uncertain and you'd have to point out to me exactly how American character is being changed because here's what I can point out to you.
Growing economy, people leading better lives, being able to care for themselves and their children.
That's what I... Trump's accomplishments, they're the accomplishments of the country.
You could argue, I think, the correct conservative way of putting it, whenever we have economic growth in this country, it's because a president got the government out of the way.
You've really achieved something when you've even changed the mind of the other side.
And now, the tariffs, the way he's going about this trade war may be all wrong.
There are very well-versed economists whom I know who say it's just wrong.
That may be.
But everybody understands that we're up against something in China now, and even the Democrats would agree with that.
Trump has put something on the American agenda of first importance, and everybody has said across the political spectrum, yes, he's right about that.
That matters to the future of the country.
These are tangible achievements if you and I We could just dim the lights for a moment and then come back on and say to America, we've just figured out who's the next president.
For sure you and I could come up with somebody who'd give us the policies and have a better, more easier to take, let's put it that way, than Donald Trump.
We could do that.
That would take us 30 seconds.
That would take us one commercial break.
That isn't the way the system works.
So I just, I feel the weight of the argument.
I feel the weight of the argument.
I think there's a counter-argument, too, to argue against myself, and that is that that is assuming Trump versus a stagnant status quo in the Democratic Party, meaning that the Democratic Party doesn't go completely off the rails.
And what we're watching right now is a Democratic Party that is embracing All of its own worst aspects, from the embrace of anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar to the embrace of radicals like Bernie Sanders.
I mean, Bernie Sanders was a kook for virtually all of his political career.
And now Bernie Sanders is the thought leader of the Democratic Party.
And Elizabeth Warren, who used to be a fairly interesting thinker, at least early in the 2000s, has not only embraced, but is doubling down on all of Sandersism.
She said the other day during that debate, that's the climate debate, that she would, if I understood this correctly, she would issue an executive order To eliminate fracking?
Yes.
Okay.
First of all, what happened to the Constitution?
That's not something you can eliminate by executive fiat.
You just can't do that, Senator.
Item one.
Item two.
In the last, what is it, decade or decade and a half?
I'll get the statistic a little bit wrong, but your viewers will be able to look it up on Google and they'll see the point I'm trying to make.
The United States has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions.
By as much as all of Europe combined.
Europe which has a larger population and a somewhat bigger economy.
And how have we done that?
By using natural gas.
And how have we driven down the prices of natural gas to such a level that it's displacing coal by fracking?
That crazed person has said, I'm going to eliminate fracking, which is precisely what has enabled us to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
So, you're quite right, the Democratic Party is not status quo.
They're going, this is, I don't know, it's, what is it like?
It's like, it's almost like watching that wonderful movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
These candidates are getting crazier in real time.
It is.
It is astonishing.
She also said that she would ban nuclear power.
So basically, the two best versions of power on planet Earth for reducing carbon emissions are apparently out the window.
And I suppose she'll be creating wind farms with a wealth tax or something.
It is astonishing to watch as the Democratic Party moves in this direction.
It's one of the reasons why I think that To turn to the other side, their view of the future is untenable.
I think that people are going to get quickly very tired of the woke scolding and the insane changing lines of the left.
I mean you find yourself literally on a day-to-day level feeling like Indiana Jones in the last crusade trying to step letter to letter.
Here's the way Joe Biden could seize the nomination and frankly sweep all the way to the White House and defeat Donald Trump.
The lines are shifting and you're seeing Democrats themselves who are getting caught up in these shifting lines and having to apologize because the line shifted yesterday and they went to sleep.
Joe Biden, here's the way Joe Biden could win, in my opinion.
Here's the way Joe Biden could seize the nomination and frankly sweep all the way to the White House and defeat Donald Trump.
And here's how Joe Biden could win.
Joe Biden could say, I grew up, I, Joe Biden, grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania in LA.
And to me, the Democratic Party, when I think of the Democratic Party, I think of Scranton.
Where there were coal miners.
Those were the best jobs that a lot of people could get.
And those jobs mattered.
And the Democratic Party is the party of jobs.
Where there were Irish, like the Bidens, and Poles, and Slovaks, and Italians, and the Democratic Party is the party of the immigrant party, but of immigrants who came to this country to become Americans.
All of us went to school together.
All of us learned English.
All of us learned American history.
That is the Democratic Party that I stood for.
Jobs, ordinary working people, and also, this was the Democratic Party, of people of faith.
The Bidens went to mass on Sunday, and our neighbors went to synagogue, and the Democratic Party should be a home for the great American middle class and working Americans who believe in the traditions in which they were raised.
If he said, I'm done with you lunatics, I want to Represent the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, he would sweep to the White House, in my opinion.
Now, could Joe Biden try to move the Democratic Party back to its own traditions?
The FDR party, the JFK party, the Bill Clinton party.
I don't think that he has the stomach for that, frankly.
And more importantly, I don't think the media are with him on that.
I mean, it is amazing how much of this is all driven by the media, which does bring us to the question of the media.
So Ronald Reagan obviously did enormous battles with the media, but it seems as though it gets worse and worse with each successive Republican administration.
I mean, something like 94 percent of all press coverage of President Trump has been negative.
He's obviously in these knockdown, drag out battles with the media.
In my opinion, he He won the election in 2016 by running against the media as much as he won it by running against Hillary Clinton.
It's pretty obvious that right now his plan for 2020 is not even to run against the Democrat, it's to run against the media, which is why he's railing against the media so much.
If I had to put my finger on one area of American life that is increasing the polarization and leading to the radicalism and the ire of both sides, it would be the way that the media have behaved Over the past 20 years, which has completely stripped them of any patina of objectivity.
I mean, it used to be that there at least was the patina.
Now it's been completely stripped.
It was a lie before, but now the lie has been unmasked and not unmasked by Republicans, not unmasked by Trump, unmasked by the media themselves, who decided to basically, at the same time, come out of the closet as overt Democrats and then still claim that they are objective journalists and gaslight the rest of America.
I agree with every bit of that.
I agree with absolutely every word of that.
When I was being interviewed for my position as a speechwriter, David Gergen, then Deputy, what was he, Director of Communications in the Reagan White House, had me into his office in the West Wing, and he had in his office the same television console You may not recall this, Ben, but television could be big pieces of furniture in the old days that H.R.
Haldeman had had made for himself when he was chief of staff to Richard Nixon.
And the television had three screens, one big screen and then two smaller screens.
Now, why were there three screens?
That was so that H.R.
Haldeman during Nixon and David Gergen during Reagan could watch all three nightly newscasts at the same time.
NBC, CBS, ABC.
You read the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and you were done with your morning reading.
Done for the day.
And then in the evening, you watched half-hour newscasts by CBS, NBC, and ABC, and then once again, you were done.
Now, what that meant was that all of those entities had business incentives.
They were for-profit businesses, and they had business incentives to reach to the middle.
Okay, you know all about this.
That model is just gone.
The media now is all bits and pieces and fragments, and what our side can do is what you're doing.
We simply have to found our own outlets.
As Mr. Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, when he founded Fox News, he said, well, I have a business insight here.
There's a niche market that's underserved.
It's half of the country.
It strikes me as non-desperate in the sense that our side is doing a pretty good job between Fox News and the Wall Street Journal and Ben Shapiro, who is either on... It's amazing to me because you're down the hall and you're everywhere at once, apparently.
So, all that is good news.
We probably ought to have more of it.
Michael Barone, here's the last sort of consoling point, solving point that I make to myself and I offer it to you.
Michael Barone, terrific journalist, deep sense of American history, and Michael Barone argues we've been here before.
That is to say, we've had fragmented press outlets that were highly partisan, and that was the way it was through much of the 19th century.
So, overwhelmingly newspapers.
Every town had a Democratic newspaper and a Whig newspaper and a Republican newspaper, and they were vicious to each other.
And what do you get during that period of American history?
Well, of course you get the Civil War.
That's unfortunate, but fundamentally what you get is the settling of the West and the emergence of a great nation.
It doesn't need to hold us back, but we cannot permit ourselves to be condescended to and talked down to By the people who run CNN and the New York Times.
So I'm fortunate.
I get to talk about ideas for a living.
You get to talk about ideas for a living and study them and write about them.
But it does feel that as attention spans wither and as people are spending five seconds on each story and as everything becomes Twitter-fied, that the prospect of true conversations have gone by the wayside.
And I see this mostly in the area of solutions.
People spend an awful lot of time online talking about problems, and then shouting at each other that they don't properly recognize the problem.
So to take an example that just comes to mind, on the left, they never talk about actual practical solutions to climate change.
It's all sloganeering about getting rid of fossil fuels, which is not going to happen, or coming up with some vast global agreement with China and India, which is never going to happen, and then yelling at people that they are climate deniers if they say that those solutions are not actually going to work.
And this seems to be working for a certain number of Americans.
On the same page, you sort of see on the right side of the aisle that objections on a variety of issues are more knee-jerk than idea-based, at least for the folks on Twitter.
Twitter, as I've put it, is a place for dunking and being dunked upon, but it seems that increasingly politics is a place for dunking and being dunked upon, that solutions are secondary to problems.
We are going to see a reversion to debates over ideas, or do you think that this is sort of the new normal and driven by social media?
So I said at the top of this program, I'm an admirer of yours, but I have three sons who are just fanatics.
I have my oldest son in particular, Pedro.
I'm just telling you, I just observe in my own family.
So he goes off to a fancy school, and his heroes, people he read about, During college?
Jesus?
Moses?
Maimonides?
No.
It's Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.
And why is that?
Of course, because part of it is because of your point of view.
Much of it is because of your point of view.
But you two guys, Jordan Peterson and you, are doing plenty of long form.
You're both producing books.
This show is an hour-long show.
You're not doing tweets.
This requires quite a lot.
Well, actually, I almost feel as though at the end I should put on a red tie and then ask my son if he saw me wearing a tie just to see if he watched all hour long of this episode.
I don't know.
I know I have friends in the publishing industry.
Book sales are up.
There is the podcasts.
Podcasts I do, I helped to found Ricochet, which is, which now you, we've had you on.
Of course.
Of course you, oh, you know Ricochet.
I know Ricochet.
Okay, so Ricochet, everybody go to ricochet.com and listen to our podcast.
First in space, Ricochet, yeah.
Okay, great.
And it turns out that if you do a half hour podcast, the comment is, could you make that an hour?
People want to, there is a, or I think back to in the 50s and 60s, and I think it remains strong through much of the 70s, you had the Book of the Month Club.
Do you remember reading about it?
I think it was gone by the time you appeared on the scene, but the Book of the Month Club What it was addressing was this very American urge for self-improvement, to educate ourselves.
Democracy doesn't just mean you get to vote, it means you get to be as smart as anybody else.
And if you didn't get a chance to go to a fancy school, there's still the Book of the Month Club.
Well, of course, the Book of the Month Club is gone, but I just see it over and over.
Now, maybe it's because of the Hoover Institution, or I'm in something like the business that you're in, in the sense that I do my own writing, and we have Ricochet, and then I have Uncommon Knowledge, my own interview show.
And people respond to this.
They're grateful for it.
I just don't think that Twitter defines the American character.
I just don't buy it.
I don't see it.
I mean, frankly, I'm spending a lot less time on Twitter just because I find it soul-sucking.
And I think there are a lot of people who feel the same way.
You can get the information.
It takes a little bit longer if you're not on Twitter, but at least you're not spending all day jockeying for position with people who hate your guts.
And that saves you an enormous amount of time and stress, as it turns out.
That's sort of your job description, isn't it?
Jocking for a position with people who hate your guts?
Yeah, that's pretty much my slogan, actually.
Should be right there under facts don't care about your feelings.
We've put it on a t-shirt.
But I wanted to ask you about Uncommon Knowledge.
You've had the opportunity to interview an enormous number of major public figures.
Who did you find the most interesting?
Oh, well, in one way or another, they're all interesting, of course, but the people Christopher Hitchens?
Christopher and I disagreed on almost everything.
Well, actually, Christopher was kind of a layer cake on his literary criticism.
He'd read everything in English literature, and his literary judgments were always flawless, in my opinion.
Then you get to politics, and it's mixed, half and half.
And then you get to religion, and he was wrong every time he opened his mouth.
But Christopher had First of all, he had a beautiful voice and he was wonderfully articulate, but he had integrity.
He was the kind of sparring partner you wanted because he was an honest... Christopher Hitchens was an honest man.
He would tell you straightforwardly what his own conclusions were and how he reached them.
So there's Christopher.
Tom Sowell.
Tom Sowell grew up in the South until he was a small boy, and then he was sent to live with relatives in Harlem.
And he turned out to be a very intelligent, very bright boy who went to Howard University in Washington, Harvard University, I believe Columbia and the University of Chicago.
He holds degrees for sure from Harvard and then he has a master's and a doctorate in economics.
And he started out as a Marxist and fought his way through, fought his way through, To the conservative, or I shouldn't say conservative, I'm not sure Tom would call himself a conservative, but certainly to a free market libertarian position.
And for an African American to stand up to the pressures that he's under is just, he's funny and brilliant and tough and resilient.
And ideas matter so much that if he thinks the conclusion is correct, he will follow it, whatever the price.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's a man who's been willing to pay a price.
That's tremendously impressive.
Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman, whom I interviewed, what, three or four times.
Milton Friedman has been gone now.
He died deep in his 90s.
In 2006, if I recall correctly.
But he was, in many ways, the most important economist, or certainly one of the two or three most important economists of the entire 20th century.
And I was doing an interview with him.
This actually, this stays in my mind as one moment that just went through me.
And I asked a question, and he responded.
And I said, well, wait a minute, Milton.
You're not making an economic argument, you're making a moral argument.
And he looked at me and said, of course I'm making a moral argument.
Is there any other kind of argument that matters?
Oh, you get it.
Economics wasn't a game for him.
You worked your economic analysis because it was human lives that were at stake.
This was serious business.
Fantastic!
Fantastic!
This brilliant man who was technically so gifted, technically at the top of his field, when it came down to it, all the arguments were moral.
Fantastic.
So I want to ask about the state of higher education a little bit.
So you're obviously at the Hoover Institution and you've been around higher education for quite a while.
Do you think that higher education can be saved?
Because it seems as though it has fallen into disrepair except for a few key sort of institutions across the country that the gender studies theory of the moment and the attempt to First of all, let's draw a sharp distinction between the STEM stuff, which is doing just fine.
STEM between STEM and humanities.
And I have the feeling, this is very disconcerting, but I have the feeling that in some places Bright kids are flocking to the sciences and avoiding the humanities.
And where did we see that happen before?
In the old Soviet Union.
It's the sciences that were uncorruptible then and that remain incorruptible, uncorruptible today.
So the STEM, the sciences are doing just fine.
The major American research universities are without peer anywhere else in the world, or as far as I can tell, anywhere else in history.
So that leads us to the humanities.
And I don't know quite, I'm so, in a way I'm too close to it.
Because I work at Stanford University, and then I actually, I was a trustee at Dartmouth College, my alma mater, and my four oldest children have all attended Dartmouth College.
And so, there's political correctness everywhere.
And great institutions can only hire the talent that's coming up through the system.
And the talent that comes up through the system, if you're in classics or English or history, it seems as though there's a kind of political correctness.
And yet, at Stanford, you have the kids who are working on the Stanford Review.
And many of them are in the humanities.
And at Dartmouth, you've got the Dartmouth Review.
That's where the reviews were started.
You've got a program at Dartmouth called the Political Economy Project, which is a place where specifically devoted... Actually, this is an interesting thing to me.
This will take a moment or two more to explain.
When I went to college, in economics, it was taught as a conflict of great ideas.
Political science, or government as we called it at Dartmouth, you began by studying political philosophy.
You'd read John Locke, you'd read Aristotle.
The ideas have tended to be squeezed out of the disciplines in favor of quantitative techniques.
So what you get in economics, even introductory economics these days, you're taught how to run regression analyses.
And you can graduate four years at a very fancy institution and have no clue what all of this communism versus capitalism stuff was about.
Milton Friedman versus John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, what was that all about?
So several professors at Dartmouth have established a program for examining the great ideas, democracy versus other forms of government, capitalism versus central planning.
So there are so many There's a kind of bubbling up of a sort of self-awareness that we may have lost the thread here.
Let's establish a program here.
Let's establish a program there.
It's impossible for me to... My friend Peter Thiel, he just thinks I'm naive.
And you may think I'm naive as well.
I don't know, but it's impossible for me to...
to just wish the humanities out of existence at American universities.
I see too many new shoots coming up, growing up.
So in one second, I want to ask you to assess the health of the Reagan three-legged stool of politics because we've seen all these debates inside the conservative movement about is that still the model for the conservative movement going forward?
If you want to hear Peter Robinson's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
Well, Peter, thank you so much for stopping by.
This has really been a pleasure, and I really appreciate your time.
Good to see you.
My pleasure.
My pleasure.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Hay.
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