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May 26, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:03
THE CONSERVATIVE PREDICAMENT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep588
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Coming up, a special episode.
I'm going to examine the relevance and application of conservatism to the threats and challenges we face today.
I'll trace how conservatism first developed in America, its meaning and application in the Reagan era, how it lost its clarity and coherence in the Bush years, the Trumpian remaking or reorientation of conservatism and the unique type of conservatism that we need now to overthrow the left and the Democrats.
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Hey guys, this is a special episode I'm going to do today called the conservative redicament. And it's a topic that's been on my mind in part because I've been a conservative really all my adult life. I'll talk about how I discovered conservatism. It wasn't so much that I became a conservative or converted to conservatism. It's something that I recognized that I always was.
So for me, conservatism was an acknowledgement that, hey, this is a formulation, it's a consolidation, it's a coherent statement of what I have believed probably from the time I was a child.
Now, conservatism today seems to be in a kind of disarray.
Number one, we hardly hear the topic intelligently discussed.
We have all kinds of people who claim to be conservatives, and yet it's an interesting question mark about whether they are.
National Review, the magazine, was for many years and I think still claims to be the kind of intellectual hallmark of conservatism, but I think?
You've got Never Trumpers who claim to be conservative.
I see Joe Walsh, for example, I was on his podcast, I guess a month or so ago, said, I'm a conservative.
In fact, the Lincoln Project had an ad recently or a meme where they basically said, we're conservative, but we're not partisan.
Now, since the Republican Party has long been, in fact, this goes all the way back to the 1970s and 80s, the Republican Party has been the vehicle for conservatism and, of course, the Democratic Party for the opposite, for progressivism, for leftism, for radicalism.
What does it mean to say that you're a conservative, but you reject the only vehicle through which conservative policies are being implemented?
What does it mean to be a conservative and regard the Republican Party as a danger to the country, which is pretty much what the Lincoln Project believes.
We know today what progressivism is.
Progressivism is essentially the ensemble of policies promoted by the left in the progressive scene, number one.
They have a clear vision of where they want to go.
I think it's a terrible place, but at least we know where that is.
They also seem very unified.
Look at the Democrats, for example, and how so-called moderate Democrats vote pretty much all the time with the Democratic left.
Even the so-called far left, people like the Squad, AOC, Cori Bush...
Those are people who are nevertheless very much in the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
They don't buck the Democratic Party.
You might think that on key issues like Ukraine, they'd be like, we're not voting for funding, we're an anti-war party, we're in the tradition of Bernie Sanders.
But no, not only them, but Bernie Sanders too.
He's on board. So Pelosi, when she was speaker, was able to corral a very unified kind of coalition, whereas the Republican side is more divided.
The Republican side, first of all, is now divided sharply into the Trump and DeSantis camp and there's a lot of acrimony between those two camps which I am not pleased about.
I'll say a little bit more about that.
But you also have the Republicans divided seemingly into a sort of a MAGA wing and an establishment wing and then the so-called RINOs, the Republicans in name only.
This, by the way, is a relatively recent term.
I don't think that we had...
We had moderates in the Reagan years, but I think Reagan looked upon Republican moderates as friends that were just sort of a little soft and needed to be toughened up.
Their spine needed to be hardened.
But the idea that these people were, quote, Republicans in name only, that they should really be Democrats, we would kick them out of the party, this was, I would say, anathema and really unthinkable to Reagan.
Now, when I speak on campuses today, I come across young people, and I realize as I am outlining conservative ideas, and some of the key tenets of conservatism, which I'll talk about in the next segment, they are really baffled.
They look at me like, I don't really know what you're saying.
It's almost like I was describing a phenomenon that is Utterly unfamiliar to them.
And then it occurs to me that while in previous generations you might have had liberal faculty, but they at least educated young people about this is the free market side of the argument.
This is the socialist side of the argument.
And they might even advocate for the socialist side or for the leftist side of the argument, but at least they conveyed information.
This is what Milton Friedman believes.
This is what conservative economists say.
This is the conservative foreign policy vision of the world.
They think the Soviet Union is a dangerous threat.
So young people were at least in a position to adjudicate, even in a biased forum, what they think about conservatism.
But I think now the propaganda on the left is so great that for many young people, conservatism is not taught.
And when conservative ideas are presented, young people have that sort of dumbfounded look.
They're a little specific. And of course, they can't think of refutations because they've never even heard these arguments before.
So all of this, I think, creates an urgent need for a sort of a reaffirmation of what conservatism is, what it is today as opposed to in the past, which is to say that conservatism clearly does evolve.
It does change. The principles don't change.
I want to be clear about that.
But the application does.
Why? Because the situation is different.
And so we need, I'm going to argue by the end of this show, a kind of not only a reinvigorated, but a reoriented and a newly creative conservatism that is adequate to our current situation.
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Who is the inventor of conservatism?
Conservatism as a philosophy.
Who's the first person to put it forward?
Now, there are some people who think that conservatism in its original meaning goes back to the classics, goes back to the ancient world.
You can find conservatism implicitly argued for in the works of people like Plato and Aristotle, of course, later Thomas Aquinas.
But I think that in terms of a coherent philosophy in the early modern period, the founder of conservatism intellectually is Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke was acknowledged to be the founder of conservatism by Russell Kirk in his important book that came out, I think, around 1954.
The book was called The Conservative Mind, and Kirk rightly gave Burke, a certain pride of place.
And yet, as you read Burke, and a really good book, by the way, to read is Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Burke wrote other important works as well, but this is clearly his masterpiece.
It's a kind of a, well, I would call it a sophisticated rant against the French Revolution.
And of course, the French Revolution represented, you could almost call it, the zenith of progressivism.
The French Revolution was based on the idea that in the future, there will be so much progress that we will create a new world better than any world that existed before.
And a lot of elements of even today, modern progressivism, which is to say regimented control, the idea of a state-run society, the attack on property, the attack on family, the attack on religion...
At one point, the French revolutionaries took a hold of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and converted it into kind of a secular museum.
Eventually, they were guillotining people in the Plasti-Aplasti-Concord.
So you have this...
I don't think I would disagree in principle with any of those.
I believe in liberty. I believe in equality, not equality of condition, but certainly equality of rights and equality of opportunity, where it is pragmatic and reasonable to have that.
And I also believe in fraternity, the idea that we have a sort of brotherhood with our fellow citizens and also Underneath that and deeper, a universal concept of human brotherhood, which of course is advocated by Christianity.
But nevertheless, the French Revolution in its actions went to extremes and embodied, I think, a loathsome philosophy and Burke rightly reacted against this in his sort of brilliant fulmination.
And yet... When you see the things that Burke is arguing about today, they make no sense to us.
In other words, it's difficult for us to fully identify with them.
Number one, Burke defends monarchy.
For Burke, monarchy is something that represents the sort of accumulated wisdom of the past.
There have been monarchs going back to ancient times.
Burke, of course, realizes they can be bad kings and good kings.
But he thinks that if you have a good king exercising authority...
Legitimately, and to some degree, Burke was not opposed to constitutional monarchy, in which there is power reserve for parliament, power reserve for the courts.
But Burke had no problem with monarchy.
He had no problem with aristocracy.
And he makes a sort of, I would say, almost unqualified defense of tradition.
For Burke, tradition is good.
And Burke's argument is, I think, mostly right, which is that we need tradition because it's the accumulated...
Tried and true wisdom that has come through practice.
It's only when you practice things and put them into effect that you realize that they work or they don't work.
I'm trying to make a bicycle. Let me take my concepts, which are drawn in a blueprint, a piece of paper, and see if I can make the bicycle actually go on the road.
And similarly for political institutions.
Burke was very cautious about sort of ripping down things because he, you can sort of almost embody the Burkean philosophy like this, don't take offense down unless you know why the guy who put it up, put it up.
Because it was put up there for a reason.
It served a purpose.
Now, maybe the purpose has become antiquated, but maybe the purpose still exists and you just don't know what that purpose is.
So, if you go down ripping down the fence, that's a kind of premature, rash and typically progressive kind of action, which is a kind of ignorant charge at the fence, even though the fence is serving an important, even if somewhat, invisible purpose. So this was Burke.
But I think with Burke, Burke never distinguished between good and bad traditions.
Burke was, in a sense, out of sync, certainly, with some of the principles of the American founding.
And so there's a real need to go beyond Burke and come to the American founders and come to the ideas embodied in that tradition.
Well, you'd have to say liberal document, but the American founding was liberal not in the modern sense, but in the classical sense, classical liberalism.
And so if I were to summarize the American founding, I would say it's classical liberalism.
And what's classical liberalism?
The defense of liberty.
What kind of liberty?
Well, by and large, three types of liberty.
Political liberty, which basically means the Republican form of government.
It means accountability to the people.
It means separation of powers and checks and balances and...
Government and oversight, but also limited government.
It also means economic liberty.
Economic liberty is the ability to own property, to transact business, to rise up in life without the government keeping you down.
And the third is, well, you could call it civil rights, civic freedom, and civil liberty.
So three types of liberty all combined together in the American founding, but with one added ingredient that Burke emphasized.
And that was imported by the American founders.
And that is the concern with civic virtue.
So for the American founders, it was not enough just to have a free society.
If you told the American founders, hey, listen, what if, you know, 300 million Americans freely choose to become, you know, trans or to become pornographers or to exercise their liberty in some debased fashion, the founders would go, that's horrible.
That's not what we mean by the American dream.
The American dream is the freedom to...
To build a prosperous, successful, decent, lawful, orderly, and quite honestly, morally and religiously oriented society.
So for them, freedom was an important means, but it was a means.
It was a means to the end.
And the end was summarized by Jefferson, the pursuit of happiness, the good life.
So this is the conservatism embodied in the American founding.
And this is the conservatism that we, well, even now, in a sense, seek to conserve.
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I didn't really know what conservatism was or is until I set foot on the Dartmouth campus.
I fell in with a group of conservatives who were reading books and talking about ideas that were, well, a little unfamiliar to me.
I'm like, what are they talking about?
And who are all these names that keep coming up?
People like... Whitaker Chambers and Frank Meyer, William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Friedrich Hayek.
This was, little did I know that there was a fully articulated conservative tradition.
Now, interestingly, not all these people called themselves conservatives.
Whitaker Chambers was a communist who became an anti-communist.
And if I am not mistaken, he wrote an essay in the National Review, Why I Am I'm not a conservative.
Milton Friedman, I think, saw himself as a free market economist.
I think he was comfortable with the conservative label.
Bill Buckley certainly was.
Solzhenitsyn was too Russian to see himself as a Welcome to my show!
This conservatism, some Americans would look at and go, well, this is very alien to us.
But nevertheless, it had a profound impact on me.
And in fact, right now on Audible, I'm listening to The Gulag Archipelago, a book that I had read in pieces but never kind of gone through straight.
I'm much more familiar with Solzhenitsyn's other book, which is, by the way, a very good gateway to his work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Hayek was really a libertarian, but a masterful student of the free market, his great work called The Road to Serfdom.
And then there were a bunch of other conservative intellectuals who I encountered mainly through Reaganism.
Now, when I say Reaganism, it sounds like I encountered them through Reagan.
But you've got to realize, and this is odd to say, but for those of us who were there, Reaganism preceded Reagan.
It obviously wasn't called Reaganism then, but supply-side economics, which is the idea that supply often precedes demand, that the entrepreneur creates new things and puts them on the market.
Because in traditional economic theory, you think of there's a demand for something.
People want, let's just say, cars.
And so car makers go, okay, well, people want about a million cars.
Let's just say new cars a year.
So we're going to go make a million cars.
No. A lot of times, entrepreneurs think of Steve Jobs, think of artificial intelligence now.
They create the product first.
Nobody asked for it.
Nobody even knew it was coming.
There was no demand.
The supply creates the demand.
That in a nutshell is supply-side economics.
Its great champion and apostle was a guy named Arthur Laffer who later became a, well, friend of mine, but also became a guru of the Reagan revolution.
Another important intellectual in those days, Jean Kirkpatrick, who in an important essay that she wrote in a magazine called Commentary, Commentary was the leading journal of the neoconservative movement.
And although we say bad things about neoconservatives today, and a lot of them deserved, the neoconservatism of the 1970s and 80s was very important, was indispensable.
I myself was strongly shaped by it, not just at Dartmouth, but later when I went on to the American Enterprise Institute, it was essentially Irving Kristol, Jean Kirkpatrick, Robert Bork, so many others, people that I've learned from that have completely shaped a lot of the way in which I see public policy.
And Gene Kirkpatrick made an important distinction in the time of Soviet communism, a distinction between what she called Authoritarian and totalitarian societies.
The point being here that although the two are lumped together, they're not the same.
An authoritarian is by and large a dictator.
He wants to rule the country.
Mainly he wants to be in charge.
But he doesn't really care about how people live their ordinary lives.
As long as they're subservient to him, as long as they don't create problems and try to overthrow him, he doesn't mind what religion people practice or what they eat, or whether they exercise or not, what kind of jobs they have.
So, by and large, authoritarian societies are driven by one man or maybe a small gang's lust for power, but they leave the people for the most part alone.
Totalitarian societies, however, says Jean Kirkpatrick, are driven by ideology.
And this is a really important point because I think it even applies not just to Soviet communism, but it applies to our leftism today.
Our leftism today is driven by ideology, which is to say, it's not just that the left today is like, okay, guys, listen, we want to do some economic redistribution.
No. They want to control how you live your life.
If they could issue orders that you eat broccoli every day, they would.
This is why they love the lockdowns.
Because under the lockdowns, they could do things.
They could regulate churches.
They could tell salons what to do.
They could tell businesses to shut down.
They could manage not just the economy, but manage the intricate details of your life.
In the end, they want to even tell us what idols to worship.
What beliefs to hold.
If we are out of sync, let's just say in their beliefs about who's a man, who's a woman, they want to browbeat us until we submit.
So the totalitarianism that Gene Kirkpatrick identified in the late 1970s and associated with other countries, China, Cuba, you know, Soviet Russia, that in a strangely prophetic way is now applicable to the leftism that we face in this country.
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The conservatism of the Reagan era was divided into three The conservatism of the Reagan era was divided into three camps and each of the camps had intellectual advocates, they had activist movements, but they all came together like three different currents of a river flowing into a single large current that we call a Reaganism. And I mentioned earlier that Reaganism preceded Reaganism.
And what I mean is really that the ideas of Reagan came before Reagan.
Reagan didn't come up with them.
He didn't manufacture them, if you will.
He just came along and he goes, I like this, I like that, I like this.
And he pulled these ideas together into a coherent way.
But the philosophy in its parts was much less coherent, and I think each part examined by itself was very promising on the one hand, but also kind of problematic.
So let's look at this. The first group were the libertarians.
And the libertarians were just fantastic in being able to describe why free markets are better than centralized control.
I said Hayek was their chief kind of expositor.
But there were many others, brilliant writers, George Gilder and others, who would just talk about ways that markets work that centralized government can't.
I remember in one of Hayek's essays, he talks about the fact...
This is my example, not his, but he says, in effect, let's take a street intersection in New York, 56th and 3rd.
And Hayek says, what's happening right now as we speak at that intersection?
And he goes... Nobody knows.
Centralized government doesn't know.
However much inputs you put into a computer, you then ask them, what's happening at 56th and 3rd?
Or go to a different city.
What's happening on Michigan Avenue and 37th?
And Hayek goes, the only people who know are the people who are on the scene.
Not just the people who live there, but let's just say there's a street vendor.
This is a guy who has a hot dog stand at that intersection.
Well, he happens to know, well, yeah, there was an accident here a couple of hours ago.
I know that's very crowded today.
So Hayek's point is that decisions are best made at the decentralized level by the people who are in the best position to know what's really going on.
And this idea that a centralized government can coordinate for all these different states, for large states and small, for cities and rural areas, for places as far distant as Alaska, and then on the other end, Florida.
He goes, this is nonsensical.
This is human hubris.
And so Hayek identified the arrogance at the heart of modern progressivism.
But there was a downside to these libertarians, and the downside was, in the end, they trusted the market so much.
That even if our jobs were being sent abroad, even if this was hollowing out our middle class, even if this was decimating small towns and even small cities, because you had entire cities based on single industries.
Pittsburgh, for example, was based on steel.
Detroit was based on cars.
And so what happens is once the car industry moves to Japan and moves elsewhere and people can make cars cheaper or they can make steel cheaper, on the one hand, yeah, that's good for consumers because they can pay less and get a really good car, a Japanese car perhaps, or a German car.
But on the other hand, what happens to all those people?
What happens to the whole infrastructure, to the community, the civic culture around those cities and towns?
And the answer is, it's not a pretty sight.
And the libertarians really were blind to this, in my opinion.
And this is something where Trump comes in and he says, wait a minute, these trade deals that we make and this kind of system of international free trade, it's not without benefits.
And if you look at the world as a market, then sure, there are benefits to the world to have a free market.
But we are also Americans.
We live in one part of the world called America.
America is, if you will, our home and our team.
And we want America to be successful and America to be prosperous.
So, shouldn't we look at American interests, no less than sort of global welfare?
So, all of this would come later, but this is not something that the libertarians, and I must say myself, influenced by libertarianism, not sufficiently alert and sensitive to this point, going back to the Reagan years.
Then you had the neocons, and the neocons were anti-communist, and they rightly identified the threat posed by Soviet Russia.
They were extremely effective in polemically arguing against it, but also building strong policies.
Many of these neocons, Richard Pipes was the Sovietologist.
Richard Perle ended up in the Nuclear Weapons Department of the State Department.
And so these are guys who not only thought ideas, but they actually served in high positions in government, and they deserve a measure of credit for the fall of the Soviet Empire.
Obviously, the primary credit goes, I think, to Reagan.
Gorbachev deserves some credit.
Margaret Thatcher does.
Lech Walesa, the Pope, John Paul II. But the neocons played an important part.
The problem with the neocons is that they continued in the same militaristic frame of mind.
They continue to be very anti-Russia today, even though Russia is no longer communist.
They act as though it is.
They're always looking for the next, for the new sort of Soviet Union.
This is part of why they want to, they want to, they have this kind of aggression toward Putin.
They are, they've become champions of, you could call them forever wars.
They've lost the distinction, which, by the way, Reagan had.
And I'll talk about this in the next segment.
Reagan was pragmatic about the use of force in the way that the neocons aren't.
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The neocons after the Reagan era pretty much all went in with Bush.
And I gotta say that the Bush presidencies, and I'm thinking really about both Bushes.
Now, again, it's not that the Bushes didn't accomplish things, because they did.
Both of them did. And I think particularly George H.W. Bush.
He, in his one term, presided over the fall of the Soviet Union, which didn't occur under Reagan.
It actually occurred after Reagan.
Yes, the Berlin Wall came down in 89, but remember, Reagan left office in January of 89, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991-92.
Problem was that Bush, both Bushes, had a more simplistic understanding of foreign policy than Reagan, and particularly George W. So George W. in the Iraq War was arguing for essentially preemptive action.
We think that those guys may have weapons of mass destruction.
Well, the Bush said they do have them.
And it turned out they didn't have them.
So how you can get something so fundamentally wrong?
I mean, yes, the CIA got it wrong.
The intelligence agencies got it wrong.
But it was ultimately Bush's call.
And so this is so important.
Sort of like the policeman who bursts into your apartment claiming that there are drugs in your house and starts rifling through your drawers.
And guess what? You don't have any drugs.
You never did. And so this was a sort of massive blow to the Bush administration, but it was a massive blow to conservative foreign policy because conservative foreign policy at that time became identified with the Iraq War and became identified with George W. Bush.
Now, I defended the Iraq War, but I recognized that this WMD thing was a little bit dubious, and I made a different kind of argument for intervention in Iraq, which, frankly, if I think Bush had made, he would have done a lot better.
My argument was really an argument out of an old Western movie, which is that you have the new sheriff in town, John Wayne, he goes into a bar, the bad guys are there, but he doesn't know exactly who they are.
So you've had this terrible terrorist incident.
You're not exactly sure where these al-Qaeda people are coming from.
Are they from Saudi Arabia?
Are they from Egypt? Are they from Pakistan?
Are they Afghans? Is it some combination of them?
Well, the short answer is you don't really care.
Because what John Wayne does is he looks for some of the bad guys in the bar who are causing trouble.
He pistol whips them.
And then he walks out of the bar, basically, hey guys, listen, there's a new sheriff in town.
Just realize...
That I will not be responding kindly or sympathetically to the kind of stuff that you've been...
So it sends a powerful message across the entire region that the US will be ruthless in stamping this kind of terrorism out.
And I think if Bush had said that, people would go, yeah, that totally makes sense.
They're the ones who attacked us.
But instead, we had this sort of...
policy that could not be defended, was refuted by the facts on the ground, ended up creating a long war with no end in sight. The American public became first weary and then disgusted. And so that was the origin of sort of the Trumpian reversal. And by the Trumpian reversal, I mean Trump's idea that we should be very cautious. Not that Trump, Trump is not an isolationist.
It's not the idea that the United States retreats behind its walls.
In fact, Trump has said, even in connection with Ukraine, he's talked to Debbie and me about the fact that, hey, there are occasions when he's told foreign leaders, you know, I'll bomb the heck out of you.
Don't try to do that, or I don't know what I'm going to do, and you don't want to find out.
So it's not as if Trump is unwilling to use force.
Let's remember he used force against, was it, al-Baghdadi?
So Trump is...
But Trump is prudent about the use of force.
And in this sense, I think there's a continuity between Trump and Reagan.
Reagan was willing to use force, but he used force in a careful way.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan with 100,000 troops, Reagan didn't go, well, let's send 100,000 troops to fight them.
No, Reagan basically said, listen, it's the job of the Afghans to fight.
Now, some of the other Muslim countries want to join them.
That's great. They can fight.
And we'll supply them with weapons.
Yeah, the Soviets have these helicopters that you can't normally knock down.
We'll send you some Stinger rockets.
You'll be able to shoot down those helicopters.
But it's your fight.
So you defend your own freedom.
We will help. And I think that's a sensible policy in general, even today.
And if we adopted that policy in a prudent way in Ukraine, I would be more supportive of it.
But we're clearly adopting it in an extremely imprudent way.
We're devoting, in a sense, unlimited resources to Ukraine, resources that we need in this country.
We're also not very careful about looking at what is really our objective here.
Are we trying to bring the Russians to the negotiating table to listen to the Biden people?
It sounds like they have no objective.
They want the Russians to beat a complete retreat, which why would the Russians even do?
This is basically like a giant country, Russia, fighting Lithuania, a small country, Ukraine.
Now, Ukraine has the backing of NATO, so it's this weird sort of surrogate type of war.
But I think Trump is right to be cautious about it.
We all should be cautious about it.
I think if Reagan were alive today, Reagan would be cautious about it.
So, once again, the Reagan coalition was libertarians, anti-communists, of which the neocons were the dominant group.
And then the third group were the social or cultural conservatives.
And I'll talk more about all this in the next segment.
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Hey guys, a quick correction from the last segment.
I mentioned that Trump got rid of al-Baghdadi.
I actually meant Soleimani.
So Debbie is like, Dinesh, it's Soleimani, not...
Al-Baghdadi and she is correct.
Now, going back to my college days, William F. Buckley spoke at Dartmouth and he spoke about the conundrum, the predicament of a conservative in a radical society or a conservative in a radical culture.
And And what he meant was that a lot of these campuses have been taken over by leftists, far leftists.
And so conservatism in its kind of original meaning, which is you conserve, you hold on to, you protect, you keep things going.
But how do you keep things going when the things that are going are leftist?
They are radical. What do you do then?
And Buckley's point was, well, you can't be a conservative in the old sense.
You have to change tactics.
You retain your philosophical conservatism, to be sure.
But temperamentally, you've got to become more creative.
You've got to become more subversive.
You've got to become a little more of an intellectual gorilla.
Not gorilla, but gorilla.
You've got to overturn the apple cart.
You've got to cause trouble. And that's kind of what we were doing at Dartmouth through our Renegade Campus newspaper called the Dartmouth Review.
But interestingly, that advice, which I took to be like campus advice for the 1980s, is very relevant to us today.
Why? Because what's happened is that the whole society has become radicalized.
It's become radicalized because of the leftist takeover of major cultural institutions.
Now, it's bad enough that the left controls, it's increased its domination over the institutions that it has long held, so the media.
Always left, but now far left.
Hollywood always left, now far left.
So these institutions were recognized to be, even academia, recognized to be tilting to the left.
But there were institutions that we traditionally identified as conservative.
The Boy Scouts were conservative.
The Little Leagues were conservative.
The churches were conservative.
The FBI was conservative.
The military was conservative.
The police were conservative.
So isn't it interesting? Corporations were seen as conservative.
Typically, if you met a CEO in the 1980s, there was about a 70% chance that the guy was a Republican.
So there were some Democrats, but not that many.
And now it's changed.
Now it seems the left has made inroads with the kind of cultural...
Think of it. You've got a woke military.
You've got an FBI chasing down conservatives as being enemies of the state.
You've got corporations like Bud Light putting out transgender ads.
It's a whole new environment.
And so Buckley's dictum, which is how can you be a conservative in a radicalized culture...
A radicalized popular culture and a radicalized political culture.
Well, I think this is really where we see the significance of Trump.
Because Trump came out of popular culture.
And yet, in some sense, Trump, with a kind of unerring instinct, recognized that this culture needs to be engaged and it needs to be resisted.
And we need a political campaign that is also a cultural campaign.
And so this is the phenomenon that we call, you know, MAGA or we call Trumpism.
It's a resistance to the establishment to some degree Republican as well as Democratic.
It emphasizes national borders.
Now why? Because what we've seen is that large parts of America have not benefited from From the great economic boom of the last 50 years.
I mean, think of how sad this is.
If I think of my own life, for example, and if I just were to make a kind of a poverty chart from the bottom quintile to the top quintile, I started out in the bottom quintile.
Then I went to the fourth, then to the third, then to the second, then to the first.
So I've seen my own life improve dramatically over the past 50 years.
And then I look at my fellow Americans, people who have been here longer than I have, and I see their life is the same, or in some senses, worse.
Worse, why? Because even if they're economically somewhat better off, suddenly the civic culture that once held their community or their town together has been decimated.
And we have new problems that have to do with drugs and fentanyl and crime waves that have overtaken cities and now even many small towns.
An epidemic of suicide.
I mean, think about it, in an advanced society like ours, you have people who have kind of lost their sense of purpose.
Either they've lost their sense of meaning in life, or they don't see a better future for themselves.
I don't see any reason why someone would commit suicide if they saw a better future for themselves, or even if they were enduring some hardship or suffering, if they felt a sense of either civic or national or individual spiritual purpose.
So the Trump phenomenon, but I think as I think about Trump now, and I think Trump would say the same, even he underestimated the degree of the depth of corruption of the left, the depth of corruption of the police agencies and all of this means that we have a supreme task ahead, one of not only dealing with this kind of...
Aggressive leftism that attacks us on every front, but also the positive task of building institutions, our America, within America, if you will, so that we can live good lives, decent lives, lives in which we're not subsidizing the values that are against us.
And this involves building not just a parallel economy, you've probably heard that phrase, but a parallel society.
This is not an advocacy of secession or let's break the country up.
In fact, it's an alternative to secession.
Namely, we build our America inside of America and live in it the good life that we want to live.
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So what does conservatism mean today?
It means taking the original principles, the principle of restoring conservatism, By the way, this constitutional liberty has been undermined through the courts going back now for almost a century with the expanding scope of government that I think would have horrified the founders.
But then under COVID, look at the way they've run roughshod over basic liberties clearly specified in the Bill of Rights.
So this is where we need a role for the Supreme Court.
And we need to be very aggressive in making sure that these basic liberties are fully restored.
And so that's one of the things that we need to do.
The second is we need to rebuild our civic culture.
And that is not going to be easy.
And we're not going to rebuild the civic culture of the left.
Quite honestly, there are parts of this country where if there are people voting for Democrats and those places are going downhill, we have to let them go downhill.
In fact, we should encourage them to go downhill and we should encourage our people who are in those areas to get out.
It's not easy to get out, I recognize, but when you're in a sinking ship, is there any alternative but to look for a lifeboat and to look for an exit?
The ship is going down in any case.
We can build inside of America a conservative America.
It won't compose all of America.
It might compose half of America.
I still like to believe that we have a majority of Americans who retain their common sense, who want to have a society based upon freedom, upon prosperity, upon civic decency, upon law and order, who recognize a lot of the craziness that is coming our way.
I don't like Trump.
I don't like Trump's character.
And so it's not that they don't have issues with the Republicans.
And in some cases, those issues are completely justified because the Republican Party is full of sluggards and it has its share of people who are kind of, you know, alligators in the swamp.
It's got people who benefit from the current system, who resist the reforms that need to be made.
So there's a lot of work to do.
But the question I have for you is that, listen, as conservatives, do we have an alternative mechanism to bring about political change than the Republican Party?
And the answer is absolutely not.
If we were to create more division, a MAGA party, this would be terrible.
We would divide our vote and the Democrats would win every single time.
I think in the culture we need to build a lot of things.
We need to build our own online university.
We need to create, and this is something Debbie has emphasized, a media channel that is not just a news channel.
I mean, the stuff we have now is terrible.
I say terrible because its quality just doesn't compete either in reach or in quality with the stuff that's going on on the left.
But imagine if we had a network that was more like a CBS or an ABC and it had 100 investigative reporters that were digging into the stuff that the Democrats and the left is doing.
Think of the value that that would have and the way that would change the whole national discussion.
We certainly need emboldened leaders.
And we're seeing some signs the Republican Party is becoming less invertebrate.
It's toughening its backbone.
But it's happening, in my view, too slow.
And I don't really see any significant progress.
I mean, I'm not saying it isn't occurring.
I'm just saying I don't see it at the Republican National Committee.
The Republican National Committee is sort of like the coach of our team.
So here we are putting a team on the field and we have a coach that has resources, that has access to all kinds of information and intelligence.
It's operating in all 50 states.
And so if you've got a coaching team that's terrible, this is not going to bode well for your prospects on the field.
And yet what we seem to have is a set of swamp creatures, Republican consultants, and their main concern here is how do I get paid for the next election?
And to them, it doesn't really matter whether the Republicans win.
Well, I won't say it doesn't matter, but let's say it's a matter of relative indifference who wins the election because next time there's going to be another election, I'm going to get paid all over again.
So there are serious problems right of center.
There's also the problem right now that our intellectual movement is basically gone.
I look at a lot of the intellectuals from the 1980s and say, what happened to those guys?
And then a bunch of them became Never Trumpers.
Some of them just dropped out.
Some of them are saying the same nonsense that they did 30 years ago.
No revisions as if they live in a...
In a time warp. So we need to cultivate a new conservative intellectual movement whose job it is not again to reinvent the wheel, not to come up with a sort of a new conservative philosophy, but to apply the conservative principles that are time-tested, that go back all the way to Burke, through the American founders, through Buckley and the Reagan movement, all the way to the present, apply them to our current situation.
In the end, I'm temperamentally optimistic.
I think Debbie's a little more of a pessimist.
I'm a little bit more of an optimist.
But we need some of both because pessimists often have a more realistic view of what's happening on the ground.
But the optimist is valuable, too, because the optimist always knows what is possible.
And if you don't know what is possible, you're going to tend to be sort of resigned to the situation as it is.
So we need an element of realism, but we also need an element of hope.
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