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Jan. 15, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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TEXAS VS BIDEN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep747
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Coming up, I'll analyze the showdown between Texas and the Biden regime over the porous southern border.
I'll reveal how the 2024 election might be an eerie replay of the 1980 election in which a failed president, Jimmy Carter, took on Ronald Reagan.
And conservative activist and commentator Gavin Wax joins me.
We're going to talk about the Iowa caucus and also about a forthcoming book, The Emerging Populist Majority.
If you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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Today is the day of the Iowa caucus.
So the real first out-the-gate measure of how things are going to be shaping up this year for the 2024 election.
And it's a frigid day in Iowa with heavy snowfall.
I mean, the temperature is something like minus 12, minus 14 degrees.
So this is brutal.
I don't know if it's going to have an impact on the turnout or, Debbie was saying earlier this morning, well, I think a lot of older people are likely to kind of Be cautious today because it's not that healthy to get out in this kind of weather.
But on the other hand, I've seen lines of people outdoors waiting for Trump.
So this had to be kind of manic determination that we're going to show up no matter what.
Pretty amazing to see.
And so I have no prognostications.
I don't like to sort of guess about who's gonna come out first or second.
I mean, I think I know who's gonna come out first.
It's Trump.
He's been leading decisively in the polls.
But it's gonna be interesting to see who comes in second, who comes in third, who comes in fourth.
Vivek has been kind of promising a surprise that he's gonna do much better than expected.
I think that's probably true.
And in fact, that Trump had a little salvo against Vivek, which tells me that the Trump people have noticed that Vivek is doing well.
Now, I'll have Gavin Wax on shortly.
We're gonna talk about the Iowa caucus in a little more detail.
you I want to comment on Fannie Willis.
She gave a talk recently.
It looks like she's in a church.
I'm really not sure where this talk was, but it's got a bunch of people, almost like a choir behind her.
And well, very interestingly, she seems to be confirming the allegations that were made against her, that she has been funneling money to this man, Nicholas Wade, who is her boyfriend.
Now, she didn't address the money part of it, but her statements were to the effect of, well, as a black woman, you've got to realize that we black women do make mistakes, we do fall short, we do stumble.
So I read this to mean that the allegations are largely true, probably entirely true.
And this does not get Fannie Willis off the hook in any way, because it's one thing to say, we need humility, we need forgiveness, we need grace.
By the way, first of all, this is coming from someone who doesn't extend any grace to anyone else.
She's a vicious prosecutor, she uses her power to go after her political opponents, and now she wants us to give her grace.
But leaving that aside, legal issues don't come down to an issue of grace.
They come down to corruption.
They come down to conflicts of interest.
They come down to that you have responsibilities as a prosecutor.
And you take an oath of office.
And you are bound by legal codes and conventions.
And so the judge is going to pay no attention.
The judge has already said, I'm going to be looking into this.
And in mid-February, Fannie Willis is going to have to file a response to these corruption charges.
So it's going to be very interesting to see what she says, given that now she appears to be admitting at least that this relationship has been going on.
Well, and if the relationship has been going on, the rest of it is simply a matter of public record.
Did she appoint this prosecutor?
Yes. Did she go through a board of approval or tell anybody she was doing it?
No. Is she the one who approves all the money going to this guy?
Yes. Well, if they're romantically involved, did they in fact do romantic things together like go on cruises and go to hotel rooms?
And the answer most likely is yes.
Yes, yes and yes again.
So something that had started out where people in the legal community in Atlanta were like, well, there's no proof that's been given.
We don't see any receipts in this legal filing.
Well, all right, but we have now moved one step closer to the truth.
So very interesting development out of Atlanta.
And then I noticed that there's a battle brewing between Texas and the federal government, Texas and the Biden administration.
That because this may be finally our chance to secede, or at least to raise the issue of secession, and we'll talk about that a little bit later this week.
But the Texas National Guard has been taking active steps to block illegals.
They are using riot shields to stop the big inflow in Eagle Pass, Texas.
They've seized Shelby Park, also in Eagle Pass, and they basically told the Border Patrol, you are not allowed to enter here.
So the Biden administration, freaking out about this, has filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court, basically saying, we have to stop Texas from protecting the citizens of Texas.
Now, I know the argument they're going to make.
They're going to say immigration is a federal responsibility.
And whether or not Texas thinks we're following the law, it is our job to do it.
Kind of like it's our job to do the defense of the country.
If America is, let's say, facing a danger of nuclear attack, Texas cannot say we're going to deploy our own missiles.
So this is going to be fought out at the level of the Supreme Court.
But isn't it interesting that here is Texas trying ultimately to do nothing more than enforce the The immigration law of the country in Texas and our government, our federal government under Biden and the Biden regime is doing its best to thwart Texas from fulfilling not only the law but also the will of the citizens of Texas.
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The Democratic pollster Doug Schoen.
I don't know if you know this guy, Doug Schoen.
You might have seen him. He appears periodically on Fox News.
He is a conservative Democrat, kind of a rare breed these days.
But he's a shrewd analyst of what's happening in the country.
And he had an interesting...
An argument the other day that I want to spell out where he says that in the 2024 election we might, I underline the word might because nothing is sure in politics and we are still some distance away from the final voting, but he says it looks like it's shaping up to be like 1980 all over again.
Now, I mean, I find this fascinating in part because I came to the country in 1978 and By the fall of 1979, I was a freshman at Dartmouth.
So 1980 was really the early part of my sophomore year, at least November of 1980.
And I think?
But on the other hand, Biden adds that kind of element of corruption, of villainy that you don't see with Carter.
I mean, no one can deny that Carter didn't enrich himself while he was in public office.
He didn't come into public office, whether it was the governorship of Georgia or the presidency and leave rich.
Biden, on the other hand, came poor and has become very rich through political office.
So that's an important difference.
But Doug Schoen's point is, let's look at the electoral similarities.
He goes, look, Carter, by the time the election came around, was extremely unpopular.
He was extremely unpopular in the last year.
His poll ratings were down.
And he was running against a guy, Reagan...
Well, that's what we hear about Trump.
Biden may be unpopular, but Trump is unelectable.
Also, says Doug Schoen, inflation.
Inflation was a major problem in the Carter years.
Now, inflation then was much higher than it is today.
But inflation had sort of been conquered.
Inflation had gone down to 0%, to 1%, 1.5%.
And the surge in inflation has come as a kind of nasty surprise.
Part of it was due to COVID, but a lot of it is just due to just promiscuous levels of government spending.
And so we have now seen many news reports over the past year or two.
inflation has hit the highest levels that it's been since, well, Jimmy Carter.
In foreign policy, the country was a mess.
The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
There was, of course, the Middle East crisis, which is to say the hostage crisis that was produced in Iran by the rise to power of the Khomeini regime.
And Carter just had no idea how to deal with any of that.
Well, look at the foreign policy disasters in the Biden era.
One upon the other, the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, the continuing kind of mess in Ukraine where we're constantly assured, well, we were told that the Ukraine war would have been won in a few weeks.
But then we're told, well, no, it's going to drag out a little bit longer.
We're constantly told, well, Putin is facing all these reversals.
Well, if Putin's facing all these reversals, why is Russia in possession of all this Ukraine territory and not the other way around?
Elections, as Doug's shown, are decided on kitchen table issues.
Those are really what motivate the decisive element of the electorate.
In other words, the element of the electorate that's not all that political, what do they care about?
Well, they care about food prices and gas prices and home prices and mortgage rates.
So the kind of They also care, by the way, about some issues that are not economic directly but have a bearing on economic issues.
So the border, crime, these are issues that affect people because they see the country is being overrun.
They see that criminals are running amok.
They see that things are out of control.
And then, says Doug Schoen, by and large what people do is they don't understand the ideological differences between parties, at least the people in the middle don't.
And so they just go, who do I think is responsible for these problems?
Why am I paying higher prices?
Why is crime going up?
Well, the answer is, it's generally the bums who are in charge.
It's the people who are in office, and so you vote against them.
That's exactly what happened in 1980.
It was essentially a throw-the-bums-out campaign.
And if you remember the famous slogan of Reagan, are you better off than you were four years ago?
And that's a question that Trump can ask with particular effect because, of course, he was the guy in charge before.
So in a sense, what he's saying is, are you better off than you were when I was in charge?
And I think the answer to that question is pretty obvious.
So despite all the efforts on the part of media types and reporters, well, you know, The economy is doing a little better.
It's just that the American people don't really realize that.
We've got to do better at messaging.
And of course the Biden people are having meetings with the press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, trying to almost help them craft their messaging.
It's almost a collusion between the Biden regime and the press to try to do the work of getting the message out.
But guess what? Gas prices are what they are.
Food prices are what they are.
Mortgage prices are what they are.
So despite all these efforts to convince you that something is different, I think most people are going to say, well, I think I'm going to go with my lying eyes.
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Guys, I'm happy to welcome to the podcast Gavin Wax.
He's a New York-based conservative activist and commentator, executive director of the National Constitutional Law Union.
I know him as the president of the New York Young Republican Club, which is the oldest and largest young Republican club in the country.
You can follow him on X, at Gavin Wax, W-A-X. And he's also co-author of, and we're going to talk a little bit about this, The Emerging Populist Majority.
Gavin, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
I appreciate it. It is pretty cold all around the country and extremely cold in Iowa.
Is this going to have any kind of effect on the Iowa caucus?
Is it going to make a difference in terms of the outcome or is it just a cold day for an election?
Well, thank you for having me, Dinesh.
I don't think it's going to have much of an impact.
A lot of the surveys and polls we've seen have shown that the Trump base in Iowa, the Trump supporters in Iowa, that they are committed to caucus regardless of the weather.
They're going to get out there. They're a dedicated bunch.
They're enthusiastic. They're excited.
They're high-intensity voters, if you will.
uh and I think a lot of the uh uh you know harping on the weather and the bemoaning of the weather is coming from uh the various campaigns and political camps that are uh coping and they're seething and they're hoping uh to find an excuse for why their uh candidates are going to do so poorly uh later this evening when the results come in ultimately uh this has been in the bag for a long time for president trump uh he's been polling at some of the most uh with some of the largest historic leads
uh in polling history in the state by some of the most accurate pollsters We're seeing polls come out that show him north of 50%.
He's a dominating force in Iowa.
The caucuses will be completely won by him.
I'm very confident in that.
And this will go down as a massive victory in his political campaign, and it'll pave the way to open the doors for the general election.
I know early on some of the DeSantis people were confidently predicting that they would win Iowa.
They seem to be backing off from all that.
And now for the other candidates, it looks like it's going to be a matter of which of them can beat expectations.
None of them are going to come close to Trump perhaps, but they're kind of running against each other, almost like a battle for second and third and fourth place.
I don't know if you are a predictions man.
Do you want to try to say who you think is going to come in second, third, and fourth?
Well, listen, I think you're right, Dinesh.
The goalposts have certainly moved rapidly during this primary campaign, certainly among the DeSantis camp.
Their standards have gotten lower, lower, and lower, and what they want to count as a so-called win has moved further and further from an actual electoral victory.
Now they're arguing, or rather fighting over scraps, So to speak.
I mean, we've certainly seen a surge from Nikki Haley as much of the establishment and donor class has now rallied to her thinking that she could actually be the real challenger and opponent to the Trump movement, the ascendant Trump movement within the Republican Party, as Ron DeSantis' stock has fallen with his largely incompetent campaign.
We obviously have seen Vivek I'll perform pretty well, you know, comparatively, especially since it's been an underfunded campaign, and he's really coming in as an underdog.
I think, you know, if I was to, you know, be a bit of a betting man, I wouldn't think it'd be crazy to suggest that Nikki Haley comes in second, Ron DeSantis in third, and Vivek with a surprisingly...
I think one thing is definitive, though.
It's that President Trump is going to win overwhelmingly.
He's going to win with an electoral mandate, and he's going to go in to New Hampshire, a much more competitive state, with a lot of momentum on his side.
Does that mean that...
When the DeSantis people take stock, I'm thinking here of the DeSantis campaign, but also the DeSantis donors.
These are people who have put a lot of money behind DeSantis.
He kind of came into it, what, $200 million plus in his war chest.
Does that mean that he's going to...
I mean, there has been some talk that DeSantis might even call it a day if he disappoints in Iowa just because he put so much into...
His expectations initially were so high with Iowa.
Yeah, it's a funny story.
I mean, he spent close to 40 million in Iowa, same with Nikki Haley, which is an astronomical number, only to come in third place, a distant third or second place, I may add.
This is not a competitive caucus like it was in, say, 2016.
I think this just goes to show that he just really wasn't ready for prime time.
He wasn't ready for the national stage.
He was elevated, or rather promoted, beyond his competency to be a national contender.
And a lot of these donors, they squandered millions upon millions of dollars on a campaign that just didn't have the stage presence, didn't have the charisma, wasn't articulate, couldn't connect with voters, and really couldn't go toe-to-toe with President Trump.
He peaked very early.
He peaked like a girl in high school somewhere around December of 2022.
And since then, he's been plummeting like a rock and he's put all his eggs in one basket.
You want to diversify your stock portfolio. You also want to diversify your electoral strategy. And he put all of his eggs in the Iowa basket. He tried to run to Trump's right on that.
That only hurt him in New Hampshire. And if you look at the electoral map and the electoral calendar, after this is New Hampshire, he's really down bad there. I've seen polls with him as low as 5%.
He has no appeal in that state. You go into South Carolina, Nikki Haley's home state, she's still going to lose it, but he'll come in probably a distant third there.
And then you look at Nevada, that's going to be a Republican stronghold where Trump cleans house again.
So the map is horrible for him.
He has no place to gain momentum.
And whether or not he drops out after Iowa, it's going to be a massive embarrassment to him, his consultants, and all of his staff.
He's still going to be on the ballot in Florida, so he really set himself up for quite a politically damaging series of events that totally could have been avoided if he put his ego at the door.
So do you think that if you were DeSantis, what he should have done is basically say, hey, listen, you know, the vast majority of the Republican base thinks that Trump won in 2020.
And that alone is going to cause a lot of people to think, listen, this is Trump's year, and so wait it out, and you could then be perhaps the heir apparent in 2028.
Was that DeSantis' mistake?
Or do you think his mistake was...
Not to run more in the Vivek style, by which I mean to run more a pro-Trump type of alternative and say in effect, hey guys, listen, if for some reason Trump is off the ticket, if something happens to Trump, if for whatever reason you were looking for another candidate, that's gonna be me, but I'm gonna be running in the Trumpian mode.
Would DeSantis have been better to run that way?
It's a great question, Dinesh.
I mean, I'll start with the political timing.
I mean, timing is everything in politics.
Many people have commented on Chris Christie's trajectory that he should have ran in 2012.
That was his moment. He chose not to.
He ran in 2016. He got destroyed.
And now people are likewise commenting in the reverse on Ron DeSantis, that instead of having jumped in, he should have waited.
I think there's certainly some truth to that.
But I also think at the same time, if we're going to put our alternate history hats on for a second...
He still would have faced a lot of the same shortcomings that he as an individual has in terms of his style, his campaigning, all the rest.
I think that still would have been exposed in 2028.
I think the field would have been much larger.
I think it would be a stronger field in 2028 without Trump in it.
So even had he waited, I don't think...
He necessarily would have been the kingmaker or the heir apparent that many people think he would have been.
I think he has some underlying flaws that through this national campaign and all the attention has begun to be exposed.
Now, the second question, which I think is more interesting, had he run a more Trumpian, pro-Trump Maga-adjacent, Maga-friendly kind of campaign in the way that Vivek had been running up until very recently.
I certainly think this would have helped him in his numbers.
I think ultimately his strategy couldn't really pick a lane.
In the beginning, he was sort of doing that.
He was kind of toying with it.
He was sort of playing footsies.
Then he really just came out as an anti-Trumper very aggressively, him and his surrogates online and elsewhere, attacking the president's track record, attacking the president's success, throwing loyalty into the trash, all the rest.
I mean, at the end of the day, the slice of the pie and the GOP that are never-Trumpers or anti-Trumpers is extremely narrow.
It's extremely thin. You're really fighting over 10% to maybe 15%.
And that's very, very generous on my part of the pie.
And when you had multiple candidates competing for that pie, you're all going to be flailing around in second, third, fourth, fifth place.
Now, listen, had he run a more energetic campaign, say like Vivek, I think he would have done a little bit better.
But at the same time, Vivek's strengths are largely due to Vivek as an individual.
Vivek has been charismatic on the campaign.
He's been articulate. He's been able to connect with voters.
He's been able to run a very frugal campaign kind of by the bootstraps.
I'm not a fan of Vivek, and I think he's made some mistakes, and I'm not supporting him in any way.
But if you're going to compare them both, I don't even think Ron DeSantis would have been capable of running the campaign that Vivek is running.
He would have been too much You know, under the guise of his consultants and all their grifting ways, and he would have been shifted in too many different directions, which is exactly what we've seen.
So I think ultimately, I don't think Ron DeSantis will ever be president.
That's a big, bold prediction I'll make on this show, but we'll see how things unfold over the next few weeks.
What do you think, Gavin, is the cause of the really remarkable tenacity of the Trump support?
And by that I mean, there's going to be, you mentioned the donor class.
I'm sure there are donor, big Republican donor types who are saying, well, you know, this is a very risky way to go.
Trump is a pretty radioactive figure.
And then there is a real possibility that he's going to be facing one, maybe more convictions before the election.
It's even possible that he might be incarcerated.
So why would Republicans throw their lot in?
With a guy like Trump who is so dicey in these respects, even if you agree with him on issues, shouldn't Republicans pick a safer, cleaner path, if you will?
I'm saying this sort of in a devil's advocate mode, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about why you think the Republican base is like hanging in there with Trump.
Well, listen, I think contrary to the popular sentiments of the pundit class, President Trump is actually the strongest candidate for the Republican Party, and many people continue to underestimate him and misread him and his movement over the last however many years,
a decade almost. President Trump is polling better than he ever has before in the general election, at the national level, on the state level, in different demographic divisions, whether it's young voters, whether it's minorities, Hispanics, etc.
He is our best chance to take back the White House in 2024.
He has a record to run on.
He has a record of success.
And he's one of the few people that really can connect with the voters in a way that most of these manufactured and robotic politicos can't.
And I think people have to understand that his movement transcends ideology in a way.
It's very tied to him as a personality, as an individual.
People relate to him. They feel a sense of loyalty to him.
They feel a certain connection to him.
And that's not going to be – you can't just shake that off of them with the typical type of political campaigning and political operations that we've seen from, say, let's say, Ron DeSantis.
I think he has a very durable movement.
I think he has a very stable and strong base of support that is only growing by the day.
He's only becoming more vindicated, more of a martyr, if you will.
and the attacks on him are only proving his case to the American people better than he can even make it because the system is targeting him and him alone.
They're going after him with a certain ferociousness that we haven't ever seen in American politics before and it's only giving support to everything he's been saying and everything that his supporters believe already in their hearts that he is the guy, he's the man that can really change Washington and he's really who we need to put back into office.
So everything is really working in his favor.
The Biden administration is flailing.
I don't see any situation either domestically or abroad getting better over the next 10 months, whether it's the economy, whether it's foreign policy, whether it's just the internal stability of our country and internal cohesion or the institutional corruption.
All these things that are eating away at the republic are going to continue for the next 10 months, and people are only going to become More and more fond of their lives under President Trump and his first administration.
So he's in a fantastic position, and I think he's going to win.
I think he's never had a stronger political coalition behind him.
I think he's really going to redraw the map once again and really create new coalitions, create a new electoral map that if Republicans are smart, they'll be able to pick up the pieces after he finishes his second term, and they'll be able to move forward with it in a sort of ascendant populist majority.
Gavin, you're the co-author of a book, The Emerging Populist Majority.
Now, a generation ago, Kevin Phillips wrote a kind of a classic work, The Emerging Republican Majority, I think it was called.
And there have been these kind of macro attempts to analyze big things that are happening in the country.
For Kevin Phillips, for example, one of the big trends was the fact that the Sun Belt, Was moving toward the Republican Party, becoming part of this kind of emerging Republican majority coalition.
And it seems like Kevin Phillips was right, at least right for about 40 years.
Then we've heard, starting early in this century, the idea that as America becomes more diverse, the country is going to now have a kind of an emerging Democratic majority, which is anchored in Hispanics and blacks and sort of feminist women and maybe gays and so on.
And there seems to have been some truth to that.
At least that was, to some degree, the Obama coalition.
Of course, it includes progressive whites who always want to run to the front of this pack.
But it seems like you and your co-author are diagnosing something new that's happening that's important now and will be important, let's say, over the next decade or so.
Outline that trend.
What is this emerging populist majority?
Well, you laid it up perfectly, Dinesh.
This follows the tradition of the emerging Republican majority from 1969, which did, as you say, correctly predict a lot of the Republican trends that we saw with the election of Nixon, with the election of Reagan, and moving into even the early 2000s.
And then at the same time, it also follows from the failed tradition, if you will, of the emerging Democratic majority of 2004, which really crashed and burned because of one figure who we've been talking about for quite some time now, President Donald J. Trump.
I mean, the emerging Democrat majority, while some of the underlying demographic trends and predictions were certainly correct, it also hinged on maintaining the old Democrat coalition of labor.
I mean, in all of their predictions, they were still maintaining super majorities and massive victories in a place like West Virginia.
Now, obviously, knowing what we know today, West Virginia is probably the most Republican state in the country.
But obviously, looking back, that wasn't always the case.
And I think what we've really seen over the last few years has been a complete realignment in the American body politic.
we've seen the Republican Party, I'll bet, reluctantly begin to transform from the party of big business, from the party of the country clubs, and from the party of the suburbs to this sort of reverse FDR coalition, where they're the party of the rurals and they're the party of the working class inner city, whether it's white, Hispanic, or otherwise.
And this sort of emerging coalition, if it's embraced, if it's sort of focused on and welcomed, could really lead to massive electoral windfalls to the Republican Party. I think the largest problem has been that without President Trump as a populist at the top of the ticket, without President Trump and his sort of force of character, Republicans haven't been able to capitalize on this movement.
It was President Trump who broke the blue wall, after all, and it's President Trump right now who's polling as high as eight or nine points ahead in a state like Michigan, which would have been unheard of for most standard Republicans of the Mitt Romney, Bush, or McCain mold. But this is something that transcends the United States. This is a movement that's going on across the world. We saw it with Brexit. We've seen it with the rise of populist figures across continental Europe. We've seen it even in Latin America. I mean,
populism can take different forms. There's a more libertarian variety in that of Javier Malay in Argentina. There's obviously more conservative nationalist versions like you see in Italy.
But at the same time, ultimately, it's against the elites and it's against the status quo and it's against all this sort of neoliberal, neoconservative world order that's really gutted most of the Western world with open borders, with this sort of just economic, hyper-economic gutting of the country for profits.
It's seen the endless wars.
It's a movement that runs contrary to all of those different strains and forces and currents that have really been driving the decline of the United States and the broader population.
West. And in the United States, we've seen the working class completely realign.
We're starting to see younger people realign.
We're starting to see some of the racial divisions politically realign, where you see a lot of Hispanics moving in our way.
So all these trends can be taken advantage of if we really build a coherent populist vision for the future that isn't simply stuck in this sort of textbook Definitions of conservatism or these sort of dated modes of pure libertarian,
neoliberal fantasies about government and the economy, if we're able to be a little bit more pragmatic and we're able to speak to the actual needs and issues of the voters, we can see massive electoral challenges.
I think we're moving in the right direction.
This is happening slowly.
After all, if you look back at history, which the book often does, when the Republican Party was once the Rockefeller Republican Party of the Northeast, the liberal Rockefeller mold, it took maybe 20, 30, even 40 years to transition from that through the Goldwater movement through Nixon, ultimately culminating in the more fusionist, libertarian, conservative model of politics of Ronald Reagan.
That didn't happen overnight.
That happened over a series of decades where Republican Party committees were slowly taken over, where different think tanks were formed, where a movement was slowly being built.
And I think a lot of the failings, if you want to call them that, of the first Trump administration largely have to do with how visionary a figure he was, how ahead of the curve he was, that he basically chartered a movement that didn't have the infrastructure behind it because he was so much ahead of the curve.
But now going into 2024, he has that movement, he has that infrastructure, he has that intellectual capital.
That's sort of forming in these different populist circles across the country that were he to take office again, it would be a very different situation.
And all of this is part of the broader emerging populist majority, which will continue on a well past President Trump's second term and will continue for the next several decades to come.
Very interesting stuff, Gavin.
And I must say, you know, very hopeful because there's so many bad things happening in the country today.
It's nice to be able to look ahead and see that there are powerful, enduring trends that are going our way.
Guys, I've been talking to Gavin Wax.
You can follow him on x at Gavin Wax.
The book, The Emerging Populist Majority.
Gavin, thanks very much for joining me.
Thank you so much, Dinesh. It hits shelves January 23rd.
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I'm in the chapter of C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves, in which he's discussing the peculiar nature and virtues of a friendship.
And he says that friendship is the least natural of the loves, which is to say it's not forced upon us.
We don't have to do it.
Eros, it would seem, is necessary for, well, biological reproduction.
Well, as Aristotle put it, man is a social animal.
So in one degree or another, we're going to find ourselves in society, bumping up, if you will, against all kinds of people that we see, many of them again and again.
And out of that grows affection or storgie.
But friendship is something that is more selective.
To some degree, it's a little more elite.
And it is the product, of course, of choice.
People choose to be friends and choose to stay friends.
Now, friendships, as Lewis, are sometimes confused with general camaraderie.
For example, we find ourselves in groups, a hockey team, a classroom at a boys' school.
These are a bunch of people, and they play together in recess.
Or even a club, where you join a club that is a New York athletic club.
And true, there is some general common interest.
People there play racquetball.
Some people play tennis.
Other people go there to swim.
But, says Lewis, this isn't really friendship per se.
He says, it is the soil out of which friendship grows.
You're at the New York Athletic Club and you...
Meet a couple of guys and they're just like you and they have a lot in common with you and the three of you become friends inside the club and then you go meet up there for drinks afterward.
So that is friendship.
but simply belonging to a hunter-gatherer group where all the men go out and hunt animals and all the women stay home and they either knit or sew or put the food together on the table.
Lewis says that by itself is not friendship.
True, you're doing things together.
True, you're talking about them.
True, there's some element of planning and anticipation.
But even so, friendship is, in a sense, more narrowly defined.
Friendship arises, he says, out of mere companionship, when two or more of the companions discover they have in common some insight or interest or taste, which the others do not share, and which until that moment each believe to be his own unique treasure.
So friendship is a kind of shared vision, according to Lewis.
And he says that friendship is not pursued kind of for itself.
Nobody, in a sense, succeeds at friendship by going out searching for friends.
The friendship arises accidentally, serendipitously.
You are talking to someone and you're like, wait, this guy actually is on the same journey or the same sort of quest that I am, and the friendship arises out of that.
And So friendship in that sense is friendship typically about something.
Something may not be explicitly laid out.
You know, you have friends over many years.
Debbie has friends who go back to her high school days.
But their friendship is more than the fact that, hey, we went to high school together.
How do we know that? Well...
Because Debbie went to high school with 900 other people.
She's not friends with all of them.
So the friendship is culled out of that.
It's a narrowing of that large circle of people.
And Lewis is very eager to emphasize that friendship is...
Sometimes friendship can move into romantic or erotic love.
Two people who are born a girl who are just friends eventually fall in love with each other.
They get married. That can happen.
But the fact that the one kind of then...
Transforms into the other doesn't mean that the two are the same.
Lewis, again, will say that even in married love, there is elements of friendship.
There's even elements of just storgi affection.
You're just kind of used to each other.
And sometimes you look at an old couple and, you know, there's not a whole lot of erotic love going on between them, perhaps.
They're 85 years old.
But on the other hand, there's just a lot of friendship and there's also a lot of affection.
Affection that just comes from, oh, you're making that weird sound again.
You know, just that kind of familiarity breeds a certain kind of closeness and intimacy.
So, another point that I mentioned the last time was that erotic love is possessive.
It is exclusive.
It is jealous.
It limits itself.
Hey, you know, it's two people, really.
But friendship isn't like that.
And friendship welcomes a third.
Two of you, you are on a journey together, but hey, the more the merry.
If you can find another guy who's going to join the team and shares the same interests, no friends are going to say no.
No admission. If two friends are exclusive in that way and shutting other people out, there's some element of their relationship that is not just friendship.
Because friendship, says Lewis, is not in that sense, is not possessive in that way.
Then Lewis begins to talk about the fact that friendship should not be understood as based upon need.
Because no one, in a sense, strictly speaking, needs a friend.
A friend is almost like a gift.
It's something like on top of life as it is defined by necessity.
Now, he says this is not to say that friends don't help each other.
You might go to a friend and go, hey, listen, I'm in a terrible situation.
I need to borrow money.
This is generally, they say, not a good thing for friends to do.
But nevertheless, says Lewis, if you do it and you have a true friend, they're obviously going to help you.
It's not important to the friendship.
It's not something that...
Friendship is not based upon obligation.
It's not based upon contract.
It's almost like this is a peripheral aspect of the friendship.
It's incidental.
And then Lewis makes a remarkable point that I found to be true, which is that you can develop a friendship, and the friendship exists over a pretty long period of time, and yet you don't know basic...
Family details about your friend.
Sometimes you have a friend and because you've come together, because let's just say, for example, you share the love of history or stamp collecting or anything like that and you're immersed in that and you suddenly realize you're not even sure you know the guy's wife's name.
And you don't realize how many brothers or sisters they have.
In some cases, you don't even know where they live.
And so there are all these details about a friend, how they earn their living, that what their profession is, or what their income is, or what their family history is.
And It's not to say you don't find out these things.
You do find them out. But again, they're incidental.
It's like, who cares? It could be different, but it wouldn't make any difference to your friendship because your friendship is really not about that.
And therefore, says Lewis, and this is really where he's kind of going with all this, is that while other types of love are anchored...
your physical body, obviously erotic love has a kind of a bodily aspect to it, or anchored in the kind of deep web of connections that you make with people.
Think for example about Storgi and how it's anchored in family connections.
I have, I'm the oldest son in the family and I relate a certain way to my younger brother and then the two of us have a sister and we relate differently to her.
So all of this is the kind of complex mechanism of Storgi but it's all based upon family background.
It's based upon the genetic ties that bind people together.
Not that Storge requires genetic ties.
You can have affection for a neighbor or even a dog.
But nevertheless, says Lewis, Storge is based upon history.
It's based upon the kind of where you are in space and in time.
And he says friendship, however, is kind of different.
First of all, friendship never involves any duties.
Storgi involves duties.
You have a kind of duty of cordiality to the people who are around you.
You have obligations to your parents and, in some cases, to your children.
Not necessarily willing obligations, but you nevertheless undertake them anyway.
But, says Lewis, friendship isn't like that.
No duties. No obligations.
You don't owe your friend anything and he doesn't owe you anything.
So friendship is in that sense unnecessary.
It's like philosophy.
It's like art. You appreciate it kind of for itself.
And says Lewis, in a very Lewisian turn of phrase, friendship has no survival value.
Rather, it is one of those things which gives value to survival.
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