All Episodes
Previous Next
June 12, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:57
BREAKTHROUGH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1103
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, I want to talk about this terrible Air India crash.
I'm also going to talk about Trump's hopes for a big trade deal with China.
The political theorist Yoram Hazoni is going to join me.
We're going to talk about his important book, The Virtue of Nationalism.
And I'm going to continue my discussion of my book on Reagan, focusing on 1982, the darkest year of the Reagan presidency.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube.
Or Rumble or X, or you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
Hit the subscribe, the follow, the notifications button.
I'd appreciate it.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Just got word of this terrible Air India crash just outside of a city called Ahmedabad.
not a very well-known city in India.
India is...
But the plane takes off 200 or so passengers on board and it crashes just minutes, moments after being in the air.
Now, how this one guy survived, I'll have no idea.
This is a guy, apparently an Indian guy, but a British national.
He's sitting in seat 11A.
The plane, by the way, plows into a building to such a degree that the plane is sticking out the back of the building.
This is the kind of crash for which you expect no survivors, and initially they announced that there weren't any.
But evidently, this one guy makes it.
Not only makes it, but he walks off the plane.
he's bruised and he's taken immediately to an ambulance, but he's talking and he's able to say that there was a loud bang and then the crash.
Now, it's certainly too early to even think about what caused the crash, but it is, I think, a reminder to all of us of the, well, the fragility of life, the precariousness of life,
There's been a rather disturbing pattern of planes going down.
There have been multiple crashes, right?
In the United States, some in California.
And I think Debbie was telling me about something, two separate crashes in the last couple of days before this one.
But this is a Boeing Dreamliner.
This is a crash with over 200 people on board.
a massive tragedy and a massive accident.
And so, you know, It is, as I say, the NTSB, National Transportation Safety Board, is probably on site, if not on their way, and we'll eventually learn what went wrong here.
But Boeing, as you know, has been under a lot of heat, and they have had a disproportionate number of incidents involving Boeing.
People have raised the issue of Boeing's DEI.
Initially, Debbie was like, can't be DEI because the Indians don't have DEI.
Of course, the Indians don't have DEI per se.
But Boeing, the construction of the plane, I remember an investigative journalist interviewing people at Boeing.
And there was a mood at Boeing that, you know, things aren't going all that well at this company.
You might remember that Trump had his issues with Boeing recently.
So I'm going to leave the topic for further examination and investigation.
But I think Boeing needs to take an internal look at its practices and at its products.
And find out if there are things that they can do better.
Now, let me turn to the rhetoric that I'm seeing on social media.
This is a kind of line of opposition to Trump's policies.
And what is amusing is that when the left comes up with a certain line, Accuracy.
We find all kinds of people, elected officials, media figures, the left in general, all saying the same thing.
And it's all saying the same thing for like a day or two days or a week, and then they go on to something else.
So for a while with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, it was Maryland man.
He's just a Maryland man.
And all the headlines, Maryland man, Maryland man.
And now the line on Trump is, guess what, MAGA?
California belonged to Mexico.
So all this talk about deporting people and sending them home, the implication is California is their home.
Yes, they're Mexicans, but California belonged to Mexico.
And this one guy puts out...
You MAGA people are so stupid, you don't even realize that California belonged to Mexico.
But some of us aren't all that stupid, and not only that, we actually know the history that the poster of this claim doesn't seem to know, which is that while it's true that California belonged to Mexico, well, who did Mexico belong to?
The answer is Spain.
So California, like Mexico, was part of the Spanish territories in the Americas.
So is anybody with a straight face talking about giving California, like, back to Spain?
No.
And let's remember that the Spaniards came.
They were the first ones to get to this continent.
Well, I mean, Columbus was, and Columbus was Italian initially.
I mean, not initially, but he was the first guy to get here.
But even he came under Spanish.
He was sponsored by Isabella of Castile.
She is the one who put together the money, and his ship sailed out of Spain, not out of Italy.
And then, of course, the Spanish came subsequent ships.
And so here's the point.
How long did Mexico remain as a colonial property of Spain?
And the answer is all the way to 1821.
That's when Mexico got its independence.
And so Mexico, as an independent nation, controlled California.
You may say California belonged to the independent nation of Mexico only from 1821 until 1821.
And so how long did Mexico have it as an independent nation?
Two and a half decades, 25 years.
That's it.
So this is a very weak claim when it's put in that kind of historical context.
Let me talk a little bit about Trump and Musk, because I think a very positive development is that Musk not only deleted his claim about Trump being on the Epstein list, but Musk has now said, basically, I went too far.
My tweets against Trump were ill-advised.
Remember, he had called for Trump's impeachment.
And when I first saw all this, I was quite dismayed because I thought these guys, Most of the aggression was coming from Musk, but Trump was hitting back in his own way.
Trump rarely lets this kind of thing go unanswered, that this was creating an irreparable breach.
But Trump himself has said, there's no breach, and I'm very willing to let it go and get past it.
And Trump has shown, and I think this is not the first example of it, an ability to reconcile with people that he has had rather bitter fights with.
And here are some examples.
Ted Cruz, who now works quite well with Trump after, remember, lying Ted, your wife is ugly, all kinds of stuff.
And then you have Marco Rubio, little Marco, all the back and forth that went on between Rubio and Trump.
And not only is Rubio now a key member, maybe even the key member of the Trump administration, but gets along well with Trump.
J.D. Vance, another anti-Trump guy who And so all of this, I think, bodes well for Trump and Musk going forward.
I also want to say a few words about the Trump-China deal.
And it appears that this is a deal that has not been completed.
It's not consummated.
It is in the making.
But the outlines of the deal are done.
And Trump put out a telling statement on this, basically not only saying, hey, we're making progress.
He had said that once before, but rather this is the shape of this deal with China.
Now, let's remember the United States has had a setup with China where we've had minimal to no tariffs on China.
And China has had whatever tariffs it wants to impose on American products.
In some cases, blocking them from the country altogether, in other cases making it punitively expensive for U.S. exports to go to China.
Granted, the Chinese, even under no tariffs, would be selling a lot more over here than we would be selling over there.
But the point is that So, hey, if you're going to have some tariffs on me, I'm going to have some tariffs on you.
And that's really all that Trump has insisted upon.
Apparently, under the New Deal, the new, not New Deal in the sense of FDR, but the new arrangement, The United States will impose tariffs on China, which are pretty high.
I think the number Trump used was something like 55%, which is a high tariff, much higher than Trump's other tariffs, but nevertheless is vastly lower than the 125 and 150% tariffs that Trump had not only been talking about, but started to implement.
In a lot of these tariff regimes, it is important to have balance, clarity, and predictability because it's very difficult to manufacture products arranged for their transport abroad without having any idea of what the tariffs are going to be.
So while Trump was engaging in what Treasury Secretary Besant called strategic uncertainty, hey, we're going to not let them know where we're going with all this.
At some point, the uncertainty needs to end and you need to have a kind of predictable policy.
That, by the way, applies to tax policy and lots of other things.
I mean, would you like to be going into a new business where you have no idea what the tax rate is going to be next year?
No.
It's going to be difficult for you to make projections, forecasts, any of that, even know if your business is going to be viable in the first place.
So it looks like 55% tariffs on China.
The Chinese will have, for their part, something like 10% thereabouts tariffs on American products.
I'm not sure if it's a flat tariff on all the products or if it averages out to 10%.
But I think the good news is that a deal is in the making and should be finalized shortly.
I think that's going to be good for both parties.
It will resume peaceful trade between us and China.
And there's no reason we can't have some peaceful trade with China, although Trump's point is it needs to be on different terms than it has been before.
Trump, I think, is showing himself here to be a tough negotiator, but a man who can be dealt with.
And so it is telling that we are talking here not just about trade deals with allies, trade deals with Canada or with the EU, but the trade deal with China was bound to be perhaps the most contentious.
with the chinese also are notoriously thin-skinned have a tremendous sense of their own imperial or at least their own destiny as a great power and so they do not It seems that the Trump people have understood that.
And so if we don't have a deal, we're nevertheless pretty close to one.
Most of us think of Medicare as something to deal with in the future, someday, and well, that's kind of how I felt until recently.
Well, I'm now 64. The moment you hit that number, it begins.
The junk mail, the robocalls, the TV ads with washed-up celebrities.
None of it really makes any sense.
The more I looked into it, the clearer it became that this Medicare system is meant to be confusing.
Why?
Because it lets big insurers profit.
From your confusion and uncertainty.
In fact, the DOJ just filed a major lawsuit accusing some of the largest Medicare brokers of misleading seniors, steering them into plans that paid the highest kickbacks and not the best coverage.
That's why I turned to Chapter.
Now, Chapter is independent.
Their advisors walk you through every option, unbiased, pressure-free.
They help you find the plan that's right for you and all at no point.
Call Chapter.
Dial pound 250 and then say Dinesh.
Don't let big insurance decide for you.
Take control.
Call Chapter today.
It's easy.
Here's how you do it.
Dial pound 250, keyword Dinesh.
As you know, our friend Mike Lindell has a passion to help everyone get the best sleep of your life.
He didn't stop by simply creating the best pillow.
Mike also created the best bedsheets ever.
Debbie and I use these.
We love them.
They look and feel great, which means an even better night's sleep for me, which is important for my busy schedule.
Now, Mike is offering the best deal on his Geezer Dream bedsheets, any size, any color, just $49.98.
That's right.
You get kings, you get queens, cal kings, split kings.
As I said, any size, any color, just $49.98.
But order now, because when they're gone, they're gone.
Also, for a limited time, when your order is over $100, you get $100 in free digital gifts.
Call 800-876-0227.
That's 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use the promo code.
It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
When you do that, you're going to get this amazing offer, $49.98 on the Giza Dream Sheets.
Any size, any color.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a philosopher, a political theorist, also a student of the Bible, a Bible scholar.
This is Yoram Hazoni.
He's written a number of important books, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, The Virtue of Nationalism, Conservatism, A Rediscovery.
And we're going to talk about the virtue of nationalism.
By the way, his website is yoramhazoni.org.
You can follow him on X at Y, Hazoni, H-A-Z-O-N-Y.
Yoram, welcome.
Thank you, as always, for joining me.
And it seems like for many years, nationalism was a little bit of a bad word.
People were somewhat comfortable talking about patriotism, Would shrink from the idea of nationalism.
Do you think that that's true?
And what was the reason for this sort of bad odor behind the word nationalism?
Absolutely.
I definitely think it's true.
The word nationalism was widely accepted as a reasonable political position.
The idea that the world should be made up of many independent nations or that it should be governed by many independent nations was very popular in many educated circles and other circles, political circles, I think right up until World War II.
And there can't be any doubt that the fact that Hitler adopted this word First of all, gave the word many of the terrible resonances that it has today.
And also, I mean, we shouldn't miss the fact that after the Second World War, there were many Marxist and utopian liberal writers who pounced on the opportunity,
as they say today, to take the word nationalism, which Which had stood for national independence, national freedom, and to turn it into something evil, something that really was inappropriate to be discussed seriously in intellectual circles.
I don't think that happened until the 1960s, in fact, that the shift took place and being a nationalist, you know.
fighting for the freedom of India or of Israel or any number of other countries ceased to be something noble and became something ugly.
I mean, it's interesting because wasn't nationalism very widely used even on the left prior to that?
I say that because I, I remember Stalin would use the phrase mother Russia.
So, you know, unlike Trotsky and maybe even Lenin, who spoke an internationalist Marxist term, Stalin was not unwilling to appeal to nationalism, certainly during the World War II period.
Gandhi, as you mentioned, was very much of a nationalist.
I don't know if Che Guevara was a nationalist, maybe to some degree.
But you're saying that starting in the 60s, nationalism became equated with, what, ethnicity, ethnic nationalism, and racism?
Is that where the bad odor came from?
I wouldn't include Stalin.
I mean, Stalin is actually one of the progenitors Patriotism is a word that refers to loving your own country.
Nationalism can be used that way, but nationalism is always Nationalism is the idea that the world is governed best when nations are given their freedom.
That was not a view that Stalin actually upheld.
He and Hitler both despised nationalism because they didn't like the idea of independent states that stand against their worldwide imperial aspirations.
The big switch that we're talking about takes place when intellectuals adopt the idea that independent nation-states are a bad idea.
That's something that is really revolutionary.
It's a rejection of the American tradition that national independence is crucial.
the British and French, many nations had this idea, which was kind of codified in the 1600s with the Treaty of Westphalia, that national independence in principle is a good idea.
This is something, by the way, that goes
that empires, you know, the lions praying on the lambs is imperial states praying on smaller nations and subjugating them.
is uniformly seen as evil, as leading to murder, theft, rape, That's the way that the prophets see the idea of an international empire.
And so we have a very, very long tradition in the Christian and Jewish West of valuing independence from foreign rule.
You don't see that begin to fade up until the precursors of the European Union.
So today, the European Union stands for this kind of theory of liberal internationalist theory, which says we shouldn't have borders, we shouldn't have independent nations.
And the leaders of the European Union constantly turn to the example of Hitler and say, look, if nations are independent, then we'll get Hitler.
And so what do we need?
Well, we need universal liberal empire, which is in fact what the EU aspires to.
And I think you can also argue, I argue in this book, As soon as the Berlin Wall falls and the Cold War ends, you get voices.
I quote Charles Krauthammer at the beginning of the book.
People don't remember this today, but in 1989, already Charles Krauthammer published an essay called Universal Dominion, which explicitly argued that That the goal of the Americans post-communism should be to diminish the sovereign standing of independent states and create effectively a world government.
And do you think that these internationalist EU types are applying this doctrine consistently worldwide, or do you think that in a somewhat familiar manner they Because are they calling for China to submit to world order or India to dissolve its boundaries?
Or aren't they calling for the Palestinians to have their own state?
So isn't it interesting that, I mean, is this a doctrine in which they are being consistent or are they using it as an ideological bludgeon for the West?
Well, both.
They are using it as an ideological bludgeon.
And there is an internal consistency, although it's not something that in this case I admire in the book.
I have a chapter about this dual standard that you're referring to.
And in fact, it goes at least as far back as Kant.
Kant's famous essay.
in favor of a world federation, a single government, it is notorious for making this distinction, saying that different nations are at different stages on their road to maturity.
And he says explicitly that the Europeans are the first to have achieved maturity.
So Europe is going to be the first place where the borders are going to be erased and nations are going to become He says individually, human beings and tribes, it takes them millennia to come to the point where they can live together peacefully under a single government.
And now it's time for nations to do the same thing.
And he says it'll start in Europe, but the other nations of the world are still childish.
He says.
They're still childish and primitive.
And so we have to wait patiently.
They have to go through the stage of reaching independence and then reaching maturity and then joining the World Federation, which is the aim of proper thinking enlightenment rationalists.
So yes, there is exactly this double standard where you'll find Europeans and liberal Americans
So it's really a shockingly condescending point of view, but it has its own version of consistency, yes.
And do you think that the left here, and I'm using the left in a very broad sense because I suppose I'd be very reluctant to put Kant, you know, in any easy way as being quote on the left.
I realize we're talking about a broader tradition here, but certainly in its leftist variant of recent years, it appears that they are trying to transpose our loyalties away from the nation state, but toward other forms of belonging.
In other words, The whole idea of sort of ethnic tribalism, the idea of sort of gender loyalties, the various kind of points of allegiance and identity politics.
Would you say that part of the reason they want to dissolve or at least diminish nationalism is to fortify these other type of allegiances?
Yes, I think it's important to...
to make a distinction between liberal internationalists and woke neo-Marxist internationalists.
Now, that distinction used to be very important between liberals who would base themselves on theories like Kant's, where they would begin with the sovereign individual and then work from there to an argument that So that's one tradition.
And you can say that's just a different tradition from the explicitly revolutionary Marxist tradition.
The Marxist tradition, unlike the liberal tradition, the Marxists have always said that The goal is to destroy ruling elites.
That's not something you find said explicitly by liberal thinkers.
Today, the two things are kind of merging together.
And so the distinction is more in theory than in practice.
the left is kind of moving from its old liberalism to this neo-Marxism.
But you're absolutely right that the liberals always claimed, no, we're just The normal thing for human beings is that everybody should be free and equal.
And all sorts of thinkers moved from there to this borderless world in which individuals would be maximally free.
But the move towards saying, look, actually, what international institutions should be doing is to overthrow the rule of That's a variation of Marxism.
Marx, from the beginning, analyzed society, not in terms of individuals, but in terms of groups.
I don't think that that's especially awful thing to do, but his view that the dominant group in There's no alternative other than to wage group war against the ruling elites and to destroy them.
That is today the dominant flavor left of center, certainly in American and British politics and in a number of other countries as well.
Do you think, Yoram, as I look around the world, I think of people like Millet in Argentina, Maloney in Italy, the new guy who just won in Poland, even Modi in India, of course, Trump, that you now have these somewhat explicitly nationalist leaders.
who are, you know, respectively, you know, Argentina first and Italy first and India first.
And could we see a configuration in which the globalists are on the one side, and then you have all these kind of nationalist leaders looking out for their own country, but also recognizing a commonality of spirit and purpose among other nationalists who are doing the same around the world so that the world now is divided between the nationalists on the one side
and, if you will, the universalists or the globalists on the other?
I mean, it's interesting that the globalists, the liberal internationalists and their revolutionary friends, they find this movement towards nationalism, which at this point exists in almost every democratic country in the world now, has its internal politics reconfigured.
To reflect exactly the difference that you're talking about.
So back in 2016, when Trump was first elected and we had the Brexit referendum a few months earlier, back in 2016, it was still unclear to many that this is the way things were going to go.
And at this point, I think it's unarguable that the issue...
It's interesting that nationalism and conservatism in this generation have become closely aligned.
And so you have what's effectively a nationalist conservative camp.
in almost every democratic country, sometimes working together with anti-Marxist liberals, but the nationalism is where the energy is.
And arrayed against it is many of the elites in every democratic country who see themselves as not just enlightened, but part of this kind of
So now, you know, probably doesn't need to be emphasized that there can be very large differences in worldview between nationalists in different countries.
And you know, the worldview of Trump and Milley and Modi and Orban and the Brexiteers in Britain, Nigel Farage.
You can't say that they all have the same worldview.
But, you know, but that's part of a nationalist political theory is seeking to allow the differences among nations to express themselves.
Each nation has its own language, its own, often its own religion, its own constitutional tradition and an inherited tradition of its component parts and tribes banding together in joint causes.
So that's the way that nations communicate.
So we're often in this very strange debate in which those who are these days waving the flag of diversity on all sorts of lefty issues, politically what they want is world homogeneity.
And the nationalists who Obviously, come from a more traditionalist and particularist kind of view and are looking for the freedom of their own nations, their own peoples.
It's the nationalists who actually end up representing diversity on the world stage, allowing nations to be concerned for their own interests according to their own ways of thinking and their own approaches.
You see it when Donald Trump goes to Poland in his first years in office and talks about America should be first for Americans, but other nations should be first for their own elected figures.
So this tendency of the nationalist conservative camp to be the most serious defender of an actual
And as we close out, Yoram, wouldn't it also be true to say that this nationalism, just in the way that you describe it, is far more consistent with democracy itself?
And I say that because, look, we in a country are electing leaders to look out for us.
So when you, within a country, What is it about, if not, the welfare of the citizens of that particular country?
By contrast, if you had some sort of a globalist order, let's just say run by elites from various different countries, kind of all coming together, kind of World Economic Forum style, to plan for epidemics and to plan for this and to plan for that, where's the democratic accountability?
Again, I couldn't agree with you more.
In The Virtue of Nationalism, there's a detailed argument along your lines that says that, in fact, democracy has never existed in the history of the world under imperial government.
And this is an argument, by the way, that it's not new to me.
John Stuart Mill includes it on representative government, that the possibility of a democratic politics depends on the mutual loyalty of the people who are running the democracy.
So it's possible to have...
changes of party, changes of direction based on elections.
But that requires a tremendous cohesiveness of that.
The moment that you have different nationalities that are asserting themselves under the framework of a single government, there's no trust between those nationalities.
And that's kind of what we're seeing an example of in California right now, is that the moment that people start waving Mexican flags.
Then that's a clear statement.
I'm not loyal to what you're loyal to.
I'm not a part of you.
And even if somehow that's not what they mean, that's inevitably the way that it's going to be interpreted, correctly interpreted.
If you're not stepping forward to wave the American flag because you're a part of my people, then what kind of common politics can we have?
That's the end of democracy.
It may take a longer or shorter time to get to civil war, but the foundation of democracy has to be in nationality and national independence.
Not to mention the somewhat unwittingly comic element of waving a Mexican flag and basically saying, please don't send me to the country whose flag I'm professing allegiance to here, right?
I want to stay in the country that I supposedly hate.
So guys, I've been talking to Yoram Hazoni.
The book, a very important one, The Virtue of Nationalism.
Check him out at yoramhazoni.org.
Yoram, it's always a pleasure, and thank you for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
God bless you.
Take care.
The Trump administration has their sleeves rolled up.
They're streamlining some big monumental moves right now, It's difficult for them to take my personal finances or yours into account when trying to fix the country.
We have to do that ourselves.
Now, this is why tens of thousands of Americans are taking action.
They're buying gold now from Birch Gold.
Here are some facts.
In the past 12 months, the value of gold has increased by 30%.
Central banks are buying gold in large quantities.
Why would they want to do that?
Think about it.
BRICS nations are looking to unseat the U.S. dollar as the global reserve.
You need to take action.
You need to find peace of mind.
And you can do it in gold.
Birch Gold makes it easy to convert an existing IRA, a 401k, into a tax-sheltered IRA in physical gold.
Or you can just buy some gold to store at home.
Just text my name, Dinesh, to 989898.
Birch Gold will send you a free information kit on gold.
There's no obligation, just useful information.
Birch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, thousands of happy customers.
So trust Birch Gold.
Diversify your savings today.
Text the word Dinesh to 989898.
There's been a national focus on eating only the healthiest foods, and that's great news for Balance of Nature.
Their method of producing a vibrant nutritional supplement is second to none.
While so many others use chemicals and additives, balance of nature is made solely from whole foods.
These are fruits and veggies in a capsule.
Other methods sacrifice nutritional quality for the sake of profits and volume, but Balance of Nature's advanced vacuum cold process involves freeze-drying the fruits and veggies into a fine powder, helping to retain as much nutritional value as possible compared to other inferior methods which cut corners at your disposal.
Use my discount code AMERICA.
You get 35% off, plus free shipping and a money-back guarantee.
Here's the number to call, 800-246-8751.
Again, 800-246-8751.
Or you can go to balanceofnature.com.
When you use discount code AMERICA, you'll get 35% off.
Plus free shipping.
The big problem that Reagan had to confront, probably the biggest problem of all, was the problem of galloping runaway inflation.
Now inflation is bad under any circumstances.
There's no such thing as good inflation.
Inflation has bad effects all around.
And all of this makes it particularly strange that our Federal Reserve has an official policy of seeking something like 2% inflation.
They want inflation.
Why they want inflation is a topic for another day.
It has to do with the fact that we have an economy that essentially runs on debt.
And inflation benefits the government.
How so?
Because the government borrows all this money.
That's where the debt is.
And then they have to pay it back.
But if you keep devaluing the currency, then the debt becomes cheaper to pay back because you're borrowing in dollars and you're paying back in dollars that buy less.
So this is why the Fed likes inflation, but it's bad for the rest of us.
In other words, it's bad for everybody.
So Reagan, however, had very serious inflation inherited from the Carter years and from before.
And Reagan decided it's time to choke it off, to choke off inflation.
And there is a way to do it.
It's a rather painful way.
And politicians don't like to do it that way, which is why, by and large, our politicians don't support what Reagan did, namely, A very tight monetary policy.
Essentially, it's like pulling a rope tight around the economy by reducing the money supply.
And when you reduce the money supply, what happens is there's less money in the country.
Interest rates go up.
They go up because of the law of supply and demand.
There's a certain amount of demand for money.
There's less money available because you've tightened the monetary supply.
And therefore, the price of money, which is basically the interest rate, goes up.
Now, this was all carried out by an economist named Paul Volcker.
He was the head of the Federal Reserve.
By the way, I had a slight dealing myself with Volker because he was my graduation speaker at Dartmouth.
And he gave, Nobody liked it because we were all exuberant.
We were excited.
He was a big name speaker.
We were looking for some kind of assessment of the maybe state of the country or the state of the economy.
And he gave a very dry talk that was rooted in econometric analysis.
It was sort of, I mean, an important address, but not...
And so we all just kind of stood robotically in the audience and waited for the more fun stuff, which was the handing out of the diplomas and so on.
But Volcker was, interestingly enough, a conservative Democrat.
But Reagan, nevertheless, supported him, backed him, and reappointed him, which shows you that Reagan did not take the view that Trump's view now is we need to have lower interest rates, that the Federal Reserve is not lowering them fast enough.
That's why Trump's nickname is too slow for the chairman of the Fed.
And Trump is pursuing what most presidents do.
He wants low interest rates because what he wants is the economy to And he wants to light the engine of economic growth.
Now, Reagan did too.
But Reagan essentially realized that inflation is so bad that we need to choke it off first.
And that's going to bring a political price.
So Reagan's policy of As I say, it's an indirect policy because he's supporting Volcker.
And inflation comes down, but Reagan also has to pay a heavy price.
And what is that price?
Slowed economic growth.
Unemployment.
A lot of people were out of work.
Some people lost their homes.
And this is when the left came up with the title for Reagan's economic policy, Reaganomics.
They haven't really done this to Trump.
We haven't heard Trumponomics or something to that effect.
But nevertheless, in 1982, this was, I would say, the doom year of the Reagan presidency.
In fact, it almost doomed the presidency itself.
You had Reagan, who was facing great political headwinds.
And by the way, this turned out to be a midterm year.
We sometimes hear today said that we've got to do well in the midterm.
We can't afford to lose our House and Senate majorities.
By the way, the House majority is a little more precarious for next year than the Senate majority.
It's unlikely we'll lose the Senate majority.
We could lose a seat in the Senate, but probably not more than that.
And I agree.
We don't want to lose the House majority.
But Reagan's view was that the country is so upside down that fixing the country is really what's important.
And Reagan was willing to take a beating, as he did, by the way, in the midterms.
Now, the media...
In a way, no surprise.
We're used to all this.
A classic example that I chose to illustrate the media was CBS TV, a documentary called People Like Us.
And what were they doing?
What they always do, which is they were finding sympathetic examples of people who had been really hurt by Reagan's policies.
They're ordinary people.
The left will never produce its usual parade of perverts, right?
They're not going to show some criminal.
They're not going to show some guy who...
They're going to show, by and large, a single mom.
And sure enough, an Ohio man with cerebral palsy had been dropped from the welfare rolls.
Take a look.
This is Reagan's so-called welfare reform.
A Wisconsin mother who was caring for a comatose daughter was forced by Medicaid regulations to move her into an institution.
Oh, look at mean Reagan.
A Hispanic woman whose welfare and health benefits were cut off and couldn't afford cancer treatment for her teenage son.
This is essentially journalism by horror stories.
And this is, as I say, a pattern.
If the left is dealing with racism, they will generally use the same recycled horror stories.
Hope is that people will not understand that showing anomalous things doesn't necessarily make a kind of pattern.
But since you don't know that, you think, oh, wow, this is really representative of what's going on throughout the country.
That's the sleight of hand that is being pulled here.
The Reagan people kind of protested the documentary, but to no avail.
And now, what's interesting to note is that you started having Republicans We're likely to see something similar with Trump if you have short-term pain, even if it is then followed by kind of long-term gain.
This is Kevin Phillips, who was kind of a Republican strategist, Today, the guy is very much against Trump.
He's close to being a never-Trumper.
But in Reagan's own days, he was kind of, I won't say becoming a never-Reagan guy, but he kind of turned on Reagan from the virtually right out the gate in the very first and second year.
The New York Times, the stench of failure hangs around Reagan's White House.
And the pressure was on Reagan to undo his policies, undo the tax policy, loosen economic policy, go in a different direction.
But Reagan said, no.
He said, I'm not doing it.
I'm not changing course.
Essentially, he said these policies are the response to things that have taken a long time to get us here, to make the mess, and we need a little bit of time to clean it up.
And in some ways, I think this is Trump's view also with tariffs.
Trump's view is it's taken us a long time to get into this destructive trade imbalance.
And I'm not going to back down, at least not in principle.
I might make prudential adjustments, which, by the way, Reagan, too, was willing to make.
But you see Reagan's coolness under pressure in an anecdote where Reagan was confronted after giving a speech by Sam Donaldson of ABC News.
And here is Sam Donaldson, Mr. President, in talking about the continuing recession tonight.
You have blamed the mistakes of the past.
You've blamed the Congress.
You've blamed the media.
Does any of the blame belong to you?
And Reagan goes, well, yes, because for many years I was a Democrat.
Classic Reagan.
He has this marvelous ability to engage in spontaneous repartee.
Notice this is not a prepared...
But this is Reagan thinking on his feet and very nimbly punching back.
And even Sam Donaldson was forced to kind of chuckle because he knew that Reagan kind of got him.
This was a time when the media, although hostile, was nevertheless, there was a little bit of kind of camaraderie between Reagan and even a guy like Sam Donaldson.
That has disappeared now in the Trump era.
Reagan's slogan during the recession of 1982, stay the course, stay the course.
And this was the theme of the midterms.
And notice that Stay the Course is not a denial that bad things are happening in the country, that the economy has essentially ground to a halt.
It isn't just growing slowly.
It's really not growing at all.
And unemployment is moving dramatically upward.
And this is the painful medicine being applied by Paul Volcker, but with Reagan's full support.
Stay the Course is essentially conveying, I know it's bad, but hang in there, because it's going to change.
It's kind of a message of hope.
It's also a message of resolution, because it implies, I'm not going to change course.
There's no other course.
I'm reminded now about Javier Millet in Argentina.
When Millet came in with this wide menu of policies, which included monetary restriction, similar to Reagan, efforts to ultimately ignite the economy, reduction of debt.
He was asked by a journalist, what is your plan B?
What if things don't go as you anticipated?
What else are you going to do?
And Millet basically said, there's no plan B. There's no other way to go.
The free market solution is the only solution.
That's what we're doing.
We're not backing down.
We're staying the course.
Now, I'd like to tell you that the American people were inspired by Reagan.
Three cheers for the Gipper.
We're going to hang with you, but not at all.
They did not do that.
According to the Gallup poll, Reagan's popularity dropped to 35%, low, lower than Trump's right now.
This was really the lowest for a president in the post-war era.
And even though some people have called Reagan the Teflon president, this was a tag applied to him at the very beginning by the left, he didn't seem all that kind of Teflony or invulnerable to attack.
The 1982 election was And, of course, the Democrats had a House majority already, but you can imagine the House majority became bigger, made it more difficult for Reagan to get things accomplished after that first midterm.
In the Senate, the GOP managed to hold its majority, 54 to 46. Partly the reason for this is that there were just a lot more Democratic seats that were up.
And so as a result, the Republican Party was able to hold its own.
But the Democrats did well and stayed in local races.
They picked up some seven additional governorships.
So this was not three cheers for the Gipper.
It was at most one cheer, which is to say not very much for Reagan.
And I conclude the chapter.
By saying that it looked like Reagan was heading to be a failed one-term president.
And then this brings me to Chapter 5, and Chapter 5 of the book is called They Don't Call It Reaganomics Anymore.
I'll just give you a little preview of Chapter 5 by going into the first paragraph, in which I make the point that, you know what?
Ideas matter.
This is kind of a conservative slogan.
Ideas have consequences.
Reagan was a man of ideas.
He came in with a lot of new policies.
And you can admire Reagan for his conviction, for being able to get these policies enacted and implemented.
But it remains to be seen if these policies were the right ones.
In other words, what's the point of staying the course through a recession if it's the wrong course and the recession goes on and on and on?
The point I'm making is that leaders are judged not just by how successfully did you get your programs enacted, but whether those policies actually worked.
What were the results of your policies?
Was Reagan correct?
To subordinate the problems of the deficit to other priorities, was he right to support this tough monetary policy?
And I'll simply close this segment and pick it up next week by noting that Reagan was right.
And in 1983, the year following Reagan's sort of difficult year of 82, You essentially saw the economy turn around.
It went into an explosive phase of economic growth.
Unemployment came down.
The stock market soared.
Inflation was completely in check.
In fact, it was so in check that we didn't really have inflation for the rest of the 1980s and for the 1990s.
You'd have to come into the 21st century, this century.
When inflation once again begins a problem, and it only really starts rearing its head in around 2008, 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crash when the Federal Reserve went into another orgy of money printing.
So Reagan's policies, and I'll give you the data on Monday.
Were, in fact, successful.
Staying the course worked.
And ultimately, I think the policies worked not just because Reagan was tough, Reagan was willing to hang with them, but the policies, in fact, were the right ones.
▲
Export Selection