Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 90 skewers Trump as a "proto-fascist" for authoritarianism and torture rhetoric, mocking his critics’ Hitler comparisons while defending Ted Cruz’s constitutionalism. Historian James Pearson frames America’s stagnation—2% GDP growth, $35T debt, and cultural collapse—as a pre-crisis phase like the 1930s, warning Trump’s loss could trigger Democratic overreach. Solutions? Deregulation and civil society revival—but Pearson cautions history repeats only in tragedy. Clavin ends with ReaganPrivacy.com’s anti-surveillance pitch and a defiant anthem, leaving the election’s stakes as existential. [Automatically generated summary]
As the weekend draws near and the apocalyptic shadow of a clavenless America darkens the political landscape, it's time to take a look at the week gone by and assess where we stand through the clarifying lens of our hysterical tears.
The important question to ask today is this.
If Donald Trump is Biff from Back to the Future and Bernie Sanders is Doc Brown after he returned from the 1930s as a crazed socialist, is it possible we can induce Marty McFly to run for president in his previous role as Alex Keaton, the conservative from Family Ties?
Okay, possibly that's not the important question to ask today.
Possibly that's not even a question we have to ask at all.
But how about this one?
Since Clint Eastwood has endorsed Donald Trump and Chuck Norris has endorsed Ted Cruz, shouldn't the entire election be decided through a cage match between Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Or perhaps we should ask, if Donald Trump is elected president, should Ben Higgins give the rose to Hillary Clinton on The Bachelor?
Maybe the real question is, have I fallen into my television set?
And if so, could someone cut a hole in the screen and let me back into reality, where statesmen like ladies and gentlemen run for office while boorish real estate developers build garish casinos and women like Hillary Clinton spend their time rattling a tin cup against the bars of their cell and screaming, you lousy screw, when I get out of here, I'll make you wish you'd never been born.
Or maybe that's not reality.
Maybe this is reality right now and what I thought was reality is just an old television show called America.
I hope this has cleared things up.
Trigger war.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
The most depressing monologue ever.
I'm too depressed to go on, folks.
We'll just sit here and stare for a while.
All right, we have to talk about our sponsors first, ReaganPrivacy.com, who are here, they are here to protect your privacy from big tech companies that are scanning your emails so they can target you with advertisements you don't want or from the government, which is just collecting everything it can get from your social security number to your socks.
So take back your privacy by getting a special, your own email at Reagan.com.
It'll be your name at Reagan.com, your private email address, and not only will you be able to proudly share President Reagan's name with every email you send to your liberal brother-in-law, but you'll also know that your emails will never be scanned or shared with third parties.
So go to RavenReaganPrivacy.com right now and secure your personal private email address.
And if you do it right now, you get two months free.
Reaganprivacy.com.
All right.
So yesterday, not tomorrow, yesterday, Shapiro and Jeremy Boring, the God-King of the Daily Wire, he's our managing editor, are giving me a hard time.
And they said the worst thing about when Donald Trump is president and we're all put in gulags for opposing him, the worst thing is going to be having to listen to me tell them that things are not as bad as they seem.
And I take exception to that.
But maybe they have a point.
I don't know.
See, they think I'm an optimist, but it's just not true.
I'm just a scrappy little New Yorker.
I'm not one of these Californians.
It rains.
Oh, we're all going to drown.
Oh, the Republic is falling.
Boo-hoo.
I just like spit in your eye.
But last night, I finished reading this really, really interesting book called Shattered Consensus, The Rise and Decline of America's Post-War Political Order by James Pearson.
And James Pearson is going to be with us on the show today because the book, I felt, really does a lot to put the present moment in perspective.
And his outlook, I wouldn't call his outlook sunny, but I would also say it's not despairing.
It is filled with hope for the future, even though he sees the problems up ahead.
So he'll be on in a little while.
Let's talk first about what's going on in the news.
I'm not even going to go into the Democrat debate.
The thing that's really interesting to me right now is the wars among the pundits.
Donald Trump has not only created this war in the political class, also media pundits are at war and people are starting to blame each other for who they support and who they don't support and whether they support Trump and whether they don't support Trump.
And I've been very clear.
My feeling about Trump is I think Trump is a proto-fascist who does not have conservative values, the conservative values I'm looking for in a candidate.
Never mind that he's vulgar, never mind that he's mean, never mind that he's a bully.
I think all those things speak to character and are really, really important.
But my basic real fear and objection about him is that he's a proto-fascist.
What I mean by that, I use that word proto-fascist.
Proto- means first or earliest.
And it's used to say that somebody, he's not a fascist.
He just has the makings of a fascist.
He has those first stirrings of a fascist.
And we saw, you know, Ted Cruz was complaining about this the other day.
I mean, Cruz is obviously getting frustrated that Trump has sort of stolen his strategy for winning the presidential election and stolen it with personality and style rather than substance.
And Cruz, obviously, who's a man of substance, a man of the Constitution, he's getting a little frustrated.
So this is what he said the other day.
No political candidate is going to make America great again.
It's not going to be Donald Trump.
It's not going to be me.
It's not going to be any candidate.
The only power strong enough to restore this nation is we, the people.
It is not about us.
It is about the people.
And so the idea that you would take this loyalty oath, you know what?
I raise my hand and I take an oath to you, to the people.
That's who's working for whom.
And the idea that a candidate running for office wants the people to pledge loyalty to him like subjects to a king.
Well, we've had seven years of a president who thinks he's an emperor.
And I've got to say, the only hand raising I'm interested in is on January 20th, 2017, when I hope to raise my right hand and have my left hand sitting on the Bible, when I make a promise, a pledge to every American to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.
Well, you know, and that is substance.
I feel bad for the guy.
He's obviously not feeling well, and he looks so pale.
He looks like the vampire from the Munsters, remember, with the white pancake makeup.
He does.
But, you know, he is talking about substance.
You know, people are starting to, as I say, the media is starting to divvy upsides.
And Ann Coulter, for instance, wrote a very funny piece.
She has been with Trump from the beginning because she's very concerned about the immigration thing, and she's put that above all else.
And she wrote a very funny piece saying that pretty soon every conservative pundit who doesn't like Trump is going to write the same column.
And the column is going to go like this.
Watching the candidacy of Donald Trump, I am continually struck by his resemblance to a man who came to power in a far-off land nearly 85 years ago, a historical epoch that I had naively hoped was well buried in the past.
This is Ann imitating conservative pundits, right?
Consider the following.
Adolf Hitler held gigantic rallies where he inspired millions with rousing speeches.
Donald Trump holds gigantic rallies where he inspires millions with rousing speeches.
Adolf Hitler talked about making his country great again.
Donald Trump talks about making his country great again.
Adolf Hitler promised military victories.
Donald Trump promises military victories.
Adolf Hitler had a loyal and overweight henchman, Hermann Gehring.
Donald Trump has a loyal and overweight henchman, Chris Christie.
And is a terrific writer.
But of course, of course, I am seeing that.
Brett Stevens wrote that column yesterday in the Wall Street Journal.
It's the 1930s all over again.
And I don't have that sense of panic either.
I don't believe we're going to the gulag, although I won't go because I'm turning Shapiro in.
That's all I'm getting out of it.
It was him.
He said it.
However, the other day, I think it was two days ago, Michelle Fields, who I know and a really lovely reporter, was filling in for a reporter at Breitbart.com.
Here's Lloyd Grove, the Daily Beast, describing what happened.
Fields, whose usual beat is Senator Ted Cruz, was subbing for Breitbart's flu-suffering Trump reporter, Alex Swawyer, at the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, during the candidates' election night rally press conference.
Trump had just racked up impressive victories.
At the end of the night, as Trump and his entourage, including a Secret Service detail, slowly made their way toward the exit, the real estate mogul was taking questions from journalists representing CNN, NBC News, and other outlets.
Fields was walking next to Trump on his right when she pointed her recording device at him and asked if he still disagrees, as he said last December, with late Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia's attacks on affirmative action.
Before Trump could answer, Leewandowski, this is Corey Lewandowski, his campaign manager, Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, grabbed Fields from behind, taking hold of her left forearm and yanking her down toward the ground like a ragdoll, as a witness told the Daily Beast.
Fields, who on Wednesday was sporting a purple bruise as a result of the encounter, was shocked and shaken, barely managing to keep her footing as Lee Wandowski and the Trump scrum headed out the doors, according to colleagues.
Now, Leewandowski's explanation to Breitbart, okay, this is one of the most disturbing things about this, besides roughing up this woman who's about, you know, she's a very slender, easily thrown-down person.
Their explanation was that he had never met Fields before.
He didn't recognize her as a Breitbart reporter and instead mistook her for an adversarial member of the mainstream media.
Guess what?
That's not an excuse.
That is not an excuse.
And Breitbart's statement, kind of weakly, Breitbart.com's statement weakly demanding an apology was shameful.
I mean, they just, that's not what you do.
You know, Cheryl Atkinson, who was the reporter who had to quit CBS because they wouldn't let her report on scandals in the Obama administration, she has a thing called the substitution game, where she substitutes, she says they play it soft with Democrats in the news media, as we all know.
And so she says, let's substitute what would happen if it was George W. Bush who used the IRS to attack his enemies instead of Obama.
How would CBS cover that?
Well, we know, we know.
I mean, you know, the New York Times would have published one of those big black books, you know, the road to tyranny, you know, like they did after the kerfuffle at Abu Ghraib, you know, the road to torture.
They had this big thing.
It was like a coffee table.
It wasn't a coffee table book.
It was like a coffee table, you know, about Abu Ghraib and the people who'd been misused there.
Like it was this big, like it was American policy to abuse these guys.
So let's play the substitution game this way, too.
What if Hillary Clinton's guy?
What if Obama's guy?
What if Obama's guy threw down a female reporter or any reporter as they're marching because they thought, oh, because we thought he was an adversary.
We thought he was an adversarial reporter.
You know, we didn't realize it was a friendly reporter.
And when we see an adversarial reporter, we kick her to the curb, you know?
I mean, that's what I mean by a proto-fascist.
Trump is not a fascist because he's not an actual fascist because he doesn't have a fascist philosophy.
But when he goes on a debate stage and he says, you know, the military will torture people if I tell them to, even if it's not the law, because I'll tell them to and I'll be president, you know, that's proto-fascism.
That's an instinct for fascism that is not something we need in this country.
Proto-Fascism Instincts00:04:52
And I just want to remind you, you know, that I'm not saying that the people who support him are supporting him for ratings.
Trump has great ratings.
He is entertaining TV.
And I'm not saying the people who support him or even who go soft on him are just doing it for ratings.
But I will say that the people who come out against him are risking their ratings.
And that's guys like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro who have taken the chance of saying, you know, this is bad news for America.
They are the ones who are risking something, risking their careers, risking their audience.
And just remember it, because Trump, it will come out what Trump is in the long run.
And then you're going to remember who left the lights on.
You know, is it Motel 6 that says we'll leave the, well, this is Motel 1776, okay?
Where these guys, guys like Shapiro and Beck and Mark Levin, they're leaving the lights on for you.
So you remember when it's time to come home from the excitement of a guy who beats up reporters and calls for hecklers to be beaten up, they're the ones who stood tall and actually took a risk to say the right thing.
All right, have we got our guest?
Have we got Pearson on the line?
Almost.
Almost.
Okay.
Well, let's go back and do our sponsor again so we have that out of the way, because I want to remind you that your privacy is under attack.
You've got the big tech companies who are scanning your emails, which I find so incredibly creepy.
And then the ad, you know, you mention something in your email and the ads show up on your screen whether you want them or not.
The government obviously always wants to is doing that data scanning where they collect all the data and they say, oh, but we would never abuse it.
And if you believe that, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn, I'm going to sell you next.
But you can take back your privacy by getting an email address at Reagan.com.
You'll get your name, Joe Schmoe, unless your name happens to be something else.
We're very flexible.
But if your name is Joe Schmo, you'll get Joe Schmo at Reagan.com.
That will be your private email address.
And you will not only be able to have Reagan's name in every one of your emails, which will drive your friends insane, but you can also know that these emails will never be scanned and the information never shared with third parties.
So go to ReaganPrivacy.com, ReaganPrivacy.com, and secure your personal private email address.
And you can get two bonus months free if you do it right now, ReaganPrivacy.com.
How are we doing?
One minute.
One minute.
All right, well, let me talk a little bit about this book.
And we'll hopefully have James Pearson here on the line in a moment.
He's online, but they're lightning.
They're lightning.
Okay.
The book is called Shattered Consensus, The Rise and Decline of America's Post-War Political Order.
And James Pearson is president of the William E. Simon Foundation and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
That's where my pals are at City Journal, where I am a traveling editor or something.
I can't remember what they call me, but I do contribute to City Journal from time to time.
James Pearson is the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, How the Kennedy Assassination Shattered American Liberalism.
And there's some excellent, excellent essays about the Kennedy assassination and the way it was covered in this book, In Shattered Consensus.
His essays on politics and culture have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Criterion, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and The American Spectator.
And there is a central theory in this, a central thesis in this book about the way consensuses fall apart.
It also contains some sensational, really sensational essays on the university, how the university got to be the kind of left-wing brainwashing factory it is today, and on the Kennedy assassination, and on where the country is going.
Can we bring one second?
Okay.
I'm vamping a little bit, but all right.
There he is.
Oh, you are a little bit in the dark, but that's all right.
You look like you're escaping from somebody who's trying to assassinate you.
I hope that's not true.
Can you hear me okay?
I can hear you.
Let me turn a light on.
You might see me better.
I did.
Oh, much better.
Yes, that is better.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it, Andrew.
I finished the book last night.
I have to congratulate you.
I think it is really difficult to write a book that is this knowledgeable, scholarly is the word I would use, but it reads so easily and simply and very clear and just a rare thing.
And it's a joy.
Period of Economic Crisis00:13:08
It's a joy to read.
And it really gave me a good perspective on the stuff that's going on now.
And I hope you'll kind of share some of that with the audience a little bit.
Thank you.
Explain, first of all, the shattered consensus.
You say that basically this is the fourth time this has happened.
So explain a little bit about what that is, how it's happened three times before, and what exactly it means when a consensus shatters.
Well, America, as I write in the book, seems to resolve its deepest problems in relatively brief periods of upheaval and reform.
I identify three such periods, the Jeffersonian period surrounding the election of 1800, following the battle with Alexander Hamilton and the American Revolution.
The 1850s and 1860s, when we got fought over slavery and territorial expansion.
And then again in the 1930s and 1940s when we dealt with Depression and World War.
And out of each of these periods, we developed a dominating party, which organized a new consensus in America to take us forward into a new era of expansion and development.
Following the Jeffersonian election, America expanded rapidly across the country.
By 1850, we were a continental republic.
Of course, the economic system at that time was based upon the export of cotton and slavery.
We know it happened in the 1860s.
In the following period, it was an industrial period dominated by the Republican Party with its base in the North.
Previous system, the base was in the South.
And we industrialized the country in that period.
The collapse in the 1930s and the war in the 1940s led to an era of Democratic Party domination, building out the welfare state, a new role for government.
In 1930, federal government spent about 2% of GDP.
By 1945, it was spending about well over a quarter of GDP, and it pretty much settled into 20, 25% of GDP through the entire post-war period.
Of course, that led to a general consensus in the country in the 1950s, somewhat over the role of government, somewhat over the role of the United States and international system, somewhat over the role over the influence of religion and family and our culture.
So I suggest that a lot of this has broken down in the last 20 years or so.
We've gone through a period of economic upheaval, globalization, the collapse of some of our big corporations, the auto industry, the steel industry, the rise of technology, computers, internet, greater individualism in our culture.
breakdown of family, breakdown of religion.
A lot of these things have been developing side by side in America.
On top of this, we have slowing economic growth.
The last 15 years, roughly 2% annual GDP growth.
The post-war average from 1950 to 2000 was over 3%.
That's one of the things that's irritating those voters out there who are going for Donald Trump.
On top of that, we have a lot of debt in the system.
We made a lot of pledges to retirees and pensioners and students.
That's going to be difficult to pay.
So my thought is that we are going to have to rebuild our political and economic system.
But we'll probably have to go through a period of difficulty before we're able to do that.
That was actually my next question, that in each of these cases, what you describe is this kind of, you know, terrible upheaval, especially the Civil War, but certainly the Depression and the World War.
I mean, these are awful upheavals, but out of that comes a stronger America, really, an America that's now ready for a new era.
Are you, you're not saying that we're in that crisis yet, are you?
No, I think we're stumbling toward it.
I think that the next recession or stock market crash that we have will send the United States into a significant crisis in terms of paying debt and meeting pledges governments have made.
So, you know, we're not there yet.
Our central bank has kept the economy afloat at interest rates low in an effort to try to steer us through this crisis that began in 2008.
We'll see how long that lasts.
But we have a demographic issue.
The baby boomers are retiring.
The population is aging.
As many people are leaving the workforce every year, turning 65, as are entering it at age 22.
That's a factor that's dragging on the economy.
So I think all of these things over the next decade are going to push us into a crisis of sorts.
There's no guarantee we'll come out of it.
There's no guarantee we'd solve the Civil War.
No guarantee we would come out of the Depression in the way that we did.
We managed to do it.
That's a basis for some hope, but there are no guarantees.
We could go through an extended period of stalemate in America.
Well, first of all, let me just remind people we're talking about the book Shattered Consensus, The Rise and Decline of America's Post-War Political Order by James Pearson.
It really covers a lot of ground, but does it in a very clear, really dynamic way, just a really good read.
And I recommend it because it'll give you a lot of, it'll calm your hysteria as you're looking at the political field today to remember that we've gone through this stuff before.
Let me ask you, before we talk about the future, though, let me ask you when you're looking, I'm looking at this political race right now.
And I look at Donald Trump, and I have to tell you, I actually had hair when this election began.
And it's just, I look at Donald Trump, and I just am appalled.
I mean, I just think this is not a character I've seen on the American political landscape before.
I know such characters do pop up from time to time, but I haven't seen one before.
And then I look at the other side, and I see basically what to me is a felon running against a communist.
And I have to struggle sometimes not to despair.
What do you see when you look at this current election cycle?
Well, you're certainly correct in saying we've never seen a figure like Donald Trump before.
It is interesting in the sense that both Trump and Sanders are attacking free trade.
That's been a bipartisan idea that's united both parties, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, through this past 30 years.
Support for free trade seems to be eroding.
It is surprising that a figure who seems prepared to say anything like Donald Trump has gotten to the place where he is.
It looks to me like he will win the Republican nomination.
That's not certain.
I think the only way that he will be stopped is at an open convention.
And there, I think the thought is that he will come up just short of the 50% he needs, and the other 50% at the convention will deny him the nomination and look elsewhere.
I think that's a distinct possibility.
And of course, if he did win the nomination, we don't know what happened in the general election.
We could get a wipeout like 1964, Cold War, and which would extend all the way down the ticket.
The Democrats would sweep into the Congress, take the Senate and the House, and they would then be in a position to enact the entirety of their agenda, as happened in 1965 with Lyndon Johnson.
And these are things we're still wrestling with.
So, you know, I think Donald Trump has taken a deck of cards and thrown it to the four winds.
We don't know where it's going to land.
He could be stronger than we think or weaker than we think.
We've not had a character like this on the national scene.
But that would be the one thing that I would fear.
And I would fear that if that happened, that would make things worse.
So your fear is that Trump will be destroyed in the election, basically.
He'll lose and take the ticket with him.
The Democrats will enact their agenda.
They'll spend more.
They'll tax more.
And they'll make our situation worse than it otherwise would have been.
So you seem to foresee, in any case, some kind of financial crisis coming up, but we obviously can't pay for our entitlements.
As you say, the baby boomers are retiring en masse, and not enough people are coming into the workforce to support all those entitlements and the public pensions and all that.
When you look at that crisis, when you look into the future beyond the smoke and dust of that crisis, what do you see?
How do you envision a stronger America coming out of that?
What would that look like?
Well, I think the demographic crisis is a 15 to 20 year situation.
By the year 2030, we'll be through the most of it.
So we'll have some difficulty over the next 10, 12 years in dealing with it.
What I would hope is that we can find a way to restore economic growth in this country.
No one knows exactly how to do that.
Ronald Reagan did it by a mix of deregulation and tax cutting.
There's not a lot of room to cut taxes.
We've done that tax cutting.
So that option isn't there for us as it was before.
Maybe deregulation.
But I would like to see America rebuild its civil society.
Those institutions, church, family, community, local government, civic associations, they're badly frayed by the events of the last 20, 30 years.
And that's feeding into the discontent.
In the Great Depression, when we had all that economic suffering, people were religious.
A lot of them lived on farms.
They had families to fall back on.
They were not used to the level of affluence we're used to today.
We don't have those things to fall back on today if we should go through a period of difficulty.
We're used to affluence.
Young people today have never been through, except for 2008, a terrible recession.
Haven't even been through an extended bear market in stocks.
Stocks have rocketed straight north since the early 1980s.
So I would fear that we're not prepared for that.
And that if ever we do come out of this next crisis, that it will be by rebuilding our civil society and restoring economic growth.
Okay.
So I'm running out of time, but let me just ask you one last question.
When you wake up in the morning and read the newspaper, do you get a stomachache or do you think, no, we're going to be okay?
I mean, a lot of people here are talking about the fall of the Republic.
So I'm asking how you feel about it.
You know, it's a glass half full, half empty sort of thing.
Look, America's a big country, 330 million people.
A great reservoir of natural resources, an enterprising people, a free people.
Look at all the great companies that we have out there in America, far more than any other country.
So we're better positioned to face the future than any other nation state out there.
And our economic and political system is sufficiently flexible to address these problems.
The thing is that America never seems to address its problems preemptively.
It's the way our political system is set up.
We've known for a long time that the baby boomers are going to retire.
We've known that since the 1950s.
But we never made any preparation for it, and we're still not making preparations for it.
So we seem to have to wait for crises to occur before we address our deepest problems.
I suggest that I think that'll happen again.
Yeah, yeah.
I agree.
We always seem to be overcorrecting.
Shattered Consensus is the book by James Pearson, The Rise and Decline of America's Post-War Political Order.
I ripped through it.
I just thought it was terrific.
James Pearson, thank you very much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Andrew, appreciate it very much.
Thank you.
All right, bye-bye.
We will talk about this some more next week when we come back.
I have some ideas that I'd like to put forward because it always seems to me that it's a good thing to know when you're fighting against something what you're fighting for.
Debating Deep Problems00:01:22
So let me end with stuff I like.
There is a band, a band, a duet, a duo, whatever, that came about in the 90s in England.
They weren't a one-hit wonder.
They were like a one-album wonder.
They put out an album called Ocean Drive that had like five hits off.
It sold millions of copies in the UK, which is basically every single person in the UK had to buy it for them to do that.
They were called the Lighthouse Family.
They are kind of a mix of easy listening and folk rock, I would say.
So let's take a listen to the Lighthouse family as we leave.
The song is called Free.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin show, Keep the Country Together While I'm Gone.
And I'll be back on Monday to show you the way.
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.
I wish I could break all the chains holding me.
I wish I could say all the things that I should say.
Say them loud, say them clear for the whole wide world here.