Ep. 118’s Andrew Clavin satirizes the 2016 election as a dystopian choice between Hillary Clinton’s scandals (e.g., Gussifer’s email leaks) and Trump’s authoritarian leanings—tariffs, a Muslim ban, and Scalia-style Supreme Court picks—while Henry Olson blames the GOP’s ideological purity for alienating working-class voters. Olson warns Trump’s polarizing tactics could backfire unless conservatives pivot to economic nationalism, but a third-party split risks handing Clinton victory. The episode ends with a grim Coward-esque prediction: America’s future hinges on whether the right can escape its own dogma—or face collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the excitement of the Republican primaries is over, and it sort of feels like that day in January when the holidays end and you finally pack up the ornaments for another year and throw away the Christmas tree.
Except instead of a Christmas tree, it's democracy, and instead of another year, it's more like a thousand years of darkness.
Now is the time for thoughtful people to look back over the last few months and ask themselves, what happened?
Who can we blame for it?
What punishment could possibly be horrible enough for them?
And how would they look covered in lime?
Of course, I don't want to seem to look down on or disrespect the berserk simean nincum poops who voted for Donald Trump.
I don't want to seem like one of those elite establishment types who get all mired in concepts like reality or constitutional governance or honesty or decency or civilized behavior or decency or any of the other brie cheese and chardonnay, hoity-toity ideas that lift us above the level of reptiles.
Because Donald Trump is going to make America great again, if by America you mean dreamland and by great you mean a crapfest.
And if you don't want to be left standing out in the cold with nothing to keep you company but your principles and your humanity and a nice glass of Chardonnay, it's time to come to terms with Trump's nomination and decide on a response.
Here are a few options along with their pros and cons.
Option one, you could vote for Hillary Clinton, plunging America into a nightmare of political hackery and misguided leftist policy that will ravage our economy and send the world spiraling into chaos.
Pro, it would give us a sense of seamless continuity with the last seven years.
Cons, the apocalypse and her screechy voice.
Option two, you could refuse to vote and let Hillary get elected by default.
Pro, you could sleep at night knowing you weren't to blame for the destruction of the country.
Con, you'd probably have to wake up sometime.
Three, you could set your misgivings aside and vote for Donald Trump.
Pro, you would avert Hillary's gutting of the Constitution and a catastrophic mishandling of world events.
Con, you would usher in Trump's gutting of the Constitution and catastrophic mishandling of world events.
Now when I'm faced with tough choices like this, I have a little trick I like to use to help me make up my mind.
First, I take three playing cards, say an ace, a king, and a queen, and I set them on a table in a little pile.
Then I douse them in lighter fluid and set them on fire.
Then I press my face into the blaze until my flesh bursts into flame.
I still don't know what to do, but at least now I've been reduced to a smoldering pile of ash.
So that's actually an improvement.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clayman, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
Would you stop laughing at my own jokes?
Oh, that's me laughing at my own jokes.
I'm sorry.
All right, here we are.
We've got the great Henry Olson coming on to help us assess what the hell just happened to our country.
He's a terrific writer at the National Review and many other places, observes election things.
He's predicted so much that's come down the pike, so I wanted to get his take on what may be coming down on the pike.
And, you know, we're going to take our time deciding what our response should be.
I mean, I feel that we at least have until the apocalypse, which was last Tuesday.
So I guess that's not so good.
Meanwhile, you know, please subscribe.
You get to watch us as we make up our minds, as we ponder on events.
You won't just listen.
You can watch us.
You can also send in questions.
And next Wednesday, we'll have a mailbag and answer some of your questions.
And of course, we'll be answering the two real big mysteries.
What was John Kasich thinking?
And when's the next boat leave for New Zealand?
All right, so it's the day after, the day after Donald Trump, for certain, claimed the nomination, the Republican nomination for the presidency.
Our heads reel, and yet we ask ourselves the big question that everybody's asking is: can Donald Trump unify the party he just destroyed completely?
And Hillary Clinton, have to give her credit, put out a great ad yesterday, an ad about can Trump unify the party.
This is the ad, not the cut of Hillary.
Let's take a look at this ad she put out.
I am a unifier.
We're going to be a unified party.
He is a conhart.
A phony.
Donald Trump is the know-nothing candidate.
Donald is a bully.
This is an individual who mocked a disabled reporter.
Ah, I don't remember.
Who attributed a reporter's questions to her menstrual cycle.
Blood coming out of her whatever.
The most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency.
The man who seems to only feel big when he's trying to make other people look small.
Don't worry about it a little, Margo.
Gentlemen.
The man is utterly a bully.
The sign of deep insecurity and weakness.
The bullying, the greed, the showing off.
I'm really rich.
The misogyny.
The absurd third grade theatrics.
Count to 10, Donald.
Count to 10.
He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious big.
A narcissist at a level I don't think this country's ever seen.
He would not be the commander-in-chief we need to keep our country safe.
This guy is so unfit to be commander-in-chief.
His domestic policies would lead to recession.
His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe.
I bring people together.
Everybody loves me.
He's got, he needs therapy.
That's a great ad.
It's all the people.
If you weren't watching, if you haven't subscribed yet and couldn't see it, it's all the leaders of the Republican Party just trashing Trump completely.
And fair enough, because the funny thing, of course, is that a lot of those people in the next couple of weeks are suddenly going to, you know, the veil is going to fall, the scales are going to fall from their eyes, and suddenly they're going to see that if they want to win, they're going to have to support Trump and they're going to change their tune.
Not here.
We don't know what we're going to do in terms of voting, but we know this man is unfit for office.
The only thing is, is the competition is worse.
We also just don't know what's going to happen yet.
I feel that there's more stuff to come.
Trump himself says he doesn't want everybody on board.
He was asked earlier in the day yesterday whether he was going to take any outside funding, and he talked about the unity of the party.
This is what he said.
I do love self-funding, and I don't want anything for myself, but we do need money for the party.
The party will come together.
I don't think it's imperative that the entire party come together.
I don't want everybody.
I don't even want certain people that were extraordinarily nasty.
Let them go their own way.
Let them wait eight years or let them wait 16 years or whatever because I think we're going to have a great success against probably Hillary because the system is totally rigged against Bernie.
I've been totally rigged against him.
So probably we're going to have Hillary.
So if you insulted him personally, no, it's always personal with the Donald.
You know, he said, never mind the country, never mind the Constitution, never mind principles, never mind anything.
He says, it's just if you insulted Donald Trump, forget it.
Forget the whole thing.
And so the point about self-funding, by the way, totally gone.
He's now going to accept, here's the Wall Street Journal, facing a prospective tab of more than $1 billion to finance a general election run for the White House.
Donald Trump reversed course Wednesday and said he would actively raise money to ensure his campaign has the resources to compete with Hillary Clinton's fundraising juggernaut.
His campaign also is beginning to work with the Republican National Committee to set up a joint fundraising committee after his two rivals, Cruz and Kasich, dropped out in the wake of Mr. Trump's resounding Indiana win on Tuesday.
I'll be putting up money, but won't be completely self-funding, Mr. Trump said.
He's going to create, he says, a world-class finance organization.
The campaign will tap his expansive personal Rolodex in a new bank.
So the thing is, you know, this is all through the primaries.
He was saying, I'm self-funding.
All these other guys are bought and paid for.
And I kept saying, you know, Donald Trump has been buying and paying for politicians for years, and all he wants is to be on the other side of that equation.
You know, why am I?
It's like the end of the mafia, the godfather.
Remember the end of the godfather where Corleone says to his son, you know, I'm tired of being on the string with these politicians.
I wanted you to be the senator.
I wanted you to be Senator Corleone.
Well, here he is.
And the Times, the New York Times, a former newspaper, says that Trump is now reaching out quietly to the establishment, which, of course, he's got to do.
And, you know, it's not entirely fair.
Some people have said, oh, Trump is the establishment, but that's not entirely fair.
He violates every principle that we thought was a Republican principle.
You know, he violates principles of entitlement reform, small government, constitutional governments, of free trade.
He violates that.
He's less of a hawk than the Republican Party has basically been.
But now, according to the Times, Donald Trump is turning his attention to the general election and has begun quietly reaching out to key elements of the Republican establishment as he seeks to unite the party behind his candidacy before his anticipated battle against Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Trump, who is expected to run on a non-ideological platform of his own design, that's nice New York Timesian subtlety.
I like that, a non-ideological platform of his own design, is trying to reassure party officials that he understands there are certain norms even he needs to follow, like the norm from cheers.
I don't know what norm they think Donald Trump is going to follow, but he says he's going to reassure them that he's going to follow certain norms and that he is capable of producing an organization and infrastructure that can sustain a costly general election campaign.
One interesting thing, you know, I've been asked going around asking people, the question that I keep asking people is, are we responsible for the results of a non-vote?
When we have two candidates, Trump and Clinton, who are not fit for office, you know, a lot of people are saying quite fairly, I'm just going to vote down ticket, I'm not going to vote for the presidency.
And of course, a lot of other people, especially the people on the Trump train, are saying, well, then you're just essentially voting for Hillary Clinton.
And I've asked people, you know, how do you feel about that?
What does your conscience say to you about not voting at all if it means a Hillary, if it might mean a Hillary victory?
And is there anything, I asked a friend yesterday, is there anything that would make you vote for Donald Trump that would decide you?
And my friend said, and this has now become a meme, I didn't realize this, this is now kind of getting passed around, if he appointed a cabinet before he was elected, which would be pretty strange, but if he appointed a cabinet and it was a cabinet full of serious conservative people.
So in other words, if he had Rudy Giuliani as Attorney General, that would be very hopeful.
If he had, you know, Louis the Chiv Falcone, who helped him put up a building in lower Manhattan, you know, this is my friend Louis de Chev, he's going to be the Attorney General.
I thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm going to be a great attorney general.
None of this RICO stuff is going to be happening anymore.
Believe me, believe me.
But frankly, no more RICO, believe me.
If that happens, then I'll get a little nervous.
But who knows?
He might do it.
The Times, the New York Times, interviewed Trump about what the start of a Trump presidency would look like.
And Trump made a lot of noise, conservative-sounding noise, mostly, which was convincing enough so that the Trump took it to the Trump.
The Times took it off the front page.
It was on the front page of my little app, but when I looked at the paper, it wasn't there.
Shortly after the November 8th election, President-elect Trump and his vice president, most likely a governor or member of Congress, would begin interviewing candidates for the open Supreme Court seat and quickly settle on a nominee in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia.
This is Trump talking to the New York Times very recently about what the start of his presidency would look like.
He would start, quote, building a government based on relationships, perhaps inviting the Republican leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to escape the chilly Washington fall and schmooze at Mar-a-Lago over golf and two-pound lobsters.
That would be a big thrill for Ryan.
They'll sell him anything for that.
On Inauguration Day, he would go to a beautiful gallaball or two.
And by the end of his first 100 days, as the nation's 45th leader, oh, I'm sorry, he would, after the beautiful Galabal, he would focus mostly on rescinding Obama executive orders on immigration, and he would call up corporate executives and threaten punitive measures if they shift jobs out of the United States.
I'm not sure if that would be like assassination or torture or what, I guess, tariffs, I suppose.
By the end of his first 100 days as the nation's 45th leader, the wall with Mexico would be designed, the immigration ban on Muslims would be in place, the audit of the Federal Reserve would be underway, and plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act would be in motion.
So Trump says, I know people aren't sure right now what a President Trump will be like, he says, but things will be fine.
Loose Cannon Threats00:03:10
I'm not running for president to make things unstable for the country.
So he's reaching out to the people who look at him and panic, and he's trying to say things are just going to be just the way I said they are.
And the only thing in that list that kind of got my dander up was the idea that he's going to threaten American business leaders, that if they leave the country, he's going to take punitive measures.
I assume those punitive measures are going to be tariffs.
That seems to me a recipe for driving up prices and causing, I mean, businesses are powerful.
They are where, remember, you can have businesses without a government.
You can't have a government without businesses.
You can't have a government.
Government makes no money.
The money flows into the government from the people who are actually making money.
So you've got to have those businesses.
When Barack Obama said, you know, if you built a business, you didn't build that.
The fact is, if you're the president, you didn't build that.
If you're in government, you didn't build that.
We build the government.
But businesses are built by individuals and by the companies and by their workers.
So that makes no sense to me.
But other things, they sounded fine.
So that's where he's reaching out.
And of course, the great argument for Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton.
Hillary is now forming her general election strategy, and she put forward, she gave her, how she's going to present herself as the wise old hand against the loose cannon, a term she uses maybe five times in this one-minute statement.
I've seen the presidency up close from two different perspectives, and I think I know what it takes.
And I don't think we can take a risk on a loose cannon like Donald Trump running our country.
You know, Donald Trump has said it's okay for other countries to get nuclear weapons.
I think that's just downright dangerous.
He has said wages are too high.
I think we need to have a raise for the American people, raise the minimum wage, get wages back going up.
I think when he says women should be punished for having abortions, that is, you know, just beyond anything that I can imagine.
I think most women can imagine.
He did walk that back.
Well, he's a loose cannon.
I mean, he's somebody who has said so many things, and I'm sure he'll be scrambling and his advisors will be scrambling.
But he's already said all of these things.
He says climate change is a Chinese hoax, and I think it's real, and we've got to pull the world together to deal with it.
So you can go down a long list, some of which he's tried to bob and weave a little bit, but I think it's a risk.
I think he is a loose cannon, and loose cannons tend to misfire.
So while she was saying that the Romanian hacker Gussifer was in her pocket stealing her emails, Gussifer now says he read all her emails and hacked in.
It was easy.
All he had to do was just find her password, and he was in.
You know, we're in this situation where the best argument for Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton, and the best argument for Hillary Clinton is Donald Trump.
So let us, it's a confusing situation.
Let us bring on our guest, Henry Olson.
Unfortunately, we couldn't get him on video.
We're going to have him on the phone.
So, if you're watching and it seems like he's not moving around much, that's because that's a still picture.
Henry Olson is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Four Faces of Republican Voters00:15:12
Prior to that, he was a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, a vice president with my friends the Manhattan Institute, and president of the Commonwealth Foundation.
What he is, he's an election analyst and a political essayist.
And what he does is he studies conservative politics.
He looks at election returns and poll data, try to understand why people vote the way they do, and tries to teach thinkers, conservative politicians, and thinkers how they can best advance their ideas in the climate they face.
He is the author of Four Faces of the Republican Party.
This is one of his interesting theories that we're going to talk about: Four Faces of the Republican Party, which is published by Palgrave, co-authored with Dante Scala, and it's available.
You can get it as an e-book or a hard copy, Four Faces of the Republican Party.
Are you there, Henry?
I am.
How are you doing, Andrew?
I am good.
How are you?
I'm trying to recover from the apocalypse that consumed my party.
You know, it's quite something, and I've been reading you a long time.
And you have been, I mean, you must feel like the boy Cassandra at this point because you have been screaming for a long time that the Republican Party was not paying attention to the people it should be paying attention to.
Is that a fair way to put it?
That is a fair way to put it.
And I do feel like Cassandra, that had the Republican Party done more to talk with and understand these voters, it would not be facing the impending nomination of Donald Trump.
So who were they?
Who were the voters they ignored, and what did they have to say to them?
The voters they've been ignoring are people who tend to be downscale economically compared to the people who are here in Washington.
They tend to be people who didn't graduate from a four-year college.
They tend to be middle-income or more or less.
And these are people who are under more threat economically and whose values are in disrepute by the elites in this country.
And they want somebody who says, Look, you're not collateral damage on the pursuit to a global economy.
You're American citizens, too.
And we're going to make government work in your interest, and we're not going to ignore you.
But the Republican Party, kudo almost to a person, has largely ignored them for years.
And Donald Trump comes along and says, Hey, I get you.
I hear you.
I love you.
I've got your back.
Put me in the White House.
And they responded.
Yeah, in space, they responded, no question.
You called this in the New York Times.
I saw a quote from you.
I'm watching a 160-year-old political party commit suicide.
So tell me about the four faces of the Republican Party, because this played into what you were saying when you were trying to warn the party.
Who are these four faces?
The four faces of the Republican Party are the four ideological factions that existed pre-Trump.
And what I would argue is that what Trump did is kind of bring in and create his own new fifth faction.
But the four faces are two types of movement conservatives: the people we would know as religious evangelicals, social conservatives, and fiscal conservatives.
But together, even though they make a lot of noise, when you look at the actual voters, they're only about a third or of the Republican Party nationally.
And the rest of the Republican Party are the other two faces.
These are the moderates, who are the sort of people who have been keeping John Kasich in the race.
And then the middle people who tell pollsters they're somewhat conservative.
And the best way I can describe them is: these are the people who prefer John Boehner to Ted Cruz.
And they like lower taxes, but they also like compromise.
They like governing.
And I suspect, although the pollsters don't ask, that if you said, would you rather have the best Republican possible or would you rather stop the Democrat?
That these are the people who would prefer stopping the Democrat.
And where the Republican Party had been going wrong for years was that the major factions were at war with each other, and none of them were paying attention to the group of voters who could swing the general election in their favor, which is the group that Trump has brought together in a fifth faction that doesn't care a whole lot about ideology but does feel that the Republican Party should be on their side and start protecting them from the downside effects of the competition they've been subject to for 20 years.
The people who were I call them idealists.
I mean, I was a Cruz guy in terms of principle.
I didn't think he was a very appealing candidate, but in terms of constitutional principle, that's kind of where I stand.
But I have listened to a lot of the harsh rhetoric of the right, what they kind of categorize as the Fox News rhetoric, the Rush Limbaugh rhetoric.
And I've wondered sometimes if the purity of their ideals doesn't get in the way of an actual functioning Republican Party, the perfect being the enemy of the good sort of thing.
Has that played into this, do you think?
I think it's the reason, the main reason why Ted Cruz is out of the race right now is that in the early races, Ted Cruz was consolidating himself as the candidate of the two factions of the very conservatives.
If the Republican Party were the Tea Party plus the social conservatives, Ted Cruz would be the nominee, not Donald Trump, because he's been winning those voters consistently.
He even won those voters in Indiana, but they're only a third of the party.
And when you tell the other two-thirds of the party that not only do we disagree with you, but we think that you're impure and that you're closeted Democrats, then when your guy comes around and asks for your help, you may not find it very forthcoming.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I don't think it's an accident that John Boehner chose the week before the Indiana primary to accidentally, in the quote, call Ted Cruz Lucifer in the flesh.
That was a signal to everybody whose instincts, the people in the early stages were backing Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, the somewhat conservatives.
And when Cruz won in Wisconsin, it was because he won them over.
And then in the month after that, he lost them again.
And in the run-up to the final battle, John Boehner sent a message to everybody: hey, remember what he thinks about you.
Remember what he did to us.
And they backed, and Cruz lost somewhat conservatives very handily in Indiana.
Yeah, yeah, no, that sounds exactly right.
So now we're looking at the future.
There are two big questions.
The first is, what about the general?
As you look at the general, what do you see?
Nate Silver wrote yesterday that Trump was going to have a hard road to hoe, but Trump has kind of confounded every prediction so far.
What do you think?
Yeah, he is going to have a hard row to hoe, but it's not an impossible one.
But he is somebody who is going to have to reach out to both Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and say it's safe to get back in the water.
And that's going to be, one, reminding them that they really dislike Hillary Clinton, which they do, but also saying, you know, I'm not the wild guy that you think I might be.
I'm actually somebody whose word is my bond and somebody who can run a government.
And that's what his moves over the last couple of days have been.
If he's successful at doing that, then he could make a fight and go of it because Hillary Clinton is extremely unpopular.
You saw that in the polls that were showing John Kasich beating her handily.
John Kasich was basically generic, non-crazy, non-ideological Republican.
He wasn't well known, but to the extent he was known, people felt safe with him.
If Trump can restore that, he can take the voters who are energized, who are voting, who haven't voted before, or who voted for Obama four years ago, add them to the Romney base, and he could win.
It's just going to be difficult for him to combine the safety message with the rile them up message over a period of six months.
Plus, I mean, it seems to be his personality.
He doesn't really seem to be able.
I always say this, you know, we always, commentators are always telling politicians what they can do, but they can't change their nature.
And he doesn't seem to be able to curtail his tongue at all.
I mean, he went right back to his Raphael Cruz killed Kennedy routine yesterday after he'd won already.
When I was a campaign consultant in my youth, the saying always was that the campaign ultimately reflects the candidate.
And if the candidate in this case is somebody who is prone to saying outlandish things and attracting free media as a result, then the candidate can't be disciplined because the candidate inherently is undisciplined.
And that's going to destroy his safety message.
We'll find out whether or not that is the man or if that's just been an act for the last six months.
So looking at it from the other side, from the side of the never Trumps, the far right, the people who are looking at Trump as I'm looking at him, just absolutely appalled.
Appalled not just by his policies, because I don't really know what his policies would be, but I'm appalled by his character.
I really am.
And, you know, can he win those people over?
Are they going to sit this out, do you think?
I think what he has to do is minimize the Republican slippage, but not, he can't eliminate it.
There are going to be a few percent of the electorate who are going to sit this out.
Or if Ben Sass's intriguing tweet is a prelude to his declaring that he's going to be a chaotic third-party candidate, then people will vote for him.
It won't be a huge percent, but one, two, three, four percent of the general electorate is in this highly polarized age more than enough to cost him.
Equally as important as the ideological never-Trumpers is the people who are the Kasich voter, the somewhat conservative voter who aren't ideologically opposed to him, but are really appalled by him, as you said, appalled by his character.
Those are the people he's moving at right now.
I think he's figuring that I'm never going to get the never-Trumpers on my side, but if I can get the person who voted for Romney to hold their nose and vote for me because they hate Hillary and they're no longer scared by me, you know, I can lose that one or 2% and make it up.
I'm not sure he can, but I think that's his calculus.
What about wither conservatism, I guess, is what I want to ask.
The party just left the station without us.
Where do we go?
How do we become a force in American politics again?
Well, I think what we need to do is recognize that Americans' challenges have changed.
Americans' worries have changed.
We don't have the same economic base that we did 35 years ago with Ronald Reagan.
People, a lot of times, because we were successful, aren't paying as heavy a tax burden.
It's much more laying on the rich than it was when Reagan was elected.
And so consequently, they're not as concerned with tax cuts or income tax cuts.
They might be concerned with payroll tax cuts.
So I think conservatives need to do is first get out of the purity uber alis mode and adopt Reagan's strategy of 70% of a loaf is where I want to be.
That 70% of a loaf is a victory.
And then the second thing is we have to understand that the people who are open to joining our coalition are not free market purists.
They are people who want government to help in an active but limited way to make sure that they are part of the American dream.
A pursuit of free trade without dealing with the dislocations is going to signal to these people that they're not part of America, that they're not part of a conservatism that cares about people like them.
And so conservatism, much as in the 70s it had to adapt to deal with the rise of social conservatism and with the challenges of stagflation, we need to deal with the challenges of globalization.
And we need to deal with the challenges of being a unipolar power.
And that might call for more restraint than we've exercised in the past 15 years.
You know, I have one last, I have only time for one last question.
I'm talking to Henry Olson, Four Faces, the author of Four Faces of the Republican Party from Palgrave, co-authored with Dante Scala, and it's available as an e-book or in hard copy, Four Faces of the Republican Party.
I guess my final question is this.
We joke a lot here about the Daily Wire, about the end of the Republic, and I'm never quite sure how much we're joking.
What keeps you up at night?
I mean, when you look at this situation, you look at someone like Clinton, Hillary Clinton, who seems to me unfit for office, running against Donald Trump, who seems to me unfit for office.
Do you fear for the country or do you feel this is just another bump in a road of a country that's been through far worse than this and we're going to be okay?
I both fear for the country, but I'm not consigned to thinking that it's an inevitable decline.
That there are temptations that people are taking.
They're grabbing the forbidden fruit of authoritarianism or a decline of our liberties.
But I think some of that and a lot of that actually comes to the door of conservatives, of not having recognized where the American people are right now and adapting to meet the voters where they are.
I think if we do that, America wants to be governed by a center-right coalition that enhances rather than restricts freedom, that respects a strong but not an overweening power overseas, and respects liberty within the context of traditional morality.
It doesn't want to go off the boat in one direction or another unless it's pushed, but we have to offer them that.
And if we do, I think we'll win, and I think we'll win for years and years to come.
But we have to choose that.
And if we don't, the alternative is going to be, out of desperation, they will choose one form of liberty-denying force, whether it's the soft social democracy of a Clinton or the authoritarianism of a Trump.
One of the best, as I expected, one of the best analyses I've heard this season, Henry Olson, thank you very much for coming on.
I hope you'll come back.
Thank you very much for having me, and I'd love to, Andrew.
All right, I'll talk to you again.
Thanks.
Henry Olson, the author of Four Faces of the Republican Party.
You can read his stuff at National Review.
Just an excellent observer has predicted so much of what we've seen and really analyzes things to the ground without passion, you know, without getting crazy about it.
All right, we've come to the end of an apocalyptic week, and yet here we are standing in the rubble of our republic.
Stuff I like.
I'm going to end today.
If this is not, you know, I had forgotten all about this song until I started to think of what song would be appropriate to end the week on.
And I suddenly realized this should be Ben Shapiro's theme song.
We got to tell Ben about this song because this is a great song.
Bad Times Just Around the Corner00:01:57
You know, if you think that things like this haven't happened to great nations before, in the 1950s, after Britain essentially won World War II, I mean, of course, they couldn't have done it without us, but they stood alone for a long time against Hitler and against all of Europe, a Nazi Europe.
They got rid of the guy who had guided them through the war, the conservative Winston Churchill, and they brought in this left-wing government.
And of course, you know, the forces of socialism were very, very strong then because the Soviet Union was still in this phase of industrializing.
People thought they were going to do great.
I've seen the future and it works.
It's the Soviet Union.
So Noel Coward, possibly one of the most talented show business people who ever lived, I always say that Noel Coward is my proof that the very far-right Christians are wrong and that gay people won't be allowed into heaven because if Noel Coward isn't in heaven, it won't be heaven.
Because he was just one of the heavenly songwriters.
He wrote a hilarious song called There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner.
This is in 1952.
And just listen to this one verse and then we'll come back.
This really should be Ben's theme song.
So just listen to the verse and we'll come back and say bye.
There are bad times just around the corner.
We can all look forward to despair.
It's as clear as crystal from Bridlington to Bristol that we can't save democracy and we don't much care.
If the reds and the pinks believe that England stinks and that world revolution is bound to spread, we'd better all learn the lyrics of the old red flag and wait until we drop down dead.
A likely story, land of hope and glory.
Wait until we drop down dead.
Michael Law singing Noel Coward's There are bad times just around the corner.