Andrew Klavan dissects Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment theatrics while defending Trump’s 1970s NYC revitalization projects and economic record, contrasting it with China’s 70th communist anniversary—65M dead under Mao—mocking Trump’s congratulatory tweet to Xi amid Hong Kong protests. He slams Warren/Sanders’ wealth taxes as impractical, citing rising median incomes under Trump, then pivots to Kevin Williamson’s The Smallest Minority, exposing how status anxiety and social media mobs replace substantive debate, mirroring medieval upheavals. Williamson warns identity politics and performative activism fracture democracies, replacing liberalism’s compassion with divisive "diversity as dogma," leaving Klavan to blame modern polarization on rejecting unifying principles like freedom. [Automatically generated summary]
There's been a lot of talk about impeachment lately.
For instance, Adam Schiff recently issued a statement saying, quote, I'm not someone who ordinarily talks about impeachment while I'm going to the bathroom, but in this case, I'll make the same exception I've made every day since November of 2016, unquote.
But what is impeachment?
How does it work?
And why does Adam Schiff look like that?
Is it like a curse or a disease or something or the result of some sort of accident?
And maybe that's beside the point.
The point is, it's time for a civics lesson on how impeachment works.
Impeachment is a process for removing a president from office so that Mike Pence will become president and outlaw rainbows so that all the unicorns will come and stab him, and then your party will have the power instead of the bad Orange Party.
The process of impeachment is laid out in Articles 1 and 2 of the Constitution.
And before the process of impeachment can begin, each member of the House of Representatives must assign an intern to find a copy of the Constitution and pretend to have read it.
Then the Congressman himself must stare at the articles until the liquor kicks in and the words blur and become meaningless.
Of course, he will have already done that with the rest of the Constitution before taking office.
Article 2 says the president can be impeached for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, such as being Republican or attempting to stop the slow spread of federal power until it swallows every last trace of liberty, like the blob in the movie of the same name.
After pretending to read the Constitution, the congressman must then go on TV and talk crap while his friend the interviewer looks very serious, even though they both know it's crap.
It's just that obvious.
Finally, the Congress takes a vote.
And everyone goes back to doing whatever they were doing before, namely nothing.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped, tipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
You know, we used to have that great board which had a head on it, how many days I had gone without cracking up during my own openings, but we've lost that.
And now folks, you at home, will just have to keep track for me.
All right.
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Covering Up Trump's Win00:06:27
So recently, a Florida middle school teacher got in a spot of trouble after giving her students an exam in which she suggested that Donald Trump is an idiot.
She's not the only person who said so.
Bernie Sanders tweeted it just a few weeks ago.
Don Lemon, who ought to know what stupid looks like, has called Trump stupid, and The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and Mother Jones have all used the stupid word on him.
I have to admit, it sometimes seems to me that Trump is painfully ignorant of some pretty important things.
If I found out he had never read a book cover to cover in his life, I would not be entirely surprised.
But whatever else he is, stupid does not seem to me to be an accurate description of this president.
Trump has been a massively successful man in massively difficult businesses for at least 50 years.
You can say he got a good start in life, no doubt he did, and you can say he got lucky, maybe so.
But the kind of success Trump has had, sustained, varied, creative, original success, is not generally vouchsafe to the stupid.
People no longer remember, and young people never knew, how important Trump was as a developer in New York City in the 70s.
That's the New York City of the movie Taxi Driver and this television show, The Deuce.
It was a trash can of a city.
The parks belonged to muggers.
Midtown belonged to hookers.
And decades of Democratic rule had convinced people that it just couldn't get any better than that.
Trump put it on the road to getting better.
His building complex helped make the West Side livable.
His hotel helped win Columbus Circle back from the bums.
And when the city couldn't finish Woman's Skating Rink after six years, Trump finished it in under six months and helped reclaim Central Park.
His tower at the United Nations Plaza and on Fifth Avenue helped redesign the skyline.
And all of that happened when so-called smarter men wouldn't risk a dime on a city that Democrats had turned into the sort of cesspool they've now made Chicago and San Francisco.
After a while, Trump got tired of the brutal New York real estate game and he started to rake in sheep dough, licensing his name on lots of crappy stuff.
A lot of his worst moves like his casinos date to that time.
But then Trump found television and he became a major star in another brutal business for 14 years.
Trump admittedly looked petty and mean when he pointed out that even a big name like Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn't make his program work the way he did.
But even a big name like Horn Schwarzenegger couldn't make that program work like Trump did because it's not easy to do and Trump did it.
And of course he won the presidency when almost no one thought that was possible.
No one who was smart, that is, no one who was in the know.
I've heard people do everything they could to explain that presidential win away.
They say he didn't win, Hillary lost.
They say he didn't win the popular vote as if that counted for anything.
Or they say he just got lucky.
But if that doesn't sound like the various sour grapes to you, you haven't lived or if you have lived, you haven't been paying attention.
Success always takes luck.
And some stupid people stumble into it.
They definitely do.
But not this much.
Not this kind.
Not again and again.
Now, I bring this up because for the past three years, every genius and his genius uncle has been throwing himself against this guy, trying to take him down.
And if you ask me, they all look like knuckleheads, whereas Trump is not only still standing, he's actually going strong.
The economy is doing well.
We're not in any new wars.
And the Democrats seem about to go down an impeachment road that's as likely as not to end in a cliff.
This matters to me because I simply cannot cover this Ukraine scandal as if it were a scandal, the way everybody else is covering it.
Who did what?
And did he do this?
And what's the law here?
Did the other guys do the same thing?
I don't think this is a scandal.
I think it's a continuation of the struggle between, on the one hand, a deeply flawed individual who is largely in the right about our politics and an entrenched elite and its deep state who have lost the plot of America entirely.
It's going to be extremely interesting to find out which of these are the real American idiots.
Remember, stupid is as stupid does.
So let's start instead of talking about the Ukraine because I just, I can't stand this story because I just think it's not the story.
I think the story is the intelligence community is trying to cover up what it did to Donald Trump and how corrupt it was under the Obama administration.
That's what the story is.
And since nobody's covering it like that, there's not that much to talk about yet.
So let's just talk about for a minute.
I want to talk about China.
And it's important because it's important to us here.
China celebrated 70 years of communist oppression yesterday.
They had the ceremonial shooting. of the protester in Hong Kong.
They actually shot a guy in Hong Kong.
The police say it was self-defense as the demonstrations for freedom there got incredibly violent and got even more violent than they have.
You can see if you're watching, we're playing video of this incredible, incredible celebration, which emphasized the military might of China shooting off the gigantic cannons and the, oh my gosh, the missiles.
You know, we've seen this from communism before.
This is 70 years since Mao Zedong took over.
That's what it is.
That's what it's marking.
70 years, the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.
And he got a hand at the Mao.
He's up against Hitler and Stalin.
So this was not, you know, this was not a contest for amateurs.
This was the professional mass murderers.
Here, I'm reading from Lee Edwards over at Heritage Foundation.
He says, according to the authoritative Black Book of Communism, I think this was compiled by the French, an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao's repeated merciless attempts to create a new socialist China.
Anyone who got in his way was done away with by execution, imprisonment, or forced famine.
And the guys he loved to kill best, he loved those intellectuals.
He loved to murder intellectuals.
He said, he said, what's so unusual about the emperor of the China, Shui Huang of the China dynasty?
He buried alive 460 scholars, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars.
It was a wonderful guy that Mao Zedong.
And that's what they're celebrating.
70 years, 70 years of Mao Zedong.
President Xi was saying there isn't any force able to shake our great motherland's status.
There isn't any force able to impede the forward strides of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.
He got a 70-gun salute, and he said that the communist-ruled state had reversed China's tragic fate of being bullied and humiliated.
Helix Mattress Offer00:02:25
And Donald Trump, who does sometimes do dopey stuff, he tweeted, congratulations.
I'm sorry, the world is absurd.
I'm here to enjoy it.
Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China.
And, you know, they're going to put up a big golden C that says over 65 million killed.
What's he congratulating him on?
Come on, Donald, what the hell?
What is he congratulating the Chinese people on?
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I was hoping I could throw him off by not doing it at the top of that show.
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Why Violence Fails00:08:09
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All right, so they're celebrating this.
And of course, meanwhile, in Hong Kong, these people are desperately trying to keep, you know, you say they're fighting for their freedom.
What they're fighting is this slow encroachment of Chinese oppression into their government, right?
And it got violent.
Hong Kong police shot a protester in the chest.
This is a day of bitter, bitter fighting.
And the incident was the first of its kind since the protests erupted in the city.
And, you know, Jimmy Lai, the tech guy in Hong Kong, tech millionaire in Hong Kong, says, he says, as a media man, I understand that the coverage of events will disproportionately focus on acts of violence.
But please don't let the acts of a desperate few protesters blind the world to the violence and oppression that sustains the regime in Beijing and the fundamentally peaceful nature of the Hong Kong people.
All we see from our government is a cold-blooded campaign of arrests, greater control of private companies, and interference in the teaching of our high schools.
We're fighting for what was promised us.
Universal suffrage is a right to which we're entitled in our basic law, which is the mini-constitution that took effect when the UK made the mistake of handing over the territory in 1997.
The president of China has abrogated that treaty in 2014 by imposing limits on elections for Hong Kong's chief executive and members of the Legislative Council.
And a right has been denied to us.
They're fighting for that.
They're fighting so they can't be extradited for trial to China because then their right to free speech is essentially gone.
Lei goes on to say, individual liberty is what distinguishes both Hong Kong and the West from China.
The hustle and bustle of the free market is built on liberty and the rule of law.
So I want to just show you this because it represents something to me that I find so amazing.
It is a video, something called The Passion Times, posted a video of this American woman in Hong Kong.
She says she lives in Hong Kong, remonstrating with, she goes out and tries to tear down the protesters' pamphlets, you know, the things that they posted on the walls, protesting, demanding freedom.
And she lectures them as only an American woman can do about not being disrespectful to the thugs oppressing them.
This is not a public form.
Yes, yep.
Who's not participating in this?
And why don't the universities get involved instead of protesting?
What a waste of time for everybody.
You guys should take joining her on your Sunday.
Is this okay?
Is this respectful?
Why not?
If my mother saw me wrote this...
How did you do that?
What did you do?
I'm not saying what they did is right at all.
But they don't respect us.
They're wrong, too.
They won't do so.
So, look, look.
Violence breeds violence.
Do you agree?
Do you agree?
Give me one case where violence led to a good solution.
I think for them.
Get out all the way through now.
Okay, I'll go.
You're right.
So the problem is, it's not because I demand.
Do you guys value freedom more than safety?
Do we read?
Okay.
I think safety is more important than freedom.
And if you could hear her, she says, you guys value freedom more than safety.
I think safety is more important than freedom.
I want to be really careful what I say here because I want to make sure, not because I worry about, you know, media matters, which is always trying to twist our words and all this stuff.
It's not because of that.
I just want to make sure that I'm saying what I want to say.
It is not that American women are awful.
I love American women.
I love women to begin with, but I love American women very specifically.
There's a lot of things about American women I love.
It's not that American women are awful.
It is that when American women are awful, they are so often awful like that.
Entitled, superior.
She's not listening to what these people want.
She is comparing everything to her privileged, untouchable life.
You know, it's like she does not realize.
This is why if you did not allow women to vote, no Democrat would ever be elected.
She wants safety over freedom.
Perhaps one of the most, well, how can I put it?
One of the most low things a privileged person can say.
How much lower can you go than to tell people who are fighting for their freedom that they should privilege safety over freedom?
Every single person who gave that loudmouthed name the right to speak, who sent a child, a son, to die on the battlefields of Bunker Hill or of Gettysburg or of in World War II.
I mean, every one of those people who died valued freedom over safety so that she could become that entitled loudmouth with no sense.
She thinks she dropped from heaven into a world prepared for her.
She thinks her freedom, her rights, her ability, her equality, her equality with men, the fact that she can live for the first time in human history, that a woman can live essentially any life she wants, she thinks that came out of nowhere.
Maybe she did it herself.
It must be because she's such a nice person and so good looking.
The way she goes her yoga classes, they must have just given her that freedom.
Everything she has was bought with blood.
Everything she has was bought by men, men and their moms who valued freedom over safety, every single one of them.
And now she's lecturing to these people who are carrying American flags, for God's sake.
They're carrying American flags as representative of the freedom they are willing to risk their lives for.
After meeting that woman, I wouldn't be surprised if they started burning those flags.
Oh, I'm sorry, we didn't realize it was people like that.
I mean, it is amazing.
It is amazing.
If there is anybody more entitled than an American woman, I do not know who it is.
And like I said, most American women, I love them, but when they are awful, they are awful just like that.
And it says something about our country that we produce people who are so ignorant that they don't even know where their freedoms come from.
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I do not know why everything is making me laugh today, but everything is making me laugh today.
It's just one of those days.
It's one of those days where the absurdity of life gets so speaking of the absurdity of life.
America's Wealth Inequality Crisis00:16:02
The New York Times, a former newspaper, made a discovery about the Democrats.
We're talking about the oppression of Chinese communism for 70 years, and it got a little better after Tiananmen Square.
Now it's shut down again.
They started to, what they think is, what they think is that they can maintain their oppressive government if they let the market have a little bit of freedom to finance the government.
Because as long as people are rich, they tend not to rebel against the government.
So they think they can have the free market without the free people.
I don't believe that's going to work.
70 years, 70 years is about the lifespan of communism.
It just takes about 70 years to destroy a country.
It's almost demonic because in the course of that 70 years, the people who started the communism die off, and the new people don't understand why everything is going wrong.
It's like the people in San Francisco.
Why is there suddenly crap in the street?
Why are there suddenly bums everywhere?
They don't understand that it's the Democrats.
It's the left-wing governance that turns cities into that every single time it's tried.
In New York, I've talked to liberals and they said, no, no, no, the city's not getting worse.
I can see it's getting worse.
I can see that it took a Rudy Giuliani, a tough guy who was crazy enough to stand up to people calling him Hitler and a racist and all that, to clean up the city.
It is going back whence it came, slowly, but first it's slow and then it's fast.
So the New York Times has made a discovery about the Democrats, okay?
They are suddenly shocked, shocked to find there's socialism going on in the Democrat Party.
This is like really the Union of Soviet Socialist Newspapers, the New York Times.
Here it is: proposals from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have raised concerns from economists and business leaders who fear their plans would sap economic growth.
Progressive Democrats are advocating the most drastic shifts in tax policy in over a century as they look to redistribute wealth and chip away at the economic power of the super rich with new taxes that could fundamentally reshape the United States economy.
That is what Trump is standing in the way of.
That is what dumb, evil, mean Orange Trump is standing in the way of.
As they compete for the, again, reading from the Times, as they compete for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont have proposed wealth taxes that would shrink the fortunes of the richest Americans.
Their plans envision an enormous transfer of money from the wealthy to ordinary people with revenue from the wealth tax used to finance new social programs like tuition-free college, universal child care, and Medicare for all.
If you think that the richest Americans are going to pay that tax, raise your hand and then put your hand on top of your head and it's really hard and go, oh my Lord, I'm an idiot because you're an idiot if you think that's going to happen.
The rich can go anywhere they want.
They don't have to pay any taxes they don't want.
The taxes always fall on the middle class.
But here in the credulous world of the New York Times, they go on.
The wealth taxes under discussion would deal a major blow to the balance sheets of American plutocrats like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett.
As if, right?
As if.
They're going to let huge chunks of their wealth disappear.
If the tax that Ms. Warren has called for had been in place since 1982, the net worth of the 15 richest Americans in 2018 would have been half as much, according to two economists who helped develop the plan.
And again, no, it wouldn't.
They would be somewhere else.
They would go, people go where they want to go.
You know, so Emily Eakins, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, writing in the Federalist, did a study about why this stuff appeals to people.
She said, in a new study, I examine whether envy and resentment of the successful or compassion for the needy better explain support for this kind of socialism.
Raising taxes on the rich, redistribution and the like.
Statistical tests reveal resentment of the successful has about twice the effect of compassion in predicting support for increasing top marginal tax rates, wealth redistribution, hostility to capitalism, and believing billionaires should not exist.
You've got things that are broken in your life.
I'll tell you exactly why.
It's because giant corporations, billionaires have seized our government.
And for decades now, they have been making that government work for a thinner and thinner slice at the top.
So think about that for a minute.
If anything is broken in your life, your wife's cheating on you, your husband smacks you around, you know, your kids are smoking.
If anything's broken in your life, it can be fixed by attacking the big corporations.
That's what she just said.
It is what she said.
And it is amazing, the idea that things are getting more and more unequal, that it's harder and harder to get ahead.
Alexandria Casional Cortex, she's out there saying, oh, the poverty is much, much worse than anybody thinks it is.
I mean, listen to this bubblehead.
I mean, what this all is, is us reaching into our pockets and deciding how we're already spending the money that we're already contributing to society.
The problem is that America is at its wealthiest point that we've ever been, and yet we are at one of our most unequal points that we've ever been.
You would not know that our country is posting record profits because 40 million Americans are living in poverty right now.
And if the poverty line was real, if it was at around what some people think it should be, about $38,000 a year, we would be shocked at how much the richest society on the planet is allowing so much of its people to live in destitute.
So we're not talking about paying for somebody else.
We're talking about getting our own rent under control.
We're talking about not getting fleeced by our own landlords.
We're talking about making sure that food is on our kids' tables.
So this is not about other people.
This is about saying if you contribute to our society, you deserve to benefit from our society, not just corporations getting tax cuts and fossil fuel companies getting rewarded for their extraction and dooming future generations.
It's like she lives in a cartoon universe.
You know, first of all, she starts out by saying, she starts out by saying, this is about how we put our hands in our pockets, but it's really about how she puts her hand in my pocket.
It's not about what we decide to do with our money.
That's freedom.
When I decide I'm going to spend my money on a Chinese meal, which is going to give the guy who owns the Chinese restaurant more money, it's going to give me a meal I want, and he's going to have money to spend and spend it somewhere else, which works because each person knows where he wants to spend his money.
It's about her taking your money.
Secondly, she then goes on to say $38,000 should be the poverty line.
Listen, if you're making $38,000 and you're single and you have no kids and you're living in a place that's not New York or LA, you're doing pretty well.
I mean, that's not bad at all.
So that's ridiculous.
The official poverty rate was 12.3%.
So that is close to 40 million people of our huge population, but that's down 0.4 percentage points from 12.7 percent in 2016.
And it's the third consecutive annual decline in poverty since 2014.
The poverty rate has fallen 2.5 percentage points from 14.8 percent to 12.3 percent.
Why?
Capitalism.
That's why.
Plus, President Trump has been doing a lot to change the wealth of the middle class.
Real median household income, the amount earned by those in the very middle, hit $65,000 in 2019 dollars for the 12 months ending in July.
That's the highest level ever and a gain of $4,000, more than $4,000 or 6.8% since Mr. Trump took office.
By comparison, during seven and a half years under President Obama, starting from the end of the recession in June 2009 through January 2017, the median household income rose by only about $1,000.
So it's all fantasy.
It is all a fantasy world.
And she says we shouldn't be rewarding those evil people who get fossil fuels, dooming future races, and giving her every, once again, same problem as the girl in Hong Kong.
She doesn't know where everything she has comes from.
It all comes from fuel.
It all comes from energy.
All these lovely things that she has, including her freedom, including her equality, which are all dependent on technology.
Those things all come to her by the people doing the capitalist thing that she hates so much.
I'm going to stop there because we've got a great guest coming up, Kevin Williamson, one of the smartest guys I know and one of the most rambunctious.
I'll use that phrase.
And so I want to get to him, but please remember it is the mailbag tomorrow.
You want to go to dailywire.com and subscribe, and then you can go on, press the podcast button, press the Andrew Clavin podcast, press the mailbag symbol and ask me anything you want.
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Come on over to dailywire.com.
All right.
Kevin Williamson is, as I say, he is one of the smartest guys I know, which I just find incredibly irritating.
He's a roving correspondent for National Review, and he doesn't work for The Atlantic, where he was fired after about 20 minutes.
He's got a new book called The Smallest Minority, Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics.
It was described as the most profane, hilarious, and insightful book I've read in quite a while by someone named Ben Shapiro.
I don't know who that is, but he sounds like he knows what he's talking about.
Kevin, are you there?
I'm here.
All right.
How you doing, pal?
It's good to see you.
Profoundly irritating, I guess.
One of the more honest ones I've had in my life.
I still have never forgiven you for making me read that book.
What was the name of that book again?
It's the that huge tome by the, oh my God, the novelist, the tennis playing novelist.
What, what?
Was it Infinite Chest?
Yes, Infinite Chest.
He talked me into reading that.
And I had to be restrained from going back to you personally.
However, it's not a, anyway, the smallest minority, independent thinking in the age of mob politics.
I haven't, I've had a chance to start this, but not finish it.
Is there a country, are we becoming a country of idiots?
Are becoming, maybe a little bit there.
Americans are an interesting sort of split personality as a people.
We're geniuses in so many ways.
We build and design and manufacture, invent so much of the cool stuff in the world.
90% of what people love about the world comes from the United States in one form or another.
We're brilliant in many ways.
As voters, we're idiots.
And people who participate in politics, we tend to be idiots as well.
And that's because our political discourse, as I go into at some length in the book, isn't really about politics.
It's about status and insecurity.
And it ends up being this kind of embarrassing public group therapy session of saying, you know, people like me are good.
People like that are bad.
My status competition is worthy and worthwhile and makes the world a better place.
His is terrible and awful and comes from Malfeasance or racism or homophobia or something else.
And social media, of course, has made that worse in a sense.
It didn't make us worse, but it made us bad more quickly.
So there's less of a pause between, you know, the instinct and the outpouring.
So it's kind of like alcohol.
It more reveals what was underneath already than changing what was already there.
And so we're at this really very, very stupid moment in discourse.
And I think that that is, it's irritating, of course, for one thing.
And it's no fun being surrounded by a vast ocean of stupidity all the time.
But it also has serious consequences in that democracies really rely on conversation.
That's how we work through problems.
That's how we reach consensus.
I know consensus is sort of a dirty word right now, along with compromise, but that's how you get social stability in a country with democratic institutions is you need a lot of buy-in on some basic policy questions.
But if every dispute is an absolute moral question, it's us and them, good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, we're the resistance, they're the third Reich, then you can't really develop consensus or compromise if that's your model for engagement.
And which is why we have so much policy instability right now.
So is this happening everywhere or is this happening specifically to us?
Because a lot of the things you're saying, you know, intellectuals have always felt America was a stupid country.
I mean, we're kind of, you know, the forest gump imitation of America that we have a good heart, but we're idiots has always kind of been around.
Is this, A, is it new?
And B, is it happening everywhere or just to us?
I think it's happening a bit in a lot of other places too.
I think it's worse here in some ways for cultural reasons in that because we don't, weirdly enough, because we don't have the history of traditional social hierarchies that you have in, say, Europe or in some parts of Asia, our sense of status insecurity is in some ways much more intense in the United States because the United States being a very free and dynamic and highly capitalistic society, everything's always up for renegotiation.
You know, you could start at the very bottom and go to the very top.
You can start at the very top and go to the very bottom.
You may be the most important person in the world today and tomorrow you are cast into the outer dark.
So it's a different kind of society.
And we've seen similar patterns before.
One of the things I get into in the book a lot is the case of the beginnings of what we might call capitalism at the end of the Middle Ages.
And Eric Frommright's writ a lot about this in Escape from Freedom.
So you had a situation in which economic changes were making people better off in material terms.
They were politically more free in many ways than they had been before.
They were certainly richer and better fed and better housed and better cared for.
But these ancient status relationships were suddenly dissolved and everything was up for renegotiation.
This made people very, very anxious.
And so they went looking for new sources of status and meaning and new things to belong to, out of which came things like the Reformation, some forms of religious fanaticism, the early stirrings of nationalism, things like that.
And the social changes we're going through right now with what we call globalization, for lack of a better word, are not comparable in scale to that.
This is not like the end of the Middle Ages, but it is very disruptive.
And so we're seeing a broadly similar pattern where we've got a lot of things that are going on economically in terms of how we actually produce physical goods and services that we consume and how we trade them and how we distribute them.
That's leaving us all much better off than we were.
We are richest, freest, best-fed, best housed, best cared for people who've ever lived.
We have the best medicine and all the rest of it, the most leisure time, the most cultural consumption.
But a lot of things that people took for granted for a long time that were a sense of status and stability in their life are no longer there.
I mean, the obvious example is that people of my father's generation often would work for one or maybe two companies for the entirety of their careers.
They would have this big corporation that gave them a sense of status, a sense that they were being taken care of, a sense of stability.
Americans are moving less than they used to, but the Americans at the top of the income distribution, the highly educated, high-income people who really set the cultural tone in a lot of ways, we move a lot more than people did a couple of generations ago.
We get married later in life.
We have children later in life, or we don't do those things at all.
So a lot of things that used to give people a sense of who they were and belonging and what their status came from aren't there anymore.
The Shift in Stability00:09:36
And they're looking for new things or they're diminished in some ways and they're looking for new things.
And unfortunately, one of the things a lot of people have turned to is this really dopey, hysterical form of performative identity politics.
And I think that is, it's making it difficult to govern a big, diverse, complex country like ours.
You read my stuff, I think from time to time, you know, I'm a big fan of Switzerland.
I think Switzerland is an awfully well-governed place.
And I think it's got a very useful and productive civic culture, a sense of citizenship, a sense of what government is there to do and how people are able to cooperate.
It's a very small country.
It's relatively, very strong, long-standing institutions.
And the sorts of things that make a country like Switzerland work or the Nordic welfare states, you know, Sweden and Denmark and countries like that, which in spite of the way a lot of conservatives talk about, they were pretty good countries in a lot of ways and they're pretty well governed and people are pretty happy there.
But those things are not really available, I think, to a country as large and dynamic and diverse as ours and one that lacks certain of the civic virtues that I think you see, particularly in Northern Europe.
Yeah, you know, I was in Switzerland over the summer and I have to say it is a well-governed country and civilized in ways that we're not.
There's just no question about it.
We're talking to Kevin Williamson, author of The Smallest Minority Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics.
What is, you know, conservatives are always talking about the road to serfdom.
You have the road to smurfdom.
What is that?
The dumb fun.
I don't know.
I like people feeling small and but it is true that we deal a lot with very large institutions and very large forces.
I think this is why things like, say, air travel are so irritating to people.
Because when, did you read that story in the Wall Street Journal about the American airlines ditching people in Peru for like four days and it loaded them up in airplanes and then said, nope, we're not taking off, get off the airplanes and send them back to their hotels and they were sleeping in the airport.
And it was, some of them were pregnant, some of them needed medicine, things like that.
And you end up running against these situations that you have very little control over.
And you've got people in these old company towns where the whole civic culture and economy was based on essentially one business or one industry.
And then suddenly that's gone.
You've got no sense of control over those sorts of things.
And I think that the largeness of modern life and the scale of it and the incomprehensibility of modern economic production is alienating to people.
You know, if you take something relatively simple like container shipping, you know, we've got stuff we want to get from extra wild.
We put it in a box.
We put the box on a boat.
The boat goes there.
Vastly complicated.
It is one of the most complex undertakings that the human race has ever managed to successfully pull off.
It's like doing a moon launch 24 hours a day, seven days and 65 days a year.
And in dealing with these large, bad, incomprehensibly complex systems, people feel a lack of control over things.
And then you add to that certain sorts of status anxiety that we're seeing in a society like ours.
People want to reassert command over things.
And that's a lot of what our politics is currently about.
So you have Trump promising his constituents that I will regain control on your behalf.
And then you've got a very open rhetoric of seizing control on the left right now where people are talking about the new America and it's the new America's turn to govern.
And these old white men who are no longer going to be in the majority must have their power taken away.
And the fact that a lot of this gets now expressed in such explicitly racial terms and explicitly sexual terms, and sometimes explicitly religious terms, I think is really, really unhealthy for us.
I have to stop you there.
I would love to go on talking, but I'm out of time.
Kevin Williams, an author of The Smallest Minority, Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics.
I hope you come back.
I'd like to talk to you about what's going on in the moment next time, but I hope you'll come back and talk again.
Got my number anytime.
Thanks a lot, Kevin.
It's good to see you.
Go ahead.
I got to end.
I want to end with a final reflection.
I've been watching, I think I've mentioned this before.
I've been watching NYPD Blue, a show that goes from the 90s into the 2000s.
And it is a revolutionary show in a lot of ways.
It is written by, created by Stephen Bochko, who was one of the founders of the revolution in television, and David Milch, who you know from Deadwood, he went on to do Deadwood.
They created this show together.
And it is a brilliant, brilliant show, which centers on, although they don't realize it for about four seasons, that it centers on this detective Andy Sipowitz played by Dennis Franz.
And the fascinating thing about it is the show is filled with liberal preachments, the kind of thing I always talk about when I talk about how the left controlling the culture changes the way people think or at least tracks the changes, the way people think.
Although a lot of studies show they actually do affect the way people think.
So there's a lot of preachment in it because Andy Sipowitz starts out as a racist cop.
That's why they don't think he's the star of the show.
You could never create a character like him today who is sympathetic and yet racist, openly racist, doesn't like black people, thinks they're taking over unfairly, thinks he's been passed over by black people unfairly, and has something to think about everybody, but is constantly preaching.
But it follows his progression into learning to respect a gay guy, a black guy, and he becomes a leader.
But the one thing he never loses is he never loses the fact that when he is dealing with bad guys, he roughs them up.
Here's a scene where he's talking to a wife beater.
Tell me what's going on here.
Yeah.
You're going to central booking to get processed for beating your wife.
Is she suppressing charges?
Oh, she sure is.
Okay, now I got to get an attorney on.
You like smacking people around, Frank?
No.
You sure like smacking your wife around.
There's a lot more to it.
No!
Stop!
Don't you try smacking me around, Frank.
Guard!
He left.
Come on, hit me, Frank.
Stop!
Or do you only like hitting women?
You leave me alone!
All right, here's what's going to happen, Frank.
You're going in the system.
And when you get out, whether it's a week or a month from now, I'm going to be there waiting for you.
And then I'm going to drive you to a bus station and I'm going to buy you a cup of coffee and a candy star.
And you're going to get on that bus and you're never going to set foot around here again.
Because if you do, I will put you in the hospital.
You got it.
I'll see you when you get out, Frank.
You know, that was when liberals remembered that sometimes you have to do some bad things to get good things done.
And one of the things we're seeing is this tension between when they say, oh, this guy did, you know, pinched a girl's butt, or he slept with a porn star, or he did something, something even worse than that.
Maybe said something that wasn't quite right to the president of the Ukraine.
And for that, we are supposed to set aside our love of capitalism, our love of freedom, our right to bear arms, our right to free speech.
We're supposed to set all that aside to punish him for doing that.
But of course, here, we are constantly seeing Sipowitz being rebuked for being a tough guy.
But we're always thinking, as the audience, we're always thinking, no, no, no, do what you got to do to get the bad guys off the street.
So there was still a kind of sense of reality among these liberal shows.
The liberal preachment contained a bunch of reality.
And the preachment, the liberal preachment was basically about accepting people.
It wasn't about being replaced.
It wasn't about you're bad because you're white.
It wasn't about, you know, the blacks are coming and now it's their turn.
It was simply about tolerance for all of us.
We live on a small planet.
We live with a short life.
We're supposed to be nice to one another or something with which I agree.
In that sense, if that's being a liberal, sign me up.
I am a liberal.
But what has happened since then is the idea that there is no difference in value between any two things.
So in other words, you not only have to accept people, you have to accept that something about them is exactly the same and equal in value to something else.
You have to accept that the relationship between a man and a man is the same as a relationship between a man and a woman.
But of course, nothing that is different is the same.
That is a stupid thing to say, but you have to say it because that is what the left is preaching.
Nothing that is different is the same.
So we have a right to make judgments.
We have a right to value one thing more than another.
We have a right to like people, different kinds of people more than another.
And so the thing that liberalism has been preaching has actually changed.
And they have followed the wrong path of that idea.
The path should have been toward love and tolerance and understanding and not judging people, you know, having compassion on people and not judging them, but looking into yourself first.
That's the path you want to go down.
But instead, they went through this path where they wanted to basically eliminate morality entirely, eliminate difference entirely, and basically say that there is no idea that brings us together, that the diversity itself, the diversity itself is of value.
The diversity itself is of zero value.
The diversity itself is of zero value.
What is good about the diversity is it serves the idea that unifies us, which is the idea of freedom.
They lost that plot, and that's why they're talking the nonsense they're talking today.
Got through this almost this entire show.
I don't think we even mentioned the Ukraine.
Good for us.
I'll be back tomorrow with the mailbag.
Andrew Klavan Show00:01:04
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