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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
56:04
Things that Matter
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You are listening to the best of the Dennis Prager Show.
Hello everybody, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
I'm going to immediately go to my guest, who's one of the supreme thinkers in this country.
And what he thinks about is, or let's put it this way, it can be a little depressing because he's thinking about what has happened to America since 1960. He's one of the handful of thinkers who probably doesn't need an introduction to many of you.
He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
He is Charles Murray.
And his book, Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960 to 2010, is now out in paperback.
The book is up at DennisPrager.com.
And Charles Murray, welcome back to The Dennis Prager Show.
Dennis, it's good to talk to you again.
I appreciate that.
Where are you located?
I am sitting in Burkittsville, Maryland.
It's about 60 miles out of D.C., 172 people strong.
Where the virtues of America still reign?
Well, you know, we have all the problems that the rest of the country has.
And in fact, part of the motivation for writing Coming Apart is that I was watching what happens in my little corner of the woods.
My wife and I live in a blue-collar-slash-middle-class town.
That has a few oddballs like me.
And my children went to the local public schools.
They're great people.
We will live here until they take us out in a truck.
But these problems I talk about in coming apart, you know, with young men who are out of the labor force and young women who are having families but with no father involved and the rest of that, that's happening here too.
And it's very disturbing.
Is it fair to summarize your thesis, and it's a very important one, very important one, in that you believe that values determine human behavior more than economics alone?
I think that that's not the thesis of the book, Dennis, but it is certainly true that I think what we have seen happen.
It's largely independent, not completely, largely independent of economic forces.
We have seen a change in the culture that goes bone deep.
So what is the thesis of the book if that is not?
The thesis is that we have seen a qualitative change in the nature of classes in this country over the last 50 years.
I'm not talking about the 1% versus the 99%.
Money is not the determining factor.
Fifty years ago, we still had a civic culture that was broadly shared across socioeconomic classes.
And on a variety of key dimensions, we have seen divergence between the working class and the upper middle class that is unprecedented in American history.
That's half of it, Dennis, just real quickly to set the framework for your listeners.
The other half is that during the same period, we have developed within the upper middle class A new upper class, a relatively small proportion of the population that runs the country and that is increasingly completely ignorant of the way the rest of the country works.
They live in a world of their own, isolated and oblivious.
So are these three separate groups?
Yeah, think of the new upper class as a subset of the upper middle class.
Think of a new lower class as a subset of the working class.
That's the easiest way to deal with it.
So, in effect, there are four groups.
Yeah.
Well, you've got a small group on top, the new upper class, that is increasingly isolated.
You've got a new lower class that is separated from these core institutions, and that's happened quite recently, and they no longer participate in the institutions of American life to some important degree.
When I summarized your thesis, why did you say that while that's true, that's not the thesis?
Because I understand the thesis is regarding the isolation of groups from one another, which is unprecedented, and obviously it's what I want to talk about.
But what I summarized is fair as well, correct?
Yeah.
That it's a values question more than an economics question.
Yes, and this has been, Dennis, one of the most interesting things in the years since the book has come out, the reaction.
I deliberately wrote the book so the people on the left could read it, which is to say I did not go through the arguments in Losing Ground, another book of mine, which says the 60s have a lot to answer for in producing these problems.
Because I knew if I did that, I would lose my audience on the left, and I wanted to talk about the problem.
So I got a lot of very gratifying agreement that I was talking about a real problem.
But the reflexive, glib answer was, oh, but this is because of globalization, it's because of the loss of manufacturing jobs, because of the stagnation of working-class wages.
It was just, it was like...
Oh, so let me ask you, I'm very happy, I love your honesty, and I love so much about what you write and do.
But in this regard, Did you ever think to yourself afterwards, maybe it wasn't worth trying to not alienate the left?
No, actually, Dennis, I went the other way.
And I will tell you, the moment I said it worked, and that was Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, wrote a column a few weeks after the book came out, saying essentially, well, Murray's politics are nuts, but he's talking about a real problem.
And he would have never written that if I'd done either of two things.
First, if I'd talked about the causes, he would have never even read the book.
And secondly, if I hadn't limited it to white America, he wouldn't have felt nearly as open.
Right, of course.
Because it would have been racism that caused the issue.
Exactly.
So those two steps opened up the dialogue.
Okay, so let me ask you, as one who just devoted ten years to a book which came out last year, and I did name the source.
Leftism, as I call it, which I believe is, as I often say to my listeners, and I write in my book, I think is the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years, dwarfing.
I mean it sincerely.
No, I was laughing because it just hit home when you said it that way.
Yeah.
No, it's a way to look at it that's important.
I debated it, and then I realized, but if, you see, if that Nicholas Kristoff, to me it's like, and I don't want to go on because I want you to do most of the talking by far, but this is so important to me because your work is so important to me, that Nicholas Kristoff says along with you, ah, you know what, the patient really is suffering from the following symptoms.
But Murray and I have entirely different views as to why the patient got this disease.
What's the good of their agreement?
Well, I am a little bit like Lucy.
No, I'm like Charlie Brown and the football.
You're old enough to remember this, where he keeps trying to punt the ball and she keeps pulling it away.
But he keeps hoping for better things next time.
So in part, I'm an eternal optimist.
But there is this basis for my optimism.
A lot of the problems I'm talking about, especially with the new upper class, are ones that resonate with people across the political spectrum.
When I talk to affluent parents on the left as well as the right about the way their children really don't know a thing about how this country works, I get nods of agreement in these audiences.
Look, this is not going to be fixed by policy changes, Dennis.
I'm absolutely convinced of this, given the political reality of the next several years.
It has to be cultural changes that turn us around, and those cultural changes cannot be imposed from the right.
We have got to talk about these problems in a way that people start to live their lives differently across the political spectrum.
You know, you can say I'm crazy, but that is the way I look at it right now.
In a way, just to finish this thought, Dennis, it doesn't make any difference anymore what got these things started 50 years ago.
Because whatever the changes in policies were that triggered a lot of these things, they have long since been supplanted by cultural changes that have a life of their own.
Right.
I agree, and I just want to reinforce a point there.
I am a religious individual, and you speak about religiosity as one of the four major factors, I think, in industrialism, marriage, and honesty and religiosity.
I just want to support you in this with my own anecdotal example, if that is not a redundant phrase, and that is...
I go to synagogue just about every Saturday, and it is the one place where I can truly say it is irrelevant how much money you have, how much status you have.
We intermingle.
We also have lunch at our service, so we get to socially intermingle and not just sit in our chairs or pews, as one might call it.
And you're entirely right.
That is one of the great levelers of class that no longer exists for the upper 1% that doesn't go to church much.
Is that correct?
Yeah, you're exactly right.
Alright, we'll be back in a moment.
Charles Murray's book is now in paperback, Coming Apart.
And it's very sad because this was a unique civilization in people...
We always had rich people, but we never had the separateness that we're now having.
Again, the book is coming apart.
It is up at DennisPrager.com.
I continue with Charles Murray.
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I'm Dennis Prager, talking to one of the terrific thinkers of our time.
And I use that label with very few people.
Charles Murray is one of them.
He's with the American Enterprise Institute.
And another great thinker to come from Burkittsville, Maryland.
I don't understand what they have in the water there that produces such...
How many people did you say live in your town?
172. We have had a very steady population over the last 20 years that we've lived here.
It's a pretty little Civil War village west of Frederick, Maryland.
The book that is now out in paperback is coming apart.
And what he did in this was write about white America so that all racial issues...
All ethnic issues can be put aside.
What has happened to white America between 1960 and 2010?
I want to repeat one of your major points, and that is that in general, in American life, with four qualities, marriage, industriousness, church, and honesty, the odds, do you hold today as well, the odds are overwhelming that you will?
As you write, not only succeed, but even more importantly, attain happiness?
That I personally?
Are you talking about...
No, do you believe that that still holds true in America for most people?
The means for pursuing happiness have been degraded.
That's the easiest way to put it.
Look, I didn't choose those four qualities out of thin air.
It's fascinating if you go back to the Founders.
And you hear them talk about the Constitution and how the new country will work.
Every single one of them says, very explicitly, this Constitution won't work unless the people have certain qualities.
And they all, in their own independent ways, talked about what those qualities were, and they converged on these four.
It was remarkable the degree they all mentioned all of them.
And so that's why I picked those.
But there's a link to happiness there, too.
The pursuit of happiness.
As it occurs, in the sense of the Declaration of Independence, really is contingent on a very few basic domains in life.
One of them is your vocation, your work, as a source of deep satisfaction.
Another is family.
A third is faith.
And a fourth is your community.
And I actually challenge people to come up with a domain in which they feel deep satisfaction in life.
That's not one of those four.
But the point is that the decay that I've talked about in honesty, religion, marriage, and work all directly affect the ability of people to pursue happiness.
And success.
So you can climb classes with those four traits.
Is that fair to say?
Yes, that's where socioeconomic mobility is driven by.
If you have those four things going for you, or even three of the four.
You are going to be much more likely to be successful in American life.
But more than that, Dennis, you're more likely to reach the age of 70, the age I have just reached, and able to look back on who you've been and what you've done and take great satisfaction in it.
That's how it works.
Yes, but people don't think that anyway.
What happens after 30, we were told the baby booby years doesn't matter.
I know.
You know, it's interesting.
I first wrote a book called In Pursuit back in 1998, at which time I talked about some of these issues, and I had in the book, I was saying, what you need to worry about is reaching the age of 70 and looking back on who you've been and what you've done.
And it's kind of an odd position after all these years.
To actually be at that age that I was talking about projecting in 1988. No kidding, I understand that.
Not there yet, but I truly understand that.
I want to understand, though, and I want my listeners to understand, this upper tiny percent that live in their own ghettos, in gilded ghettos, when did that happen and why?
It happened because of two broad phenomena that were both good in their own way.
One is that the value of brains became much greater over the course of the 20th century.
If you were a really super smart lawyer in 1920, you didn't make that much more money than just sort of an ordinary lawyer.
If you're a super smart lawyer in 2013, you can put together multinational deals, you can negotiate the regulatory jungle in Washington, and you can be worth millions of dollars.
That change occurred throughout the whole occupational sector.
You know, that's not bad.
It gives people a chance with those talents to realize the value of their talents.
The other thing that happened that was very good was that the universities got very efficient at identifying intellectual talent, even if it came from a small town in the Midwest, and even if the parents were plumbers, that's good.
It gave people a chance to realize their potential.
But you do both of those things over a period of several decades.
And you end up with a class, a new upper class, that has its own tastes and preferences and is quite different from the rest of the country.
A real quick illustrative statistic, Dennis.
Back in 1960, there were neighborhoods that were then known as the places where rich people lived.
Beverly Hills, Northside of Chicago, that sort of thing.
I collected the numbers for 14 of those neighborhoods.
The average income in those fancy neighborhoods in 1960 was $84,000.
That's in today's dollars.
And only 26% had college degrees.
Wait, that's in today's dollars?
In today's dollars.
Rich people live there, but so do a lot of other people live in those exclusive neighborhoods.
There was all sorts of cultural heterogeneity.
Educationally, too, was very important, heterogeneity.
That has now disappeared.
So you go to those same neighborhoods now, and everybody went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and places like that.
They have advanced degrees.
They're making not $84,000 as a median.
They're making a couple hundred.
These enclaves now are incredibly more segregated from the rest of the country than they used to be.
I'm still trying to understand.
We value brains, so brains got more money.
That's fine.
And then the people who got more money decided to live only amongst one another?
No, think of it this way.
Think of the Upper East Side of New York in 1960 when the median income on the Upper East Side of New York was $60,000, not even $84,000.
So you had the rich people living there, but you had all sorts of other people.
Think also of the individual couples in Westchester or Beverly Hills or that.
When the typical couple in 1960, one had a college degree, the other had a high school diploma.
In that kind of situation, you don't develop a culture that does the things that today's upper-class culture does, whereby they, in those days, people pretty much watched the same movies, the same television shows.
In order to have a distinct culture, you have to have a critical mass of people who've been socialized in the same way.
And those two dynamics I talked about, the elite education and the money, interacted to produce that.
That strikes me as almost insoluble.
We'll be back in a moment.
Is there a solution?
If you'd like to ask Charles Murray a question, 1-8 Prager 776. The book is coming apart, and it's up at my website.
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Hello everybody and welcome to or back to the Dennis Prager Show.
It is a delight to have Charles Krauthammer on.
He used to be fairly regular on the show, and life goes on as it does, but it's a real pleasure to have him back.
A book out, as many of you probably know, a terrific book of some choice columns from a number of decades, which gives you an idea of how good the columns are.
The book is titled Things That Matter, Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics.
The book is now number one on Amazon in all the world of nonfiction.
It is number one.
I'm not surprised.
Charles, welcome back to The Dennis Prager Show.
It's a pleasure to be with you, Dennis.
Well, thank you.
Your late brother was a big fan, and I know you knew that, and it always touched me that you would mention that.
Which reminds me to mention to you, I'd like to tell you, because I've been an avid reader of yours, as you know, for so long.
I want to tell you two, I think they're my favorite.
And tell me how you feel about them.
One was, I believe it was on Stem Cell Research, and wherein you wrote about George W. Bush's, the depth of his statements on the issue, contrasted with his opponents, and that you yourself, theoretically, would have the most to gain given your paralysis, and yet you wrote, but...
Aren't there moral issues that are greater than all of us?
And I thought that, if I may use the term, I thought the column was heroic.
Is it in the book?
Yes, it is.
It stemmed from a discussion on the President's Council of Bioethics on which I sat, where that issue had come up.
And I said, you know, this might help me someday, but what's far more important to me is that my son grow up in the world.
Where moral lines are drawn and where we don't wantonly manipulate the human embryo.
In that kind of world, I would not want to bequeath to him.
So yes, that was it.
And I remember, there's also, I think in the book, there's a column.
I was actually invited by President Obama to the signing of his revision of the stem cell law.
It happened that the line I would have drawn, It was different from George W. Bush's line.
And it is exactly where Obama drew it.
So he assumed that I would come to the ceremony.
And if that had been the only thing, I might have.
But at the same time, Obama left open the manipulation of the human embryo with no limits.
And I found that utterly unconscionable.
And I just declined to attend the ceremony.
And that column's in the book as well.
Yeah, I recall the declining.
I've quoted you on that so often because you come, obviously, not only do you come from the places that I mentioned in light of your own physical condition, but you are also, and this is something I've always wanted to ask you, would you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist?
Oh, I believe atheism is the least plausible of all theologies.
I mean, there are a lot of wild ones out there, but there weren't atheists.
Clearly.
So contrary to what is possible is atheism.
I mean, the idea that all this universe, I mean, what is it, always existed?
It created itself ex nihilo?
I mean, talk about the violation of human rationality.
So that to me is sort of off the charts.
As to believing, I mean, I think I live in a place where maybe Jefferson, not to flatter myself, but I would...
Follow the kind of theology that Jefferson and Albert Einstein had, which is a recognition of the mystery of the universe and the fact that it is impenetrable.
I think it was Newton who once used the phrase that we are like snails on the beach and the ocean trying to figure out the tides.
We have as much possible Understanding of the ultimate meaning and source of the universe, as does that snail.
So I stand in awe of the mystery, and that's sort of where I leave it.
What is the difference, and I'm not going to pursue this much, but obviously people would be very interested, because they're interested in you.
What's the difference between mystery?
Is mystery capitalized in your mind?
Well, I mean, mystery does not necessarily mean agency.
What I'm skeptical is the notion of some interventionist being in human history.
The mystery tells me that the universe is so complex and so dense with things that we cannot possibly understand.
Again, thinking of the snail on the seashore trying to work out the tides using Newtonian mechanics.
That it's best to bow in awe to it.
And beyond that, people can interpret as they want.
They can see it as an agency.
They can see it as an intervener in history.
They can see it as Einstein did.
When he spoke of God doesn't play dice with the universe, referring to quantum mechanics, he meant that there's an order and a regularity in nature that inspires awe.
And the sense that there's something way beyond the human understanding.
So that I fully accept, and I feel it.
To feel more, you need to have the kind of faith experience, which I haven't had.
I respect it in others.
My father was a fairly orthodox Jew.
My brother was as well.
And I leave it as a question rather than an answer.
Okay.
But you will find this of interest because you noted the idea, it's preposterous, the idea that all of this came from nothing.
And I had the astrophysicist who wrote the book, I think it's something from nothing.
Right, he attributed it to equations in quantum mechanics that would account for this.
Yeah, but of course, you would have loved this because I said to him...
At a given point, so you're telling me that even those laws came from nothing?
And his answer basically was, well, it depends what nothing means.
Yeah.
It's like what is is.
Well, I mean, then you have to capitalize nothing.
Then you have to look at the nothing and say, wait, maybe this isn't, you know, in Maimonides, you know that his theology was that.
Right, you can only say what God isn't.
You can only say what God is not.
Yep, yep.
So his theology wasn't, I mean, you know.
Once you start to say that there's something inherent in the nothingness of the universe that already has laws, you come over the bridge.
You're on the other side.
Yes, exactly.
How did you start out politically?
First of all, I grew up in Canada.
I was born in the U.S., but my family moved to Canada when I was five.
So I grew up in Montreal.
I went to McGill.
The 60s and McGill were not like the 60s here.
There was no Vietnam War, obviously.
It was an issue of French-Canadian nationalism.
So it was a whole different kind of radicalism.
But when I came to the U.S., I sort of identified as my American family had, as a liberal Democrat, but a Cold War Democrat.
I was always a Cold War liberal.
My hero was Scoop Jackson.
I write about this.
The introduction to the book is an original essay, a very long one.
Autobiographical.
And I talk about my transition from a doctor to a writer, and from a Cold War liberal, Scoop Jackson acolyte, to a conservative over years.
You know, in 1976, when I was a doctor in Massachusetts, I handed out leaflets for Scoop on the sidewalk in the Massachusetts Democratic primary.
You remember, Scoop, he was very liberal.
And he was tough as nails on the Soviets.
No illusions.
But he had one flaw as a candidate.
You remember this.
He was extremely dull.
It was said of Scoop Jackson that if he ever gave a fireside chat, the fire would go out.
So that was Scoop's problem.
But anyway, see, people don't understand today that in the late 70s there was a very powerful and important segment of the Democratic Party that was conservative, especially on foreign policy.
It was called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority.
And it involved Scoop Jackson, Pat Moynihan, Hewitt Humphrey.
The problem is, and this is my transition that you were asking about, is that they petered out.
I mean, the last remaining member of that tribe, the last Mohican, was Joe Lieberman, who was essentially driven out of the Democratic Party.
Liberal and domestic issues, tough on foreign issues.
So that brings me to the 80s.
I worked for Mondale.
In 1980, I was a speechwriter for him in 1980. But then on Inauguration Day, when Reagan came in 1981, and again, all of this is in the introduction.
Reagan sworn in the first term.
I went to work for the New Republic.
And then the transition started when I was persuaded by empirical evidence about the damage that the war on poverty, the great society, that liberal policies were doing.
And as a scientist, as a...
Doctor who's open to empirical evidence.
When the medicine is killing your patient, you stop giving the medicine.
Beautifully said.
And you think of something else.
Let me tell everybody once again, I'm talking to Charles Krauthammer, as I'm sure nearly every one of you knows simply by his voice.
His major book just come out, Things That Matter.
It is up at DennisPrager.com.
We continue.
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Hi everybody, this is Dennis Prager, delighted to have Charles Krauthammer as my guest.
And we're talking about everything, actually.
Indeed, he writes about everything.
His book is the number one in the country in Amazon non-fiction.
And the book is Things That Matter, Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics.
And because you folks get a chance to hear him on the politics of the day, I am really concentrating on the large, large issues that he doesn't get a chance to speak about quite as often, obviously, as the issues of the day.
Before that, though, I'd like to ask you, because I'm a big fan of reading people's columns when, obviously, if they're worth reading.
My theory is, if it's worth reading, it's like a symphony.
Just because you heard it once, why would you not want to hear it again?
So, my question to you, since I completely buy the idea of reading good people's columns or good columnist's columns, did you feel tempted and did you change any of them?
Oh no, I changed nothing.
I mean, I changed...
I explained in the introduction.
Sometimes I changed headlines because, you know, headlines are written by somebody else.
Right.
And they have to fit the column space.
You don't have to do that.
So yeah, I would write a new headline if it was appropriate.
The only time I changed anything, and I was very tempted, there were things that weren't quite right or the words didn't quite sing the way.
I thought that'd be cheating.
So the only thing I did is for punctuation, I regularized it, because remember, I wrote in the Washington Post, I've been writing in the Post, in Time Magazine, in Commentary, the Weekly Standard.
And as you know, all the publications have different style books.
So one has serial commas, the other doesn't.
So I did standard.
I picked one set of punctuation standards and stuck to it.
And the last thing I did is when there was a reference that was particularly obscure.
That nobody would remember.
I would usually edit it out simply because I didn't want to clutter up the book with footnotes.
And then the only other thing I would ever do is if a thought or a quotation were repeated in two columns, say 10 or 15 years apart, I might create ellipses and just eliminate ones for redundancy.
So other than those very, very minor changes, there's no change of meaning anywhere.
I figure I wrote it, and I'll stay with it.
Did you come across a column that you thought, uh-oh, I got that wrong?
Oh, well, look, I was once a liberal.
But I wasn't really a flaming liberal.
No, exactly.
Even at the beginning of my career.
You hated evil.
Well, that, perhaps.
Unless it was really tempting, you know, like chocolate-covered evil.
Ah, good point.
No, I mean, it's not that I hate it.
I went back, I've been writing for 30 years, so I went back to 1981. And I read everything.
God, that almost killed me, a million words.
That's a lot of words.
And what I did is I chose the ones, as you say, the ones that stand the test of time.
There's one of my favorites that's about Halley's Comet, which returns every 76 years.
And I wrote on the year when it returned, which is 1985, I believe.
And it sort of stands up.
There's a lot about science.
There's a lot about, you know, some of the beautiful things in life.
A number theory, art.
I write about the baseball, the perfectly thrown outfield assist.
There's a column on Rick Ankele, you know, the guy who came back when his career was dead as a pitcher, sort of like in The Natural, and he came back eight years later as a hitter.
I mean, it's sort of a resurrection.
I write about the proper uses of the F word.
I have a column on why don't...
Touch my junk is the anthem of, you know, the Tea Party patriot today.
So it's all about fads and fashions, about some of the things that are elegant and beautiful.
But, you know, I intended, Dennis, to pick only those columns and do a book called There's More to Life Than Politics.
But in the end, I decided I couldn't do that.
And it's for the same reason I left medicine, to become a writer.
And the reason is that in the end, everything that matters, all things elegant and beautiful, depend on getting the politics right.
Politics is grubby and grasping.
It's cynical and manipulative.
Everybody today is rightly disgusted with the practice of politics.
But in the end, Dennis, if you get the politics wrong, all things that matter, everything elegant and beautiful, get swept away.
Germany, 1933. China and the Cultural Revolution.
In five years they tried to destroy.
5,000 years of Chinese culture.
They even abolished color in clothing.
And you don't even have to go to history, Dennis.
You go to North Korea today, the politics of a mad Stalinism has reduced the people to slavery and created a desolation spiritual and moral unlike any And material, of course, unlike any on Earth.
So in the end, you've got to do the politics.
Distasteful, grubby, and inelegant as it is.
And that's why the book is half on politics and half on the other one.
Obviously well said.
So let me ask you then, do you think that ultimately the most noble profession for somebody wishing to do good is politics?
I don't know about nobility.
I do think it's the most important.
And it's why I left medicine, which wasn't...
But you're not a politician.
You're an influencer.
Well, somebody in public life, whether you're an influencer or you're an elected official or you're an administrator or you're a Henry Kissinger, you know, whether you're elected, you're appointed, I'm sort of on the periphery.
But I'm just saying to be engaged in political life.
Oh, okay.
I don't think it's the most noble thing.
Well, important and noble.
I think a doctor is noble.
I think that really is.
You are unmistakably doing the good.
And I left it because I thought that the scale of what politics does, which is to determine whether the good will flourish or whether it will die, is too important.
Not to be involved in it, even from the outside.
In terms of doing good, if you could be, you didn't have to run, somehow you could be appointed, and that's possible, as you know, with the death of a senator, let's say.
Would you rather be Senator Krauthammer or political writer and speaker Krauthammer?
Well, I think my gifts lie in analysis and in prose.
I don't know whether I'd have any gifts whatsoever as either a governor or a legislator.
I sort of found my way to my current profession by pure serendipity, never intending to get there.
But it turned out that fate had determined that I would find what I was meant to do.
If you ask me in the abstract, if it were somebody else, if you had a bright young man of a good heart, or a bright young woman of a good heart, and you would say, should you become a commentator or a senator?
I'd probably say become a senator, because there you can act more directly, rather than indirectly, as I do.
We'll be back in a moment.
Charles Krauthammer and the book, which is obviously self-recommending, and he comes out with few books, though many columns.
Things That Matter is the book at DennisPrager.com.
Hello, everybody, and welcome back.
I'm Dennis Prager, speaking with Charles Krauthammer, who has allotted an entire hour here, for which I am appreciative.
He's very squeezed, given the number of interviews about his wonderful new book, Things That Matter.
The book is number one.
Out of, what is it on Amazon?
Something like three million books, number one in nonfiction.
That's a very big deal.
That's the number that matters.
I think the New York Times bestseller list, which I'm not being self-serving.
My book did make it onto that list, but I think the Amazon list is actually the more accurate.
Nobody knows.
My book was only released a week ago today, so that week of last week will not appear in the newspaper until a week from Sunday.
There's a two-week lag, which I didn't even know about until I looked at the listings this week.
So last week won't show up until the past week.
It's the same people who came up with the formula for Coke.
Yeah, but that works.
Yeah.
There you go.
All right, fair enough.
I'm not going to knock it, though, until I see where I end up.
Yeah, no, no, I understand it.
Let me reserve judgment.
Yeah, that's fair enough.
Are you...
I'll give you a scale.
I love talking scales.
So 1 to 10, 1 utterly pessimistic, 1 to 10 exuberantly optimistic about the United States.
What number?
I'd do a seven.
Really?
That high?
Yes.
Sets me apart from most of my conservative friends.
That's right.
And the reason?
Or reasons?
The reason is, you know, here we get kind of touchy-feely.
But it's a two-part answer.
Number one, there's something providential about American history.
It's very improbable that we should have succeeded as we have.
That we should in the late 1700s.
Have had the greatest collection of political minds in the history of the world on a tiny little outpost of the West, you know, clinging to the shores of the Atlantic.
Then in the 19th century, we need a Lincoln, we get a Lincoln.
20th century, we need an FDR and a Reagan, and we get them.
I'm not talking about a savior coming along.
So I think about this.
Why is it that we always seem to renew ourselves, even when things are dark?
And the reason, I think, is there's something about the basic...
Decency, common sense, and love of freedom that is deeply embedded in the American people.
That overcomes, for example, biased media.
That overcomes bad economic times.
And I think we'll even overcome the kinds of dependency that liberal governments try to create among the people.
There's just something that I respect and almost am in awe of, of how different our country is from Western Europe.
Where they knuckle under to regulators without a protest.
I think I was reading just an hour or two ago, in one other country could you have had the Tea Party?
A spontaneous reaction of free people with no leader, no direction, no agenda, I mean specific agenda, other than to say to liberals who are obviously extending and intruding into their lives, but making government more powerful.
And more intrusive, saying, you know, this isn't us.
We don't want to go this way.
And creating, for example, the 2010 election result, which was a shellacking, as Obama called it.
So there's a great resilience, and I think it has to do with the basic spirit of America.
And that's why I always remain.
And my mentor at being optimistic is one of the great neoconservatives, Irving Kristol.
Irving was very, very critical of the welfare state.
Very critical of liberals.
But he never despaired, and he always had this kind of sunny equanimous disposition, a bit like Reagan did.
Which is, you know, we find our way, and we will, even though things are tough.
And even though the dominant intellectual forces of America, the university and the media, demonized the Tea Party as racist and evil?
The dominant intellectual forces in America have been the forces of the left for a hundred years.
And in fact, what's new is the vibrancy of the conservative opposition.
Remember in the early 1950s, I think it was Lionel Trilling who said that liberalism was the only viable political ideology in the United States.
And then comes Buckley.
And then comes Reagan.
Alright, hold it there.
Hold it there, because I want to remind everybody.
The book is Things That Matter.
The author, Charles Krauthammer.
I'm Dennis Prager.
We return.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
I'll bet you, if you have listened to me for more than a month, and some of you have been listening to me for 33 years, but for more than any...
Time frame between a month and 33 years, you probably know my preoccupying question.
Why?
I have to know why.
It's just, it's like the addict has to get his or her rush.
I have to know why.
It's been true since I was a child.
It drove me crazy when teachers or parents said, when they would tell me to do something, I'd say, why?
And they said, because I said so.
By the way, which is a fine answer after a while, but I ache to know why, and if I got an explanation, I did whatever anybody wanted.
Why have we intellectually gotten into the terrible state that, for example, our universities are in, the nihilism?
There is no truth, there is no beauty, there is no good, everything is relative, there isn't even truth necessarily.
How does Harvard, which has as its motto, Lux et Veritas, isn't that Harvard's motto, or is that Yale?
No, is it Yale?
I think it's Harvard.
Light and truth, one of the elite universities.
How did it happen that light and truth no longer matter?
So, I read and I have read some terrific books about this.
One was just published this week, and I say terrific book.
It's titled The Devil's Pleasure Palace.
I've had this author on, Michael Walsh.
Michael is a former classical music critic of Time magazine, so he's very deeply involved in cultural matters.
He's now a regular contributor, political, cultural commentary at PJ Media and National Review, etc., etc.
The book was published just three days ago, The Devil's Pleasure Palace, The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West.
It sounds like heavy duty, but he writes in a way that makes it accessible.
Look, he has to, because I'm very serious about this.
If you write for time, you're writing for the public.
You weren't writing for the Journal of Ontological Discourse, which Alan has, by the way, a subscription to.
He brings in the issue so excited each week.
Michael Walsh, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
Dennis, thank you so much for having me on.
I appreciate it.
Yes, you're always a good guest to have.
So, again, folks, the subtitle is The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West.
Subversion of the West, everybody understands.
Very few people know what critical theory is.
What is it?
Critical theory.
It's actually a lot simpler than everybody thinks.
Because it was formulated by a group of big-dome German intellectuals and expressed in German originally, we tend to think of it as very intimidating.
Basically, all it says is there is no institution, no cultural totem, no principle that is beyond attack and preferably destruction.
So that critical theory applies across the board to all of the basic institutions of what we used to call Judeo-Christian civilization, Western civilization, whatever the term was.
And it was developed by a group of men after the First World War and then injected into America after the Second World War via Columbia University.
and it's spread through the culture with the results that we see all around us.
Why isn't it called critical?
Well, I understand it's self-serving, but in reality, if your description is accurate, and I know it to be accurate, then we could call it destruction theory.
Yeah, we should call it destruction theory, and that's one of the points of The Devil's Pleasure Palace, is that it's, and I use the term advisedly but regularly in this book, satanic, literally satanic, in that it is against creation.
It is the negation of the creation of Western civilization as it's been.
Continuing for the past thousand plus years.
It is an anti-philosophy for the sake of being anti.
The book is The Devil's Pleasure Palace.
It is up at DennisPrager.com.
And is the original publication in paperback?
Or is it in both Hardcore and Kindle?
Right.
And Kindle as well.
And I'm recording the audio book right now, as a matter of fact.
Well, not this second.
Which is not easy.
Oh, it's much harder than it looks.
Oh, I gave up.
No, no, no.
HarperCollins asked me to record my book on America, on Americanism, and it took me two hours to do the introduction, and I thought, I can't do this.
Yeah, well, we've done two sessions already.
We have the last session today, and I think we'll get the book finished today.
Well, congratulations.
It is a real challenge.
Anyway, however you get it, it is worth reading and it is clear.
So I have dated this reductionism and this antithesis to Western culture to the end of the 19th century, again with Germans coming over.
But the critical theory was sort of the nail in the coffin.
And that's after World War I. Yes, it's formulated by two men in particular, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Protestant, and Georg Lukacs, who was a Jewish-Hungarian.
And the two of them were reacting to the destruction of the First World War.
Let's face it, the First World War actually ended Western civilization.
That's right.
And we're just playing it out now.
But they resented what had happened, and they were searching for...
A way to finish it off, essentially.
Lukács asks famously at one point, who will save us from Western culture?
And they developed this notion that everything can be under attack.
Gramsci invented the idea of the long march through the institutions, that they were, we'll use the M word, cultural Marxists who realized that the Marxist economic scientific theory wasn't going to work.
They could see it not working already in the Soviet Union.
It didn't take hold in Germany.
It didn't take hold in Britain.
But they felt a better way would be to use Marxist principles against the culture itself rather than strictly confining them to the economy.
And this was very appealing to whom in America?
Why didn't they come over?
And American professors say, what are you kidding?
We love Western civilization.
Why didn't they say that?
That's a good question, because it happened right after the war.
The second generation of Frankfurters, the intellectual generation, Max Horkheimer, Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, who you'll remember as I do from our college days, when he was tremendously influential, Wilhelm Reich.
Marcuse was once asked, do you love anything about America?
Do you know what his answer was?
Besides no, what?
No, no, he had him answer.
The mountains, the rivers.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Well, Adorno came to California, as did a lot of the refugees from Hitler during the war period, and he hated California.
And as I say in the book, how can you hate California?
Yes, especially then.
Especially then, when it was perfect.
So these guys were just malcontent, miserable, sodding human beings.
They are, forgive me, Michael, I just want to say, they are the embodiment of the unhappy make the world worse.
That's exactly right.
There is no replacement to critical theory.
There is only the destruction.
And the way we got into this subject, if I could just talk a little bit about the background of the book then?
Roger Kimball, my publisher at Encounter, a colleague and a friend at PJ Media, and I had been kicking around a book and I said, I really want to write a book about God and Satan.
After my own personal experience, which you and I have talked about, I began to question a lot of religious tenets and my own faith, Catholicism in this case.
So I wanted to get into the battle between good and evil.
And I felt that the one way in was through art.
So it's the central thesis of this book that Art, the narrative, the heroic narrative, which is actually the foundation of individualism, which is a Western characteristic, is implanted in us by God, and that this actually manifests itself in the religions that we practice.
I go into more detail.
I want to bore the audience with that right now.
But the way in was, for me, reading Paradise Lost again, which I... Milton's great poem.
And then looking for the counter-paradise lost, which was, of course, Goethe's Faust.
So we had a poem about God, and we had a poem about the devil.
And their interaction I used as the prism for this work of really cultural criticism.
That's precisely what it is.
Right.
So that's how it happened.
Talk about this personal crisis at all, or is it something you like to keep personal?
Well, I don't talk about it in this book.
No, no, no, but I'm saying you mentioned it in passing.
I am aware of it, but I don't know if you...
Well, you and I talked about it on the air a couple years ago.
My daughter died very suddenly in her sleep at the age of 22 on Christmas Day with her impeccable dramatic timing a few years back.
That's probably the worst thing that can ever happen to anybody.
And after that, nothing bad can happen to you.
The book is The Devil's Pleasure Palace.
Michael Walsh, former cultural editor at Time Magazine, has written this very important book.
How did we get where we are?
How did we get to this nihilism that dominates the university and came through Columbia?
Guess where I went?
We'll be back in a moment.
The book is up at DennisPrager.com.
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