RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - True Lies
Aired: 2026-03-13
Duration: 15:07


=== Politics Concealing Itself (07:03) ===

[00:00:00]  So Philip, tell us a little bit about yourself and then we can start talking about this article you wrote.
[00:00:10]  Well, I'm a student.
[00:00:13]  I'm like studying philosophy.
[00:00:15]  I can tell that.
[00:00:17]  Yeah, you can tell from maybe the topic or the vernacular of the article.
[00:00:23]  I'm interested in, you know, obviously like power dynamics and how politics kind of conceals itself.
[00:00:34]  I think Trump himself is like emblematic of the kind of character of the age.
[00:00:42]  You do see the marriage of politics with entertainment.
[00:00:47]  I know that's trite, but yeah, we belabored the point that, yeah, we have the reality TV star as sitting in the Oval Office.
[00:00:57]  But there's actually a lot of significance in this that people kind of overlook or they fall into these traps.
[00:01:07]  And so I think it's worth, of course, like delving a little deeper into the issue at hand here.
[00:01:16]  Definitely.
[00:01:18]  Maybe my article is just kind of an opener for a can of worms.
[00:01:24]  Yeah, I agree.
[00:01:25]  I thought it was a great big picture look at Trump and it can, the ideas in there can kind of be applied in a lot of different ways.
[00:01:34]  Yeah, let me do this.
[00:01:35]  Before we get the conversation started, I'll just put the art, the link, the article in the chat.
[00:01:40]  It's actually in the scratch pad for today, but just in case you haven't seen it, you can check it out and maybe read it at length.
[00:01:51]  So let me start out by bringing you back a little bit.
[00:01:59]  I imagine you're in your early 20s.
[00:02:02]  I am.
[00:02:02]  Yes.
[00:02:03]  Okay.
[00:02:04]  So 10 years.
[00:02:06]  Wow.
[00:02:07]  So when Trump came on the scene, you were like 10.
[00:02:11]  I was in middle school.
[00:02:15]  Okay.
[00:02:15]  Well, I want to ask this seriously when you were like fifth or sixth grade or whatever, what was your impression of the whole thing?
[00:02:23]  Because I have a child who was, who is your age back then, if that's the right way of putting it.
[00:02:31]  And she does have a kind of sense of who Trump is.
[00:02:34]  And she actually even has opinions on Trump.
[00:02:36]  But what was it like being that young and Trump coming on the scene?
[00:02:40]  Was it just politics, adult stuff, or was there something special?
[00:02:45]  I don't think I was all that interested in it, to be honest.
[00:02:50]  I was kind of, I think, caught off guard by his election.
[00:02:57]  But apart from being kind of this like news event that was particularly unexpected, I don't think I gave it really much thought, actually.
[00:03:09]  And of course, you'd like see headlines about, you know, he says this new thing that's got everyone turned inside out.
[00:03:18]  But for me, it wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't really focused on it, to be honest.
[00:03:24]  It's understandable.
[00:03:26]  I can remember the first election that I was sort of aware of.
[00:03:30]  I can vaguely remember my sister watching television and seeing Ronald Reagan on the television.
[00:03:36]  This is sort of how old I am.
[00:03:38]  But the first one that I sort of followed to some degree was George Herbert Walker Bush versus Dukakis.
[00:03:47]  I remember there was this dynamic where all of our teachers were voting for Dukakis because, you know, there's liberal bias basically, or I shouldn't even say bias, just liberal tendency among that profession.
[00:04:00]  But I did sort of resonate with Republicans very early on.
[00:04:04]  I kind of resonated with the right wing, even though I'm not sure I even knew about any issue or something like that.
[00:04:14]  But that type of politics seems extremely stayed in comparison to Trump.
[00:04:21]  And obviously there were some dirty politics about that campaign that had the famous Willie Horden ad, you know, race baiting Southern strategic lore.
[00:04:30]  But there is something different.
[00:04:32]  First off, we're saturated by politics in a way, young people are saturated by politics in a way that they weren't previously.
[00:04:41]  You would have to go and sit down and watch the news to learn about what's going on in the election or read a newspaper, which we certainly weren't doing.
[00:04:49]  And now there is a kind of pop culture quality to Trump that, you know, Trump's name would be evoked in some of these totally stupid, like mumble rap songs and, you know, like, ooh, ooh, Donald Trump.
[00:05:06]  Like just, I'm just making that up, but you, you get my point.
[00:05:10]  Like he, he was a, he was an icon of reality television show star.
[00:05:14]  Even before he went on The Apprentice, he was sort of a reality television show star.
[00:05:19]  I guess your youth has inspired me to reminisce here, but I knew about Trump when I was a kid because I would go with my mother to the to the grocery store to go shopping.
[00:05:29]  And I kept up with his love affair with Marla Maples just by reading the covers of People magazine and the National Inquirer or something.
[00:05:40]  I kind of knew what was going on.
[00:05:42]  He was in my mind, you know, even at a young age.
[00:05:46]  He's always been a reality show star for his entire life.
[00:05:51]  And even before he did an actual reality show.
[00:05:55]  But yeah, I mean, so I, so I, and, and then now the young people are kind of like saturated with pop, you know, TikTok videos or whatever.
[00:06:04]  They're saturated with that kind of thing.
[00:06:08]  So do you think that we can never go back?
[00:06:12]  That politics sort of must be a reality show going forward?
[00:06:17]  Or do you think that this is a, you know, an aberration?
[00:06:26]  I think it's left a permit of impact.
[00:06:28]  And I don't think we're going to see like a figure to the breadth and extremity of Trump like in the near future, actually.
[00:06:36]  I think he's like kind of a once-in-a-bloom figure, but I think he's left like an indelible mark on at least how politics appears to people, how politics is interpreted, how politicians are interpreted.
[00:06:51]  I do remember when I was like very little, I heard about McCain's defeat to Obama.
[00:07:01]  And I didn't know anything about politics.

=== The Ambiguity of Power (05:23) ===

[00:07:03]  And maybe this was me regurgitating, you know, my parents' opinions.
[00:07:10]  But I kind of had the impression that Obama was like boring.
[00:07:15]  He didn't really do anything.
[00:07:17]  He talked a lot.
[00:07:18]  He was kind of like a community organizer.
[00:07:22]  But he wasn't kind of decisive.
[00:07:26]  And I think the funny thing about Trump is he's equally, he's not decisive either, in a way, but he kind of pretends to be.
[00:07:38]  And so everyone is, and supporters especially, critics too, are left in like this moment of suspense that never actually ends.
[00:07:47]  So the final decision, this kind of Smithian decision, never actually arrives, but we're always waiting for it.
[00:07:57]  I think that is very true because you can't really understand what the policy is.
[00:08:06]  And I think there's a way in which he has a natural instinct to allow that to happen because he has a natural instinct to be all things to all people.
[00:08:15]  And, you know, there is a degree to him that is polemical where, you know, he calls out the fake news media and says the Democrats are evil.
[00:08:23]  Whatever.
[00:08:24]  I get that.
[00:08:25]  But in his heart of hearts, I do think he sincerely desires to be loved.
[00:08:31]  I think maybe that's his fundamental desire, maybe his only desire.
[00:08:36]  And there's a way in which even something like the Iran war, where it's sort of ambiguous in a way that other things weren't previously, you know, what are we doing there?
[00:08:49]  Are we engaging in regime change?
[00:08:53]  Are we knocking them so they don't get nuclear weapons?
[00:08:56]  Are we going to pull out?
[00:08:58]  Are we going to stay there for the long haul?
[00:09:00]  Is this for Israel?
[00:09:01]  Is this for America?
[00:09:02]  I mean, it's sort of all of that.
[00:09:04]  And he says different things to different, at different times, to different audiences.
[00:09:08]  And there's just this sort of ambiguity that I think is strategic on some instinctual level.
[00:09:17]  Like this is how he operates is to never make a decision or to sort of be all things to all people or to be a kind of screen on which you can project fantasies and things like that.
[00:09:29]  Well, I don't think we could say he intends it in a way that we might have this idea of a politician as like a strategist who kind of intends ambiguity.
[00:09:44]  Like I think it is instinctual with Trump.
[00:09:47]  And maybe it derives from his, you know, desire to be liked and to be popular to everyone.
[00:09:55]  But I think that's what's also interesting.
[00:09:57]  It's like, you know, in the article, I use, you know, Kantian ideas to kind of present this picture of Trump that we have and that a lot of people have, you know, beneath the skin,
[00:10:13]  beneath the media kind of shimmer as like someone who's making decisions intentionally, posturing a certain way, because he has this kind of inner dialogue, this like inner personality.
[00:10:28]  Maybe he's like particularly pernicious as an evil, vicious person, or maybe he's he's actually trying to do the right thing, but he's restrained by his advisors or something.
[00:10:41]  This is all projection upon Trump that it reveals more about the interpreter than Trump who's being interpreted.
[00:10:50]  Right.
[00:10:51]  And there's no thing in itself.
[00:10:53]  There's only the perception of the thing.
[00:10:55]  That's the only thing we can ever get from him.
[00:10:57]  Yeah.
[00:10:58]  Well, you have, of course, like the numina, which is the thing behind perception, behind, you know, the imposition of, you know, these concepts that we have in, I guess, in Kantian language, you know, you'd say forms of the understanding that structure our experience.
[00:11:18]  But it's like what a lot of people are trying to do who are, you know, plan trusters or panicans, what they're trying to do is read some kind of inner strategy, motive, or intention into the phenomena.
[00:11:33]  And this is kind of like Metaphysical speculation, insofar as it's like for Kant, we can't actually reach beyond the phenomena.
[00:11:44]  Reason is constrained to what the information that is structured by sensibility and intuitions.
[00:11:53]  But we nonetheless have a desire to.
[00:11:57]  Because it kind of also, it's also exacerbated by the fact that there's a contradiction on the surface.
[00:12:03]  And so, how do we restore coherence?
[00:12:05]  We kind of project our own, I guess, formulations upon in order to make sense of it all.
[00:12:15]  So we can kind of achieve a semblance of coherence in interpreting him.
[00:12:19]  But I think this also plays into kind of Trump's Trump's interests.

=== Coalescing Anti-Government Coalitions (02:40) ===

[00:12:27]  And that, you know, he can be equally accessible to everyone.
[00:12:32]  He can build these vast coalitions without ever really committing to a particular point or Bobi.
[00:12:40]  And so, like I said, I think that ties into what you were saying earlier.
[00:12:45]  He's like, he's anyone to everyone.
[00:12:48]  Yeah.
[00:12:49]  This makes him a really good campaigner as well.
[00:12:52]  I mean, but it's problematic when you actually have to govern because you kind of have to make decisions.
[00:12:59]  That's the way, if you're going to make policies, if you're going to undertake the labor of governance, you have to exclude some people.
[00:13:11]  There's a lot I want to pick up on there, but I'll just start with this.
[00:13:18]  One sense that I have with Trump is that he's sort of constantly campaigning, and the MAGA coalition is constantly on the ouse.
[00:13:31]  And what I mean by this is that so much of the Trump coalition in 2016 and 2020 and 24 and 2024, the coalitions, we should say, because a lot of boomers died, a lot of new people came in.
[00:13:47]  It's this sort of grab bag, a basket of deplorables, you could say, using Hillary Clinton's language of anti-government animosity, which is very ironic.
[00:14:01]  Like in 2020, and it was sort of early at COVID at that point, but you still had the makings of people being like, I want to get out of my house.
[00:14:10]  I'm not wearing a mask and all that kind of stuff.
[00:14:13]  They were voting for Trump.
[00:14:15]  In 2024, it was the anti-vax coalition.
[00:14:18]  I remember Brett Weinstein had this like heady transcendental movement of some kind.
[00:14:26]  I have no earthly idea what exactly they were advocating for, but it was like with 2020, we got 2020 vision of the evils of the deep state and, you know, what something like that.
[00:14:38]  They were all voting for Trump.
[00:14:40]  All the podcast bros who were liberal five years ago or libertarian or even left leftist are voting for Trump.
[00:14:51]  There's this combination of anti-government energy that coalesces into these coalitions.
[00:15:01]  And I don't think he can win without that.
[00:15:04]  He's sort of like the anti-candidate.
[00:15:06]  That's when he's at his best.