David Frum critiques the "Trumpocracy," arguing American conservatism has devolved into obsolete anti-leftism, allowing Donald Trump to exploit a vacuum left by failures on healthcare and the opioid epidemic. While noting unproven direct coordination, Frum asserts Trump knowingly profited from Russian hacking, shifting politics toward virulent ethnic competition rather than class issues. He proposes renewing national identity through reduced immigration and stronger social insurance, predicting future political innovation will emerge from state and local levels to defend free speech against both violence and corruption. [Automatically generated summary]
Folks, it's official. We are entering the age of enlightenment.
My friend, a true feminist in the best sense of the word, and a fearless defender of free speech, Christina Hoff Summers, was invited to speak at Lewis and Clark Law School this week.
Here's what happened when she began her talk.
unidentified
We choose to protest male supremacy, not give it a platform.
Christina Summers has repeatedly delegitimized the suffering of women worldwide.
Christina Summers has repeatedly delegitimized the suffering of women worldwide.
But we believe our siblings and our comrades, women are not liars with victim mentalities.
Putting aside the creepiness of the clone-like, repetitive chanting from the protesters, their use of free speech actually isn't a use of free speech at all.
While of course they have the right to protest, your right to exercise your free speech doesn't come at the expense of someone else's right to exercise theirs.
So, what this means is, yes, you can peacefully protest outside of an event.
You can silently protest inside of an event.
You can hold all the signs you want and you can encourage others to join your cause.
You cannot, however, use your freedoms to trample on the freedoms of others.
This chanting, which again, took place before Christina had even begun to speak, reminded me of when I was at UCLA with Milo Yiannopoulos about two years ago.
Protesters screamed, spit through garbage cans, pulled fire alarms and even called in bomb threats before we even took the stage.
Perhaps most egregiously, though, was the group of students who linked arms to create a human wall to stop us and other viewers from even going inside the venue itself.
Apparently they aren't against walls, they just don't like Trump's wall.
Christina's talk continued through the chanting, and the protesters then broke out in song.
unidentified
Which side are you on friends?
♪ No platform for fascists, no platform at all ♪ ♪ And we will fight for justice until Christina's gone
♪ ♪ Which side are you on, friends, which side are you on
♪ ♪ Which side are you on, friends, which side are you on
Of course Christina Hoff Summers isn't a fascist at all, she's just an old school liberal who dared challenge modern day leftism.
Ironically, these people, so keen on fighting the fake fascism in their minds, don't understand that they themselves are the ones who are actually using fascist tactics of silencing and drowning out their opponents until there is no opposition remaining at all.
But if you're still confused, here's a simple definition of fascism.
Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and control of industry and commerce which came to prominence in early 20th century Europe.
Do you think Christina Hoff Summers is for dictatorial power?
Is she for forcible suppression of opposition?
To top it off, she even works at the American Enterprise Institute, which is against control of industry and commerce.
Now just think for a moment if the ideas these students were espousing were the set of ideas in power.
They actually would be for dictatorial control, as they believe their cause is the most just, and their opponents are simply evil.
How do you think it would be going for dissent and opposition in their system?
Perhaps the most insidious piece of the cultural Marxism that we see spreading on college campuses these days is that it is using the freedoms that our democratic capitalist society has against itself.
Of course, it would never offer these same protections to minority voices in the dystopian future that it would bring.
While this event thankfully wasn't nearly as violent as when Milo went to UC Berkeley and the school burned down, or when it took $600,000 of security to ensure that Ben Shapiro could speak there without threat, this display at Lewis and Clark is just another reminder of how the backwards thinking of cultural Marxism is coming for all dissenters cloaked in the mask of tolerance and diversity.
Sadly, this story really only broke on right leaning blogs, and was only shared by the usual suspects who continually defend freedom of expression.
As of recording this, I haven't seen any left leaning websites that covered it.
intersectionality.
Sadly, this story really only broke on right leaning blogs and was only shared by the usual
suspects who continually defend freedom of expression.
As of recording this, I haven't seen any left leaning websites that covered it.
The reason for this is twofold.
On one hand, when you can win arguments by silencing your opponents, your job is pretty
But also, and perhaps more importantly, the good actors on the left, which I still believe there are some, who want to call out events like this, rarely do because they know that the same tactics of smearing and silencing will eventually be used against them And then they'll be purged from their former home.
Just ask former guests of mine like Brett Weinstein, Laura Kipnis, Lindsey Shepard and others who dare speak out against this tyrannical faux diversity movement.
The silver lining though of course is that the more that people like Brett, Laura and others speak out, the more room they give for people like you to do the exact same in your life.
Speaking of Berkeley, I spoke there yesterday with Heather McDonald and Steve Simpson, and I'll be speaking at many other colleges in the coming months.
Come join me wherever I may be and ask me as many hard questions in the Q&A as you'd like.
I ask only one thing, which is that if you sing, please make it a little snappier than what we just heard.
A cover of Journey, Fleetwood Mac, or even Frank Sinatra would be preferable.
All right, so a lot of things I want to talk to you about.
I thought your personal history is interesting, and usually when I see you on television, you're talking about the day-to-day machinations of politics.
We have a place in Prince Edward County which is about two and a half hours east of Toronto where my wife and I and our children have spent summers now for almost three decades.
Canada is a That's an interesting phrase.
of the United States with some things omitted, some things intensified.
And so I think it offers Americans often a kind of, well, what if examination of what the United States
She was a radio interviewer on a show called As It Happens for a decade, and then was the founder of a show called The Journal, which was one of those face-to-face TV shows at a time when satellite, instant satellite communication was quite new.
My late father was a businessman, not involved in the political world, and he had a lot of distance from politics.
But yes, my parents' dinner table was a place, it was a high-pressure environment.
They thought deeply about things.
But they were not ideological.
And one of the places where I really learned to think was around that dinner table, because You know, my mother's very skeptical about everything, including her own children.
And the way she, when you were saying something she didn't like, well, she would never argue with you, but she would just sit marching these two lines of interrogatory questions.
And you would eventually realize, I'm caught between these two lines.
And she would force you to think more deeply about, and not just political things, but about everything.
Why do you do that?
Why do you say that?
Why do you think that's funny?
And it made you a more conscious person.
And I try to live up to that in the way I raise my own children.
You never try, I try never to tell them what to do or what to think, but instead to challenge them to think
and to think more deeply.
And not just about the big things, but about everything.
Do you think that's what we're fundamentally missing I mean, I think it's what I try to bring to this show.
I try to let my guests talk even when I disagree with them and maybe poke and prod them in ways to learn a little bit more, but that everyone in the media these days is just pounding at each other and hitting each other and trying to destroy each other instead of sort of going along that journey with you and figuring out why you think that way and more importantly, how you think.
What it makes you aware of is that human history is very tragic, that power can be abused, and it makes you begin to think very hard about, well, how do we build a society?
And so there I was on the Toronto subway system in a society that really worked.
And it forces you to think, most societies aren't like this.
In most societies, people are exposed to random terror and to dictatorial power.
How do you make societies that work and that protect people and respect human Dignity and human freedom.
So I began, and of course at 14 you have no answers, but you become interested in the question.
And what you also know is that when people say, I have a great scheme for humanity, it just requires a few prison camps away.
There are warnings early on in any utopian project like that.
We're going to have to, you know, break some eggs here to make our omelette.
And at first you're right.
At first the eggs are not... At first the eggs are kind of small.
But you can tell those steps.
And that one of the things that, you know, I mean, this is, I think, one of the reasons why people look at what's happening on campuses with such alarm.
Because, you know, obviously the people who are shouting down people on campus, they don't have police forces.
So when I first came across you, I think it was probably maybe 10 years ago, you were on Real Time a lot, and I would just see you on different television shows.
And it was probably when, for me personally, I was a little more left than maybe I am at the moment.
Or at least the whole Overton window has just shifted that it's hard to put anyone on the traditional map anymore.
But you always struck me as a sensible conservative.
I never watched you and was like, ah, that's the guy I disagree with on the right, in some crazed way.
What does conservatism, because you are a conservative, right?
Well, I think it starts with the way our brains are built.
That there are people who are more conscious of risk, and there are people who are less conscious of risk.
There are people who hanker for change, there are people who are ready to stick with present evils rather than try new ones.
And that's just a matter of brain chemistry.
Then, when people with those different brain chemistries approach the problems of society, they start building systems of ideas.
So the reason I've stopped using the phrase, a conservative, and stopped talking about the conservative movement, is what I would have called conservatism, when I came out of college in 1982, was a set of answers to the problems of the 1970s and 80s.
Inflation, crime, the Soviet menace, the disorder in American life, sluggish productivity growth.
And the conservatives of those days had a series of policy recommendations for those problems, and by and large, they worked.
And the result was that the problems either were overcome or anyway, so reduced in significance, they stopped being the most important problems that Americans cared about.
New problems came to the fore.
And about those new problems, conservatives had the same old answers they'd had back in 1982.
And it became a kind of fetish.
That if lower taxes were the right way to respond to low productivity growth in 1982, then if you had completely different problems in 2008, then obviously still lower taxes must work just as well as they did with a completely different set of problems in 1982.
So, I think what has happened is that the conservative movement, conservative politics, is a fossil.
It's interesting in that it reveals, it's like unearthing some piece of rock from a different geological era.
It tells you something about what people had on their minds in 1982.
But if you say, how am I going to solve the problems of 2018?
Yeah, so when people say that they're conservatives now, does that have any particular meaning to you?
Like, I guess there is the set that you're talking about from 82 that's going, you know, we know what the answers are then, but that seems very different from now.
And then of course, we're obviously gonna spend a lot of time talking about Trump, and that really has flipped us on its head.
Now, what that does is first, it makes, it does a couple of things.
First, it makes oppositionism.
It means you're always against, never for.
And the second thing it means is you never have the initiative.
Because you don't know what you think about anything until somebody else tells you first.
And I think that's one of the reasons why conservatives were so vulnerable to Trump, is that You had an intellectual estate that was largely untenanted and falling into disrepair and Donald Trump came and kicked the door down and moved in.
Look, there have been a lot of, I've almost always supported, well until 2016, I always supported the Republican nominee for president.
And I thought there have been a lot of people who have had real promise to make a good president.
Mitt Romney would have made a very, very good president.
Conservatism's problem and Republicanism's problem has been that you take people who have real promise as leaders and you then connect them to a program that can't win a Democratic election.
You know, since The end of the Cold War.
The Republican nominee for president has won a majority of the popular vote exactly once.
That was in 2004 in the aftermath of 9-11.
There's no longer a national majority for what Republicans are offering.
And what has happened, and it's no surprise, because when you're saying, well our big idea is to take the Medicare guarantee away from everybody under 55, to put Medicaid on the path toward extinction, and to use all of that to finance more tax cuts like those that worked in the 1980s, in a completely different set of circumstances.
You're not talking to or about me.
So, good people have been committed to an unworkable And what has happened then has been that as Republicans have lost, the parties become more desperate and more vulnerable.
But what has also happened is that you have had an increasingly self-conscious move in the conservative world.
And this is part of the Trumpocracy that I talk about in the book to say, well, if we can't win a majority of the people, We're going to cope with that by redefining who the proper people are.
We're going to define the country.
We're going to shrink our definition of who are the people and divide the country between the people and those people.
And if we have a majority of the people, that's all we care about.
And we're going to try to find ways to prevent those people from participating and even voting.
Yeah, but one of the really damaging things, I mean societies have states, states need revenue.
So, there are ways, the United States might not need so much tax money if, for example,
it didn't spend twice as much per person on health care as everybody else in the world.
When you look at the actual dollars the United States spends on health provision for terrible results, it's very expensive.
Conservatives, by and large, are not interested in getting their fingers into that problem.
The government needs revenue and it has to be funded.
And part of the fossilization happens.
Conservatives say, you say, we've got a problem.
Whatever it is.
Well, if I can solve it with a tax cut, then I'm for doing something.
If I can only solve it by having a spending increase, then I won't do anything.
What then happens is cynical operators say, well, what if we take our spending increase, and instead of doing it through an appropriation, we do it through a tax credit?
How do you feel that?
Oh, then I'm fine!
And the result is that whether the problem is housing, or higher education, or caring for disabled children, that conservatives can be sold a solution in the form of a tax credit, which is usually the least efficient way of solving a problem.
And the result is that you get this kind of malformed state, where the United States has a really big and expensive government, but it's financed in especially inefficient ways, and it addresses problems in especially inefficient ways.
So is the first part there, though, that nobody actually cuts spending?
You know, I've had Ben Shapiro in here a bunch of times, and that's what he talks about, that we can keep raising taxes forever and ever and ever, but that really we have this just giant monstrosity of a government that's incredibly inefficient.
I mean, even healthcare aside, just everything, all the mid-level bureaus and regulators and just this massive federal government that was never supposed to get so big.
That we never actually really look at how much of that we could chop away at, where then, if we did a little of that, we could have the sort of relevant conversations about tax cuts that you're talking about.
The United States, what does the United States government spend its money on?
Defense, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
I think that's, those things together, I think that's about 80%.
So, the rest of the government, you know, is, I mean, I think it's true that dollar for dollar the U.S.
government is less efficient than that of other countries, mostly because of the inheritance of not having a proper civil service.
The idea that the President starts off by appointing the top 10,000 jobs in the civil service, so it's highly political, and you get a lot of people who shouldn't basically have no background in government, don't know what they're doing, and things are not done in a very efficient way.
Also, the power of Congress means there are a lot of people who are always trying to put in some special benefit, and things happen that don't make a... so you have military bases in places where they shouldn't be.
But if you were, this is why I say conservatism is obsolete.
If you want to reduce the state share of expense, and really, I mean, not just by repackaging things as tax, that are, you know, that, I mean, one of the ways we, for example, fund the care of disabled children is through a series of tax credits that are not labeled as expenditures but really are.
You have to do something about Medicare and Medicaid.
And so the conservative idea has been, okay, well the answer is, we're going to take away Medicare and Medicaid from people.
And the reason that the Obama period has been such a crisis, and the period afterwards,
is the defeat over, the defeat of the conservative attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act
and to pass the Ryan Plan, means that conservatives have to now face a world in which the United
States has joined the other developed countries.
And having something like, or something closer to, a universal health care guarantee.
The old idea, we'll save money just by not covering people.
That is not going to be workable in the politics of the 21st century.
So that means you have to actually pay attention to how Medicare works, and you have to say,
how, while covering everybody, do we squeeze costs out of the system?
And that requires a commitment to policy detail that conservatives don't like to do, because they like the sweeping comment, we just need to cut all this waste.
But when you say, well, where is the waste in Medicare?
Well, the answer is, well, the United States overpays for all of these services.
Per unit.
And doctors make more money in the United States than they do in other places.
You have these—but you also have this problem of you have a sicker population than what people do in other countries.
Americans die earlier.
They're less likely to wear seatbelts.
They have more gun accidents.
You have to delve—to deal with this problem, you have to delve into detail in a way that The conservative preference for ideology over factual specificity makes conservatives not very useful at it.
Really, like really saying, you know, we had, look, if you looked at the real grassroots movement on both sides, I mean, Bernie was pretty extreme left, and Trump was whatever, it's hard to call extreme right, but we'll get into that, whatever you call that, that, you know, just the wrecking of the system.
So every once in a while, somebody will put his head above the parapet and say, I don't think the government should be providing health care for everybody.
Bing!
You lose an election.
That is how Donald Trump became the Republican nominee.
That's right.
Paul Ryan does not think the government should provide health care to everybody.
The problem is the Republican primary voter thinks, well, the government shouldn't provide health care to everybody, but they should provide health care to everyone like me.
So, yes, they should provide health care to all the over-65s, they should provide health care to all the veterans, but once you do that, you're into a very big program.
And once you're saying the government should provide health care to all the over-65s, that's where most of the spending takes place anyway.
So just to be clear, you have an ideological difference with maybe the Paul Ryan approach, but you think it's a legitimate way of looking at the government, right?
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I don't understand.
It's not a way that a political party that wants to compete for power in the United States can think.
Because the voters won't accept it.
So what ends up happening is that the Republicans have a bunch of commitment.
They have a bunch of theoretical commitments and a bunch of operational commitments.
And those, they don't line up.
And in fact, the Republican Party does maintain Medicare.
It does maintain Medicaid.
And it tries to find little economies, usually in not very efficient ways.
The result is, because it doesn't care about how those problems work, and it's not psychically committed to them, there is no one there saying, how is it that Germany and France and Switzerland and the Netherlands, Canada, cover more people, have longer life expectancies, and spend less?
The difference between what the United States spends The difference between spending in the American economy and healthcare and that of the other developed countries is about three or four points of GDP, which is bigger than the defense budget.
So what does that say, then, just about, we don't even have to make this about conservatives per se, what does that say about our system?
If a guy came up, let's say, a Republican nominee came up and really was talking about that, the ins and outs, I mean, no matter what, let's just look at 2016.
I mean, he would have been clubbed over the head by Trump.
If that's true, like, if that's true, what does that say about... If one of the interviewers had said during the interview, Mr. Trump, you say you're going to preserve Medicare and Medicaid.
What does Medicare do, and what does Medicaid do, and what's the difference?
I will bet you...
The amount of money the Republican Party are going to corruptly put in his pockets at Mar-a-Lago, that he couldn't have answered that question.
I did a video before the election saying if you want to stump Trump, ask him what the three branches of government are and what they're supposed to do.
So that kind of stuff I do agree, but this thing about sort of there was no plan or something.
There was no plan.
In some way, even if I can intellectually get there with you, there's something about that idea that then he duped by, it's scary, I guess I would say.
It's pretty scary to think that someone who had no plan duped the rest of us.
Like that inherently seems like a plan at some level.
Because we're sort of talking about plans at different levels here.
Look, Donald Trump is one of the great scam artists of all time.
He scammed the people at Trump University.
And the scam was possible because of the disillusionment of so many people with responsible politics.
But what he intuited...
I mean, Donald Trump has certain talents and geniuses.
I mean, he is a genius at finding the weakness in things.
And he understood the weakness in the institutional Republican Party, which is that they were offering a message that their own voters hated.
And I have a lot of detail on that in the book, about how when you actually showed Republican voters, Republican primary voters, what Paul Ryan wanted to do, they just recoiled from it.
He's going to take away my Medicare?
He's going to take away my mother's nursing home?
That's the plan?
That's the famous Ryan plan?
So Donald Trump understood that, and what he then understood as well was that in the absence of a program, that this anti-leftism that had become what conservatism was, this was a series of resentments and rages that were waiting for somebody who could articulate it, who Raged and resented as powerfully as they did.
I mean, Republicans, the previous Republican nominees would sometimes tap these feelings, try to channel them, but they didn't share them.
Okay, so before we go fully into Trump and then we're gonna spend the rest of the interview on Trump, I just wanna talk a little bit about the modern Democrats and the left in general and all of that.
So what do you make of the feeling that he was going for?
I think that's a pretty legit feeling on what's happened with the left related to free speech and the endless hysteria and everyone's a bigot and a racist and identity politics.
Behind all of those things you describe is a new fact in the politics of the United States in the past 15-20 years, which is that we are moving into a period of intensifying ethnic competition for power, for money, and for the right to define what it means to be an American.
The country's made this big gamble on changing itself.
And across the developed world, countries like the United States have made similar gambles.
The proportion of the foreign-born in Sweden is now as high as in the United States.
The proportion of foreign-born in Germany is nearly as high as in the United States.
Immigration is a source of massive social tension, and a lot of the immigration happened without anybody ever consciously intending it, and without much of a debate over it, and with a refusal to tally costs and benefits in an accurate way.
So these countries have been changed, and what you have is then a series of new demands and new resentments.
And that's one of the reasons that the conservatism I grew up with is so out of date.
Back in 1985, the argument between liberals and conservatives was basically an argument about the
economy.
And this is true not just in every developed country.
You had a party of the people who worked for wages and the party of the people who own capital assets and work for salaries.
The left were the people whose jobs were supported by taxes.
The right were the people whose jobs were supported by profits.
If you were in management, you were on the right.
If you were in a union, you were on the left.
Not to sound Marxist about this, but essentially your relationship to the means of production was the organizing principle of politics.
What also happened in 1985 was that people remembered that this kind of politics could spiral out of control.
They'd seen it happen in the 1930s, and you could get fascist movements, you could get communist movements, and so there were attempts to temper The competition between the wage people and the salary people, between the owners and the workers.
And so you had the left accepted a market economy and the right accepted a social insurance state, but that's what the argument was about.
With the collapse of socialism, that argument ended.
The modern left is not really a socialist movement anymore.
People will sometimes use the word.
I mean, back in 1950, there were people who really thought that if the government owned the banks, the banks would make better lending decisions than they did, than they would if they were private.
There's somebody who thinks every- No, no, I don't mean no one, but I mean that if Bernie was president, that eventually the creeping movement of this, yeah, Elizabeth Warren, that creeping movement- I think Elizabeth Warren does not want the government to own the banks, no.
I mean, if you were to say to her, what is the best run country on earth?
Bernie always used to say Denmark was the best run country.
Denmark is a free market society.
It's got a bigger social insurance system than the United States.
And he said that because, the reason he said that was, it was never a serious answer, because he didn't, he'd stopped caring.
That's not what politics is about.
What politics is about is, In 1985, if I knew how you made your living, I could probably guess how you voted.
Today, If I know where your grandparents come from, I know how you vote.
So if your grandparents did not belong to the local ethnic majority, whether in the United States or Germany or Britain, you are in the party of what used to be the left.
If your grandparents do belong, do or did belong to the local ethnic majority, you are in what is the party of the right, used to be.
And that's true however you make your living, however much or little money you have.
And that was not true in former days.
So you have this politics of ethnic competition.
And that's one of the reasons why politics are so much more virulent, because in the end, with money, you can always split the difference.
Somewhere we say, will you take 20%?
No?
Will you take 23%?
Oh, 28%?
Okay, we have a deal.
But when you're competing, what does it mean to be an American?
Who gets to define American-ness?
We haven't found a way to split the difference on that.
And until we do, we're going to have very virulent politics.
When the Sarah Palin's and others talk about what it means to be a real American, and some
things are real American, other things are not, they're looking for a way to claim ethnic
legitimation.
We may not have the numbers anymore, but we still define the country.
And that is one of the things that's going on.
That's what these political correctness battles are all about.
I mean, it's always true that there are things people don't say.
There are always things that people don't say, even if they're free to say them.
There are things they don't say.
How does that happen?
There are things that you don't say.
And who gets to decide?
And that's what we're struggling over.
What we are calling political correctness is people saying, there used to be a set of rules of taboos.
We have a new set of taboos.
We want the old taboos to be untaboo, and we want to impose the new taboo.
And the people on the receiving end of that say, we like our old taboos, and we don't want these new taboos.
And that's where Donald Trump is coming from.
That's a real dispute.
It's important, but it's new, and it's dangerous, and we don't know how to manage it.
And we have this deeply opportunistic The actor who's taking advantage of it.
Okay, so before we fully dive into that, does this show you that our brand of multiculturalism, which has worked better than virtually any European state, our melting pot, does this tell you that the experiment is starting to fail?
Let's dive into this Trump guy, because I sense that everything we've talked about for the first half here, a lot of your answers now are sort of directly related to this guy, who saw the weakness.
But not to the personality of this guy, but to the whole system.
Look, here, let me, I'll take one last attempt to do it on a wider lens, and then we'll... Yeah.
You know, imagine somebody standing on a timeline, and the center of the timeline is 1990.
And they go forward 25 years, 2015, and maybe they go to sleep and they wake up.
Who are the most important politicians in the country when they go to sleep?
Bush and Clinton.
Who are the most important politicians in the country in 2015?
Bush and Clinton.
What are they talking about?
Iraq and healthcare.
You go back 25 years from 1990, you're in 1965, and it's a different world.
There's an AFL-CIO.
There are riots in the cities.
There are liberal Republicans and segregationist Democrats.
So we have had this frozen politics for a long time, and it was ready to be changed, and the existing Republican Party couldn't cope with it, and Donald Trump did.
He smashed the system open.
So he's created some opportunities for a new kind of political arrangement, because the old one had become so stale.
But what he's also done, and this is the theme of the book, Is he's raising questions not just about the way we do politics, but about the whole political system, because he is a deeply authoritarian personality, his project is authoritarian, and the way he governs is not compatible with the rule of law society.
We have people, I mean, there's Geert Wilders, there's Marine Le Pen, there's the Alternative for Germany.
We're recording just a few days before people see this program.
There's an election in Italy in which the traditional parties were swept aside and a kind of joke party, the Five Star Movement, which was founded by a comedian and which is, you know, kind of an authoritarian populist party of the left, is now in league with a kind of neo-fascist party.
And we are seeing the breakdown of the traditional parties of the center, driven by slow growth and ethnic competition.
You know, at the darkest moments in American history, 1932, 1860, political parties and political movements converged on programs that were constitutional, that were liberal in the broadest sense of the term.
And they found leaders who wanted to uphold the American Tradition, and change it enough that it could continue, but without violating its essence.
There remain many secrets in the Russia story, but there's no mystery.
The exact modalities of how the exchange happened remain uncertain.
But here is what I think I do know, and I think what you know.
We know that Russia wanted Donald Trump to be president, and even more badly wanted Hillary Clinton not to be president.
We know that they intervened in a massive way, in an industrial scale, and we're learning more and more all the time how big it was, to hurt Hillary Clinton first in the Democratic primaries, to help Donald Trump first in the Republican primaries, and then in the general election to help Trump at Clinton's expense.
If you know that a crime has been committed against Americans by a foreign government, you would be annoyed about that, especially if you aspire to be President of the United States.
So we don't know to what degree yet, we don't know to what degree, if any, people on his campaign were in regular back-and-forth communication with the Russians, but he stood on a stage and in June of 2016 and welcomed the Russians
breaking American law to steal his opponent's email to his advantage.
His son took a meeting with people who were offering him Russian hacked information on Hillary Clinton.
The lawyer who was at the meeting was somebody with intense Kremlin connections and who advertised that she had Kremlin connections, that she said in the famous email to Don Jr., the Russian government wants to elect your father.
I have information from the Russian government it could help your campaign.
And he said, great, I love it, especially in the summer.
I am telling you that if An emissary from the Russian government had approached George W. Bush in the election of 2000 and said, I have information on Al Gore that will help you.
There wouldn't have been a meeting.
There would have been a phone call to the FBI.
And there might even have been a phone call to the Gore campaign.
No, so I believe the Russians helped, and I believe that Donald Trump... It's not a belief, it's on video, you can look it up.
Donald Trump welcomed the help, was ready to accept the help.
and profited from the help.
And I believe it made a difference in the election.
I believe also that there were Russian attempts, as far as we know, they're not successful,
to interfere with the actual mechanics of voting in a number of states.
Here's what I don't know.
I don't know whether information flowed back from the United States to Russia after Don Jr.' 's meeting.
I don't know that.
I don't know whether the Russian operation to influence the American election benefited from any kind of information provided by American counterparts.
Those are things we don't know.
What I do know is that Donald Trump did not act patriotically, and he did not act with respect to the American political system, and I will never get past that.
I mean, when Hillary Clinton found that South American beauty queen who was offended by Donald Trump, Do I, is it possible the Clinton campaign paid her money for her story?
That's possible.
But there's a difference between, I really think there's a bright line difference between the usual operations of American politics, which can be pretty rough, and Accepting help from the clandestine service of a foreign government.
Let me give you another example to make a difference.
So in 2004, it was no secret that Gerhard Schroeder of Germany and Jacques Chirac, the President of France, would dearly love to see John Kerry beat George W. Bush.
They made that very clear.
They gave interviews.
They were just counting the minutes until Bush was gone.
And it was also clear in 2012 that Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel preferred Romney to Obama.
Your allies have opinions.
It is, but in none of those elections did we have hostile foreign states, China, Russia, Iran, actors like that, working not through talking to journalists, but through clandestine intelligence services, to help one candidate and hurt another, and have it all be visible, and have the candidate who was helped, accept the help.
I mean, imagine if Iran had tried to intervene in 2012 against or for Obama or Romney.
And one of those candidates had said, Iran, if you're listening, thank you for the help.
Right, so I wanna really talk about the presidency and sort of the decisions in that,
but to sort of get us to some sort of ending with this, if this all unfurls the way I think you suspect
it will unfurl, I mean, you definitely would be for impeachment and removing him and all that, right?
This is where it's going to start.
The part that I'm struggling with this is if we take all of the people that talk about all this, it seems to me what we're talking about is, okay, well, you impeach Trump, and then really, then we have to do something which is unprecedented, which is most likely Pence knew something, and now you have to take the whole administration out.
George Shultz, who was Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, had been an important executive, maybe CEO at Bechtel, the giant engineering firm.
And at his confirmation hearing, he was asked, Mr. Shultz, after you become Secretary of State, what will your relationship be with Bechtel?
And he said, well, there's only one possible answer.
Nothing.
That's right.
That was the standard.
So what you have is an attack on every ethical norm of the U.S.
government, both financial and national security.
And half the country is being borne along.
The discussions we are having are discussions that, if in 2013, As recently as that.
I said, someday we'll be having these discussions.
People think we'll be so far gone even to contemplate.
So that is unprocessable.
Are we heading toward an impeachment crisis?
Here's what the crisis we're heading toward.
And here's what I really One of my deepest worries.
I think there's a good chance we're going to arrive at this place.
Mueller is going to report, assuming he's not fired, and he's going to discover a lot of things that are violations of the law, done by mid-level and even upper-level people.
And he may discover some financial malpractices.
There are a lot of laws about things like declaring you're a foreign agent, that there are technical rules about campaign finance, and he will discover, or may, infractions of those.
But the core thing in the Russian matter that people like me are concerned about is probably not illegal.
It's probably not illegal for an American politician to work with a hostile foreign.
I mean, no, there isn't such a law, and it's hard to imagine what such a law would look like.
And so where we may be A year and a half from now is confronting this that Donald Trump worked in some way.
We may be I'm not predicting this I'm just hypothesizing worked in some way with a hostile foreign intelligence service But he himself broke no law in doing that and now the country's going to have to process How to deal with that and it's going to be part of what is going on in this new era which is ripping apart the butt the the cords that bind us because One of the things that makes a country Is the assumption how your connections to your fellow Americans, however much you may disagree with them, and however you may have a different color skin or have a different accent from you, that bond is more powerful than the bonds outside the border.
And as American politics becomes ethnicized, I think a lot of people are saying, my connections with this global movement of reactionary populist forces are more powerful than my bonds to fellow Americans of different skin and different accent.
And because of that, unless you can show me that Donald Trump literally broke a federal criminal statute, I don't mind what he did.
The way we get out of it is we have to renew American nationhood.
And so, we have to do—if we get out of this, we're going to do something—some are going to sound pretty liberal, and some are going to sound pretty conservative.
I believe we need a lot less immigration, because that's—you have to—we have to make a nation again.
Okay, you need a thicker social insurance network.
You need a real health care system.
Because what we have to deal with, we have to deal with the crisis in life expectancy.
We have to care for each other more.
The idea that we went through in the whole second Obama term People who didn't graduate from college living less long than their parents, which literally did not happen in the Great Depression.
And not only did nobody do anything, but nobody even noticed.
This was found out by a pair of economists who happened to look at some data.
No one was paying a lot of attention to this.
The opioid epidemic erupted with no one in Washington paying much attention to it.
We're going to need to build a stronger sense of national identity.
But it's going to be a different kind of national identity.
It's not going to be Sarah Palin's America.
But we're going to have to find some way of agreeing what it means to be an American and what it means not to be an American.
You know, that melting pot story that you were told, It wasn't true at the time.
It was a myth we created later.
When the United States entered World War I, the biggest minority in the country was, or one of the biggest, were German-speaking Americans.
And there was real doubt about whether the United States would be able to fight Germany in the First World War, because the German-Americans might be disloyal.
And the country went on a ramp, having to ban German-language newspapers, it suppressed German-language schools.
It wasn't a melting pot.
It was a harsh and rancorous process.
And the United States had, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, pogroms in American
cities that were very, you know, by white Americans against blacks, that were deadlier
than the anti-Semitic pogroms that took place under the czar.
Those were facts of our history.
And out of that, we built, in the years after World War II and for half a century afterwards,
a strong sense of national identity.
We have to do that state-building and nation-building process again.
And it's going to look partly liberal, partly conservative, but it's going to be a new politics for a new century.
And if anyone is standing around saying, I don't know, I think I prefer the problems of 1982 so I can have the solutions of 1982, I'm going to say, you're just not helping.
What would you say to the people that would say, and this is a little bit more where I fall on all this, that the government is just not the answer to any of these things?
That I hear you on all of these problems, without question, no doubt.
But that to me at this point, that everything you're talking about is showing me the government no longer functions, the federal government.
specifically, no longer functions in a way that it can cope or deal with any of these things.
We get then bad actors that wanna wreck the whole thing, or we get these mid-level management people
that never really do anything, and that you could look at virtually
every member of Congress, that all the answers that you're asking for,
I would argue, have almost nothing to do with the government
and that there's other ways now, especially because of the internet and everything else,
there's other ways that we can connect and build things.
Right now, Elon Musk is the guy that's getting us into space.
Warren Buffett's working on an alternate healthcare plan.
There's just other ways to do this and that those machines they can't work anymore.
A lot of the great social transformations, American history is different from that of other countries
in this way, that often times the way the country is addressed,
the most effective cultural change in my lifetime was Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
That changed Americans' attitudes.
They changed laws, too.
I mean, the state has a rule.
I think, for things like the gun debate, I mean, I think that is going to be ultimately addressed, if it is addressed, not by state action, but by private action.
Which is, whatever the laws are, just, if you have kids and you care about them, don't have a gun in the house.
Just as Mothers Against Drunk Driving changed the idea that it was funny, drunk driving was funny, to the idea that it was not funny, so we have to change the idea that if you're a responsible parent, you're armed, to a new, better understanding that if you're armed, you're not a responsible parent.
And it's true that dollar for dollar and pound for pound, the American government has always been less effective than other governments.
But sometimes it's more effective and sometimes it's less effective.
There are things that the government is going to have to do.
And the government doesn't have to administer the healthcare system.
I would hope it wouldn't.
There's a role for the profit motive and for competition.
But the idea that we are going to accept a country in which large numbers of Americans are uncovered and are outside the health care system and that people literally die because they can't afford dental care and their teeth fester and the festering gets into their body and it kills them, that has to change.
The role of the state is part of, if we're going to have a new ethic of nationhood, With a higher border and more mutual care.
Yeah, of course government's going to be a part of that.
And by the way, not only the federal government, because a lot of the, I mean, the country's big.
So since you don't say you're a conservative specifically anymore, I mean, if people are listening and going, I get this, it's a little bit of both, because there's a lot of big government here.
I know you're saying you would prefer the government not have to do health insurance, all that.
You're sort of all over the place right now, which I think a lot of people are.
And I only ask about labels because although they're becoming increasingly meaningless, I think it helps people go, all right, this is my starting point.
Well, I don't have a label for it, because I think this is one of those moments in American history where you have to do something new.
You know, for 25 years after the Civil War, Americans kept arguing both about the Civil War and about its financial consequences.
And then they began to notice that, in the aftermath, that they had these big cities grow up that were intensely corruptly governed.
And new movements came along that said, We have, you know, it's not like the legacy of the Civil War is resolved.
It's still not fully resolved.
But in the meantime, we have to figure out how do we get streetcars in New York?
How do we get the water clean?
How do we make sure that the aldermen aren't all taking bribes?
And that new political, and at first they weren't, they just knew what the problems were.
And as they worked on the problems, they developed labels to describe what they were doing.
But first, you start, I think one of the ways that, especially on the right, One of the ways that we go wrong is a new problem is presented to us, and instead of looking at the problem and studying it, we reach for a volume of the Talmud, and we say, what did Rabbi Russell Kirk say about this three quarters of a century ago?
Oh, he never talked about it, therefore we can't do anything about it.
I appreciate the compliment, and I think there are some people that are trying to make some sense these days, but really, I mean, do you look at anyone politically involved?
I think the mayor here in Los Angeles is an example, someone who's trying to figure out how things work.
Andrew Cuomo in New York, I mean, kind of a bully, but cares about why does it cost three times as much, or whatever it is, to build a subway in New York as in London?
And so I think The regeneration of the American political system has always come from cities and states, and I think that will be even more true in the 21st century.
I mean, here in California, you need a revival of political competition.
One of the reasons why I stay a registered Republican is, you know, I look at California and say, this is what happens when you get a one-party state.
You get factional politics.
It doesn't mitigate the problems of ethnically driven politics, it makes them worse.
So we're going to need We're gonna need two-party competition.
We're gonna need new solutions.
That's what I try to do in my work, is to try to offer, you know, the possibility of a more useful kind of politics.
Yeah, it's interesting because, I mean, that's exactly what I try to do with the show, and even last week I had Mike Schellenberger on, who's running as a Democrat.
You know, he's more of an old-school Democrat, and he's into nuclear power.
And all sorts of new ideas and using technology to solve our problems.
Running against Gavin Newsom, who's the hero of the left, and he thinks he's too left.
And then this week I have you on to discuss your frustrations with the conservatives and all that.
So that's, this is what we have to keep doing at the end of the day.
Maybe we'll get Ben in here and we'll do that little facts over feelings thing, so we can get a couple other people in here to mix up some of these ideas.