John Kasich contrasts his "positive populism" with Donald Trump's negativity, arguing that victimhood rhetoric harms communities like Youngstown rather than solving economic shifts. The former Ohio Governor critiques the erosion of self-governance via social media and the rise of authoritarianism among youth, advocating instead for bottom-up change driven by virtue, faith, and community engagement. He emphasizes job creation as a moral imperative to restore dignity, urging young people to follow their conscience in public life to heal societal divisions and preserve representative democracy against the dangers of collectivism. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm not sure if you heard about this, but the 2016 election was completely bananas.
Trump and Hillary were actually only part of it as there were other characters from Bernie and Jeb to Marco and Ted.
The election also caused the implosion of the mainstream media and set us on a path that has hashtag MAGA racing towards hashtag resistance with the rest of us caught right in the middle.
Ohio Governor John Kasich was one of the more moderate voices in a campaign season that was short on moderation.
As a fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican, I see Kasich as someone who has some of the right ideas, but whose timing just wasn't right for the madness of 2016.
Kasich's team reached out to us a couple days ago and we have him in studio today, totally unscripted and unedited, with no advanced knowledge of the topics or questions.
I think this is exactly the way we need to be hearing from our politicians, and I hope
that this interview helps deal us in on these conversations in the near future.
Joining me today is the author of the new book Two Paths, America Divided or United,
a former Republican presidential candidate and the current governor of the great state of Ohio,
Some of my millennial people won't get it, but they should Google who Ted Baxter is.
That would be good for them.
So first, what I wanted to start with you, I'm incredibly excited you're here, and it's interesting because your people reached out to us about four days ago.
They said the governor would like to come in, and then we quickly set this up.
Nobody said, oh, we have to talk about this, or we can't talk about this.
You sat down here about two minutes ago, and you said whatever you wanna do is fine.
And I feel like that is partly what's lost in politics right now, that we're gonna just Well, it's not just lost in politics.
It was all, you know, we didn't do it, but these other campaigns, and I had advice from some people who had run before, make sure you get your little thing out there so you can blow up the television morning news and, you know, and like tricks, you know, that's not a good thing.
And look, people, I saw a thing on a sign yesterday, it said, email me please, we have to talk.
Yeah, I think the, Look, I didn't have a smartphone for a long time.
I had an iPad, and I got it in the very beginning, but I didn't have a smartphone.
And people would laugh at me, but I didn't need this stuff during the day.
You know, I didn't need to have basketball scores or look at the weather 25 times or, you know, some kind of headline in the news or my emails because I have people that can, you know, tell me if there's a crisis.
They tell me.
I go, okay, well, let's see what it is.
But I got my smartphone, and now the best thing about it is that I can text.
But I find that when I text, you know, what it does is it creates a laziness.
Right?
You don't have to go through a conversation.
Now don't you think, look, you have a show here where people talk.
I mean, I think that resetting our ability to talk and actually think and sit across from somebody and make some eye contact and really try to understand what they think, I think that is almost the most important thing that we've given up in these last couple years.
It was the trade-off between all these devices and the immediate response.
You know, these are people that work around and kind of support me and help me.
They're friends.
But this whole, you know, sort of funny we were You go on these shows on regular television, which I think are really important, and you get, you know, 2 million people to see you.
But if you're, like, hanging out with Logan Paul, he's got 16 million subscribers.
It's like... And you know, the funny thing about it...
Is that people can't see it really.
Now, but that's not really true because I think probably you're in demand now and you can go out and make talks and people show up to see you.
Yeah.
But it's kind of an invisible world to those who were kind of hooked on television.
Well, fortunately, a lot of people are coming to this medium now, and a lot of the guests that you asked me right before we started all these books here, I mean, most of the, I think, well, virtually every single one except the Carl Sagan book.
But one of the things that I consistently tell my audience is it's cool that a lot of the beliefs that I have, you know, I fall a little more within classical liberalism and libertarianism.
A lot of the beliefs about doing things for yourself, and I've built this business with the same ideas that I try to talk about here.
Some of which I think we're gonna get to, and it's kind of a beautiful thing.
Well, everybody kind of mocks me, because I say my father was a mailman, and so the people write that, and they're like cynical and all that.
I grew up in a town that was over, I mean, I don't think I ever met a Republican.
Not in my town.
My Uncle Harry was a Republican, they say.
We didn't listen much to him.
He's a great guy, but, you know, it was blue collar and, you know, sort of the, some of these people you would define as kind of the Trump people, you know, who felt they'd been left behind.
You know, as a result of that, I guess that's why I'm a populist, but a positive populist, not a negative populist.
Positive that we can do it.
We can, together, we can rise.
And that's a great place to come from, because you really have a sense, you have a sense of people.
You know, and it's not just the upper crust.
We respected the upper crust.
I can remember saying to my father one time, Daddy, what about the rich?
He said, well, we don't hate the rich.
We want to be the rich, you know.
And so it was great.
God fearing, conservative Democrat, good values.
Faith was a It was a part of my early childhood, which I normally drifted away from when I went to college, you know.
It's like Augustine.
He says, you know, I know I need to be committed to God, but just not right now.
I have a couple of parties to go to.
So, you know, we all drift away.
I'm not drifted.
I've come roaring back into that.
But common sense, right?
Freewheeling, sometimes it puts people off a little bit the way I am because I'm pretty direct.
But the other thing is I was telling somebody the other day that You know, I don't want people to be confused about my positions on anything.
And so if somebody says, well, I think it's blue, and I might say, well, no, I think it's red, and most people would expect me to say, okay, well, I'll consider that.
And I'm like, no, no, I just don't think that.
And I think to some degree people don't get it.
So it takes a little bit of time for people to come to understand me.
Yeah, all right, well that's what we're gonna do here for the next hour.
So you mentioned a couple interesting things there.
So you didn't grow up in a Republican family per se, and then you just used the phrase conservative Democrat.
So one of the things I talk a lot about here is that it seems to me, before we get into your party, that the conservative Democrat, or the blue dog Democrat, or sort of the moderate Democrat.
And look, I look at an issue and say, okay, what do we do about it?
We look at a problem.
How do we fix the problem?
But I'm not really going to have an ideological force that's pulling me back, but at the same time, being a conservative, I want to see what the solutions are without having to bring bureaucracy or government in.
And I'll tell you why that is.
It's because government inherently is so subject to political considerations that people have a hard time Make calling a spade a spade.
It's like, no, no, I got all these pressures, and I don't like that.
And so, when you go to government, you can get trapped, but you get trapped with big business, too.
Big business, you know, you try to, like, I need this prescription, you know, and somebody out here is telling me, oh, no, no, it costs too much, you know.
Big things like that all have always bothered me.
You know, big institutions, whether it's government, I grew up, my dad was in a union.
I always liked unions, but you know, the problem with the unions is when the union boss is not representing a worker.
And so, big institutions don't thrill me.
Where am I?
Kind of unpredictable.
See, because you kind of labeled yourself a little bit ago.
You said, well, I'm this and that.
If you ask me what I am, I'll say I'm a conservative, but then you will say, well, but why do you think this or that?
Do you have a certain leeway when it comes to thinking for yourself as a governor that maybe the senators and the congressmen can't have?
Not that you don't have to come together and work with people, but they have to do it with people outside of their state with massively competing interests and things like that.
So, I was really, Jan Brewer in Arizona did it, which really was kind of shocking to me, but I was really the first big state, big Republican governor to expand it.
Was it hard?
No, it was a piece of cake!
If I'm going to get money that's not going to put me in a straitjacket from the federal government, if I can use that money to heal, to help heal, or to help the mentally ill so they're not sleeping under a bridge or living in a jail, or if I can help people who have drug addiction to get treatment and get off of it, if I can have a lower uninsurance rate, Why wouldn't I do that?
And because people are going to yell at me and fight, so what?
Who cares?
I mean, I care.
I don't want them to be angst.
In fact, in my State of the State address, I made a talk that really had almost nothing to do with policy.
It had all to do with basically philosophy and the meaning of life.
They say it was the only State of the State speech delivered by a governor in the history of the world where the name Camus was discussed.
And I didn't mention that because I don't want to jab anybody in the eye, but the decision to do that To help people.
When Bernie and I were in the House together, he was, you know, really kind of in another orbit than we all thought he was.
And yet, you know, the country's kind of moved towards him.
And I think a lot of young people are, you know, the one thing that is concerning to me, and I have great faith in Millennials and Gen Xers, I'm not sure they understand the consequences of losing a representative democracy.
There seems to be, with some of them, some appeal towards an authoritarian figure.
A free enterprise system, Michael Novak, the great philosopher, theologian, said that a free market system that is not underlaid with a set of values is bankrupt.
Oh, I think that they The easy thing to say, politically easy thing to say, is they come from mom and dad.
And I say to people, well, where do you think mom and dad got it from?
Well, they got it from their parents.
Where do I think these virtues come from?
Look, if you're a humanist, I respect you, okay?
You wake up every day trying to figure out how to make the world a little better place.
I like that, okay?
But for me, the winds of change, the fads, can knock me off my path.
So, I need something deeper than that.
So, I look to theologians, and I believe that we are a unique form of life, greater than all other life on the earth, and I think that life is given to us by our Creator, and I think our Creator has a character that we can learn about, and that's not only held by a Christian, but also a Jew, and also a Muslim.
We have the same kind of view of creation and our purpose.
And within those values are things like mercy and justice and compassion and forgiveness and, you know, I don't know if you play golf, that we have to have mulligans in life because we, you know.
And the danger of talking about these things is that people want to say, oh, well, you don't have great values.
I caught you.
Well, yeah, of course.
I'm just a slob on a bus trying to make it through life, you know?
But I kind of know what I need to do.
So I think that these values, they flow from our Creator.
And I think too much in religion today, which has turned off a lot of young people.
I'm actually mentoring a young man in faith.
But it's not about all this judgment we hear.
It's about hope.
It's about human connectiveness.
And that's appealing to people.
And it's what I think is true about faith and virtue.
It's not confining.
It's enlarging.
It doesn't make you smaller.
It makes you bigger.
And today in religion, we see a lot of forces that are counter to that.
Yeah, well, it's interesting to me because my audience knows that Thomas Jefferson was my favorite founder, and I go to the Jefferson Memorial often in DC, and I try to read those big plaques, and to me, they're as relevant now as they were, you know, 200 some odd years ago, where he talked about, you know, they talk about a creator at the same time they're talking about why church and state have to be separate.
But what I'm saying is that you can't, if you're going to have freedom, people have to have self-restraint.
And the less self-restraint we have, the more the government tries to impose things, and the more they impose things, the less freedom we have.
So, I don't want to, I believe that our faith system, and again, if you're a humanist, that's cool with me, that's fine with me, because you're trying to do good every day.
I just, it can't work for me because I get too knocked off kilter by the culture today and the winds of change.
But with that system, it reinforces the sense of freedom.
So it's interesting, you've referenced culture a couple times, and one of the things that seemed pretty obvious From an outside perspective, the 2016 election was that Trump captured the culture.
Good or bad, he captured that.
He captured the internet culture, the reason that you're sitting here right now.
Particularly if you have other people around that want to be a victim.
Now, I'm not going to condemn them, but it's easy to fall into that if somebody tells you you don't have something because somebody else took it.
So what we need to do is, if you were to go to, say, Youngstown, Ohio, they talk about that a lot in national news, and I was a steel worker, or I worked in a coal mine in West Virginia, or whatever.
We have in Ohio, working with one of the tech companies, we have a list of all the job openings.
Okay?
Now, if you're a victim and I come to you and I say, you are a coal miner or you are a steel worker, and this would be hard for me, say, listen, I can show you this internet stuff, right?
And I can get you one of these jobs.
You don't have to become an expert, but I can show you stuff.
If I'm a victim, I may not want to do it.
But if I give that person a message, hey, look at these jobs.
It pays good money, your family will be healthier, your children will be healthier, you will have more self-respect.
But you know, it's tough where you are.
That is the better message than, well, you're just a victim and we're going to go and punish people, right?
It doesn't work for the good, for the mental health of our society.
My chief of staff, there's that, you know that show that you get on your phone at 9 o'clock Eastern?
It's like, they ask questions and you answer them.
My kids have done it for a while.
They don't do it anymore.
I don't know what the show is called.
Well anyway, she and her kids, two daughters, they listen to this every night at 9 o'clock.
And they work together.
And so she said one day to her kids, why don't I, I'll be on one phone, and you'll be on your phone, and Joy, you'll be on your phone, and let's have a competition.
They looked at her like she was crazy.
They're like, why would we do that?
You know?
So, you know, I guess what I'm saying about that is the idea of community and together is good, but we don't want that to erode the basic sense that competition is good, as long as it's played fairly.
So really what you're talking about, you're sort of talking about individualism and how we can create groups around that as opposed to collectivism, right?
In that movie, and this is made up stuff, he goes down and gets on the subway and he's talking to people and they're like, we're not giving in.
And they emboldened him, set the fire in him.
I'm not telling you that he wasn't a great leader, because clearly he was.
But it was a bottom-up and a top-down.
I mean, when we think about the Civil Rights Movement, the great leaders, Martin Luther King, they didn't get help.
Politicians were afraid of him, including JFK.
They were all afraid of him.
And what happened?
It was from the street up.
A lot of social change.
The end of the Vietnam War.
How much longer would the generals have said we were winning?
And by the way, look at Afghanistan.
They keep saying, oh, victory's just around the corner.
Terrible.
And so you have a situation here where you can't just expect change in the country because I have elected a good, I have a new good coach, so therefore I'm going to win the basketball game.
It doesn't work that way.
It works both ways.
You have a good leader, but a great group of people that drive, you know, that drive change.
How dangerous then is that cult of personality that we've now made around the president?
And I'm not just talking about Trump here, I mean even with Obama and plenty of the other presidents, that we think that somehow the executive branch, and really this one person, is going to fix everything.
It is a book that says this, and I've never talked about this before, like on television.
I was with a great preacher.
He's got 6,000 people.
He's in the Silicon Valley.
He's very grace-oriented and hopeful, and he's a Ph.D.
in psychology.
He's just got all this stuff, all this talent.
And I was asking him.
I said, I keep telling people it's bottom-up, not top-down.
He said, well, John, it's interesting.
Because a man wrote a book, and the book says that when pieces of our society start to erode, let's think about it.
Facebook, Wells Fargo, Equifax, the scandal around Volkswagen, sports, you've got guys that have brain injuries but the league isn't helping them and they're living in a car, their families are destitute.
Hollywood, we need to say anything there.
You look across the board and we're seeing an erosion of what we really want, right?
So there is a tendency, this man maintains, and I'm fascinated to read this book, that we now start looking to politics to solve these problems.
In other words, we look at politicians or government to use, in a sense, coercion to
restore things to the right balance.
And it just doesn't work that way, really, in practicality.
Now, I'm the governor of the state, seventh largest state.
I have a very powerful executive position.
But I can't just give edicts from up here and expect it to work.
The people have to be engaged and assent and do things, they have to self-govern, they
have to lift.
And so this is a very, very, I think, this is like the next thing to think about.
To me, it's the next wave.
You know, what I love, what I think has been fun because of my friends and because of my mind and the way it works, I'm kind of always looking for the next thing.
And I can kind of sense the next thing, you know?
And I believe this is something that really needs to be talked about.
I mean, it's virtue, it's religion, it's doing well by doing good, it's We're driving ourselves from the bottom up.
It's not trying to vest all this power in a handful of people in the government, because I think it's futile.
Because I see that in the middle of trying to do things, We're all weak.
Everybody's weak.
And we're all susceptible to certain pressures, you know?
And I'm like, we need to run through that door.
And they're like, oh no, no, no, no, no.
Slow down here, you know, and all that kind of stuff.
Here's the problem with politics.
You know, you could sit next to somebody your entire lifetime in an office job and never really know what they think.
But in politics, people get called out.
It's really interesting.
They get called out, and in some ways it's not fair, because it's almost like an x-ray.
Like, you know, you and I could know each other, we could hang out, we could watch basketball games, and never ever get into my finding out how you make decisions in a really tough situation.
But with politics, you're going to have to vote, and if you vote wrong, you're afraid you're going to lose.
My friend and former guest a couple times, Eric Weinstein, who's a world-renowned mathematician and thinker and all sorts of stuff, he talks about how one of the things we've lost now is communal sense-making.
That because everything has become so politicized, sports are politicized now, Hollywood, as you just mentioned, that all of these things have become so political... But what does that mean?
Well, so for example, like, you know, everything that happened with the kneeling about the National Anthem, that we start, that if you turn on SportsCenter, you're watching politics.
If you turn on the news and they're talking about Hollywood, it's about sex scandals.
You know, isn't it interesting that when we dig into somebody who we feel one way or another about, it's amazing sometimes how we find out things that change our fundamental attitude towards them.
here's what i here's what i think you're going to grow but here's what i think
where it got lost i don't feel that the players themselves were able to
articulate to americans exactly why they were doing that and exactly what they
wanted I think it was kind of lost in the motion as opposed to what is real, what's behind this?
You know, what is really behind this?
You know, I'm a black man and I've warned my kid that be careful about when you're out there late at night and what you might find.
I think if people heard that and they understood that, they would say, oh, so that was the one way you had to say something, because it so divided the country.
Now, you know, and people had different views, but you know what I found, Dave?
What I have found in my life is if you pull people together, like we have on police and community, a tough issue.
I just had two police officers killed, murdered, in my little hometown in Ohio.
You heard about it.
It happened a couple weeks ago.
Community needs to understand that mom and dad need to go home at night.
You know, they're at risk.
You go to a domestic disturbance and you have to go in a door, you are putting your life on the line.
Community needs to understand it.
But police need to understand that if you're, that they need to understand that community, if you're not treating people right in the community, you're going to have a problem.
Sit them down.
Appeal to the better angels.
And in many cases, you can come up with resolutions, but you have to get the right people in a room and you have to appeal to the better angels in them.
I think, though, that what we're seeing now is it's back to this, I don't want somebody getting something that I don't get, and somebody else took what I have, and why doesn't anybody care about me?
And I think that caring about me is real, Dave, I do.
Let's say that you have a kid and you need a pill to deal with that kid's problem, but it's expensive and you can't get it.
Does anybody stand up for you?
You know, if this is where people feel like, and this is where community matters, you know, if I'm being harassed at work, how about that story in the New York Times where these waitresses were being told, let me grope you and I'll give you a $20 tip.
I mean, who in that restaurant saw that and said, I'm going to take you outside?
Right?
The guy that was the perpetrator.
People tend to feel, I think, too much of the time that we're in this alone.
Doesn't that kind of get back to the, overstate this, but back to the texting and the no communication?
We gotta care about our neighbor the way our neighbor cares about us.
I learned that from my mother.
I'll tell you an interesting story.
My mother, we would hang out at the school all the time, and the kids came up and gave us pony rides.
My mother wanted to check out what is this whole thing going on up there, so she comes up, and I don't know, it was probably a dime to do a pony ride, and my mother was there, and she gave the guy that had the pony a lot more money than the cost of the pony ride, and we were walking home, and I said, Mom, you gave that guy a lot of money.
When you were up there and Trump, you know, usually he was browbeating everybody and you could see, sort of, each debate would go by and he'd pick who he had to go for and, you know, the media kind of fell along with that.
That really wasn't suited for what you're doing here.
Like, I'm not somebody that believes you have to go in and wreck everything, but it seems to me if we could just tweak something... Well, gerrymandering needs to be changed so that we're not... Gerrymandering is where you draw a district to favor one party or the other and then all you have to do is listen to people in your extreme and not have to listen to people who are Who are different than you, but you need to be heard.
That's one thing.
Don't have an answer for the finance, the spending.
I don't know what to do about it, but I'm open to anything.
And then when it comes to immigration itself, we need to know who's coming, and we need to be able to protect our borders, but I don't want to be shrinking legal immigration.
I think people create a great deal to our country.
Trade, you know, it's a thorny issue, but 40 million Americans have trade-related jobs.
And most of the businesses that are involved in exporting are small and medium-sized businesses, and consumers benefit from open and free.
Now if it's not open and free, fine, then have a process to restore equity.
But just don't go out to create a trade war.
You know, I mean, those are things, what else you want to ask about?
I mean, those are two that jump at me, there's lots of them.
It was at, I believe, it was the first or second Republican debate, and I asked you a question in the, you know, with everyone's jamming the microphone.
No, trust me, I had to fight through plenty of people to get the question.
But basically, my question to you was that the social issues, that gay marriage in particular, I could tell you, I think in the first debate, you immediately said, they asked you about it, and you said, that's not what I want to focus on.
So you'd love for the Republicans to get past the social stuff, right?
Right, I mean, I think in effect the party has, even the more conservative Christian side of the party isn't talking about it that, like, I don't hear Santorum or Huckabee really rallying against it anymore.
No, it's tolerance, and it's, you know, things have changed, and, you know, I prefer the traditional marriage, but, you know, I'm not like, I don't worry what you're doing.
I mean, yeah, no, and we, look, and we have a lot of people die from drunk driving and all that, but we've been through that, and I don't know where this is all going to ultimately end up.
I'm just giving you my sense, dealing with a real problem here.
I don't want to have to explain to young people that, you know, you can do this, but don't do that.
I mean, we need to use creative and 21st century technology and techniques to skinny the government down to get it to do what it's supposed to do and be efficient and effective.
You just said you can't believe what it was like for me to get permission to build a studio in my garage.
All right, well, since you answered the big one already, I'll just give you a wide one to bring us home with, which would be, so many emails that I get and tweets and messages that I get are all about people that are just afraid to... Look, can I go back for one second?
Because you were asking about, like, these social issues, okay?
I read an article about Billy Graham, who spoke to 200 million people across the globe.
And he had fights with people inside of faith because he stayed away from the hot-button social issues of the time.
I think it is possible.
For example, I'm dealing with guns right now, okay?
And I have brought a group of people together to mediate that.
I think you can deal with these social issues by being in a position of bringing people together.
At the end, you may have to walk away from the table.
But I admire what Billy Graham said.
There's so much negativity in the world today.
Why don't I, like Billy Graham did, why don't I just focus on the positive things, the uplifting things, instead of dragging yourself down into these ditches where we just go into warfare, World War I trench warfare.
It's not going to help us in the long run.
Those issues can be dealt with in a way and on the edges, but at the end, let's try to lift our culture.
All right, so the final one, though, is that I get all of these messages and tweets and emails from people that are afraid to get involved.
They're just afraid to say what they think, either because of political correctness or the way it's gonna affect their job or their friends or anything.
You're obviously out there.
You're clearly not afraid to say what you think.
As I said, there was no preparation.
You sat down and we did this for an hour.
What would you say to those young people that wanna get involved?
Sometimes when you stand up, sometimes you might lose something.
But in the long run, you'll be admired and leave an indelible impression for showing courage.
Have people around you that you can talk these things through because, you know, just doing it all yourself leads to self-righteous behavior that is not always very pretty.