Richard Dreyfuss joins Dave Rubin to discuss his book One Thought Scares Me, arguing America faces an "endgame" of merciless partisanship. Drawing from his family's leftist history, including a great-aunt who assassinated Czar Alexander and a communist-connected father, Dreyfuss critiques the "James Dean generation" for rejecting civics education. He asserts that reintroducing constitutional study in early childhood is vital to counter fatal polarization, urging Americans to cherish opposing views rather than labeling them as treasonous. Ultimately, the conversation concludes that saving the nation requires abandoning hate and embracing the foundational principles of 1787. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is an Academy Award winning actor, author of One Thought Scares Me, We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them To Know, We Don't Teach Our Children What We Don't Wish Them To Know, and a guy with a lot of moxie, Richard Dreyfuss.
For some reason, every bio of me starts out with, what a cocky, arrogant guy I am, or was, or something.
I don't really, I don't agree with it, but I don't, you know, want to start a war.
So, uh, I let it go.
But, I think it's just that I'm, I tell my truth.
I tell the truth.
I tell my truth whether it's anti-Richard or pro-Richard.
So, um, and I think that people are, are, uh, Surprised by that.
There was an article once about the fact that Barbara Streisand and Richard Dreyfuss were the only two Jews who talked about being Jews and loved it and, you know, didn't expect any bad stuff to come for that.
And I know her and we talked about it and it never occurred to me not to.
Talk about being Jewish.
I was proud of it.
But it's the kind of thing that was covered by a lot of fear or a lot of not being candid.
You know, there were lots of actors in the earlier years who were Jewish who wouldn't admit it.
So, we could go in all ways to start, but why don't we do a little bio first, because everybody knows you from, obviously, Jaws, and Close Encounters, and What About Bob, et cetera, et cetera.
But can you give me a little bit of a bio, because that'll kind of connect us to the book, because you have a sort of interesting childhood related to politics in terms of where you're at now.
My great-aunt assassinated Czar Alexander in 1881, an act which I'm very proud of.
And my grandmother was a witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and walked away from that catastrophe and went directly to the Socialist Party headquarters and volunteered and eventually became Eugene Debs' private secretary.
And I have always been their child and my mother's child.
And I once asked my mom, why were you a socialist and not a communist?
And we lived in Queens, in an area in Queens which was completely left-wing.
Completely socialist and communist.
And the guy who was the head of the Communist Party on Long Island was a big fat hospital administrator named David, and he used to tell me stories about what it was like to, you know, be a part of the American Communist Party.
And most of the stories dealt in how silly and stupid they were.
They just let him in because he was their pal Stanley.
And Stanley walked downstairs with them.
And he said that was the thing that everyone was so afraid of in the early fifties.
So, um, and also, Something that I don't think my father really understood, because my father was the head of a Jewish gang in Brooklyn in the 30s, and every time his father would close the candy store and move a few blocks and reopen it, he had to fight, his gang had to fight the Irish and the Italian gang.
And these were bloody fights, and these were sometimes to the death, like ripping out antennas from cars and sticking them in people's eyes.
And this was Pete prior to the war.
And then he went to the war with his enemies, and he, when they came back, and he had a violent war.
And very dramatic.
But when he came back, he came back not with enemies, but with brothers.
And we got so far away from that in such a short amount of time that this is all post-60s.
And it's done, it was accomplished by what I call the James Dean generation.
The ones who were too old to take acid with me.
And too young to help their fathers in World War II.
And they were without mission.
They were stuck in nothingness.
And like in the Dean film, you know, he was always yelling, you're tearing me apart.
Things were being demanded of him that tore him apart.
And when Brando did The Wild One, He was asked, what are you rebelling against?
And Brando said, what have you got?
And that's our tradition, our most immediate tradition.
And by not knowing the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration, by not knowing the birth tale of America, We cheat ourselves tremendously, and we change the values that are so important and so unique to us.
Opposing views.
What other country cherishes opposing views like we do?
One country does, and that's the country that says, my right honorable opponent.
When they talk in Parliament in Britain, They always address their worst enemy with the most respect.
And that's the tradition that we came from.
And for us to deny that, or for us to walk away from that, or feel in some way compelled for either side, conservative or liberal, to have to put down the other side, It's not enough to disagree with people.
You are called upon to put them down personally.
There are people who wouldn't consider it a good day if they hadn't put down some liberals as idiots.
And the fact is, they're not idiots.
And we are not idiots.
And the American political philosophy of A Republican democracy is not an idiotic thing.
It's a brilliant discovery.
And we changed the world.
And we lost the pride of that.
And we've reduced the pride of that system to the partisanship of the Republicans or the Democrats.
George Washington said a very, very important thing.
He said that the Constitution must always be central and the parties must always be peripheral.
And we're living in the exact opposite world now.
And that means that you're not a good conservative unless you're putting down the Democrats.
And vice versa.
You're not a good Democrat unless you're putting down conservative philosophy.
Well, let me pause you there for a moment, because I don't know how familiar you are with what I do here, but really what you're discussing is really why I started this show and what I've been trying to do for many years.
As a Brooklyn-born guy who grew up in Long Island, lived in a crazy L.A.
for eight years, and now I'm in the free state of Florida, my life That is actually very much in line with what you're talking about right there.
But I want to just jump back to the communist thing for a moment because I think that'll sort of help frame why you care so much about the founding documents and all of those things.
Do you think that maybe in the 50s or earlier when these people were avowed communists in the United States, and it's hard for people of a younger generation To kind of understand that, but really they were communists and they had meetings in basements and things like that.
Do you think to sort of give the devil his due on that, that they felt that the system could work enough that it would actually make sense?
As opposed to now, let's say, where I think a lot of people think the system no longer functions in a way so that Well, let me put it this way.
over everything wouldn't work, but like your parents, did they feel that there was a way that you could exercise
enough control over this system that it would be functional and genuinely help people?
Is that is that what strikes you as as most the starkest difference between the say sort of self-proclaimed communists or socialists of today where it really is sort of let's burn it down as opposed to let's operate within the system?
I think I think that if you are aware of the history of American labor or middle class development or anything, you're going to know that America was strong enough to accommodate a legal communist system, communist party, from the very beginning.
It never once was attacked as illegitimate.
The attack was Like, extra.
They didn't even include the legitimate party, the Communist Party.
They just attacked that weird entity known as Communism, and it was an international something ghost-like craziness.
And Stalin gave them good reason to fear them.
And the guys that I knew who were communists were always communists because of domestic reasons.
Because of the depression.
Because of lack of work.
And things like that.
They were not educated to international, you know, Marxism, etc.
And that stuff can be pretty easily dispensed with.
You know, you don't have to read Marcuse.
To understand that it's illegit, you know, and it's too bad that it wasn't allowed to just duke, you know, have a duke out, an intellectual debate between communism and it's like the Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate that they had.
That was important.
That was an important thing.
And it actually really made a difference.
Nixon stood up for commodities and private enterprise and like that.
And Khrushchev wanted to nail him to a wall.
Too bad.
He could have learned something.
And to turn over a country as big as Russia and turn it over completely to a bunch of apparatchniks that didn't know anything about the industries they were running, not a good thing.
It never occurred to me that I would be hurt by it.
And when I have friends who are on the other side, who are, you know, conservative writers and such, who say that they've been blacklisted, I like to turn to my friend Lionel Chetwin and say, Lionel, you have not been out of work since Hanoi Hilton.
I do know that Hollywood has a liberal reputation And I always cringe when I watch the Oscars and wait for some beautiful, talented actress to say something stupid about some issue.
Yeah, do you find that there's a bit of an asymmetry in the way, if you want to sort of be above the fray, but the way each side might treat you?
If I'm not mistaken, I think in 2015 you were spotted at the back of a Ted Cruz rally or something like that and people started calling you all these...
All of these awful names and you're a crazy right winger and you know, all of this stuff.
And I remember seeing that, I think on YouTube or something, thinking I didn't know anything about your politics beforehand.
It didn't matter to me.
You're a great actor.
I happen to, you know, now I really like Ted Cruz.
I didn't like him as much at the moment, but OK, you were just in the back of the room.
If I can picture the video again.
But that a certain side went crazy on you, but had it been the other way around, had you shown up to say a Hillary Clinton rally, I don't know that you would have got hate.
That it's not exactly equal.
I get the idea that you want to be above the craziness, but right now it does seem to me, and I wrote my whole first book was a defense of liberalism, of classical liberalism.
It does seem to me there is an asymmetry that we're all struggling with right now, in terms of how each side behaves.
Not to say that the conservatives don't have, they're bad actors too.
I think if you can start out by thinking that one side is inherently better than the other, that it is more easy to perceive the morality of the GOP as opposed to the Democrats, then you're nuts.
Because they're all equally nuts.
The Democrats are, and so are the Republicans.
And what happened in that year was that I simply went to the Republican caucus in Iowa to watch.
He wrote a column about what was Richard Dreyfuss doing at the Iowa caucuses.
And then the liberals went crazy.
And all of my friends and associates just couldn't leave it alone.
And my son, who at that time was quite young, he wrote A piece that was on the internet where he was saying, why is my actor father in a position to give lessons in ethics to America?
And so, what's her name?
Megan Kelly invited us on her show when she was still with Fox.
So the two of us went on.
And for me, it was simply, if you're a smart person, you scrutinize, you read everything.
You don't read what reinforces your already assumed habits.
And, you know, I hold Being a high school history teacher to be just about second to being an actor.
An actor is the best thing on earth to do.
Unless you're a high school history teacher.
And then I would say, how many kids here in this room have the same politics as their parents?
And whatever number of hands goes up, I say, for this semester, you take the opposite view.
Under compulsion, you do not agree with your parents, and I don't care.
I want you to disagree with your parents on every paper.
In retrospect, knowing that, what the 16 and a half year olds were doing, you know, in 69, now these people are running the country, I mean, I guess this isn't shocking, where we're at, huh?
So it's interesting because I talk about a lot on the show how we are at this moment, what you're describing as an end game.
We seem to be at a moment in the country where we can basically go two ways at this point.
We can either figure out how to, you know, maintain ourselves as the United States of America, Or the states really just kinda need to go their separate ways, and that's sort of what federalism's about in the first place.
But then what makes us united, and will we end up in perpetual civil war?
And, you know, there's a litany of problems with that.
So describe what Endgame, I mean, Endgame can go two ways, right?
Endgame can be we end up in just utter chaos, or there is something that comes after Endgame that's positive, right?
If you believe that you have to find that which we share and not that which divides us, we should be proud of opposing views.
We should be proud of having dissent.
And they have always been the hallmarks of America.
Always.
Until so recently that People don't understand what history itself is.
But that's what you've got to fight.
You don't have a choice between having the United States and having chaos.
Because that's not a choice.
It may be fatal.
It may be the worst possible thing that could happen to us.
But what we should be doing is agreeing on the need for civics.
And when I went to the Wall Street Journal, I was so shocked that they wouldn't endorse civics for everyone.
And they said, they implied to me that they thought that liberal teachers in civics had a hidden agenda.
And I said, a hidden agenda in civics?
Yeah.
I said, you're nuts.
You're crazy.
There's no such thing as a hidden agenda in the teaching of civics.
You either have honest history or you don't.
You either lie your way through history or you don't.
And you are willing to tell the truth.
And if you tell the truth about the Bill of Rights, why is the Bill of Rights called the Bill of Rights?
Why is it in the Constitution in a way that none of the other amendments are?
And there's a reason.
And there's a reason that breeds pride and breeds love of country.
You don't have to be in the military to have love of country.
You have to know why Nathan Hale died.
You have to know why George Washington tried to throw the coin across the river.
And you know those stories, and you'll know who you are.
And without them, you don't know who you are.
I may say that, I will say that, when we divide up between commentators that are conservative, commentators that are liberal, we're reducing American politics and American government and American history to an anecdote.
I want to end with one thing that can sort of connect your love of history and civics and clearly America to what we know, the career that we all know.
And how that sort of is relating to Hollywood these days.
It seems like I can go on Apple movies every day and literally I'll just scroll and scroll and scroll and I can't find anything new that is interesting to me.
It's almost impossible.
It feels like the studios are out of ideas.
We remake and we reboot and we retread and now the studios have all come together
and so there's just not a plethora of ideas anymore.
And I end up watching the same, I actually watched What About Bob
about two weeks ago on a Sunday.
I end up watching the same things that I was always watching
for most of my life as a child of the 80s and the 90s.
Do you think Hollywood can shift to help with some of this?
That there could be some stories?
I mean, there's plenty of stories from our past that could help us understand some of this better.
We used to be able to tell them, but we don't seem to be able to tell them anymore.
Or maybe it's not Hollywood that should be doing it.
And I went to Howard and I said, when he was in his 90s, I said, I'm going to get your stuff done.
I am.
And then I had to come to him some 10 years later and say, I'm so sorry.
But I still can't get you done.
I can't get it done.
People don't read what's in front of them.
They read the rep.
And I don't care anymore.
And I don't want anyone to really care.
If you're a communist and you've written a brilliant book like Animal Farm or 1984, Do you really think you're going to be poisoning the brains of your children by introducing them to 1984?
Good grief!
We have no sense of risk, and we have no trust in our children's brains.