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00:02:03.760All right, guys, we have of course been talking about American identity. It's been a central
00:02:09.720issue, I think, on the right in the United States. It's been a constant topic of controversy. And one
00:02:16.760of the guys who I think wrote a book that really prefigured this entire clash was R.R. Reno with
00:02:23.000his excellent book, Return of the Strong Gods. I'm very glad to have him on to discuss it today.
00:02:28.220Thank you so much for coming on. It's great to be on your show. I'm a big fan. I watched your
00:02:33.060episode when you talked about Return of the Strong Gods. Gosh, that was probably half a dozen years
00:02:37.860ago. And I said, wow, that guy really knows what he's talking about. So thanks. Thanks for having
00:02:44.300Well, I really do. I mean, what I said, I think, you know, you and Samuel Huntington probably wrote the two most important books that we're going to approach this conversation. And obviously, you saw this coming around the bend. Most people, I think, had some idea that this was lurking in the background, but you laid the framework in a way that I think is very helpful.
00:03:05.660So I guess my first question would be, are you surprised at how quickly the salience of this issue has increased? Is there any aspect of the debate that's blown up that you didn't really expect to, I guess, accelerate this quickly?
00:03:19.380No, I could see in the middle teens that the question of belonging, or the term I use in the book, this notion of home, was going to play a very important role in our political life, in our cultural life, really.
00:03:38.740I think I, in the book, I recount this conference I went to, I think it was in England, it was after Angela Merkel had allowed the million or more Muslim refugees into Europe, and this young, we were discussing immigration in a plenary session,
00:03:57.440And this young woman made an intervention about how the Muslims in her neighborhood, some of them were born in France, but they were born to parents from Algeria and other North African countries would speak about when they go on vacation, that they would be going home.
00:04:16.500And she said in the anguished voice, if I lose France, where can I go?
00:04:27.500I thought I could not imagine a more explosive political emotion than this fear of being dispossessed, becoming an exile in one's own place of birth, to sort of wander as a refugee.
00:04:45.560So, you know, I went back to New York and I thought, wow, wow, this is this is brewing and it's going to come to a boil.
00:04:55.540We have this issue, I think, becoming front and center primarily due to the immigration debate.
00:05:02.000I think, as you say, everyone is watching these Western nations transform before our eyes, especially in the United States.
00:05:09.340Right now, we have an interesting situation because originally the opposition to immigration was based on legality.
00:05:17.240Oh, well, it's illegal immigration is the problem.
00:05:19.820These people didn't go through the right steps.
00:05:34.940as soon as trump closed the border which i think again is an incredible thing the fact that we heard
00:05:41.340for decades and decades even from republicans that this was impossible and then we more or less just
00:05:46.540watched the trump administration hit a switch and and call it a day and that meant that all of a
00:05:52.000sudden the issue was no longer that of illegal immigration because we still had a large amount
00:05:57.120of people who were new arrivals or shouldn't be here or were here on temporary visas and it was
00:06:02.520very clear that the uh the plan was to make them american in some way and people recognize that we
00:06:09.600had a lot of people here that were incompatible with the culture uh or in other ways are going
00:06:14.080to be very difficult to assimilate and now the question became you know who are we what is an
00:06:19.280american in a very real sense we have to start sorting the wheat from the chaff uh no longer
00:06:24.120just make it an argument of procedure and as soon as that happened you can feel the barriers go up0.82
00:06:29.480You can feel everyone, you know, they know they're getting next to that third rail because now we're going to have to have a conversation about what makes someone American.
00:06:38.580And that means that people are going to get excluded. There's going to be a correct answer to this question.
00:06:44.040And if you're not on the right side of it, you might not belong here anymore.
00:06:47.460And that's understandably scary for a lot of people who would be in that situation.
00:06:52.200but it also feels very dangerous to conservatives who had constructed this entirely propositional
00:07:00.560understanding of what an American is. America is a set of ideas. You assent to the set of ideas
00:07:05.740and you become American. Of course, we have plenty of people who are American, who even
00:07:10.980sit in our Congress, like Ilhan Omar, who don't assent to the ideas. And yet we would have a hard
00:07:16.620time understanding how she could be excluded from the American experience. What is it about this
00:07:23.120question that creates such a tension? I mean, we know why it exists on the left, but why even inside
00:07:27.840the conservative movement does this become an incredibly dangerous topic to address?
00:07:33.520We, you know, in the book, I tell a story about the way in which the catastrophes of the first
00:07:40.660after the 20th century, World War I, and then the rise of fascism and the Soviet communist
00:07:48.260revolution in Russia, and then World War II. So we've inherited a deep anxiety about what I would
00:07:56.620call the consolidating or any kind of blood and soil nationalism seems to us to just be a pathway
00:08:05.180a disaster. So we have been socialized over the last three generations to be deeply fearful of
00:08:13.620those kinds of questions. The question of who are we as a nation has been thought to be a dangerous
00:08:20.080question to ask. And when Samuel Huntington wrote his book in the 19, it was his final book,
00:08:27.840I think late 1990s it was published, that it was really rejected as a kind of quasi-racist
00:08:37.400undertaking. So that's really going to be difficult for us to overcome, the inhibition,
00:08:45.080but it's so essential at this juncture in our nation's history to have a frank conversation
00:08:50.400about what it means to be an American,
00:09:38.360I remember being at a conference with David Brooks,
00:09:42.540And David really made a very kind of impassioned observation about how it's really narrative and story that really animate people, not arguments and ideas.
00:09:57.640And then five minutes later in the conversation, we pivoted to this question of immigration, and he plunked down for the American creed.
00:10:04.780And I said, but David, you just told us that it was narrative and not creed that really animates the human heart.
00:10:14.300So what is the American story is going to be more important than the American creed.
00:10:19.180And Samuel Huntington made a similar observation that ideas are just not powerful tools with which to knit together individuals and give them a sense of peoplehood.
00:10:34.440It's a much more mysterious and multifaceted thing that takes a body of individuals and turns them into a nation.
00:10:44.540well and i think that's what is so difficult for many people to square they have this obsession
00:10:54.380in modernity with categorization down to an inch and so everything needs to fit very neatly into
00:11:02.120well-defined boxes uh when identity when properly understood has always been real but has had fuzzy
00:11:10.400borders. It's always been something that there's been some play in the joints around. And especially
00:11:16.540when it comes to a national identity, I think it is as spiritual and metaphysical as it is
00:11:22.580scientific or directly descriptional. And so therefore, it's very hard for people to pin
00:11:29.180down. And any effort to do so seems to have been thoroughly discouraged by something that I think
00:11:36.080you helped to popularize in the discussion, which was the idea of the post-war consensus.
00:11:40.400that after world war ii we simply had this moment where we were very worried about the
00:11:47.520kind of rise of strong identities strong beliefs uh you know great men are built out of great
00:11:55.000passions and great men can do amazing but also terrible things and so we had to destroy the idea
00:12:01.600of all great men and all the passions that would ultimately inflame them if we were to prevent the
00:12:08.820rise of another hitler and so therefore the you know the strong gods as you call them of you know
00:12:15.040identity and heritage and history and faith the things that drive people to kill and die uh for
00:12:21.840for their beliefs those things had to be put away uh and so we have this moment where it's it seems
00:12:29.300like the main job of especially a certain stripe of conservative is to quiet any of those discussions
00:12:36.060Because if we delve too deeply into kind of what we locked in the closet after World War II, then what emerges could be extremely monstrous.
00:12:46.700But I think we've reached a point where not having those passions is now more dangerous than entertaining them.
00:12:54.520Because what we're seeing is stripped of those passions, stripped of those strong gods.
00:13:01.260we lose our will to believe in ourselves, and we lose the metaphysical animating spirit that
00:13:07.040drives societies forward. You can see how we were kind of eating our seed corn for many decades,
00:13:15.460because there was a strong reservoir of patriotic and religious passions and commitment. And so it
00:13:23.520slowly eroded over time. And we're, you know, a few, I was born in 1959. And so for my parents,
00:13:31.560the notion that we needed to become a more inclusive, a more open, a more capacious,
00:13:38.980a more accepting society, you know, I think made a lot of sense to them because they could
00:13:43.480take for granted the essential coherence of the American identity. But now it's 2026. You know,
00:13:52.660I'm 66 years old and I look around and I see almost all of the problems we face as a society
00:14:00.420could be put under the category of disintegration or deconsolidation. The
00:14:06.980globalized economy has created vast wealth, but it tends to be concentrated in those who are
00:14:15.860plugged into the global economy. And we know from a lot of analysis of populism that that feeling
00:14:23.560of being a kind of, if you will, an kind of economic outsider in your own country's economy
00:14:29.840is palpably felt by a lot of voters in the Rust Belt and elsewhere. And then striking demographic
00:14:39.100change, we're now at around 16% non-native-born residents of the United States, which is an all-time
00:14:45.180high so higher even than the 1920s when immigration was dramatically restricted and then of course
00:14:53.640we've you know our universities are awash with ideologies that discourage they encourage a
00:15:02.540rejection and a a critical disdain of our inheritance rather than an embrace and a love
00:15:10.620for it. So those three factors have really dramatically weakened the social fabric in
00:15:17.560the sense of solidarity in our society. So under those circumstances, I think a thoughtful person
00:15:22.580who may, as you point out, be perfectly aware of the dangers of these strong passions and
00:15:29.400commitments, that same person I think says, well, we've got to take some risks here because we can't
00:15:34.660just keep on what we've been doing. Otherwise, we're going to simply disintegrate as a coherent
00:15:40.540nation, unwilling or unable to even defend ourselves against foreign adversaries.
00:15:46.460There seems to be a confluence of factors that have driven us to this point. One is,
00:15:52.820as you say, you know, the post-war consensus and the motivations that kind of drive us
00:15:59.860economically. But it also seems that ultimately all of our governments are competing to
00:16:07.640centralize power as much as possible. One of my favorite political thinkers, Bertrand de Juvenal,
00:16:13.940wrote a great book on power about how this process requires us to, in many ways, break all previous
00:16:22.300social bonds to create loyalty only to the state. It destroys the thick relationships of faith and
00:16:29.700family and community all of these you know pre-state loyalties and without them the atomized
00:16:39.560individual becomes really nothing in the eyes of the state they have no ground to stand on they
00:16:46.760have no community to defend them and therefore we end up in a scenario where that individual
00:16:52.440becomes interchangeable because the state no longer needs to care about these previous social
00:16:58.300commitments on which it was based and i think everyone can see this as kind of the ultimate
00:17:04.540uh this is where liberalism inevitably leads us because you know the liberalism is trying to
00:17:11.980create this kind of minimal minimum viable morality for maximum interaction and cooperation
00:17:17.840and this does a lot of great things it prevents us from you know probably fighting as many wars as
00:17:23.100we do it good go to going to war over religion and these kind of things but ultimately it seems
00:17:28.120to cost us something incredibly critical that makes us human and so while these states are
00:17:33.900consolidating their power and becoming stronger than ever they're making their people weaker and
00:17:39.640sicker and less human than they've ever been and so i just wonder if this is in any way something
00:17:45.940that we can address if only because power seems to need us separated, seems to need us deracinated.
00:17:54.620We cannot be properly used by the larger state if we have these thick connections that make us
00:18:02.160resistant to the demands of the powers that oversee us. I think that's correct. There's a
00:18:08.460tendency of the modern administrative state to turn us into clients or patients that we are
00:18:15.640administered and our every need and concern is addressed by the state. But I would also add to
00:18:21.920that the empire of commerce that wants to turn us into interchangeable consumers. So those two
00:18:30.060things working in tandem. So I think a good statesman in the 21st century wants to encourage
00:18:38.260non-market, non-bureaucratic modes of human sociality.
00:18:46.360And I go, my elevator speech is, you know, faith, family, and flag.
00:18:52.280And we saw this with the transgender issue in public schools in Northern Virginia,
00:19:00.100the big uproar in 2022 uh that that uh and even earlier and it just shows that the family
00:19:10.060the parent and the relation of the parent the child is so strong that the parent is willing
00:19:15.820to stand up and go against you know um what was then the kind of punitive politically correct woke
00:19:22.520um uh opinion about transgender they were able to stand up and resist so you know the
00:19:29.560the family doesn't want the state to sort of dictate what can and cannot be said around the
00:19:35.560dinner table. That's a very important guard against tyranny. And similarly, religious belief
00:19:42.520can be a very powerful reason for a person to resist being coerced by the state if the state
00:19:50.200wants us to do something that's contrary to our religious convictions. So these thick loyalties
00:19:56.200or loves that I call them. These thick loyalties and love are really the foundation for a culture
00:20:02.840of freedom, in my estimation. And patriotism itself, as a patriotic zeal, is something that
00:20:10.400unites ordinary Americans so that they can demand that the people leaving our country,
00:20:17.780our economic elites as well as our political elites, can demand that they actually serve
00:20:22.020the interests of their country. So these are, you know, these are, we all know that some families
00:20:29.580can be dysfunctional and oppressive and some, you know, nationalistic fervor can become disordered.
00:20:36.700But the, so we know that in every aspect there are dangers, but we are, there are also great
00:20:43.860blessings to be had from, from these strong loves and strong passions.
00:20:47.720you've mentioned so far two aspects of what's happening here that i think immediately sets off
00:20:56.420kind of the the danger radar of many conservatives one you just talked about the role that capital
00:21:05.120plays in dissolving our bonds this is something that i think is critical and but people hear this
00:21:15.620They hear any critique of the effects of capital, and they think you must be communist. You must be a socialist. You must, therefore, have swung entirely into some kind of Marxist fever dream.
00:21:27.260but the protection of nation states and peoples from the effects of capital of course also echoes
00:21:36.640national socialism and so a lot of people think that if you are in any way criticizing the effects
00:21:45.040of capital you must either fall under hitler or stalin is is there a way to understand the
00:21:53.000possible corrosive excesses of capitalism without falling into one of these two ideologically0.75
00:21:59.980murderous regimes. I look to Benjamin Disraeli, the great conservative prime minister and quite
00:22:07.340frankly myth maker. I think his great genius as a political figure was his ability to conjure
00:22:12.980myth in the positive sense of the word. And he recognized that the dissolving effects that
00:22:22.640the mercantile class had to be counterbalanced by a union of the patriotic working class Englishmen
00:22:31.460and the aristocrats, so that those two forces in English society, if he could unite them
00:22:37.720around a nationalistic agenda, that there would be a counterweight to the dissolving effects of
00:22:46.600the market. And I think good statesmanship is always recognizing what the moment that we live
00:22:54.080in requires. I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Our society was sclerotic and our economy
00:23:06.220was hampered by the long-lasting effects of the New Deal and then state intervention during World
00:23:14.340war ii and we needed to loosen things up in order to unleash the dynamism of the american people
00:23:21.420the economic dynamism of american people and it largely worked but again you know that was a long
00:23:25.560time ago nearly 50 years ago and we have a very dynamic economy that produces tremendous wealth
00:23:32.660as we see we're kind of clicking along at close to three percent gdp growth with all these headwinds
00:23:37.760of high oil prices and the ballooning national debt.
00:23:43.780So if you're a statesman, you're saying,
00:23:46.420well, the issue here is not to create more economic freedom.
00:23:49.860The issue here is to blow on the embers of national solidarity
00:23:56.720that are both above and below the market,
00:24:01.740and that that is what our moment needs historically.
00:24:07.760And then to trust in, I think, both the instinctive, I always say that Americans are characterized by what I call folk libertarianism.
00:24:21.280Not a theoretical one, but kind of just a general desire not to be pushed around by these remote powers.
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00:25:25.100Along with capital, the other danger word you use there was that of demographic change.
00:25:34.580It seems very scary to a lot of conservatives to recognize that America has a core ethnos, a dominant ethnos from which our culture and our beliefs and our principles arose.
00:25:49.080Samuel Huntington of course identified this as Protestant
00:26:00.980of kind of the center left Harvard professor I think he worked for Jimmy Carter at some
00:26:05.060point not exactly a right wing white nationalist
00:26:08.020but he received lots of heat for simply identifying the
00:26:13.040factual core of American identity now Huntington
00:26:16.920believed that many people could assimilate to this that ultimately there were many people who
00:26:21.860could join that story but that ultimately you had to keep the Anglo-Protestant core centered and at
00:26:29.180some point that means preserving the demographic reality of that core and my friend Carl Benjamin
00:26:37.940has coined a term demographic security for what he what he hopes for England you know ultimately
00:26:45.560for his homeland, that the peoples of the West need to know that they have the right to protect
00:26:53.140the demographic makeup of their country. Now, that sparks a lot of discussions because, of course,
00:26:59.820we are at some level talking about race, and that is extremely dangerous in American life.
00:27:06.720So, why is it so difficult to have that discussion on the right? And is it possible to ultimately make a case to justify the preservation of a particular demographic destiny for the United States to the broader American public?
00:27:26.000The race question is so freighted with our history that it's a painful and difficult topic for all of us.
00:27:38.900You know, again, I was born in 1959, grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, at the very end of Jim Crow.
00:27:44.360So it was a racially segregated city with the boundaries enforced by baseball bats.
00:31:46.800And part of, as a Catholic, you know, I'm very quick to say America is definitely a Protestant country.
00:31:56.420And so much so that American Catholicism, like American Judaism, has become very Protestantized in our sensibilities.
00:32:08.560And, you know, my purest Catholic friends can regret that.0.58
00:32:12.800It was condemned in the late 19th century by the Vatican as Americanism and so on.
00:32:20.400I mean, you can take your theoretical point of view, but since I'm from here and I can't help but have an American personality, I kind of like it that way.
00:32:30.500Yeah, that's one of my favorite points that Huntington makes in his book is about how American Jews and Catholics are, how Protestant they have become in many of their ways.
00:32:42.120um i i am less optimistic about our ability to assimilate where we are now mainly this comes
00:32:52.380from my time as a public high school teacher i was you know doing that four or five years ago
00:32:57.740teaching in majority minority school which was almost entirely uh haitian and guatemalan or
00:33:05.360venezuelan and it was very clear that outside of consumerism these children had no connection to
00:33:14.700america the only thing you know i would i would do quizzes every day to just warm up the class and
00:33:21.680you know bring in different different avenues of of what we're going to talk about and when i would
00:33:27.200do anything about american history or american culture or even christianity basic questions like
00:33:35.180where was jesus born uh there was very little knowledge there uh but they all knew pepsi and
00:33:41.780coke and you know pizza hut and mcdonald's uh and so the only thing that they seemed to be
00:33:49.520in any way assimilating to was our consumerism because that was really all we had left to bind
00:33:55.760us together at this point um i think there is as you know c.s lewis pointed out an abolition of
00:34:02.020man a point at which you have destroyed all that you know that made man who he is and then the next
00:34:08.260generation is truly inhuman in a real sense because there's nothing left to teach them there's
00:34:13.500there's no connection back to the form i think the hour is later than many people recognize because0.98
00:34:18.300i mean there are parts of this country where the only people having children are foreigners
00:34:22.740uh the the schools are full of foreign children because uh native born americans are not having
00:34:28.700children anymore. And when we look at, you know, the work of many sociologists, including Robert
00:34:33.940Putnam, we can see that diversity is a destroyer of social cohesion. And it also depresses the
00:34:40.640birth rate of the native population. So the very things that we would need to produce another0.98
00:34:44.840generation that could better assimilate is quickly fading away. I think this is why mass deportations
00:34:52.040and strict immigration control are so radically important in a very existential way in the next0.99
00:34:59.54010 years, if we do not solve this problem, there simply will be no new generations of Americans
00:35:04.960to which other cultures, other new arrivals could assimilate to at all.
00:35:10.500As I say, maybe because I'm older and baby boomers like me, we're still stuck in our youths and we
00:35:20.620don't realize how how dramatic the changes have been and and your experience in the classroom
00:35:25.640um uh has given you a window on that so i don't i don't want to it could be that i'm naive
00:35:31.720but but uh you know i get my coffee from the tibetan guy down the street
00:35:38.520owns a little coffee shop and yeah i during the when the biden people had to open borders and
00:35:46.420during the pandemic and they came to New York0.99
00:35:49.580and we put them up, the city of New York
00:37:12.240And he said, and he bangs the steering wheel and says, I don't want my children to grow up in a country that doesn't get respected.
00:37:20.760And so there's a natural human impulse to want to be part of a great thing.
00:37:25.400And if our political leaders are willing to, and it's not going to happen from Ilhan Omar,
00:37:31.340But if our political leaders are willing to really rally around the flag and, you know, and we're able in our schools and in the public square to really champion our country, I think you'll find a lot of these young kids, you know, the Haitian kids and the Guatemalan kids will go, yeah, America's a great place.
00:37:57.580I love America. And one of the things that anguishes me is that the left promotes the opposite of that. And precisely at a time where we've undergone this dramatic demographic change, all the more do we need a revival of Americanism in public life.
00:38:22.440I do think the shifts are, we see it politically.
00:38:27.760There's a huge, there's a great uproar.
00:38:30.760I predict that every president since George H.W. Bush, except Barack Obama, who was too young, in one fashion or another, avoided service in the United States military.
00:38:43.920W. did his National Guard thing in Texas, but it was a strategy to avoid active duty in a dangerous situation in Vietnam.
00:38:51.520I would predict that every president after Donald Trump will have served in the United States military.
00:39:00.600Voters are increasingly – you talked about the people that you were teaching, these young people.
00:39:07.020But we also have a problem in our elite.
00:39:09.280Are the people who are at the top of our society actually loyal to our country?
00:39:13.160I mean, Alex Karp wrote his book about Silicon Valley condemning them for not seeking the best interests of the very country where they could make their vast wealth.
00:39:27.460So I think voters are increasingly concerned that the people leading them are not loyal to them, are not loyal to the common project that we share as Americans.
00:39:37.280And they're going to want visible signs of that loyalty.
00:39:40.560And having put in your time in the United States military is a very, very visible sign.
00:39:47.140So I'll be kind of interested to see whether that works out.
00:39:49.320In 2018 midterms, Democrats very cleverly recruited a number of seemingly moderate candidates for Congress who also had served in the military.
00:40:03.260And it was very, I think, it was good.
00:40:06.000How do you do your own, how do you meet the Make America Great Again appeal?
00:40:12.220Well, you run people who say, well, we're just as patriotic as Trump.
00:40:17.020We just have different policy views, dot, dot, dot.
00:40:19.640So I took that as a sign that what I would call politics of solidarity is rising in salience
00:40:28.460and that the signals need to be sent to voters.
00:40:31.920we are we are we're behind this common project as a nation because there's a hunger for that
00:40:39.940that obviously you know the Somali community in Minneapolis isn't thinking along these lines and0.98
00:40:46.940you and I could identify other places in the country that are immigrant dominated that won't
00:40:51.520be but it's a very big country and and I think that there's a you know a super majority that's
00:40:57.440hungering for reassurance that the national project will be renewed.
00:41:04.540Trade ice skating at Nathan Phillips Square for ice cubes in your umbrella drink.
00:41:11.000Let Porter Airlines fly you from Toronto Pearson nonstop to 10 top sun destinations in Mexico,
00:41:34.740I think that you're right about people feeling
00:41:39.140that someone is actually on board with the project.
00:41:42.640I think we can see this probably most easily
00:41:45.920in the candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy right now,
00:41:48.940who has said all the right things ideologically.
00:41:51.820He sounds like a good kind of libertarian leaning Republican, small government, you know, cutting waste, fraud and abuse, free markets, the end of wokeness.
00:42:03.040Like these are all the right talking points.0.57
00:42:04.760But when he revealed what appeared to be a real disdain for American culture, and he set himself apart as if his immigrant background gave him a superiority and a reason to be the manager of Americans rather than a fellow American who is being elected, I think we're seeing that kind of play out.
00:42:26.060and it's very interesting because you know i think that james burnham is one of the great
00:42:32.080prophets of our time uh i think the managerial revolution and the machiavellians are two of the
00:42:37.080most important books to understand where we're at right now and obviously james burnham believed
00:42:43.220that we were shifting from statesmen to managers uh and that ultimately uh you know he draws from
00:42:49.740valfredo pareto's residues of you know the the type one and two the lions and the foxes as burnham
00:42:57.120renames them and we've been ruled almost entirely by foxes we've been ruled almost entirely by those
00:43:03.780that manipulate information that are good at combining things that are good that don't hold
00:43:09.500to identity too strongly and see everything as fluid but the reason that we're ruled by those
00:43:14.500people is not an accident it's that foxes the rise of foxes coincides with the rise of complexity
00:43:21.260in society that foxes are good at manipulating and creating and managing systems in a way that
00:43:27.000lions are not and so what you're indicating is that the soul of the country the the unity of
00:43:33.880the country demands lions again it demands people who are conservative who understand you know have
00:43:40.240demonstrated loyalty through martial prowess who uh center the the maintenance of identity
00:43:45.220but i think that puts us at a strange crossroads because it's very clear that the additional
00:43:52.860complexity of the world around us really is the gradient of modernity uh that is what has rewarded
00:43:59.240and placed i think foxes and managerial systems in charge of most of the west and and many other
00:44:05.300parts of the world can we return to a lion-led society while maintaining the complexity that
00:44:12.700the foxes have built would would that require a fundamental shift or mentality uh when it comes
00:44:19.100to like this increasingly complex uh modern world we need engineers and we need managers
00:44:26.200for the reasons you give complex technological society but managing and leading are very
00:44:33.140different things. And to lead is to inspire. To lead is to draw people to enter into a common
00:44:45.540project that may not be in their self-interest, at least not in an immediate sense. And it's
00:44:51.200mysterious. These are mysterious qualities. It turns on what Max Weber called charisma.
00:44:58.140and it's a certain power of personality that can move hearts and motivate.
00:45:08.960And I think we always have them, but as you point out,
00:45:13.060whether it's our elite universities or the credentialing system that we have,
00:45:17.480it tends to give almost exclusive priority to cleverness with ideas and numbers and so on,
00:45:27.040and not to these intangible qualities that that distinguish i mean you know you can be pro-trump
00:45:33.060you can be anti-trump but you have to marvel at his ability to transfix the entire world for a
00:45:38.740decade and you know historians are going to look back and and you know that and they will i think
00:45:47.320whether they praise or condemn they won't be able to deny that a very big man strode across the stage
00:45:54.580of history. And so his rise, a very improbable rise, maybe is an indication that there's a
00:46:04.440great vacuum. And that, you know, I think Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism,
00:46:11.420she thought totalitarianism didn't have its origins in these strong, intense passions that
00:46:17.300lead people to do brave things. She thought totalitarians had its origins in a kind of
00:46:23.580atomized demoralized society that the vacuum they seek something to you know bring them out
00:46:32.160of their slow of despair and they you know that's that's it's in that kind of environment that the
00:46:37.480demagogue can can uh can run free and i i'm with you i think we that's our curse right now that's
00:46:46.120the difficult situation we we're in now we're in this atomized disintegrated demoralized
00:47:21.440me-centered existence we actually want that even though we often fend it off because we're very
00:47:27.360complicated creatures and falling creatures but we want it and in the political realm you know that
00:47:33.840that is the call to do great things uh and we you know we can only do great things as a country if
00:47:41.780we're if we're united in pursuit of those great things and people want to be united in pursuit
00:47:47.700of great things uh you know and i think our political impasses and the polarization will
00:47:54.940be resolved probably in the next decade it's hard to see how or whom or how that's going to
00:48:01.520take place but you know well there'll be some election when it'll be clear that there's that
00:48:06.58055 60 majority that really wants to go in one or another direction that's what i foresee and that's
00:48:15.780when we'll begin the process of reconsolidating, fighting over, you know, secondary things
00:48:26.060rather than fundamental things, as democratic politics always involves fighting over things,
00:48:31.900or right now we're fighting over fundamental things, you know, like, do we have a country
00:48:35.840or not, and, you know, are we going to, is there an American identity or not?
00:48:43.400I mean, I tend to see the left as the kind of political agents of the cosmopolitan globalization of everything, and they work hand-in-glove with economic globalization, even though they pretend to be its adversaries.
00:49:01.020because the real break on globalization
00:49:11.400that transcend the economic calculation.
00:49:17.840So my final question might be the most difficult one,
00:49:21.360but I think that any discussion of this topic
00:49:23.580while not addressing this would ultimately be dishonest.
00:49:27.080i never expected uh before i started doing this as a job or even once i got this job to ever really
00:49:34.740talk about israel i didn't care about it it didn't matter to me i had no great opinion one way or the
00:49:40.820other for it i had the standard conservative we should probably support them because they're0.93
00:49:45.040a democracy in the middle east and they don't hate us the way that muslims do that was basically my0.94
00:49:50.080my understanding of our relationship with israel and the bizarre thing that is that as i've done0.99
00:49:56.760this job over and over again, when I try to talk about American identity or preserving American
00:50:01.660identity, you know, protecting America as a nation, the most pushback I've received on the0.91
00:50:08.640right has almost always been around the issue of Israel, which seems like it should be entirely
00:50:13.800unconnected to me. What does this country in the Middle East have to do with American identity?
00:50:18.880But I ran up against it so many times that I had no other choice but to address it.
00:50:23.700and it seems to be tied up with the post-war consensus at some level the argument seems to go
00:50:29.660hitler existed and therefore no european descended people can ever have a country again
00:50:37.020and if you recognize that perhaps there should be a protection for those countries then you0.99
00:50:45.800probably want to get rid of israel or wipe out jewish people or bring back hitler or something
00:50:51.920like that and that narrative is so core that i you know i just had several friends go to yoram
00:50:58.440hazoni's national conservatism conference in israel on his request to kind of explain why
00:51:05.040attitudes towards israel are changing on the right and many of these people like amanda millius and
00:51:10.600jonathan keberman are jewish at least ethnically um and yet when they went there and explained that
00:51:18.060hey you know we need to have a normal relationship with america at this point we need to uh you know
00:51:24.920we can't just have this narrative well the holocaust happened therefore we protect israel at
00:51:30.660any cost you're going to need to bring normal you know tangible benefits in your relationship like
00:51:36.860any other country would you know if we're going to be friends and allies and if you want to change
00:51:42.000the relationship with the american right you need to start emphasizing those things they were
00:51:45.880immediately called anti-Semites, traitors, you know, Holocaust deniers, all kinds. Ted Cruz
00:51:52.080literally got on Twitter and called Jonathan Kieberman a Jewish man, a Holocaust denier.0.99
00:51:56.880It was one of the most amazing reactions I've ever seen. So I guess I'll just let you go0.99
00:52:02.140anywhere you want with this or nowhere at all, if you desire. But how do we untangle the issue
00:52:09.720of American identity from charges of anti-Semitism? How do we untangle this issue, you know,
00:52:18.300so that we can have just a normal relationship with this country if we need to, while also
00:52:23.560allowing America to defend itself and define itself as American without transgressing some
00:52:31.300kind of post-war taboo? Yeah, I think the taboos, I mean, Keeperman is a young man, and I think
00:52:37.800He accurately reflects, you know, a really thoughtful right-wing perspective.
00:52:45.940And I think he correctly informed the audience that, you know, Auschwitz just doesn't have the symbolic significance for a 25-year-old right-wing kid who's watching your show now.
00:53:02.200And, you know, and like, hello, stop using that trope.
00:53:09.360And moreover, it reinforces the left-wing narrative that the West is ultimately,
00:53:15.360the history of the West is a history of endless sins, you know.0.73
00:53:18.900So I think that is an important message and it needs to be reiterated.0.77
00:53:24.420You know, while the NatCon conference was happening in Jerusalem,
00:53:28.220Marco Rubio gave a speech in Athens about which cast our project or the project, the American project, as a civilizational one and not just a national one, although he affirmed that within Western civilization is only going to be renewed if the nations of the West are renewed as nations.
00:53:47.040And in that civilizational project, the state of Israel is obviously an important ally, civilizational ally.
00:53:55.980It's an extremely important cultural ally insofar as the state of Israel is very clear-minded about preserving its identity as a Jewish state.
00:54:06.880And if we could do a tenth as much, have a tenth as much clarity about preserving America as, as you said, a Protestant nation or as a more capacious sense, a Christian nation, we would be in good shape.
00:54:24.980So we could learn from the Israelis, perhaps, how it is, how to have the courage of particularity in the cosmopolitan universalistic age.
00:54:36.860And I met, you know, I think, and you're quite correct, that as a nation, as a state, Israelis have to be really crystal clear about what they bring to the table that serves America's interests.
00:54:53.480You know, I mean, my line is if Germany had a tenth of the military throwaway of Israel,
00:54:59.380we'd be in much better shape with respect to Russia and Ukraine than we have been over the last couple of years.0.62
00:55:05.020So it's an ally that can actually project power quite effectively.
00:55:10.440And that's an asset that's not to be underestimated.
00:55:14.080And, you know, I've met with some, I was at the NatCon conference.
00:55:42.460And so I think it's important that we move to a, that we develop that alliance with great clarity about how it's, and our political leaders need to give a clear explanation about how a military alliance with Israel serves the American national interest.
00:56:02.840and people can argue and we can have i mean it's a democratic society people are obviously going
00:56:08.620to argue about whether whether that alliance is well founded or poorly founded it's a it's a
00:56:15.060fitting thing to argue about just as we should argue about to the extent to which our involvement
00:56:20.340in nato serves our our interests or not and that's one of the things that it's a sign of
00:56:26.720how profound the political transitions were undergoing and how deep they are. And I think
00:56:33.020you're correct that they all bear on this question of American identity, that the question of NATO
00:56:40.220is on the table. And it is. And I credit Trump with ripping the Band-Aid off very quickly
00:56:46.120to force us to what everybody kind of somewhat suspected, which is that things are not really,
00:56:52.560like we've been just on autopilot with respect to a lot of our global commitments and don't we need
00:56:58.100to think more deeply about whether or not they actually serve the best interests of the republic
00:57:02.100one of my concerns is that the empire will swallow the republic rather than our global military
00:57:08.960commitment serving the interests of the republic and i mean it's something dwight eisenhower
00:57:13.560worried about himself and addressed and and his farewell address uh after he left the white house
00:57:18.700no i certainly i'm concerned about that as well but i think in some ways it's almost inevitable
00:57:25.920i mean you can you can try a hadrian style retritchment but over time uh it seems like
00:57:31.780the empire always uh shifts the locus of you know from rome to to byzantium uh or or something like
00:57:38.600that uh and we want to avoid that i understand i i'm just not sure that we can i i think there
00:57:45.380might be a i think in many ways oswald's playing was right about the cyclical nature of civilizations
00:57:51.020and i think that the imperial phase uh is is a very hard one to leave because the benefits of
00:57:57.140empire are too great uh and and telling the people to make themselves smaller uh in hopes of defending
00:58:04.600their own identity um not not many not many empires make that transition i mean we can look at
00:58:10.760the british and see that the abandonment of the empire has done them no favors in the defense of
00:58:15.820their of their own identity but i hope you're right i agree with you ultimately that we have
00:58:21.300the benefit of never acknowledging that we had an empire so you know i'm saying i mean we did it in
00:58:27.360a kind of ersatz fashion at the end after the end of world war world war ii and then the collapse of
00:58:33.560the soviet union i removed all the limits and the commissars warned us that they would we would
00:58:39.480that we would regret it when they were gone.
00:58:41.860And I look back and think that we were tempted into thinking
00:58:44.980we could run the whole world, the United States.
00:58:48.300And because we have a universalist liberal ideology
01:02:46.900It's a lot of fun, and it's a spicy opportunity because the people who put the book together
01:02:53.380forced us to ask a question, to answer questions for a hypothetical republic after America
01:02:59.460disintegrates. And it's the red state grouping of evangelical Christians being a 75% majority in
01:03:08.300this new rump of a nation and what kind of laws should they have. It's a good, it's a helpful0.70
01:03:13.900thought experiment, you know, to be able to probe first principles. So I think people can find that
01:03:21.480interesting excellent well everybody should definitely check that out as long as well as
01:03:26.240of course return of the strong gods if you for some reason have not read that book yet you should
01:03:30.340definitely do so and subscribe to first things magazine all the kids are reading first things
01:03:35.300that's what i'm told that's what i'm told all right let's see here cherry coke nixon says
01:03:40.180have we ever had an intergenerational fight on the right before dividing lines seem to be age 50
01:03:46.240and about legal migration of subcontinents and other nons yeah i mean i think that every i don't
01:03:54.220know 20 or so years we get a new right uh that emerges uh on the right when everyone says the
01:04:00.740new right you have to ask which new right uh but ultimately uh this does seem like the starkest
01:04:06.060one and you kind of spoke to this already about the generational divide uh zoomers and you know
01:04:10.940the boomers and kind of what's already emerged but it is it does seem very stark yeah i always say
01:04:15.980when you're talking to Republicans or conservatives over 40 and under 40. It's like talking to two
01:04:23.400entirely different political movements. Yes, I think I wrote an article published a couple
01:04:29.140three years ago called Cursed by Baby Boomers. And we are experiencing a rebellion. The baby0.94
01:04:36.460boomer generation, my generation has exerted tremendous influence over the country over
01:04:42.140the last generation you know bill clinton born in 1946 uh george w bush born in 1946
01:04:51.180donald trump born in 1946 you know joe biden 44 so this incredible concentration of uh of a certain
01:05:01.480age group dominating uh our political culture and our media movie makers all you could probably go
01:05:09.360the list of all these baby boomers and making movies and and we refuse to leave the scene and1.00
01:05:14.760so um and the zoomers are are saying they don't lay look around they say we've made a mess of it0.99
01:05:22.440and so if the boomer says left i say right the boomer says up i say down uh and i mean some of
01:05:31.400that's just uh pugnacious reactive youth but a lot of it's based on a very accurate perception
01:05:37.980of the problems facing our country absolutely he also says interesting to watch the libs and
01:05:43.680progressives rush to the defense of worker visas offshoring and subcontinents the left has always
01:05:48.540known their bread where their bread is buttered yeah i mean it of course can all be boiled down0.51
01:05:54.420to uh the now famous uh line from bernie sanders that open borders is a coke brothers uh you know0.86
01:06:00.860scheme to drive down american wages and now he is pushing for open borders and uh and uh amnesty0.82
01:06:08.340so it's become a it's a required position to be a member that to be a you know a politician in the
01:06:15.380democratic party uh it it it's very incoherent it's going to be an albatross around their necks
01:06:21.780because it it just doesn't make any sense you know uh so so uh uh we'll see how that shakes out
01:06:30.400I mean, Democratic Socialists in America, in my book, Return of the Strong Gods, I perceived a return of what I call solidarity-oriented politics, whereas we had a kind of freedom-oriented politics or an open society-oriented politics before.
01:06:46.820But the DSA, it's not a solidarity-oriented politics if you don't tackle offshoring and wage competition from migrants, whether they're legal or illegal.0.63
01:07:04.340So they're going to have to face up to that if they're going to be serious about being a working man's party.0.98
01:07:10.640At this point, they seem to be a laptop-class party, not a working man's party.
01:09:36.060when is the Love Society and its enemies coming first
01:09:40.160love first things oh that i outlined the idea of a book only after the climbing more memoir is done
01:09:46.380carl popper wrote a book called the open society and its enemies and i thought i sketched it i
01:09:52.300outlined chapters for a book the love society and its enemies because the opposite of the
01:09:56.240open society is not the closed society it's the love society love defends the things that
01:10:02.100that we love together and uh and we love welcomes others who want to share in the things that we
01:10:09.260love it's not closed in in the pejorative sense of the term but it's jealous just a long list of
01:10:17.880books that rusty absolutely has to write uh mk mek says all politics are identity politics they are
01:10:25.260and so the only question is what identity is salient uh and that's that's the real the real
01:10:30.780question in any given sense uh ultimately that that is what drives uh all contests of politics
01:10:37.280All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. Thank you again so much, Rusty, for coming on. It's been fantastic speaking with you. If it's your first time on this channel, of course, please subscribe, click the bell, notifications, all that stuff so you know when we go live. And if you want to get the Oren McIntyre show as a podcast, you need to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you everybody for watching. And as always, I will talk to you next time.