Peter Robinson is the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institute, and he knows like everything about Reagan and history and America. In this special, he tells the story behind the famous "Tear Down This Wall" speech at the Berlin Wall, and explains how he came up with the phrase, and why it's one of the most memorable quotes in American history. He also explains why he doesn't think the Soviet Union won the Cold War, which is a pet peeve of his. And he tells a story about how he almost got into a fight with an East German soldier who would peer over his shoulder at him with a binoculars. And he talks about the time he accidentally said, "We're not allowed to say that our side won the cold war. It just ended. Well, let me point out one thing: the U.S. is still here, and the USSR went defunct. We won." Thanks to Peter for coming on The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special with Ben Shapiro. It's a pleasure to have him on the show, and we hope you enjoy the Sunday Special! -Ben Shapiro and on The Daily Show with Rachel Maddow Subscribe to our new show on HBO's "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" on Comedy Central's "Goodbye Outer Space" on Amazon Prime and Vulture. Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. and become a supporter of the show by going to gimlet.fm/TheBenShawShow Subscribe and review BenShaw on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to his podcast, wherever else you re listening to this podcast gets the best listening to the latest episodes of the greatest podcast on the greatest things going on in the greatest thing on the internet? You decide what you're listening to? and most authentic and most profoundest thing you can do on the most profound podcasting opportunity in the most authentic podcasting service in the world, and most influential podcasting advice you can get the most of it's most of all, like that guy on the best thing you're going to be most authentic, no matter what you decide to do online, and more like it's a good thing, and I'm listening to it, right there, no less than that's a rock and more than that, he says it's all that and more, right up and more of it, he'll even gets it, really means that, right and truly,
00:00:48.000So let's start with, for folks who don't know your resume, your sort of most famous resume points that you wrote down in the Tear Down This Wall speech at the Berlin Wall for President Reagan.
00:00:57.000So how exactly did you come up with that phraseology?
00:01:05.0001987, spring of 1987, Berlin is celebrating some 800th anniversary.
00:01:10.000Gorbachev is going to visit, the Queen of England is going to visit, and the West German government—remember, it was West Germany and East Germany in those days—the West German government asked President Reagan to make a visit.
00:01:20.000I got assigned the speech and flew to Berlin before—oh, this would be six weeks or so before the president was to speak there—to do some research.
00:02:14.000This was the place where the Soviet advance stopped at the end of the Second World War.
00:02:18.000This was the place where the Americans and the British had taken over.
00:02:24.000So, at that moment, I was a young speechwriter in trouble because what could I write that would equal what you felt there, the felt weight of history?
00:02:33.000Several other stops in Berlin, including one to the ranking American diplomat who was full of ideas about what Ronald Reagan should not say.
00:02:40.000West Berlin is surrounded by East Germany.
00:02:42.000The people who live here are very sensitive to the nuance and subtlety necessary for East-West relations.
00:02:49.000Don't have Ronald Reagan sound like an anti-communist cowboy.
00:02:52.000And by the way, don't have him make a big deal about the wall.
00:02:56.000And that evening, I went to a dinner party West Berliners whom I had not met, but we had mutual friends back in Washington.
00:03:04.000And so they put together a sort of a buffet for me, 15 or so people, different walks of life, a professor, a couple of students, and my host and hostess were lovely retired people.
00:03:15.000He had worked at the World Bank in Washington and retired back to West Berlin.
00:03:20.000And I asked the question, I said, I've been told by the American diplomat that you've all gotten used to the wall by now.
00:03:30.000And I thought, I've made just the gaffe that the diplomat doesn't want Ronald Reagan to make.
00:03:35.000But then one man raised his arm and pointed and said, my sister lives just a few kilometers in that direction, but I haven't seen her in more than 20 years.
00:03:44.000How do you think we feel about that wall?
00:03:54.000And each person told... One man talked about walking to work each morning, and each morning he would walk under a guard tower where there was an East German soldier with a rifle over his shoulder who would peer down at him with binoculars.
00:04:09.000And the man said, We share the same history, we speak the same language, but one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal, and I have never been able to decide which was which.
00:04:18.000And then our hostess, a lovely woman called Ingeborg Eltz, who just died a couple of years ago.
00:04:23.000She must have been younger then than I am now.
00:04:30.000She'd been charming throughout the dinner party, but now she became angry.
00:04:34.000And she said, if this man Gorbachev – she smacked her, made a ball of one fist and smacked it into the palm of her other hand – if this man Gorbachev is serious with this glasnost, this perestroika, he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of that wall.
00:04:51.000And that went into my notebook, because the moment she said that, I knew that if Ronald Reagan had been there in my place, he would have responded to that remark.
00:05:01.000The simplicity, the dignity, and the power of that remark.
00:05:05.000So the answer, that's a long way around to get to the answer to your question, but if the question is, where did that phrase come from?
00:05:13.000The answer is it started with a German woman who lived behind the wall herself.
00:05:19.000So obviously you're the author of some of the most memorable words in American history to emerge from the mouth of a president of the United States.
00:05:41.000But all I was trying to do when I was in Berlin was listen as Ronald Reagan would have listened, respond as Ronald Reagan would have responded, and write a speech for him.
00:05:52.000Now, so I had worked for Vice President George H.W.
00:05:55.000Bush, a man whom I liked very much, whom in all kinds of ways I revere.
00:06:00.000I would never have written that speech for him, nor would he ever have given it.
00:06:03.000We could come to this if you'd like to, but there was a big fight over the speech.
00:06:06.000The National Security Council, the State Department, tried to squelch that line, tear down this wall.
00:06:12.000And Ronald Reagan alone insisted on delivering that speech as I had written it.
00:06:18.000So it is true that as a speechwriter in the White House, I put the words on the paper.
00:06:24.000But the deeper truth is the author of that speech, the man who called it into being, and the man who insisted on it, and the man who delivered it in a way that remains, I think permanently fixed in hundreds of thousands of memories, is Ronald Reagan.
00:06:39.000So, speaking of that sort of rhetoric, one of the things that's happened in modern American politics is this debate now over the value of presidential rhetoric.
00:06:46.000So you saw it a lot from the pro-rhetoric side when Barack Obama was president.
00:06:51.000President Obama was very mellifluous, that he spoke with great beauty and he was a great orator.
00:06:58.000Well, I want to get your take on that.
00:07:00.000But the idea was that if he had policy shortcomings, they were fulfilled by the fact that he was this wonderfully great orator with a gift.
00:08:10.000But Ronald Reagan is speaking in public, writing his own speeches.
00:08:14.000He comes to the White House fully formed as a speaker.
00:08:18.000Also, by then, he's thoroughly conservative.
00:08:20.000He's fully formed in his policy viewpoints.
00:08:23.000And the reason there was a fight over the Berlin Wall speech, the reason there were fights over quite a few of President Reagan's speeches, is that the entire administration understood That giving speeches was, perhaps more than any other, the central instrument of governance to Ronald Reagan.
00:09:42.000Barack Obama, I took a shot at Barack Obama's rhetoric.
00:09:48.000When he was speaking to a large crowd and he was in the mode of the African American church, He was capable of speaking beautifully and movingly, but that's only one mode.
00:10:01.000And there were a lot of speeches that he gave, Rose Garden speeches, straightforward addresses that were pretty clunky and really not all that surprisingly badly written, in my humble opinion.
00:10:13.000And you sort of wonder, Is this Barack Obama or is it one of the 20 really smart people he has working around him?
00:10:29.000Donald Trump has given at least half a dozen really good speeches.
00:10:36.000The speech he delivered in Saudi Arabia was an impressive thing.
00:10:39.000His State of the Union address, the first speech he gave to a joint session after becoming president, was beautifully written and pretty darned well delivered.
00:10:47.000He gave a very impressive speech in Vietnam.
00:10:50.000In my judgment, the finest speech he delivered was in Warsaw, where he said, you remember this speech?
00:11:18.000And then tweeted something else, and tweeted something else, and tweeted something else.
00:11:21.000And so the press doesn't take those big speeches seriously when they're by Donald Trump, and in some way neither does anybody else because everybody knows that wasn't really him.
00:11:32.000That was some very gifted speechwriters.
00:12:08.000This is another point about Ronald Reagan.
00:12:10.000He went over, he took the speeches seriously.
00:12:13.000You'd finish a speech, it'd go to the chief speechwriter, there'd be editing back and forth and so forth.
00:12:18.000And we owed our drafts to the president, typically 48 hours before he delivered them.
00:12:24.000And he would take the speeches with him to the residence in the evening and they'd come back the next morning marked up by Ronald Reagan.
00:12:32.000He read every line of every speech and edited those things.
00:12:36.000I can recall one time coming into the office, for some reason this stays in my mind, it was a six-page speech.
00:12:42.000And no changes on the first page, no changes.
00:12:44.000And I thought, oh, for once, he just decided to watch TV and forget about the speech.
00:12:48.000And then on the last page, on the second to last line, he had changed one word.
00:12:55.000And in some ways, that was almost more effective than anything else he might have done.
00:12:58.000Because you remember, the president is reading every word we write.
00:13:04.000And if it's not just right, he'll change it.
00:13:07.000So by the time he delivered a speech, it was really and truly He had in some way internalized it.
00:13:11.000You get no feeling of a distance between Reagan and his text.
00:13:15.000So I want to ask you about the, do some myth busting with regard to the Reagan administration, because now we're 40 years past the initiation of the Reagan administration, and people have built up.
00:13:28.000But people have built up this sort of weird myth in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan that invariably cuts to the detriment of today's Republicans.
00:13:39.000To take a quick example, there's this weird idea that Ronald Reagan and Democrats worked hand in glove, that they were best friends, that Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan were just like, they worked beautifully together as opposed to Democrats and George W. Bush or Democrats and Donald Trump.
00:13:52.000And if only we were back in the days of Reagan with a politician like Reagan, everything would be all better.
00:13:57.000How much of that is true and how much of that is myth?
00:14:00.000Almost none of it is true, but there's a kernel of it that is true.
00:14:03.000Now, when I say almost none of it is true, the back and forth on domestic policy, but also on all kinds of aspects of foreign policy.
00:14:12.000Ronald Reagan, as you will recall, wanted to give aid to the Contras in Nicaragua and Could not get that through the House of Representatives, or the Iran-Contra hearings.
00:14:24.000Congress was vicious on Ronald Reagan.
00:14:27.000Tip O'Neill was a tough, seasoned Paul, and he viewed it as his job to take down Ronald Reagan any way he could.
00:15:56.000As long as you've got me going on the old, you know, I'm going to pay a cameraman to put sugar in your gas tank before this is over.
00:16:03.000Bill Sapphire, columnist for the New York Times, great man, brilliant writer.
00:16:08.000He was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, and he formed a club for all presidential speechwriters.
00:16:14.000And when I started attending the meetings of that club, there were people who had written for Harry Truman who would show up.
00:16:21.000And what was striking about it was from The Truman administration right through to George H.W.
00:16:31.000Bush's administration, it ended with Clinton and it was really over by the time the Obama speechwriters started coming.
00:16:38.000But from Truman all the way through to George H.W.
00:16:41.000Bush, everybody understood that their president and their administration had in one way or another been engaged in the same project, and that was the defense of the republic during the Cold War.
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00:18:43.000As somebody who was five when the Berlin Wall speech was spoken, the impression that was left in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the communist regime in the USSR, is that it was the end of history, that now everybody was friends again.
00:18:59.000I mean, even if you watch Terminator 2, you have characters saying to each other, why did the Russians have missiles pointed at us?
00:19:04.000And there's this great feeling that arises in America that basically it's all over.
00:19:09.000And it seems as though we've sort of turned our guns on each other as opposed to the existential threat that used to exist out there.
00:19:14.000Maybe that was temporarily lifted for a brief moment in time after September 11th, but we're certainly back at it to an excessive degree right now.
00:19:22.000Do you think that Americans have enough in common now to actually hold each other accountable?
00:19:27.000To see each other as non-enemies in the absence of an existential threat like the Soviet Union.
00:19:36.000I also believe we have to work at what we have in common.
00:19:39.000So, I'm trying to say something, I'm trying to put this in a way that gives it some sort of edge or some sort of interest, because this is the kind of thing that you say on the radio every single day, and God bless you for saying it, but I didn't come here just to agree with you.
00:19:56.000Identity politics, the politics of dividing Americans, that's not only wrong, that approaches, in my mind, that comes close to a kind of wickedness.
00:20:08.000Because, why is it, think about this, immigration is a problem, we have to, blah, blah, blah, all that is true.
00:20:20.000But why is it that a Mexican who just crosses that border, Within a few months finds himself in a position to better the lot of his not just his family but his village back in Mexico.
00:20:34.000What is it about this country that permits remittances back to Mexico of almost 30 billion dollars a year?
00:20:41.000Why is it that one of the first things that Chinese do Chinese who, since 1979, when Deng Xiaoping had his opening to markets, and now there are lots of people in China who are rich.
00:20:57.000They try to buy real estate, right here in Southern California.
00:21:01.000They try to invest their money in this country.
00:21:05.000What is going... And the answer, of course, is that the United States of America is a miracle.
00:21:11.000And it needs to be cherished and sustained and nurtured in every way we can.
00:21:16.000People who come here... I'm trying to think... Back... Now, Ronald Reagan didn't live to see the kind of uncontrolled immigration that we have witnessed since he left office.
00:21:28.000And so he was fundamentally pretty relaxed about immigration.
00:21:34.000But what he always understood, what people of that generation always understood, was that people come here to become American.
00:21:43.000So the idea that it is in the interest of certain politicians, you and I, I'm sure, could go off and do a whole show on the problems with California, this spectacular state, so blessed in so many ways, so beautiful, so filled with enterprising and talented people.
00:22:04.000The problem with California is the government of California, in whose interest it now is to colonize certain groups or communities of people when they come here for political purposes and try to trap them in a certain kind of mindset instead of permitting them to enter into the fullness of American life.
00:22:30.000The resources of American history From the Revolutionary War, where you see, it seems providential, the way Washington is able to escape from Brooklyn across to Manhattan.
00:22:45.000The wind blows it the right way at just the right time.
00:22:47.000The courage to stand up to what was then the greatest empire on earth.
00:22:53.000Lincoln, this martyr, giving his life To hold the Union together and to abolish slavery, the greatest generation in the Second World War.
00:23:03.000I would argue that the Cold War, which is a bipartisan project, it begins with Harry Truman, it ends with George H.W.
00:23:12.000Bush and in between Intellectuals behave, by and large, pretty badly, really, during the Cold War.
00:23:20.000But it's ordinary American people who continue to vote, to sustain the politicians who want to spend the money to do what we need to do, that this country is able to sustain that kind of a project across four and a half years, four and a half decades rather, until communism collapses and the Soviet... By the way, this is a pet peeve of mine.
00:23:40.000It is now, we're not allowed to say, That our side won the Cold War, it just ended.
00:23:46.000Nobody won, nobody lost, it just ended.
00:24:27.000Do you think that we are going to choose to sustain them?
00:24:29.000So what I've seen is that the left-right divide in the United States right now seems to be breaking down into two views of American history.
00:24:36.000One is the American history that you just described, that America was based on fundamentally true, eternally good principles that we have strayed from, that we have tried to perfect our performance of, and that America is a story of us trying to and striving to live up to the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution.
00:24:52.000And then there's the alternative story.
00:24:55.000Then there's the alternative story, which is the story that the New York Times wishes to paint, which is that all institutions in America were rooted in slavery, that all of the American history was rooted in sexism and homophobia and bigotry, and that all of the grand ideals of the Declaration of Independence were basically just people making excuses for their own bigotry to enshrine their own economic power in the view of people like Charles Beard, or to try and enshrine their own Superiority ethnically in the view of perhaps Ta-Nehisi Coates.
00:25:23.000So, if you don't have a common history, it seems difficult to see what exactly can sustain us.
00:25:28.000Because it used to be that when you described a nation, a group of people who at least were going to live together, you had to at least have a few things in common.
00:25:34.000You have to have a common language, which is also being discarded because we can't even decide on what he and she mean anymore.
00:25:39.000We used to be able to have common religious principles and we broadened that out to be Judeo-Christian, not just Christian.
00:25:45.000And now the United States has become increasingly fragmentary and secular in its religious pursuits.
00:25:51.000We used to have a common history, but that's been Howard-zinified, and so a huge percentage of the population now believes that American history is an unalloyed record of bad punctuated by beautiful moments of good, which then immediately recede back into the muck.
00:26:03.000So do you think that we, I mean, the resources are there.
00:26:06.000Do you think that we are going to take advantage of those resources?
00:27:20.000For conservatives, and I say conservatives, not Republicans, because I really don't care about party affiliation as much as I do about the ideas that undergird some of that party affiliation.
00:27:29.000For conservatives, this puts them in sort of a weird spot, because if you're trying to re-enshrine respect for American history, if you're trying to re-establish an American unity that's based on fundamental principle, How do you think the Trump administration plays into this?
00:27:41.000So I was obviously deeply uneasy about Trump's election in 2016.
00:27:45.000I didn't vote for either of the major candidates, specifically because I had significant fears that President Trump was going to toxify an entire generation of young people to conservatism because he is personally so divisive and polarizing.
00:27:59.000Yeah, I obviously underestimated how conservative he would be in office.
00:28:01.000I thought he wasn't going to be particularly conservative based on his prior record.
00:28:05.000And then he turned out to be quite conservative, at least on everything except for spending, which no Republican apparently is conservative in practice on.
00:28:13.000But the question of how we unify Americans around conservative principles or really just around basic American history.
00:28:21.000That question is very much open from the right side of the aisle, given how polarizing Trump is.
00:28:25.000So how exactly should conservatives deal with Trump?
00:28:34.000Donald Trump will be gone in one year or five.
00:28:37.000And I have lived long enough, this again, to tell you that even five years isn't that long.
00:28:43.000So conservatives should be planning, should be thinking, should be sorting out policy.
00:28:51.000And planning on what happens after Donald Trump leaves.
00:28:54.000As for Donald Trump himself, I quite often get asked the question, what would Ronald Reagan have made of Donald Trump?
00:29:00.000Well, of course, there are obvious points that the bad language, the indiscipline, the inability to seem to give a speech and stick with the agenda laid out in the speech, Ronald Reagan would have found all of that very distasteful.
00:29:13.000On the other hand, Ronald Reagan was a practical man and a working politician.
00:29:20.000The most perceptive, insightful political scientist I've ever read was the old vaudeville comedian Henny Youngman.
00:29:29.000And here is the basis for all truly useful political analysis.
00:29:47.000Compared to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Trump, Trump.
00:29:52.000This may be half crazy, but I almost think when I consider Donald Trump, I remember the way the teachers used to tell us to look at a solar eclipse when we were little kids.
00:30:32.000That means that millions of Americans, not the press corps that can't stand Donald Trump Millions of ordinary Americans, and especially those toward the bottom of the economic distribution, are leading better lives in this economy.
00:31:11.000The Constitution of the United States has been saved for another 20 years.
00:31:16.000Again, don't look at him, but that's the effect of it.
00:31:19.000Foreign policy, I was disconcerted to see John Bolton.
00:31:24.000Leave the White House, just as I was disconcerted to see General Mattis step down as Secretary of Defense, or H.R.
00:31:33.000McMaster as National Security Council before John Bolton.
00:31:37.000All that, and yet at the same time, Putin annexed Crimea under Obama.
00:31:43.000He moved into Ukraine proper again under Obama.
00:31:48.000He complains all the time about NATO, and yet we have troops now, part of a NATO exercise, we have troops in Poland, right on the Russian border.
00:31:59.000According to the Prime Minister of Israel, Israel is feeling as though it needs the United States and is relying on the Trump administration.
00:32:38.000Like, let's telegraph this eight years down the line, or four years down the line, or maybe two years down the line, depending on where these elections go.
00:32:43.000I'm going to ask you to do that in just one second.
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00:33:48.000So let's talk about not the immediate election, because I agree with your analysis, which is, if I'm made to choose between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, or Donald Trump and Joe Biden, that's not a very difficult choice.
00:33:58.000I mean, the fact is that Donald Trump, on a political level, has given me most of the things I want, even while I have serious reservations about his character and the things that he says, as I think most people do.
00:34:09.000My concern is, as somebody who speaks to millennials and people who are younger than millennials, is that Trump as a character, the things that he says actually have a long-term impact on how people vote.
00:34:20.000What we're seeing from some of the polling data is that people are not living by the Supposed Churchill Maxim that that you know you're liberal when you're 20 and you're conservative when you're 40 that that's not actually what's happening.
00:34:32.000The people are voting to the left and then they're largely staying to the left as they get older and this is increasing with each generation that that transition happened more with the greatest generation than it happened with baby boomers a little bit less and then it's happened with the Millennials a lot less and then it's happening with Gen Z Who can't even vote yet, most of them, but Gen Z, it's going to happen a lot, is sort of the prevailing sentiment.
00:34:55.000So, with that said, that puts conservatives in this bizarre position, because on the one hand, you want Trump to win in 2020, and that's led a lot of people that I know, and I feel the pressure all the time, that never say a bad word about Trump, because if you say a bad word about Trump... Oh, no, no, you have to tell the truth about him.
00:35:35.000I mean, I like Bill Kristol too, but Bill's take seems to be that anything that is good for Trump is bad for conservatism because Trump himself is bad for conservatism.
00:35:43.000So any small victory for Trump is actually leading to the ascent of a destructive force within conservatism.
00:35:49.000So even if you like the judges, if you say you like the judges, then you are actually giving effect to a man who is carving the heart out of Conservatism's future, I think.
00:35:57.000If I had to put a logic on Bill, I think that's probably what he's trying to say.
00:36:03.000What is the middle road in that debate?
00:36:24.000The cohort that most strongly supported Ronald Reagan was the youngest cohort.
00:36:30.000And that remained in effect for five, six, seven years after he left office, that young people tended to be Republican.
00:36:38.000Reagan begins to draw people into the Republican Party and there's a golden moment, it didn't last long, it's only a moment, but there's a golden moment when the Republican Party achieved parity, roughly achieved parity, within a percentage point or two with the Democratic Party, sometime around the presidency, as I recall, of George H.W.
00:36:56.000The point I'm trying to make is that political preferences are actually pretty malleable.
00:37:03.000Now, if you want to say to me that's changing and it's changing against The Republican side, you may be right.
00:37:11.000All I can say is that the Reagan era wasn't all that long ago in historical terms, and as recently as then, political preferences were malleable.
00:37:21.000Donald, it also seems to me, here's where Bill Kristol is right, for sure, there's nobody like Donald Trump.
00:37:31.000Now, that means that when Donald Trump leaves the stage, whatever happens, it's going to seem a lot more normal than Donald Trump.
00:37:39.000So, I just keep the argument, there's some merit to this, I have good friends, my friend Andy Ferguson, who's one of the most beautiful writers I know and one of the finest people I know, and he keeps saying, The Trump presidency is corrosive of American character.
00:37:58.000All I can say is that seems to me vague and uncertain and you'd have to point out to me exactly how American character is being changed because here's what I can point out to you.
00:38:15.000Growing economy, people leading better lives, being able to care for themselves and their children.
00:38:20.000That's what I... Trump's accomplishments, they're the accomplishments of the country.
00:38:24.000You could argue, I think, the correct conservative way of putting it, whenever we have economic growth in this country, it's because a president got the government out of the way.
00:38:32.000You've really achieved something when you've even changed the mind of the other side.
00:38:38.000And now, the tariffs, the way he's going about this trade war may be all wrong.
00:38:42.000There are very well-versed economists whom I know who say it's just wrong.
00:38:48.000But everybody understands that we're up against something in China now, and even the Democrats would agree with that.
00:38:54.000Trump has put something on the American agenda of first importance, and everybody has said across the political spectrum, yes, he's right about that.
00:39:03.000That matters to the future of the country.
00:39:06.000These are tangible achievements if you and I We could just dim the lights for a moment and then come back on and say to America, we've just figured out who's the next president.
00:39:18.000For sure you and I could come up with somebody who'd give us the policies and have a better, more easier to take, let's put it that way, than Donald Trump.
00:39:37.000I think there's a counter-argument, too, to argue against myself, and that is that that is assuming Trump versus a stagnant status quo in the Democratic Party, meaning that the Democratic Party doesn't go completely off the rails.
00:39:47.000And what we're watching right now is a Democratic Party that is embracing All of its own worst aspects, from the embrace of anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar to the embrace of radicals like Bernie Sanders.
00:39:58.000I mean, Bernie Sanders was a kook for virtually all of his political career.
00:40:02.000And now Bernie Sanders is the thought leader of the Democratic Party.
00:40:04.000And Elizabeth Warren, who used to be a fairly interesting thinker, at least early in the 2000s, has not only embraced, but is doubling down on all of Sandersism.
00:40:12.000She said the other day during that debate, that's the climate debate, that she would, if I understood this correctly, she would issue an executive order To eliminate fracking?
00:40:33.000In the last, what is it, decade or decade and a half?
00:40:35.000I'll get the statistic a little bit wrong, but your viewers will be able to look it up on Google and they'll see the point I'm trying to make.
00:40:42.000The United States has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions.
00:41:32.000She also said that she would ban nuclear power.
00:41:33.000So basically, the two best versions of power on planet Earth for reducing carbon emissions are apparently out the window.
00:41:39.000And I suppose she'll be creating wind farms with a wealth tax or something.
00:41:43.000It is astonishing to watch as the Democratic Party moves in this direction.
00:41:47.000It's one of the reasons why I think that To turn to the other side, their view of the future is untenable.
00:41:55.000I think that people are going to get quickly very tired of the woke scolding and the insane changing lines of the left.
00:42:04.000I mean you find yourself literally on a day-to-day level feeling like Indiana Jones in the last crusade trying to step letter to letter.
00:42:10.000Here's the way Joe Biden could seize the nomination and frankly sweep all the way to the White House and defeat Donald Trump.
00:42:15.000The lines are shifting and you're seeing Democrats themselves who are getting caught up in these shifting lines and having to apologize because the line shifted yesterday and they went to sleep.
00:42:23.000Joe Biden, here's the way Joe Biden could win, in my opinion.
00:42:26.000Here's the way Joe Biden could seize the nomination and frankly sweep all the way to the White House and defeat Donald Trump.
00:42:52.000And the Democratic Party is the party of jobs.
00:42:55.000Where there were Irish, like the Bidens, and Poles, and Slovaks, and Italians, and the Democratic Party is the party of the immigrant party, but of immigrants who came to this country to become Americans.
00:43:15.000That is the Democratic Party that I stood for.
00:43:18.000Jobs, ordinary working people, and also, this was the Democratic Party, of people of faith.
00:43:26.000The Bidens went to mass on Sunday, and our neighbors went to synagogue, and the Democratic Party should be a home for the great American middle class and working Americans who believe in the traditions in which they were raised.
00:43:39.000If he said, I'm done with you lunatics, I want to Represent the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, he would sweep to the White House, in my opinion.
00:43:54.000Now, could Joe Biden try to move the Democratic Party back to its own traditions?
00:43:58.000The FDR party, the JFK party, the Bill Clinton party.
00:44:02.000I don't think that he has the stomach for that, frankly.
00:44:06.000And more importantly, I don't think the media are with him on that.
00:44:09.000I mean, it is amazing how much of this is all driven by the media, which does bring us to the question of the media.
00:44:14.000So Ronald Reagan obviously did enormous battles with the media, but it seems as though it gets worse and worse with each successive Republican administration.
00:44:22.000I mean, something like 94 percent of all press coverage of President Trump has been negative.
00:44:25.000He's obviously in these knockdown, drag out battles with the media.
00:44:29.000In my opinion, he He won the election in 2016 by running against the media as much as he won it by running against Hillary Clinton.
00:44:35.000It's pretty obvious that right now his plan for 2020 is not even to run against the Democrat, it's to run against the media, which is why he's railing against the media so much.
00:44:43.000If I had to put my finger on one area of American life that is increasing the polarization and leading to the radicalism and the ire of both sides, it would be the way that the media have behaved Over the past 20 years, which has completely stripped them of any patina of objectivity.
00:45:00.000I mean, it used to be that there at least was the patina.
00:45:03.000It was a lie before, but now the lie has been unmasked and not unmasked by Republicans, not unmasked by Trump, unmasked by the media themselves, who decided to basically, at the same time, come out of the closet as overt Democrats and then still claim that they are objective journalists and gaslight the rest of America.
00:45:20.000I agree with absolutely every word of that.
00:45:22.000When I was being interviewed for my position as a speechwriter, David Gergen, then Deputy, what was he, Director of Communications in the Reagan White House, had me into his office in the West Wing, and he had in his office the same television console You may not recall this, Ben, but television could be big pieces of furniture in the old days that H.R.
00:45:43.000Haldeman had had made for himself when he was chief of staff to Richard Nixon.
00:45:48.000And the television had three screens, one big screen and then two smaller screens.
00:47:04.000It strikes me as non-desperate in the sense that our side is doing a pretty good job between Fox News and the Wall Street Journal and Ben Shapiro, who is either on... It's amazing to me because you're down the hall and you're everywhere at once, apparently.
00:47:25.000Michael Barone, here's the last sort of consoling point, solving point that I make to myself and I offer it to you.
00:47:31.000Michael Barone, terrific journalist, deep sense of American history, and Michael Barone argues we've been here before.
00:47:37.000That is to say, we've had fragmented press outlets that were highly partisan, and that was the way it was through much of the 19th century.
00:47:50.000Every town had a Democratic newspaper and a Whig newspaper and a Republican newspaper, and they were vicious to each other.
00:47:57.000And what do you get during that period of American history?
00:48:00.000Well, of course you get the Civil War.
00:48:01.000That's unfortunate, but fundamentally what you get is the settling of the West and the emergence of a great nation.
00:48:08.000It doesn't need to hold us back, but we cannot permit ourselves to be condescended to and talked down to By the people who run CNN and the New York Times.
00:48:23.000I get to talk about ideas for a living.
00:48:24.000You get to talk about ideas for a living and study them and write about them.
00:48:27.000But it does feel that as attention spans wither and as people are spending five seconds on each story and as everything becomes Twitter-fied, that the prospect of true conversations have gone by the wayside.
00:48:40.000And I see this mostly in the area of solutions.
00:48:43.000People spend an awful lot of time online talking about problems, and then shouting at each other that they don't properly recognize the problem.
00:48:49.000So to take an example that just comes to mind, on the left, they never talk about actual practical solutions to climate change.
00:48:57.000It's all sloganeering about getting rid of fossil fuels, which is not going to happen, or coming up with some vast global agreement with China and India, which is never going to happen, and then yelling at people that they are climate deniers if they say that those solutions are not actually going to work.
00:49:10.000And this seems to be working for a certain number of Americans.
00:49:14.000On the same page, you sort of see on the right side of the aisle that objections on a variety of issues are more knee-jerk than idea-based, at least for the folks on Twitter.
00:49:26.000Twitter, as I've put it, is a place for dunking and being dunked upon, but it seems that increasingly politics is a place for dunking and being dunked upon, that solutions are secondary to problems.
00:49:36.000We are going to see a reversion to debates over ideas, or do you think that this is sort of the new normal and driven by social media?
00:49:42.000So I said at the top of this program, I'm an admirer of yours, but I have three sons who are just fanatics.
00:49:49.000I have my oldest son in particular, Pedro.
00:49:51.000I'm just telling you, I just observe in my own family.
00:49:55.000So he goes off to a fancy school, and his heroes, people he read about, During college?
00:50:27.000Well, actually, I almost feel as though at the end I should put on a red tie and then ask my son if he saw me wearing a tie just to see if he watched all hour long of this episode.
00:50:38.000I know I have friends in the publishing industry.
00:50:58.000And it turns out that if you do a half hour podcast, the comment is, could you make that an hour?
00:51:04.000People want to, there is a, or I think back to in the 50s and 60s, and I think it remains strong through much of the 70s, you had the Book of the Month Club.
00:51:19.000I think it was gone by the time you appeared on the scene, but the Book of the Month Club What it was addressing was this very American urge for self-improvement, to educate ourselves.
00:51:34.000Democracy doesn't just mean you get to vote, it means you get to be as smart as anybody else.
00:51:38.000And if you didn't get a chance to go to a fancy school, there's still the Book of the Month Club.
00:51:43.000Well, of course, the Book of the Month Club is gone, but I just see it over and over.
00:51:47.000Now, maybe it's because of the Hoover Institution, or I'm in something like the business that you're in, in the sense that I do my own writing, and we have Ricochet, and then I have Uncommon Knowledge, my own interview show.
00:52:16.000It takes a little bit longer if you're not on Twitter, but at least you're not spending all day jockeying for position with people who hate your guts.
00:52:22.000And that saves you an enormous amount of time and stress, as it turns out.
00:52:25.000That's sort of your job description, isn't it?
00:52:28.000Jocking for a position with people who hate your guts?
00:52:31.000Yeah, that's pretty much my slogan, actually.
00:52:32.000Should be right there under facts don't care about your feelings.
00:53:43.000Tom Sowell grew up in the South until he was a small boy, and then he was sent to live with relatives in Harlem.
00:53:51.000And he turned out to be a very intelligent, very bright boy who went to Howard University in Washington, Harvard University, I believe Columbia and the University of Chicago.
00:54:05.000He holds degrees for sure from Harvard and then he has a master's and a doctorate in economics.
00:54:11.000And he started out as a Marxist and fought his way through, fought his way through, To the conservative, or I shouldn't say conservative, I'm not sure Tom would call himself a conservative, but certainly to a free market libertarian position.
00:54:28.000And for an African American to stand up to the pressures that he's under is just, he's funny and brilliant and tough and resilient.
00:54:47.000And ideas matter so much that if he thinks the conclusion is correct, he will follow it, whatever the price.
00:54:55.000I guess what I'm saying is that there's a man who's been willing to pay a price.
00:55:13.000But he was, in many ways, the most important economist, or certainly one of the two or three most important economists of the entire 20th century.
00:55:20.000And I was doing an interview with him.
00:55:22.000This actually, this stays in my mind as one moment that just went through me.
00:55:30.000And I asked a question, and he responded.
00:55:32.000And I said, well, wait a minute, Milton.
00:55:35.000You're not making an economic argument, you're making a moral argument.
00:55:39.000And he looked at me and said, of course I'm making a moral argument.
00:55:43.000Is there any other kind of argument that matters?
00:56:05.000This brilliant man who was technically so gifted, technically at the top of his field, when it came down to it, all the arguments were moral.
00:56:14.000So I want to ask about the state of higher education a little bit.
00:56:16.000So you're obviously at the Hoover Institution and you've been around higher education for quite a while.
00:56:23.000Do you think that higher education can be saved?
00:56:25.000Because it seems as though it has fallen into disrepair except for a few key sort of institutions across the country that the gender studies theory of the moment and the attempt to First of all, let's draw a sharp distinction between the STEM stuff, which is doing just fine.
00:56:56.000And I have the feeling, this is very disconcerting, but I have the feeling that in some places Bright kids are flocking to the sciences and avoiding the humanities.
00:57:08.000And where did we see that happen before?
00:57:30.000And I don't know quite, I'm so, in a way I'm too close to it.
00:57:34.000Because I work at Stanford University, and then I actually, I was a trustee at Dartmouth College, my alma mater, and my four oldest children have all attended Dartmouth College.
00:57:45.000And so, there's political correctness everywhere.
00:57:51.000And great institutions can only hire the talent that's coming up through the system.
00:57:56.000And the talent that comes up through the system, if you're in classics or English or history, it seems as though there's a kind of political correctness.
00:58:06.000And yet, at Stanford, you have the kids who are working on the Stanford Review.
00:58:10.000And many of them are in the humanities.
00:58:13.000And at Dartmouth, you've got the Dartmouth Review.
00:58:15.000That's where the reviews were started.
00:58:18.000You've got a program at Dartmouth called the Political Economy Project, which is a place where specifically devoted... Actually, this is an interesting thing to me.
00:58:27.000This will take a moment or two more to explain.
00:58:30.000When I went to college, in economics, it was taught as a conflict of great ideas.
00:58:37.000Political science, or government as we called it at Dartmouth, you began by studying political philosophy.
00:58:43.000You'd read John Locke, you'd read Aristotle.
00:58:46.000The ideas have tended to be squeezed out of the disciplines in favor of quantitative techniques.
00:58:53.000So what you get in economics, even introductory economics these days, you're taught how to run regression analyses.
00:58:59.000And you can graduate four years at a very fancy institution and have no clue what all of this communism versus capitalism stuff was about.
00:59:10.000Milton Friedman versus John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, what was that all about?
00:59:15.000So several professors at Dartmouth have established a program for examining the great ideas, democracy versus other forms of government, capitalism versus central planning.
00:59:30.000So there are so many There's a kind of bubbling up of a sort of self-awareness that we may have lost the thread here.
00:59:49.000I don't know, but it's impossible for me to...
00:59:52.000to just wish the humanities out of existence at American universities.
00:59:57.000I see too many new shoots coming up, growing up.
01:00:00.000So in one second, I want to ask you to assess the health of the Reagan three-legged stool of politics because we've seen all these debates inside the conservative movement about is that still the model for the conservative movement going forward?
01:00:14.000If you want to hear Peter Robinson's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
01:00:18.000To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
01:00:24.000Well, Peter, thank you so much for stopping by.
01:00:25.000This has really been a pleasure, and I really appreciate your time.