The Ben Shapiro Show - Peter Robinson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 75

00:00:00.000 This is this pet peeve of mine.

00:00:01.000 We're not allowed to say that our side won the Cold War.

00:00:05.000 It just ended.

00:00:06.000 Well, let me point out one thing.

00:00:09.000 The United States is still here, and the Soviet Union went defunct.

00:00:12.000 We won.

00:00:20.000 Hey, hey, and welcome.

00:00:21.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.

00:00:23.000 We are pleased to welcome today Peter Robinson.

00:00:25.000 He is the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institute, and he knows like everything about Reagan and history and America.

00:00:32.000 Well, Peter, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:00:34.000 Ben, it's a pleasure.

00:00:35.000 It's a pleasure.

00:00:35.000 I'm an admirer, but I have three sons who are Ben Shapiro fanatics.

00:00:39.000 So it's a double pleasure.

00:00:41.000 Well, thank you.

00:00:42.000 It's a pleasure to have you on, and I'm glad that your sons will finally watch something that you produce.

00:00:45.000 That's very exciting.

00:00:48.000 So 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.

00:00:57.000 So how exactly did you come up with that phraseology?

00:01:00.000 How did that speech come about?

00:01:01.000 Oh, well, there's a story there.

00:01:05.000 1987, spring of 1987, Berlin is celebrating some 800th anniversary.

00:01:10.000 Gorbachev 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.

00:01:20.000 I 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.

00:01:29.000 I went to the wall.

00:01:30.000 I went to the place where the president was going to be delivering the speech.

00:01:34.000 It's all gone now.

00:01:35.000 But the wall was there, the Reichstag, which was still pocked with shell marks from the bombing at the final battle of Berlin.

00:01:45.000 And behind me was West Berlin, modern city, color, life, movement, recent model cars.

00:01:51.000 And then you look over the wall.

00:01:54.000 And there was almost no motion.

00:01:56.000 Guards marching back and forth.

00:01:58.000 It was as though the color had been leached out of it.

00:02:01.000 Everything was gray, brown.

00:02:02.000 The buildings even looked dilapidated.

00:02:04.000 So this was a place where you could feel the weight of history.

00:02:10.000 Communism there.

00:02:12.000 Capitalism here.

00:02:14.000 This was the place where the Soviet advance stopped at the end of the Second World War.

00:02:18.000 This was the place where the Americans and the British had taken over. 0.98

00:02:24.000 So, 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?

00:02:33.000 Several other stops in Berlin, including one to the ranking American diplomat who was full of ideas about what Ronald Reagan should not say.

00:02:40.000 West Berlin is surrounded by East Germany.

00:02:42.000 The people who live here are very sensitive to the nuance and subtlety necessary for East-West relations.

00:02:49.000 Don't have Ronald Reagan sound like an anti-communist cowboy.

00:02:52.000 And by the way, don't have him make a big deal about the wall.

00:02:54.000 They've all gotten used to it.

00:02:56.000 And that evening, I went to a dinner party West Berliners whom I had not met, but we had mutual friends back in Washington.

00:03:04.000 And 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.

00:03:15.000 He had worked at the World Bank in Washington and retired back to West Berlin.

00:03:20.000 And 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.

00:03:28.000 And there was a silence.

00:03:30.000 And I thought, I've made just the gaffe that the diplomat doesn't want Ronald Reagan to make.

00:03:35.000 But 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.

00:03:44.000 How do you think we feel about that wall?

00:03:46.000 And they went around the room.

00:03:48.000 They'd stopped talking about it.

00:03:50.000 They had not stopped caring about it.

00:03:52.000 They had not stopped hating it.

00:03:54.000 And 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.

00:04:09.000 And 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.

00:04:18.000 And then our hostess, a lovely woman called Ingeborg Eltz, who just died a couple of years ago.

00:04:23.000 She must have been younger then than I am now.

00:04:25.000 She was perhaps in her early fifties.

00:04:29.000 She was a very gracious woman.

00:04:30.000 She'd been charming throughout the dinner party, but now she became angry.

00:04:34.000 And 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.

00:04:51.000 And 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.

00:05:01.000 The simplicity, the dignity, and the power of that remark.

00:05:05.000 So 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?

00:05:13.000 The answer is it started with a German woman who lived behind the wall herself.

00:05:19.000 So 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.

00:05:26.000 Right.

00:05:27.000 And there's been this kind of take on presidents.

00:05:29.000 May I derail that question right away?

00:05:33.000 This is a slightly complicated point to make, but it's important to make.

00:05:38.000 I'm not the author.

00:05:39.000 I wrote it.

00:05:41.000 But 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.

00:05:52.000 Now, so I had worked for Vice President George H.W.

00:05:55.000 Bush, a man whom I liked very much, whom in all kinds of ways I revere.

00:06:00.000 I would never have written that speech for him, nor would he ever have given it.

00:06:03.000 We could come to this if you'd like to, but there was a big fight over the speech.

00:06:06.000 The National Security Council, the State Department, tried to squelch that line, tear down this wall.

00:06:12.000 And Ronald Reagan alone insisted on delivering that speech as I had written it.

00:06:18.000 So it is true that as a speechwriter in the White House, I put the words on the paper.

00:06:24.000 But 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.

00:06:39.000 So, 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.

00:06:46.000 So you saw it a lot from the pro-rhetoric side when Barack Obama was president.

00:06:51.000 President Obama was very mellifluous, that he spoke with great beauty and he was a great orator.

00:06:56.000 He was overrated in my opinion.

00:06:58.000 Well, I want to get your take on that.

00:07:00.000 But 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.

00:07:09.000 And then you have President Trump.

00:07:11.000 And most of his defenders will say, okay, well, don't pay any attention to anything that he says.

00:07:15.000 It's what he does that matters.

00:07:16.000 It's not his rhetoric that matters.

00:07:18.000 It's the stuff that he does because, you know, there's teleprompter Trump and then there's non-teleprompter Trump.

00:07:22.000 So how seriously should we take a president's rhetoric?

00:07:25.000 What percentage of the job of the presidency do you think is related to rhetoric and how much is related to policy?

00:07:30.000 When you've got it right, and I would argue that Ronald Reagan had it right almost all the time.

00:07:39.000 When you've got it right, there's no distance between the president and the rhetoric.

00:07:45.000 So that's why, as you just heard me say, I had Ronald Reagan in my mind by the time Reagan became president.

00:07:52.000 Don't forget, he'd been speaking in public since at least the 1940s.

00:07:55.000 He'd campaigned for Harry Truman for president in 1948 as part of, what was it, Hollywood for Truman.

00:08:04.000 Now, his views change.

00:08:05.000 By 1964, he endorses Barry Goldwater's run.

00:08:08.000 By 1964, Reagan is a conservative.

00:08:10.000 But Ronald Reagan is speaking in public, writing his own speeches.

00:08:14.000 He comes to the White House fully formed as a speaker.

00:08:18.000 Also, by then, he's thoroughly conservative.

00:08:20.000 He's fully formed in his policy viewpoints.

00:08:23.000 And 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.

00:08:43.000 He talked to the American people.

00:08:46.000 There's one instance after, I can remember 1986, tax reform.

00:08:52.000 We don't have the votes in the Senate.

00:08:53.000 And the President goes, one of the problems is a Republican Senator called Robert Kastenbaum from Wisconsin.

00:09:00.000 And the President goes, President Reagan, goes and spends a day in Wisconsin.

00:09:03.000 I remember that because I wrote the speech he gave in Oshkosh.

00:09:05.000 He speaks in Milwaukee and I wrote the speech he gave in Oshkosh.

00:09:09.000 And there's a day of press before he gets there, local press for the President of the United States.

00:09:15.000 Then he gives the speeches.

00:09:16.000 And three or four days later, Robert Kasten changed his mind and decided to support the 1986 tax reform.

00:09:22.000 So Reagan is working the landscape of the American people.

00:09:28.000 And he's using speeches to enunciate policy and to move opinion outside the beltway.

00:09:34.000 He is president by addressing the American people And letting the beltway fall into line, fall into place afterwards.

00:09:41.000 Okay.

00:09:42.000 Barack Obama, I took a shot at Barack Obama's rhetoric.

00:09:48.000 When 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.

00:10:01.000 And 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.

00:10:13.000 And you sort of wonder, Is this Barack Obama or is it one of the 20 really smart people he has working around him?

00:10:20.000 Okay.

00:10:20.000 And then we come to Donald Trump.

00:10:22.000 Donald Trump, as I'm sure... Am I sure you'll agree?

00:10:26.000 Well, I'll see what you say.

00:10:27.000 I'll see what you say to this.

00:10:29.000 Donald Trump has given at least half a dozen really good speeches.

00:10:36.000 The speech he delivered in Saudi Arabia was an impressive thing.

00:10:39.000 His 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.

00:10:47.000 He gave a very impressive speech in Vietnam.

00:10:50.000 In my judgment, the finest speech he delivered was in Warsaw, where he said, you remember this speech?

00:10:56.000 The defense of Western civilization.

00:10:58.000 Exactly!

00:10:59.000 The question of our time is whether Western civilization can defend itself.

00:11:04.000 You can build an entire administration around that.

00:11:07.000 You can build a four-year and indeed an eight-year agenda in foreign policy and domestic policy on the defense of the values of the West.

00:11:16.000 And he gave the speech.

00:11:18.000 And then tweeted something else, and tweeted something else, and tweeted something else.

00:11:21.000 And 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.

00:11:32.000 That was some very gifted speechwriters.

00:11:35.000 That's not ideal.

00:11:38.000 So again, I repeat the point.

00:11:41.000 There's a little trap here.

00:11:42.000 I so revered Ronald Reagan.

00:11:44.000 And to me, he got so many things right.

00:11:47.000 But I don't want to let this very clever young man who graduated from Harvard Law School maneuver me into sounding like a dinosaur.

00:11:55.000 Nevertheless, young man, nevertheless, my boy, study up on Ronald Reagan.

00:12:01.000 That's where you get it right, where there's no distance.

00:12:05.000 Reagan worked very carefully.

00:12:08.000 This is another point about Ronald Reagan.

00:12:10.000 He went over, he took the speeches seriously.

00:12:13.000 You'd finish a speech, it'd go to the chief speechwriter, there'd be editing back and forth and so forth.

00:12:18.000 And we owed our drafts to the president, typically 48 hours before he delivered them.

00:12:24.000 And 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.

00:12:32.000 He read every line of every speech and edited those things.

00:12:36.000 I can recall one time coming into the office, for some reason this stays in my mind, it was a six-page speech.

00:12:42.000 And no changes on the first page, no changes.

00:12:44.000 And I thought, oh, for once, he just decided to watch TV and forget about the speech.

00:12:48.000 And then on the last page, on the second to last line, he had changed one word.

00:12:55.000 And in some ways, that was almost more effective than anything else he might have done.

00:12:58.000 Because you remember, the president is reading every word we write.

00:13:04.000 And if it's not just right, he'll change it.

00:13:07.000 So by the time he delivered a speech, it was really and truly He had in some way internalized it.

00:13:11.000 You get no feeling of a distance between Reagan and his text.

00:13:15.000 So 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.

00:13:26.000 Excuse me while I rub my back.

00:13:28.000 But 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.

00:13:39.000 Yes.

00:13:39.000 To 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.

00:13:52.000 And if only we were back in the days of Reagan with a politician like Reagan, everything would be all better.

00:13:57.000 How much of that is true and how much of that is myth?

00:14:00.000 Almost none of it is true, but there's a kernel of it that is true.

00:14:03.000 Now, 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.

00:14:12.000 Ronald 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.

00:14:24.000 Congress was vicious on Ronald Reagan.

00:14:27.000 Tip O'Neill was a tough, seasoned Paul, and he viewed it as his job to take down Ronald Reagan any way he could.

00:14:36.000 It was actually very rough.

00:14:39.000 Here are the differences.

00:14:41.000 In the old days in Washington, this is little commented on, but I actually think it's very important.

00:14:46.000 In the old days in Washington, members of Congress and Senate lived in town.

00:14:50.000 I remember Tip O'Neill showed up for Mass at the same Catholic church that I attended.

00:14:56.000 He was there on weekends.

00:14:57.000 He'd show up, he'd go up for communion, he'd chat with people.

00:15:02.000 They knew each other.

00:15:03.000 They played, they coached Little League.

00:15:05.000 They got to know each other.

00:15:06.000 So there's, that takes some of the edge off.

00:15:08.000 And then here, this is a story which is, this is what people are getting at, I think.

00:15:15.000 And I believe this isn't actually all that well known.

00:15:17.000 Ronald Reagan, there's an assassination attempt, as you know.

00:15:20.000 And I heard this from somebody who saw it happen.

00:15:23.000 It's late at night.

00:15:25.000 There's no family around.

00:15:28.000 And Tip O'Neill shows up.

00:15:30.000 And Mrs. Reagan has left very strict orders about who's permitted to get in to see the president and who isn't.

00:15:34.000 And the Secret Service really have no idea what to do, but he is the Speaker of the House, and in he goes.

00:15:40.000 And he drops to his knees and prays.

00:15:44.000 That's inconceivable today.

00:15:45.000 And of course, by the time Reagan recovered, they're back at it again.

00:15:49.000 So there's some fundamental respect for each other.

00:15:54.000 I'll give you one other.

00:15:56.000 As 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. 0.97

00:16:03.000 Bill Sapphire, columnist for the New York Times, great man, brilliant writer.

00:16:08.000 He was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, and he formed a club for all presidential speechwriters.

00:16:14.000 And when I started attending the meetings of that club, there were people who had written for Harry Truman who would show up.

00:16:21.000 And what was striking about it was from The Truman administration right through to George H.W.

00:16:31.000 Bush's administration, it ended with Clinton and it was really over by the time the Obama speechwriters started coming.

00:16:38.000 But from Truman all the way through to George H.W.

00:16:41.000 Bush, 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.

00:16:55.000 The Cold War was serious.

00:16:58.000 And we may have had our differences, Carter to Ford and Carter to Reagan, and so...

00:17:05.000 But everybody was engaged in the defense of the republic.

00:17:08.000 One overarching cause that united every administration for four and a half decades.

00:17:15.000 That was still going on in the 1980s.

00:17:18.000 And again, that tempered That prevented them from becoming vicious with each other.

00:17:25.000 In one fundamental sense, everybody was on the same side.

00:17:28.000 So this is actually what I want to ask you about next.

00:17:31.000 I want to ask you about the post-Cold War era and how the end of the Cold War has shaped American politics.

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00:18:43.000 As 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.

00:18:59.000 I mean, even if you watch Terminator 2, you have characters saying to each other, why did the Russians have missiles pointed at us?

00:19:03.000 We're friends now.

00:19:04.000 And there's this great feeling that arises in America that basically it's all over.

00:19:09.000 And 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.

00:19:14.000 Maybe 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.

00:19:22.000 Do you think that Americans have enough in common now to actually hold each other accountable?

00:19:27.000 To see each other as non-enemies in the absence of an existential threat like the Soviet Union.

00:19:33.000 I do.

00:19:34.000 I do believe so.

00:19:36.000 I also believe we have to work at what we have in common.

00:19:39.000 So, 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.

00:19:54.000 On the other hand, I will.

00:19:56.000 Identity politics, the politics of dividing Americans, that's not only wrong, that approaches, in my mind, that comes close to a kind of wickedness.

00:20:08.000 Because, why is it, think about this, immigration is a problem, we have to, blah, blah, blah, all that is true. 1.00

00:20:20.000 But 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.

00:20:34.000 What is it about this country that permits remittances back to Mexico of almost 30 billion dollars a year?

00:20:41.000 Why 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. 0.86

00:20:56.000 What do they do?

00:20:57.000 They try to buy real estate, right here in Southern California.

00:21:01.000 They try to invest their money in this country.

00:21:05.000 What is going... And the answer, of course, is that the United States of America is a miracle.

00:21:11.000 And it needs to be cherished and sustained and nurtured in every way we can.

00:21:16.000 People 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. 0.98

00:21:28.000 And so he was fundamentally pretty relaxed about immigration.

00:21:34.000 But what he always understood, what people of that generation always understood, was that people come here to become American.

00:21:43.000 So 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.

00:22:00.000 And the homeless.

00:22:01.000 And, yes, okay.

00:22:04.000 The 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.

00:22:21.000 That's just wrong.

00:22:22.000 It is just wrong.

00:22:23.000 So, the answer is, yes, I do believe we have enough in common.

00:22:27.000 We have our ideals.

00:22:28.000 We have American history.

00:22:30.000 The 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.

00:22:45.000 The wind blows it the right way at just the right time.

00:22:47.000 The courage to stand up to what was then the greatest empire on earth.

00:22:52.000 The Civil War.

00:22:53.000 Lincoln, this martyr, giving his life To hold the Union together and to abolish slavery, the greatest generation in the Second World War.

00:23:03.000 I would argue that the Cold War, which is a bipartisan project, it begins with Harry Truman, it ends with George H.W.

00:23:12.000 Bush and in between Intellectuals behave, by and large, pretty badly, really, during the Cold War.

00:23:20.000 But 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. 0.54

00:23:40.000 It is now, we're not allowed to say, That our side won the Cold War, it just ended.

00:23:46.000 Nobody won, nobody lost, it just ended.

00:23:48.000 Well, let me point out one thing.

00:23:50.000 The United States is still here and the Soviet Union went defunct.

00:23:53.000 We won.

00:23:55.000 So, the resources of American history, the ideals that we have, the ability, this is, well, your book on the right side of history.

00:24:04.000 The astonishing thing about the Western civilization is not that it's Western.

00:24:09.000 It's that it consists of permanent truths which are open to anyone from anywhere.

00:24:16.000 And the greatest exemplar of that tradition in the world today is the United States.

00:24:21.000 Yes, of course we have enough resources.

00:24:24.000 If we choose to sustain them.

00:24:25.000 Well, that is the next question.

00:24:27.000 Do you think that we are going to choose to sustain them?

00:24:29.000 So 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.

00:24:36.000 One 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.

00:24:52.000 And then there's the alternative story.

00:24:53.000 That's the correct one.

00:24:53.000 Let's hear it.

00:24:55.000 Then 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.

00:25:23.000 So, if you don't have a common history, it seems difficult to see what exactly can sustain us.

00:25:28.000 Because 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.

00:25:34.000 You have to have a common language, which is also being discarded because we can't even decide on what he and she mean anymore.

00:25:39.000 We used to be able to have common religious principles and we broadened that out to be Judeo-Christian, not just Christian.

00:25:45.000 And now the United States has become increasingly fragmentary and secular in its religious pursuits.

00:25:51.000 We 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. 0.76

00:26:03.000 So do you think that we, I mean, the resources are there.

00:26:06.000 Do you think that we are going to take advantage of those resources?

00:26:09.000 I don't know.

00:26:10.000 I mentioned a moment ago about the resources of American history, these tremendously moving stories.

00:26:17.000 Every one of those was a close-run thing.

00:26:20.000 Marx was wrong.

00:26:21.000 History is not predetermined.

00:26:24.000 It's a question of – we are human beings.

00:26:26.000 One of the tenets of what you and I both hold, the Judeo-Christian tradition, is free will.

00:26:32.000 We as individuals have free will.

00:26:34.000 We as a nation have free will.

00:26:35.000 We can certainly choose to let it all go if we wish to do so.

00:26:40.000 And we can, by contrast, choose to hold it all together and cherish it if we wish to do that.

00:26:45.000 I honestly don't know.

00:26:48.000 I cannot say.

00:26:49.000 I hope so.

00:26:50.000 I will fight for it.

00:26:51.000 I congratulate you for fighting for it.

00:26:54.000 Actually, I do congratulate you.

00:26:56.000 There are easier ways for somebody who graduated from Harvard Law School to make money, Ben, than by waging war against Ben.

00:27:03.000 Ah, doc review didn't sound all that great.

00:27:05.000 Really, paginations and all of that.

00:27:08.000 Okay.

00:27:08.000 But let's...

00:27:10.000 So the answer is, I don't know.

00:27:12.000 Which is in some ways a statement of the basic truth.

00:27:15.000 Human will.

00:27:17.000 We have free will.

00:27:18.000 History is not predetermined.

00:27:19.000 I don't know.

00:27:20.000 For 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.

00:27:29.000 For 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?

00:27:41.000 So I was obviously deeply uneasy about Trump's election in 2016.

00:27:45.000 I 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.

00:27:59.000 Yeah, I obviously underestimated how conservative he would be in office.

00:28:01.000 I thought he wasn't going to be particularly conservative based on his prior record.

00:28:05.000 And then he turned out to be quite conservative, at least on everything except for spending, which no Republican apparently is conservative in practice on.

00:28:13.000 But the question of how we unify Americans around conservative principles or really just around basic American history.

00:28:21.000 That question is very much open from the right side of the aisle, given how polarizing Trump is.

00:28:25.000 So how exactly should conservatives deal with Trump?

00:28:28.000 Is he an asset in this effort?

00:28:30.000 Is he a detriment to the effort or an obstacle?

00:28:32.000 Where do you think that stands?

00:28:34.000 Donald Trump will be gone in one year or five.

00:28:37.000 And I have lived long enough, this again, to tell you that even five years isn't that long.

00:28:43.000 So conservatives should be planning, should be thinking, should be sorting out policy.

00:28:51.000 And planning on what happens after Donald Trump leaves.

00:28:54.000 As for Donald Trump himself, I quite often get asked the question, what would Ronald Reagan have made of Donald Trump?

00:29:00.000 Well, 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.

00:29:13.000 On the other hand, Ronald Reagan was a practical man and a working politician.

00:29:20.000 The most perceptive, insightful political scientist I've ever read was the old vaudeville comedian Henny Youngman.

00:29:29.000 And here is the basis for all truly useful political analysis.

00:29:34.000 It's a Henny Youngman gag.

00:29:36.000 Question, how's your wife? 0.97

00:29:37.000 Answer, compared to what?

00:29:39.000 Alright, so the question about Donald Trump is compared to what?

00:29:44.000 And compared to Hillary Clinton? 0.94

00:29:46.000 Trump.

00:29:47.000 Compared to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Trump, Trump.

00:29:52.000 This 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.

00:30:03.000 Don't look at it.

00:30:06.000 You can look at the shadow on the ground, you can look at the effects, but you mustn't look at the object itself.

00:30:11.000 So if you put your hand over Donald Trump, here's what you see.

00:30:15.000 A growing economy, growing more robustly than it has in more than a decade.

00:30:21.000 You see unemployment rates at historic lows.

00:30:24.000 Among African Americans and Hispanics, the lowest unemployment rates ever recorded.

00:30:31.000 What does that mean?

00:30:32.000 That 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.

00:30:49.000 People have come off welfare rolls.

00:30:50.000 They've come off food stamps.

00:30:52.000 They're able to provide for themselves and their families.

00:30:55.000 That's an achievement.

00:30:56.000 Don't look at that man.

00:30:57.000 But it's an achievement all the same.

00:30:59.000 And so it goes with Donald Trump, the appointments to the federal bench.

00:31:05.000 The never-Trumper refrain, so Gorsuch?

00:31:07.000 Yeah, so Gorsuch!

00:31:09.000 And now so Kavanaugh.

00:31:11.000 The Constitution of the United States has been saved for another 20 years.

00:31:16.000 Again, don't look at him, but that's the effect of it.

00:31:19.000 Foreign policy, I was disconcerted to see John Bolton.

00:31:24.000 Leave the White House, just as I was disconcerted to see General Mattis step down as Secretary of Defense, or H.R.

00:31:33.000 McMaster as National Security Council before John Bolton.

00:31:37.000 All that, and yet at the same time, Putin annexed Crimea under Obama.

00:31:43.000 He moved into Ukraine proper again under Obama.

00:31:48.000 He 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.

00:31:59.000 According to the Prime Minister of Israel, Israel is feeling as though it needs the United States and is relying on the Trump administration.

00:32:11.000 You have a three-year-old son.

00:32:14.000 You don't want to say to your son, son, one day I'd like you to grow up to be just like Donald Trump.

00:32:19.000 That would be a mistake.

00:32:20.000 I would talk you out of that, Ben.

00:32:22.000 But on the other hand, Him, over what the Democrats are trying to look as though they're going to nominate?

00:32:29.000 Yes, him.

00:32:31.000 So, I fully agree with the analysis in the versus measure.

00:32:35.000 I do wonder about the long-term view.

00:32:38.000 Like, 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.

00:32:43.000 I'm going to ask you to do that in just one second.

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00:33:48.000 So 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.

00:33:58.000 I 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.

00:34:09.000 My 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.

00:34:20.000 What 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.

00:34:32.000 The 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.

00:34:55.000 So, 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.

00:34:55.000 Right.

00:35:10.000 Yes, OK.

00:35:11.000 But the idea is that anything you say about Trump from one side is inherently damaging to him and may lead to the election of a Democrat.

00:35:18.000 Something that I don't actually agree with.

00:35:20.000 I think that you can critique a politician and Trump has proved himself to be strong enough to take that.

00:35:25.000 He's taken enormous amounts of abuse.

00:35:27.000 Then there is the other side, which is the sort of Bill Kristol side.

00:35:30.000 And I hesitate to mention names, but it's too late, it's been said.

00:35:33.000 Bill and I are friends.

00:35:35.000 I 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.

00:35:43.000 So any small victory for Trump is actually leading to the ascent of a destructive force within conservatism.

00:35:49.000 So 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.

00:35:57.000 If I had to put a logic on Bill, I think that's probably what he's trying to say.

00:36:03.000 What is the middle road in that debate?

00:36:05.000 How should conservatives treat Trump?

00:36:07.000 Well, on the voters, if you want to scare me to death, I'll let you do it.

00:36:13.000 But here's what I'm consoling myself with.

00:36:15.000 And again, if you want to scare me to death, you just say, Peter, yet again, that's dated.

00:36:19.000 But here is also some electoral data.

00:36:24.000 The cohort that most strongly supported Ronald Reagan was the youngest cohort.

00:36:30.000 And that remained in effect for five, six, seven years after he left office, that young people tended to be Republican.

00:36:38.000 Reagan 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.

00:36:54.000 Bush.

00:36:55.000 Then it all slid away.

00:36:56.000 The point I'm trying to make is that political preferences are actually pretty malleable.

00:37:03.000 Now, if you want to say to me that's changing and it's changing against The Republican side, you may be right.

00:37:11.000 All 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.

00:37:21.000 Donald, it also seems to me, here's where Bill Kristol is right, for sure, there's nobody like Donald Trump.

00:37:31.000 Now, that means that when Donald Trump leaves the stage, whatever happens, it's going to seem a lot more normal than Donald Trump.

00:37:39.000 So, 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.

00:37:58.000 All 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.

00:38:15.000 Growing economy, people leading better lives, being able to care for themselves and their children.

00:38:20.000 That's what I... Trump's accomplishments, they're the accomplishments of the country.

00:38:24.000 You 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.

00:38:32.000 You've really achieved something when you've even changed the mind of the other side.

00:38:38.000 And now, the tariffs, the way he's going about this trade war may be all wrong.

00:38:42.000 There are very well-versed economists whom I know who say it's just wrong.

00:38:46.000 That may be.

00:38:48.000 But everybody understands that we're up against something in China now, and even the Democrats would agree with that.

00:38:54.000 Trump has put something on the American agenda of first importance, and everybody has said across the political spectrum, yes, he's right about that.

00:39:03.000 That matters to the future of the country.

00:39:06.000 These 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.

00:39:18.000 For 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.

00:39:26.000 We could do that.

00:39:27.000 That would take us 30 seconds.

00:39:28.000 That would take us one commercial break.

00:39:30.000 That isn't the way the system works.

00:39:31.000 So I just, I feel the weight of the argument.

00:39:36.000 I feel the weight of the argument.

00:39:37.000 I 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.

00:39:47.000 And 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.

00:39:58.000 I mean, Bernie Sanders was a kook for virtually all of his political career. 1.00

00:40:02.000 And now Bernie Sanders is the thought leader of the Democratic Party.

00:40:04.000 And 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.

00:40:12.000 She 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?

00:40:20.000 Yes.

00:40:21.000 Okay.

00:40:22.000 First of all, what happened to the Constitution?

00:40:24.000 That's not something you can eliminate by executive fiat.

00:40:28.000 You just can't do that, Senator.

00:40:30.000 Item one.

00:40:31.000 Item two.

00:40:33.000 In the last, what is it, decade or decade and a half?

00:40:35.000 I'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.

00:40:42.000 The United States has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions.

00:40:46.000 By as much as all of Europe combined.

00:40:51.000 Europe which has a larger population and a somewhat bigger economy.

00:40:54.000 And how have we done that?

00:40:57.000 By using natural gas.

00:40:59.000 And how have we driven down the prices of natural gas to such a level that it's displacing coal by fracking?

00:41:06.000 That crazed person has said, I'm going to eliminate fracking, which is precisely what has enabled us to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

00:41:15.000 So, you're quite right, the Democratic Party is not status quo.

00:41:18.000 They're going, this is, I don't know, it's, what is it like?

00:41:21.000 It's like, it's almost like watching that wonderful movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

00:41:27.000 These candidates are getting crazier in real time.

00:41:31.000 It is astonishing.

00:41:31.000 It is.

00:41:32.000 She also said that she would ban nuclear power.

00:41:33.000 So basically, the two best versions of power on planet Earth for reducing carbon emissions are apparently out the window.

00:41:39.000 And I suppose she'll be creating wind farms with a wealth tax or something. 1.00

00:41:43.000 It is astonishing to watch as the Democratic Party moves in this direction.

00:41:47.000 It's one of the reasons why I think that To turn to the other side, their view of the future is untenable.

00:41:55.000 I think that people are going to get quickly very tired of the woke scolding and the insane changing lines of the left.

00:42:04.000 I 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.

00:42:10.000 Here's the way Joe Biden could seize the nomination and frankly sweep all the way to the White House and defeat Donald Trump.

00:42:15.000 The 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.

00:42:23.000 Joe Biden, here's the way Joe Biden could win, in my opinion.

00:42:26.000 Here's the way Joe Biden could seize the nomination and frankly sweep all the way to the White House and defeat Donald Trump.

00:42:33.000 And here's how Joe Biden could win.

00:42:34.000 Joe Biden could say, I grew up, I, Joe Biden, grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania in LA.

00:42:40.000 And to me, the Democratic Party, when I think of the Democratic Party, I think of Scranton.

00:42:46.000 Where there were coal miners. 0.75

00:42:48.000 Those were the best jobs that a lot of people could get.

00:42:51.000 And those jobs mattered.

00:42:52.000 And the Democratic Party is the party of jobs.

00:42:55.000 Where 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.

00:43:09.000 All of us went to school together.

00:43:11.000 All of us learned English.

00:43:12.000 All of us learned American history.

00:43:15.000 That is the Democratic Party that I stood for.

00:43:18.000 Jobs, ordinary working people, and also, this was the Democratic Party, of people of faith.

00:43:26.000 The 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.

00:43:39.000 If 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.

00:43:54.000 Now, could Joe Biden try to move the Democratic Party back to its own traditions?

00:43:58.000 The FDR party, the JFK party, the Bill Clinton party.

00:44:02.000 I don't think that he has the stomach for that, frankly.

00:44:06.000 And more importantly, I don't think the media are with him on that.

00:44:09.000 I mean, it is amazing how much of this is all driven by the media, which does bring us to the question of the media.

00:44:14.000 So Ronald Reagan obviously did enormous battles with the media, but it seems as though it gets worse and worse with each successive Republican administration.

00:44:22.000 I mean, something like 94 percent of all press coverage of President Trump has been negative.

00:44:25.000 He's obviously in these knockdown, drag out battles with the media.

00:44:29.000 In 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.

00:44:35.000 It'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.

00:44:43.000 If 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.

00:45:00.000 I mean, it used to be that there at least was the patina.

00:45:02.000 Now it's been completely stripped.

00:45:03.000 It 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.

00:45:19.000 I agree with every bit of that.

00:45:20.000 I agree with absolutely every word of that.

00:45:22.000 When 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.

00:45:43.000 Haldeman had had made for himself when he was chief of staff to Richard Nixon.

00:45:48.000 And the television had three screens, one big screen and then two smaller screens.

00:45:53.000 Now, why were there three screens?

00:45:54.000 That was so that H.R.

00:45:56.000 Haldeman during Nixon and David Gergen during Reagan could watch all three nightly newscasts at the same time.

00:46:04.000 NBC, CBS, ABC.

00:46:06.000 You read the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and you were done with your morning reading.

00:46:13.000 Done for the day.

00:46:14.000 And then in the evening, you watched half-hour newscasts by CBS, NBC, and ABC, and then once again, you were done.

00:46:21.000 Now, what that meant was that all of those entities had business incentives.

00:46:27.000 They were for-profit businesses, and they had business incentives to reach to the middle.

00:46:32.000 Okay, you know all about this.

00:46:33.000 That model is just gone.

00:46:36.000 The media now is all bits and pieces and fragments, and what our side can do is what you're doing.

00:46:46.000 We simply have to found our own outlets.

00:46:50.000 As Mr. Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, when he founded Fox News, he said, well, I have a business insight here.

00:46:58.000 There's a niche market that's underserved.

00:47:01.000 It's half of the country.

00:47:04.000 It 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.

00:47:21.000 So, all that is good news.

00:47:23.000 We probably ought to have more of it.

00:47:25.000 Michael Barone, here's the last sort of consoling point, solving point that I make to myself and I offer it to you.

00:47:31.000 Michael Barone, terrific journalist, deep sense of American history, and Michael Barone argues we've been here before.

00:47:37.000 That 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.

00:47:47.000 So, overwhelmingly newspapers.

00:47:50.000 Every town had a Democratic newspaper and a Whig newspaper and a Republican newspaper, and they were vicious to each other.

00:47:57.000 And what do you get during that period of American history?

00:48:00.000 Well, of course you get the Civil War.

00:48:01.000 That's unfortunate, but fundamentally what you get is the settling of the West and the emergence of a great nation.

00:48:08.000 It 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.

00:48:22.000 So I'm fortunate.

00:48:23.000 I get to talk about ideas for a living.

00:48:24.000 You get to talk about ideas for a living and study them and write about them.

00:48:27.000 But 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.

00:48:40.000 And I see this mostly in the area of solutions.

00:48:43.000 People spend an awful lot of time online talking about problems, and then shouting at each other that they don't properly recognize the problem.

00:48:49.000 So to take an example that just comes to mind, on the left, they never talk about actual practical solutions to climate change.

00:48:57.000 It'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.

00:49:10.000 And this seems to be working for a certain number of Americans.

00:49:14.000 On 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.

00:49:26.000 Twitter, 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.

00:49:36.000 We 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?

00:49:42.000 So I said at the top of this program, I'm an admirer of yours, but I have three sons who are just fanatics.

00:49:49.000 I have my oldest son in particular, Pedro.

00:49:51.000 I'm just telling you, I just observe in my own family.

00:49:55.000 So he goes off to a fancy school, and his heroes, people he read about, During college?

00:50:04.000 Jesus?

00:50:04.000 Moses?

00:50:05.000 Maimonides?

00:50:06.000 No.

00:50:07.000 It's Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.

00:50:09.000 And why is that?

00:50:11.000 Of course, because part of it is because of your point of view.

00:50:13.000 Much of it is because of your point of view.

00:50:15.000 But you two guys, Jordan Peterson and you, are doing plenty of long form.

00:50:21.000 You're both producing books.

00:50:23.000 This show is an hour-long show.

00:50:25.000 You're not doing tweets.

00:50:26.000 This requires quite a lot.

00:50:27.000 Well, 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.

00:50:38.000 I know I have friends in the publishing industry.

00:50:38.000 I don't know.

00:50:41.000 Book sales are up.

00:50:44.000 There is the podcasts.

00:50:47.000 Podcasts I do, I helped to found Ricochet, which is, which now you, we've had you on.

00:50:52.000 Of course.

00:50:52.000 Of course you, oh, you know Ricochet.

00:50:53.000 Okay, so Ricochet, everybody go to ricochet.com and listen to our podcast.

00:50:53.000 I know Ricochet.

00:50:56.000 First in space, Ricochet, yeah.

00:50:57.000 Okay, great.

00:50:58.000 And it turns out that if you do a half hour podcast, the comment is, could you make that an hour?

00:51:04.000 People 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.

00:51:17.000 Do you remember reading about it?

00:51:19.000 I 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.

00:51:34.000 Democracy doesn't just mean you get to vote, it means you get to be as smart as anybody else.

00:51:38.000 And if you didn't get a chance to go to a fancy school, there's still the Book of the Month Club.

00:51:43.000 Well, of course, the Book of the Month Club is gone, but I just see it over and over.

00:51:47.000 Now, 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.

00:51:57.000 And people respond to this.

00:51:59.000 They're grateful for it.

00:52:01.000 I just don't think that Twitter defines the American character.

00:52:06.000 I just don't buy it.

00:52:07.000 I don't see it.

00:52:08.000 I mean, frankly, I'm spending a lot less time on Twitter just because I find it soul-sucking.

00:52:12.000 And I think there are a lot of people who feel the same way.

00:52:14.000 You can get the information.

00:52:16.000 It 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.

00:52:22.000 And that saves you an enormous amount of time and stress, as it turns out.

00:52:25.000 That's sort of your job description, isn't it?

00:52:28.000 Jocking for a position with people who hate your guts?

00:52:31.000 Yeah, that's pretty much my slogan, actually.

00:52:32.000 Should be right there under facts don't care about your feelings.

00:52:35.000 We've put it on a t-shirt.

00:52:36.000 But I wanted to ask you about Uncommon Knowledge.

00:52:38.000 You've had the opportunity to interview an enormous number of major public figures.

00:52:42.000 Who did you find the most interesting?

00:52:46.000 Oh, well, in one way or another, they're all interesting, of course, but the people Christopher Hitchens?

00:52:56.000 Christopher and I disagreed on almost everything.

00:52:59.000 Well, actually, Christopher was kind of a layer cake on his literary criticism.

00:53:05.000 He'd read everything in English literature, and his literary judgments were always flawless, in my opinion.

00:53:12.000 Then you get to politics, and it's mixed, half and half.

00:53:16.000 And then you get to religion, and he was wrong every time he opened his mouth.

00:53:20.000 But Christopher had First of all, he had a beautiful voice and he was wonderfully articulate, but he had integrity.

00:53:28.000 He was the kind of sparring partner you wanted because he was an honest... Christopher Hitchens was an honest man.

00:53:34.000 He would tell you straightforwardly what his own conclusions were and how he reached them.

00:53:39.000 So there's Christopher.

00:53:40.000 Tom Sowell.

00:53:43.000 Tom Sowell grew up in the South until he was a small boy, and then he was sent to live with relatives in Harlem.

00:53:51.000 And 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.

00:54:05.000 He holds degrees for sure from Harvard and then he has a master's and a doctorate in economics.

00:54:11.000 And 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.

00:54:28.000 And 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.

00:54:47.000 And ideas matter so much that if he thinks the conclusion is correct, he will follow it, whatever the price.

00:54:55.000 I guess what I'm saying is that there's a man who's been willing to pay a price.

00:55:00.000 That's tremendously impressive.

00:55:02.000 Milton Friedman.

00:55:03.000 Milton Friedman, whom I interviewed, what, three or four times.

00:55:06.000 Milton Friedman has been gone now.

00:55:08.000 He died deep in his 90s.

00:55:10.000 In 2006, if I recall correctly.

00:55:13.000 But 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.

00:55:20.000 And I was doing an interview with him.

00:55:22.000 This actually, this stays in my mind as one moment that just went through me.

00:55:30.000 And I asked a question, and he responded.

00:55:32.000 And I said, well, wait a minute, Milton.

00:55:35.000 You're not making an economic argument, you're making a moral argument.

00:55:39.000 And he looked at me and said, of course I'm making a moral argument.

00:55:43.000 Is there any other kind of argument that matters?

00:55:48.000 Oh, you get it.

00:55:50.000 Economics wasn't a game for him.

00:55:55.000 You worked your economic analysis because it was human lives that were at stake.

00:56:00.000 This was serious business.

00:56:03.000 Fantastic!

00:56:04.000 Fantastic!

00:56:05.000 This 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.

00:56:13.000 Fantastic.

00:56:14.000 So I want to ask about the state of higher education a little bit.

00:56:16.000 So you're obviously at the Hoover Institution and you've been around higher education for quite a while.

00:56:23.000 Do you think that higher education can be saved?

00:56:25.000 Because 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.

00:56:52.000 STEM between STEM and humanities.

00:56:56.000 And 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.

00:57:08.000 And where did we see that happen before?

00:57:10.000 In the old Soviet Union.

00:57:11.000 It's the sciences that were uncorruptible then and that remain incorruptible, uncorruptible today.

00:57:17.000 So the STEM, the sciences are doing just fine.

00:57:20.000 The major American research universities are without peer anywhere else in the world, or as far as I can tell, anywhere else in history.

00:57:27.000 So that leads us to the humanities.

00:57:30.000 And I don't know quite, I'm so, in a way I'm too close to it.

00:57:34.000 Because 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.

00:57:45.000 And so, there's political correctness everywhere.

00:57:51.000 And great institutions can only hire the talent that's coming up through the system.

00:57:56.000 And 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.

00:58:06.000 And yet, at Stanford, you have the kids who are working on the Stanford Review.

00:58:10.000 And many of them are in the humanities.

00:58:13.000 And at Dartmouth, you've got the Dartmouth Review.

00:58:15.000 That's where the reviews were started.

00:58:18.000 You'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.

00:58:27.000 This will take a moment or two more to explain.

00:58:30.000 When I went to college, in economics, it was taught as a conflict of great ideas.

00:58:37.000 Political science, or government as we called it at Dartmouth, you began by studying political philosophy.

00:58:43.000 You'd read John Locke, you'd read Aristotle.

00:58:46.000 The ideas have tended to be squeezed out of the disciplines in favor of quantitative techniques.

00:58:53.000 So what you get in economics, even introductory economics these days, you're taught how to run regression analyses.

00:58:59.000 And you can graduate four years at a very fancy institution and have no clue what all of this communism versus capitalism stuff was about.

00:59:10.000 Milton Friedman versus John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, what was that all about?

00:59:15.000 So several professors at Dartmouth have established a program for examining the great ideas, democracy versus other forms of government, capitalism versus central planning.

00:59:30.000 So 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.

00:59:38.000 Let's establish a program here.

00:59:40.000 Let's establish a program there.

00:59:41.000 It's impossible for me to... My friend Peter Thiel, he just thinks I'm naive.

00:59:47.000 And you may think I'm naive as well.

00:59:49.000 I don't know, but it's impossible for me to...

00:59:52.000 to just wish the humanities out of existence at American universities.

00:59:57.000 I see too many new shoots coming up, growing up.

01:00:00.000 So 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?

01:00:14.000 If you want to hear Peter Robinson's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.

01:00:18.000 To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.

01:00:24.000 Well, Peter, thank you so much for stopping by.

01:00:25.000 This has really been a pleasure, and I really appreciate your time.

01:00:27.000 Good to see you.

01:00:27.000 My pleasure.

01:00:28.000 My pleasure.

01:00:29.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Hay.

01:00:40.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:00:42.000 Associate producer, Colton Haas.

01:00:44.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

01:00:46.000 Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingaro.

01:00:48.000 Editing by Donovan Fowler.

01:00:50.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.

01:00:52.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

01:00:54.000 Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

01:00:56.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 03, 2019

Peter Robinson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 75

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