Dr. Paul Kangor is a distinguished political scientist, bestselling author, and expert on communism and the political history of Ronald Reagan s presidency. Dr. Kangor s analysis of Marxist ideology and its historical implications position him as a leading voice in our contemporary debates about socialism, capitalism, and political freedom. In fact, the recent blockbuster film Reagan was inspired by his 2007 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. In today s episode, Dr. Paul and I dissect the infiltration of Marxist ideas among American progressives, the ideological crux of a Marxist worldview, and whether or not Kamala Harris can actually be classified as a Marxist herself. We also examine the similarities and differences between the presidencies of Reagan and Donald Trump, and how American conservatives can lead the way toward a less divisive future. Don t miss this important conversation with Dr. Kengor on this episode of the Sunday Special! Featuring: and . Ben J. Koppel, Paul Kanglor, , and Dr. Jay Shepkaran, . . . Ben and Dr. P.Kengor, The New York Times bestselling author of The Communist Manifesto and the best-selling author of The New Republic: A Handbook of Marxist Thought: How To Be a Marxist in the 21st-century Era, and How to Be a Progressive in a Post-Marxist America. (New York Times best-seller). The White House Correspondent and Senior Fellow at The Weekly Standard, Ben Koppelman, the New York Magazine, and the founder of the New Republic, and a regular contributor at The Daily Beast, and an American Spectator, and his wife, and co-author of The Weekly Beast and The New Spectator. . , and a contributor at the Los Angeles Review of The Nation, and also a contributing editor at The Huffington Post. , Professor, and editor at the Harvard Spectator and The Daily Mail, and is a frequent contributor at Harvard Magazine, among many other things. ... and so much more. He also teaches a course at Grove City College, and hosts a podcast at Harvard University, and writes a blog at Harvard Yardward, and has a blog, and he's a friend, too. And he's also a good friend of the Harvard Crimson, too, too? Thank you, Ben, for joining us on this Sunday Special.
00:00:33.000Paul Kengor is a distinguished political scientist, bestselling author, and expert on communism and the political history of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
00:00:39.000Kengor is professor at Grove City College, where he currently serves at the helm of the school's Center for Vision and Values, as well as a contributing editor at the American Spectator.
00:00:47.000Kengor has also authored over 20 books on topics ranging from Reagan's relationship with Pope John Paul II to the bias of the American media.
00:00:53.000Kangor's analysis of Marxist ideology and its historical implications position him as a leading voice in our contemporary debates about socialism, capitalism, and political freedom.
00:01:01.000In fact, the recent blockbuster film Reagan was inspired by Kangor's 2007 book The Crusader, Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.
00:01:08.000In today's episode, Paul and I dissect the infiltration of Marxist ideas among American progressives, the ideological crux of a Marxist's worldview, and whether or not Kamala Harris can actually be classified as a Marxist herself.
00:01:18.000We also examine the similarities and differences between the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump and how American conservatives can lead the way toward a less divisive future.
00:01:26.000Paul Kangor's body of work has enriched the public's understanding of Marxism and issued an important warning about how damaging ideas can alter the course of history.
00:01:33.000Don't miss this important conversation with Dr.
00:01:35.000Paul Kanglor on this episode of the Sunday Special.
00:01:38.000Paul, thanks so much Really appreciate it.
00:01:48.000Yeah, Ben, I gotta tell you, this is kind of a reunion.
00:01:50.000So you and I first met, you probably didn't remember this, but at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara.
00:01:57.000And so thus I have my Rancho Del Cielo shirt on.
00:02:01.000I was there for a few weeks ago for the premiere of the Reagan movie.
00:02:04.000I know we're probably going to be talking about that too.
00:02:06.000But I was trying to remember when that was.
00:02:09.000I kind of Dating it by the age of my daughter, who remembers it all really well, I think it was probably at least 10 years ago.
00:02:16.000Yeah, and I think you're talking about 2014, 2015, somewhere in that neighborhood.
00:02:26.000But let's talk about, obviously you've written about a huge number of topics of interest to our audience.
00:02:31.000Most recently you've written a lot about Marxism.
00:02:34.000And the race today between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the term Marxist has been thrown around by President Trump with regard to Kamala Harris.
00:02:42.000And there's some people who say that's unfair.
00:02:44.000She's not totally in favor of, say, nationalization of all means and mechanisms of industry.
00:02:49.000She probably has never read Karl Marx.
00:02:51.000Do you think it's fair for President Trump to call her a Marxist?
00:02:54.000How should we determine whether someone is sort of a Marxist, even colloquially, in American politics these days?
00:03:01.000And by the way, I'm at Grove City College, our Institute for Faith and Freedom, and I teach a course on Marxism at Grove City College.
00:03:07.000And this current semester, I'm teaching a course in comparative politics.
00:03:10.000We're talking about Marxism right now.
00:03:12.000And I told my students last week, I said, just as we don't like it when the left calls conservatives fascists, right?
00:03:20.000We want to be very careful about calling leftists, even radical leftists, maybe even democratic socialists, we could go through that, calling them Marxists.
00:03:30.000I mean, if you want to just call them an extreme leftist, I think that's good.
00:03:34.000But I want to call a Marxist a Marxist only if we're dealing with a legitimate Marxist.
00:03:39.000Now, in that debate, I think Trump was right about Kamala's father.
00:03:46.000I mean, Kamala's father, I mean, based on his writings and I've read some of his journal articles and he was on the econ department at Stanford University.
00:03:54.000And from what I can tell, he was a Marxist.
00:04:07.000Bourgeoisie, proletariat, probably hasn't read the Communist Manifesto.
00:04:12.000Now, when you get into the more general kind of broadening area, and this is where we are today, taking the sort of Marxist superstructure of oppressed versus oppressor, all right?
00:04:24.000You find your two groups to pit together, right?
00:04:27.000In classical Marxism, this was based on economics and class.
00:05:22.000Yeah, and I think one of the problems actually with doing that is that not only may it not be fair in terms of her actual belief system, because again, who knows what the hell she believes, but it also actually waters down what Marxism is and makes it more palatable for the masses.
00:05:35.000Because people go, okay, well, if Kamala Harris is a Marxist, it doesn't seem that bad.
00:05:38.000I mean, we're not talking about the Soviet Union.
00:05:42.000We're talking about a lady who's hobnobbing with tech CEOs and wants government interventionism in the economy and more redistribution.
00:05:49.000Whatever people think of her, they tend to then box that in with the same sort of democratic socialism that Bernie talks about in Norway, with the same Soviet full-scale Marxism that we saw applied for nearly all of the 20th century.
00:06:03.000And so then when you meet the real McCoy, right, and when someone like me and you says, you know, Bernie Sanders wasn't a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party, but he was an actual formal presidential elector.
00:07:19.000And when you look at some of Obama's rhetoric, Early in his life and when he went to Occidental College, it seems like he was at one point a Marxist.
00:07:28.000Today, probably not, although you still see some of that rhetoric, right?
00:07:58.000If you're Obama, come out and say, well, in my youth, like a lot of people at Columbia and some of these places, I flirted with those ideas, but I know better now.
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00:09:44.000So one of the things that you mentioned there is that there is this sort of no true Scotsman fallacy that people like to apply in a Marxist scenario where you'll say something is Marxist and they'll say, that's not real Marxism, right?
00:09:54.000Soviet Union's not real Marxism or Communist China in its original iteration, not real Marxism.
00:09:59.000So let's try to get to the nitty-gritty.
00:10:01.000What would you consider to be real full-scale Marxism?
00:10:04.000Where would you feel comfortable Saying, this person abides by these principles, that makes this person a Marxist, as opposed to just, say, membership in the Communist Party.
00:10:12.000You know, that's sort of an easy outlying indicator.
00:10:15.000But somebody who's not a member of CPUSA, and they are a Marxist in your view.
00:10:19.000What principles do they have to fulfill?
00:10:21.000Well, from a practical point of view, a poster boy country would be North Korea.
00:10:50.000In the manifesto, they say, the entire communist theory may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property.
00:10:58.000So, as the starting point, I mean, it's a war on private property.
00:11:02.000And, of course, that goes against, you know, the Judeo-Christian Foundation, you know, the Old Testament, New Testament, thou shalt not steal, the Ten Commandments, right, implies you have the right to property.
00:11:14.000Some people consider it a natural right, a sacred right.
00:11:18.000You know, from the cave to the courthouse, people have had the right to property.
00:11:22.000When you do something like literally try to abolish all private property, then you're really raising, R-A-Z-I-N-G, the foundations of everything.
00:11:46.000What we mean is, no, they say, precisely so.
00:11:49.000That is precisely what we intend to do.
00:11:52.000So at that point, maybe one could argue different variations, gradations, degradations, whatever, of communism.
00:11:59.000To what degree is a communist society abolishing private property, right?
00:12:03.000At the level of the home, at the level of agriculture, at the level of, you know, Pol Pot in Cambodia, whether you're allowed to own personal hygiene products, toothpaste in Cuba, whether or not you're allowed to pick your mangoes from the front tree growing on your property in Cuba.
00:12:22.000I have a former student, Lorenzo Carrizana, whose aunt in Cuba had a mango tree in her front yard.
00:12:32.000And it pained them terribly to know that there were fresh, beautiful mangoes growing on their property.
00:12:39.000But because that belonged to the state, and they weren't allowed to pick and sell their own produce because of the laws of market control versus central planning on prices and production level, they couldn't even pick the mangoes from their front yard.
00:12:55.000And when they took some in the middle of the night, They realize when they got up in the morning, what they did, they threw the peels in the garbage.
00:13:02.000So they go out and they bury them in the ground so the state won't see that they picked the mangoes.
00:13:08.000Now that's abolition of private property at a very severe level.
00:13:13.000So as a starting point, property above all, abolition of private property.
00:13:18.000That provides a really useful framework for thinking about because it also shows you the spectrum of economic interventionism and where things actually line up.
00:13:27.000So one of the great lies, of course, is that, for example, that's been used by Soviets and communist backers, is the idea that Nazism and Soviet economics were in 100% opposition.
00:13:38.000And that basically, the capitalist side is closer to Nazi economics, and the communist side is therefore good.
00:13:44.000Because what communists tend to do is they use the World War II model as a way of demonstrating that communism is actually good, since the Soviet army, by the end of the war, was on the right side of the war, as opposed to at the beginning when they actually led to the war.
00:13:57.000But with that said, if you use your framework of abolition of private property, what you end up doing is also recognizing that heavy regulation of the use of private property is closer to actual public ownership of private property than it is to economic freedom.
00:14:11.000So if you have a very corporatist system, as Nazi Germany did, in which everybody is organized into guilds by the government, in which the government is reaching into everybody's pocket and determining how your private capital is used, that is much closer to public ownership of the means of production than it is to you being able to make free decisions about the dispensation and use of your own wealth.
00:15:31.000So they knew at that point They could no longer swear a loyalty oath to Stalin's Soviet Union because Stalin was now on the side of Hitler.
00:16:17.000So, you know, with all of that sort of pointed out and the backdrop of Marxism, how do we distinguish between Marxism and something that you've talked about, which is just the old biblical story of the oppressor versus oppressed false matrix?
00:16:29.000So, I've pointed this out myself, you know, as somebody who reads the Bible pretty regularly in the original Hebrew.
00:17:04.000That sort of sense of victimization that results in aggression toward people who are more successful in one way, shape, or form through a perceived sense of oppression.
00:17:14.000That is the story of so much of human history, is this perceived sense of grievance against other people who are more successful.
00:17:20.000How do we distinguish that from Marxism?
00:17:22.000Or is Marxism just sort of one offshoot of that general oppressor-oppressed matrix?
00:17:26.000Yeah, in fact, I would argue others have, too, that the primary virtue in Marxism is envy, right?
00:19:49.000You know, Marxism is inherently atheistic, as all the Marxist Leninists and all the Marxist leaders have always said.
00:19:56.000So, to have a group of apostles in the first century getting together voluntarily on their own, By their own free will, and if you read the whole text, selling portions of the property that they're permitted to own in order to pull them together to help their fellow man, that's not Marxism.
00:20:18.000Now, Marxism would be the heavy-handed state coming into that community and every community in the entire country and telling them forcibly, All of your property will be banned.
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00:22:19.000Don't let the IRS take advantage of you if they help you need with Tax Network USA. I mean, as I've said to people all the time, I'm the most capitalist person I know.
00:22:28.000In my house, I'm a Marxist, meaning I share my wealth in common with my wife, right?
00:22:32.000I mean, we don't earn equivalent amounts of wealth, and my kids certainly don't earn anything, but we all have access to the pool of cash because when it comes to family...
00:22:40.000Obviously, it's share and share alike.
00:22:41.000That is not the same thing when it comes to things outside the family, which is, of course, why Marx is attempting to abolish the family because the family is, in fact, a bulwark against the idea that everyone is family.
00:22:50.000If you have family, then you know there's a big difference between you and your wife and your kids and, you know, this guy in New York who you've never met before.
00:22:56.000And you shouldn't be asked to treat that person as though they're a member of your family because that's not realistic to how human nature is.
00:23:02.000And I think this is one of the points that you make with regard to Marxism in particular is that Marxism, for all of its talk about being a scientific theory, which, of course, it absolutely is not.
00:23:44.000You had to do the thing, and that really was a call to action as opposed to what Marx thought it was going to be, which was a prediction of the future that never came true and, in fact, turned out to be false in every respect, ranging from the depression of wages to the idea that there would be a worldwide class uprising of the poor against the rich, which, of course, never happened, World War I being the best indicator that it never happened which, of course, never happened, World War I being the best indicator that it never happened when everybody sided along national lines What Marxism actually is a religious theory.
00:24:08.000It's a religious theory positing an eschatology of man.
00:24:12.000And when you read Marx, what you see is that he's substituting his own idea of the transformation of human nature that will erupt as a result of this inevitable end of capitalism, and a new man will be born in which everybody is purely generous and purely benevolent.
00:24:26.000And it turns out that all of the evils of the human heart, which he says were planted by capitalism in the same way that Rousseau suggests that all of the evils of the human heart were planted by the first man who created a fence, basically, that all of that will disappear.
00:24:40.000This is what the anarcho-communists, which of course makes no sense, this is what they claim.
00:24:44.000What they're really shooting for is a time when government will wither away and we'll all live in a voluntary brotherhood of man in which we ourselves have been transformed in soul.
00:24:53.000And I think that's why Marxism will never die, because if you're making a religious promise, there's no way to actually determine whether it's true or not until you hit some sort of messianic age.
00:25:01.000Yeah, and especially if you're making that argument to people who aren't religious, right?
00:25:05.000So they don't follow Judaism or Christianity, so instead they're atheistic.
00:25:10.000So this gives them their secular utopia, right?
00:25:13.000So most religious people would say, come on, dude, that's what you get in heaven, all right, when all this is over, right?
00:25:19.000You can't have that possibly here on this earth.
00:25:21.000But if you read statements from Marx, From other early communists, Moses Hess, Arthur Kessler, who's one of the people in The God That Failed.
00:25:30.000I mean, they talk about how this was like a religion.
00:25:34.000And in fact, Raymond Aron, his classic book is called The Opium of the Intellectuals.
00:25:39.000Because really, to them, that's what it's like.
00:25:41.000They make fun of religious people called religion the opium of the masses.
00:25:45.000I mean, Marxism is really absolutely the opium of the intellectuals.
00:25:49.000Ronald Reagan said, well, Marxism, Leninism, that religion of theirs.
00:25:54.000And indeed, and you started off by saying scientific, scientific.
00:26:00.000Yeah, they have this phrase, scientific socialism.
00:26:30.000So he is alive in the period of Darwin, when the origin of species comes out.
00:26:35.000So they were hoping that Marx would do for the social sciences and for economics what Darwin did for the physical sciences.
00:26:44.000So there's this idea of this evolutionary movement where mankind would start in slavery, serfdom, Capitalism, socialism, and eventually to communism, right?
00:26:56.000Socialism, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, would be the final transitionary step into communism.
00:27:02.000So this added a historical inevitability to the whole thing, right?
00:27:07.000So people could see this unfolding over time, this evolution of the history of the world.
00:27:13.000Engels, at Marx's funeral, and also at Marx's wife's funeral, quoted Darwin.
00:27:46.000But the great news is, right, through this historical Darwinian evolution that Marx created and pioneered, the world will eventually reach that utopia in the sky, full communism, classless society.
00:28:01.000And that's just one of almost every prediction that Marx made, which is complete fatuous nonsense.
00:28:11.000So, you know, one of the things that we see is when we talk about this, again, we come back to the same point, which is when we talk about Marxism, I think if you have an understanding of Marxism at all, you see how terrible it is, its terrible results.
00:28:22.000But the point that Hayek makes in the Road to Serfdom is that it actually is a road to get there.
00:28:27.000It's not as though You know, one day you wake up.
00:28:29.000It's not like Russia in 1917, where you wake up one day and suddenly it's imposed top-down.
00:28:34.000This is something that you gradually slide into.
00:28:36.000And this is where I think the temptation is for the right, saying that, okay, we're just going to describe Kamala Harris or Barack Obama as chiefly Marxist because we're warning you about where this is going, as opposed to this is a step along the roads of perdition.
00:28:50.000We say, okay, well, what they want is tomorrow, like, communist utopia.
00:28:53.000They may want something like that in the back nether regions of their brain, the lizard Marxist brain from college, 30 years in the future.
00:29:01.000But to get there, they're willing to do an awful lot of gray-dated actions.
00:29:06.000And that's why you're seeing Kamala Harris wooing CEOs and treating capitalism as though capitalism is still—you'll hear Joe Biden say this all the time— I'm not begrudging anybody the ability to earn a buck.
00:29:48.000It seemed like the last few years, the left, the Democratic left, had kind of given up on a lot of the class warfare rhetoric that they were engaging in in the 1990s.
00:29:58.000You're younger than me, probably about 10 years or so.
00:30:01.000I don't know if you remember Dick Gephardt in the early 1990s and talking about how...
00:30:07.000People who are wealthy or have done well are the winners in life's lottery and so forth.
00:30:12.000But every four years, and younger people wouldn't have experienced this, but the Democrats, they would just trot out this, he favors the rich, he favors the rich, tax cuts for billionaires, on and on and on and on and on.
00:30:24.000They seem to finally give it up with Donald Trump, I think because Trump so appealed to the middle class.
00:30:52.000So to hear Kamala in the last debate, and I've heard some commercials on television and radio since, they're going after Trump on the tax cuts for billionaires again.
00:31:02.000And when you look at Trump's tax cuts, what were they, 2017, 2018?
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00:33:10.000I mean, to me, this is the great kind of story of why capitalism is having such trouble right now.
00:33:15.000And I think the reason is because it used to be that Rockefeller actually went to church.
00:33:19.000I mean, he went to the same church as many of the people who worked for him.
00:33:22.000And in the United States, if you were a corporate head, there was a feeling of noblesse oblige that was largely church-based.
00:33:29.000It was largely based on membership in a religious community.
00:33:32.000And as that wore away, you got this very odd sort of elitist combination of Right.
00:33:45.000four years for my childhood, there was talk about a libertarian uprising where it would be, I'm left on social politics, but I'm really right-wing on economics.
00:33:52.000And it turns out that's like five people in the country.
00:33:54.000And it turns out that that's the thing that drove all the coal miners into the arms of Trump.
00:33:59.000I think this attempt to turn the sort of Trumpian phenomenon with the middle and lower classes, and I even hesitate to use those terms in America because they really don't apply.
00:34:06.000A huge percentage of people who start in the lower class will end up in the upper class or the middle class.
00:34:11.000There is no class distinction in the United States the way that there was in continental Europe in 1890 or something.
00:34:17.000So this sort of weird divide on social policy that came along with the atheistic revolution of the 60s and 70s, in which the most successful people economically also hated the morality of Of sort of middle-class churchgoers.
00:34:35.000And what Trump was doing to those West Virginia miners, he wasn't saying to them, I'm going to bring to you all sorts of good economic goodies in the way that Dick Gephardt or, say, John Edwards in 2004 would have with his To Americas nonsense.
00:34:55.000I don't think that you need to trans your kids.
00:34:57.000Those social policies, the idea that he actually understood them and didn't scorn them, that's the whole thing.
00:35:02.000To me, the signal break in sort of American politics pretty much occurs in 2008.
00:35:07.000It goes by the wayside because we all pretend it didn't happen.
00:35:09.000But when Barack Obama made that bitter clinger speech in San Francisco, that was like the hard divide in American politics where he's in San Francisco with a bunch of really, really wealthy people in shiny buildings.
00:35:19.000And they're talking about how the real downfall of the country is these schlubs who live in West Virginia and who have this whole thing about how they like God and guns and And they actually want borders.
00:35:28.000And I think that that was really more the thing.
00:35:31.000And so there's been this unfortunate gap that's now grown between, I think, Americans who have traditional values with regard to social politics and capitalism itself, because this term neoliberal gets thrown around.
00:35:44.000And I always wonder exactly kind of what that means.
00:35:46.000I'm very free market oriented and also incredibly socially conservative.
00:35:49.000And for most of my childhood, those two things went together.
00:35:51.000And it's only in the last decade or so they seem to have sort of gone separate ways.
00:36:30.000And I'll never forget, Ben, he used the phrase, yeah, I still see some of the Marxist mental architecture in phrases like bitter clingers, right?
00:36:39.000Clinging to their god and guns, right?
00:36:41.000That's very much a kind of like Marxist-like sentiment, even if it doesn't make Obama a Marxist.
00:36:47.000And the other one I think of, you mentioned the 60s radicals, Mark Rudd.
00:36:52.000He wasn't the founder of SDS, but he ran SDS and shut down Columbia University April 1968.
00:36:58.000And I read his memoir a few years ago, which is a shocking book.
00:37:02.000But to Rudd's credit, he's very honest and very candid in that book.
00:37:10.000him and Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn and the people in SDS who eventually became the weathermen and eventually the weather underground, they would go out into the working class neighborhoods, he said, of Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, and they'd be preaching Marxism to the unwashed masses, right?
00:37:26.000The working class kids, the kids of the steelworkers, right?
00:37:30.000And he said, what was the response of these people?
00:38:14.000So the incessant class warfare that the Democrats always engaged in, like I said, it seemed like it cooled in the last few years.
00:38:22.000I think because Trump has won that element.
00:38:25.000But it's coming back right now in the last few weeks, probably because Kamala is trying to make a push for some of those voters.
00:38:32.000I think this is also due to the failure of the race Marxism.
00:38:35.000So in the 2012 to 2024 era, the Democrats really, really stopped moving towards sort of the We're good to go.
00:38:58.000And so Barack Obama won on that basis in 2012, and then Hillary kind of tried to run that same campaign in 2016, and she failed because she's an upper-class white lady.
00:39:05.000And then Joe Biden ran that campaign again, in part, in 2020, but it was already failing by 2020.
00:39:11.000He had to sort of run as the moderate in the room, despite everything that was going on with the Black Lives Matter riots and everything.
00:39:16.000He sort of tried to ignore what was going on and then throw a stop to his supporters by picking Kamala as his vice president.
00:39:22.000And then by 2024, one of the things that's actually quite fascinating about the way that Kamala is running this campaign is she's not talking about race at all.
00:39:28.000Everybody on the left is begging her to talk about race.
00:39:30.000You're the first female black woman who's going to run for president and win and all this.
00:39:34.000And she doesn't want to talk about it.
00:39:35.000She keeps avoiding it, which I think is a smart strategy because I think this is played out.
00:39:39.000I think they're moving back toward the sort of class based economic Marxism.
00:39:43.000If there are only a few games that they can play here, and one of them is played out, They're going to turn to the others.
00:39:48.000And those right now seem to be class-based Marxism and sex-based Marxism, in which they're stacking up women against men.
00:39:54.000And you're seeing the largest gender gap in American history breaking out in this election.
00:39:57.000Yeah, and in the last debate, the two moderators from ABC, right?
00:40:01.000I think it was David Muir was the one who did it, brought up the Trump comments about the race, about Kamala's race.
00:40:09.000And I remember telling my students right before that debate, I said, Trump in this debate can't do anything really stupid, like bring up her race.
00:40:17.000That would be a really dumb thing to do.
00:42:40.000To shift topics slightly, but it's still part of the same overall conversation.
00:42:43.000You've written extensively, obviously, on Ronald Reagan.
00:42:46.000Ronald Reagan is the last Republican president to have won broad majorities.
00:42:50.000You could say George H.W. Bush won a broad majority.
00:42:52.000That was really on the back of Ronald Reagan.
00:42:54.000By 1992, obviously, he loses to Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, which is not exactly a duo of tremendous performance.
00:43:00.000But in any case, the Reagan era does raise questions for how conservatives can win going forward.
00:43:08.000Because Donald Trump won what can best be described as statistically, at least, a fluke election in 2016.
00:43:14.000That is a fluke election in which you lose the popular vote by three million, but you win by just enough votes in just the right places in order to win.
00:43:21.000And it looks very much as though he's going to have to pull off the same feed if he wishes to win this year.
00:43:25.000It looks as though the popular vote gap is going to be, I would think, relatively significant.
00:43:31.000I'd be shocked if he wins the popular vote in this year's election.
00:43:33.000He might just win in just enough places, just 10,000 votes here in North Carolina and 12,000 in Georgia and all the rest of that in order to pull off the presidency.
00:43:47.0002004 against John Kerry was a near run thing.
00:43:49.000That was a very close election coming down to basically Ohio and Florida.
00:43:52.000And so when you look back at the Reagan era, one of the things that is clear is that because he has the Soviet Union to run against, a thing where he can say, look, this is the thing, right?
00:44:04.000And the only way we're going to beat that is by getting rid of the ineffective, right?
00:44:09.000The argument that he was making against Jimmy Carter was that Jimmy Carter was a fool and ineffective fool.
00:44:15.000It wasn't that Jimmy Carter was actually deeply immoral.
00:44:18.000It was that Jimmy Carter was deeply ineffective.
00:44:20.000He almost became a figure of jocularity.
00:44:22.000And because the Soviet Union was out here, you had this dual threat.
00:44:25.000You had the dual threat from within of weakness, and you had the threat from without of a powerful and aggressive state that actively sought to destroy America's interests.
00:44:33.000Well, now if you fast forward to 2024, I think there's been an attempt by Republicans and some Democrats to say that China is sort of like the USSR. That parallel hasn't gone quite as well because of the deep and abiding economic relations with China.
00:44:45.000But the argument by a lot of conservatives has shifted from this sort of dual threat of inefficacy from the Democratic Party and deep and abiding threat on the foreign front to ignore all problems on the foreign front.
00:44:56.000The real threat is the internal threat.
00:44:58.000And I just wonder if that's a winning electoral message, because I don't think that most Americans look at Kamala Harris and want to see Kamala Harris as a sort of crisis-level, red-alert threat.
00:45:08.000If she's elected, we're all going to die.
00:45:11.000I think, in other words, that the Reagan message, which is Democrats are misguided, wrong, cowardly, and ineffective, And over here we have some real threats we have to face.
00:45:19.000There's probably going to be a better electoral message than ignore everything that's going on over here.
00:45:23.000Nothing really important is happening outside our borders.
00:45:25.000The real threat is Kamala Harris or Barack Obama.
00:45:27.000Even as deeply as we may feel, that that is a real threat.
00:45:31.000Yeah, you know, in our print edition of the American Spectator, I'm the editor of the American Spectator, I have a piece called Reagan Conservatism is Alive and Well.
00:45:38.000It's a special print edition on conservatism.
00:45:40.000And I'm hearing a lot of conservatives today saying, well, Reagan conservatism is dead.
00:45:50.000Faith, freedom, safety, dignity of human life, anti-communism, belief in the individual.
00:45:54.000I won't go through all of them here, but I've said that Trump can check the box on probably 11 out of 11, certainly in terms of how he governed as president, right?
00:46:04.000Even if you don't think that he's maybe in his heart a pro-lifer, I mean, he did more for the pro-life movement than Reagan did as president.
00:46:12.000The difference, though, it's not the message, it's the messenger.
00:49:31.000So why not give my friends a call over at pdsdebt.com slash Sunday today.
00:49:35.000Do you think that the country has fundamentally changed so much since that year that it's a bit of a different math?
00:49:40.000Meaning that it's almost impossible to see any Republican winning, say, New York or California, absent some serious existential threat.
00:49:47.000Even George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9-11 had to run a super competitive race against John Kerry in 2004 that came down to a few different states.
00:49:55.000We're seeing it, obviously, with President Trump.
00:49:58.000This is coming down to a few different states.
00:49:59.000It's almost impossible for me to imagine, as a transplant from California to Florida, The idea that a Republican would ever win, say, California again, or New York or Massachusetts.
00:50:08.000Are the divides in the country just too wide?
00:50:11.000And if so, what can be done about that?
00:50:14.000I think that's right, but I think a Republican could win 40 out of 50 states.
00:50:18.000And also, and I'm not trying to say this to dump on Donald Trump in this interview, but 2016, 2020, and 2024, I mean, your opponent is Hillary Clinton.
00:50:29.000Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that should be an easy sweep for any remotely, decently likable Republican.
00:50:38.000And I know people on our side will say, you know, but Trump gets out the vote, has his core of supporters.
00:50:49.000Well, actually, I do have some ideas of some of the people that could be I won't go through it because I'm going to end up arguing about each of those people.
00:50:54.000But those are three easy-to-beat opponents.
00:50:58.000They really, those should be slam dunks.
00:51:01.000And I think if you get somebody, if you had somebody who was more likable, they'd beat them fairly easily.
00:51:07.000I mean, I think that one of the things that President Trump had for a moment in this election cycle when he was running against Biden particularly and then in the aftermath, the assassination attempt, what since basically 2014, I think the American people have been craving both two things that seem to be in conflict.
00:51:23.000One is normalcy and the other is change.
00:51:25.000They want to change from the direction of the Obama years, but they also want some semblance of normalcy.
00:51:30.000They just don't want to think about what's going on in the presidential race three years in advance of an election.
00:51:36.000They don't want to be dealing with whatever is the crazy level.
00:51:39.000But I think that's what was behind whatever desire there was for Joe Biden in 2020 was more like, OK, fine, he's dead.
00:51:53.000He basically took Bernie Sanders' agenda and then just tried to run the table with it.
00:51:57.000And on foreign policy, he set the world on fire.
00:51:59.000But I think that the thing that most Americans right now are craving, and this was true, and I think Trump was doing a good job of this for a little while in the election, was just a sense of, okay, you know what, we need everything to just go back to normal, leave everything alone, calm down, take a breath.
00:52:12.000And so there was a period between that debate and the assassination attempt and then the RNC when Trump really went silent.
00:52:19.000And that was the best point of the election for him.
00:52:21.000Because he was just allowing the story to be Joe Biden and not be Donald Trump.
00:52:25.000And then the assassination attempt happened, and then the RNC happened.
00:52:28.000I think there were a couple of tactical errors at the RNC. I think J.D. Vance is incredibly smart.
00:52:33.000I'm not sure that J.D. Vance added anything to the ticket that Donald Trump didn't already have going for him.
00:52:37.000I would have picked somebody like Glenn Youngkin if it had been me and tried to make some sort of play for the middle, try to make some play for women voters.
00:52:43.000And then I think that Trump's speech at the RNC was a very bad move for him.
00:52:47.000I think that he had a unique opportunity a week after the assassination attempt to do something almost Reagan-esque.
00:52:52.000I mean, obviously, Reagan was shot by Hinckley, and there was a unifying kind of rally-round-Reagan moment because of that.
00:53:00.000Because Reagan treated that with such geniality and joviality and let's come together.
00:53:11.000But when a bullet whizzes past your ear and kills somebody behind you, that makes you start to think about the things that are important in life.
00:53:17.000The thing that's important to me is making America strong.
00:53:20.000That's the thing I've always cared about.
00:53:21.000That's the thing I care about you and your family.
00:53:23.000That would have been a moment when he could have done that.
00:53:56.000And then he started taking some shots at Biden.
00:53:58.000Not as harsh as usual, but he should have stopped there.
00:54:02.000By the way, the most meaningful thing to me in that speech, especially being a Reagan scholar, after Reagan was shot, March 30th, 1981, and Reagan says to a number of different people, he wrote this in his diary, said it to Billy Graham, said it to his son Michael, he said it to Mother Teresa, he said it to Terrence Cardinal Cook, whatever time I have left is for him.
00:54:25.000My life has been spared, tells this to John Paul II a year later when they meet at the Vatican after both had survived assassination attempts.
00:54:33.000And Trump said that night in Milwaukee, and he said it, I'm a scholar of this stuff, I'm writing these down.
00:54:41.000There's about 12 examples now where Trump has said, God spared my life, God spared my life.
00:55:42.000But those guys are the future of the party, not that J.D. Vance isn't.
00:55:46.000But that would have really done something for him.
00:55:49.000And I think one of the areas where Kamala has really taken a step up on him is with Latino voters.
00:55:55.000Because they weren't voting for Biden, at least not in the numbers they usually were.
00:55:59.000She seems to have pulled a good number of them away from Trump.
00:56:02.000So I think that was kind of a strategic electoral political mistake by Trump.
00:56:07.000I think the other thing that is really fascinating about how Trump has campaigned, and this is true since 2016, he took the position against the field in 2016 that the Iraq war was inherently bad.
00:56:17.000He said some things that you would have expected to hear actually on the democratic stage in 2016 with regard to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:56:23.000Toad Pink, international answer, right?
00:56:29.000He was using that kind of language, and because by that point the country turned on the Iraq War, that allowed him to be the insurgent inside the candidacy.
00:56:36.000But that also has meant that there's been this growing wing inside the Republican Party.
00:56:40.000When you talk about the rejection of Reaganism, I would say that the rejection of Reaganism has come in a couple of flavors.
00:56:45.000It's not on the socially conservative front.
00:56:47.000I think that the rejection of Reaganism has come in the economic flavor, and it's come in the foreign policy flavor, and I'd say more on the foreign policy flavor than on the economic flavor.
00:56:55.000There's been a new sort of Papu-Canon isolationism that is cropping up in the Republican Party.
00:57:01.000I mean, to pretend that it wasn't there in the 30s, 40s, 50s is to be ignorant of sort of the split in the Republican Party that has been there for a very long time.
00:57:09.000But it was sort of in abeyance for a while.
00:57:12.000And now it seems to have come back with a fair bit of alacrity, this sort of anti-hawkishness, anti-muscularity in foreign policy.
00:57:20.000And it's been exacerbated by sort of the bifurcated way that Trump has dealt with foreign policy.
00:57:25.000He talks like Pat Buchanan, and then he actually acts like Ronald Reagan.
00:57:29.000His foreign policy is extremely Reagan-esque.
00:57:34.000If they decide that they want to try and threaten us, we will back them off that point.
00:57:38.000And I remember I did a fundraiser for President Trump, and in that fundraiser, we were in the back room, and he was saying that the reason that he says, the reason Vladimir Putin never went into Ukraine is because I said to him, Vlad, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb this out of you.
00:57:52.000And Vlad looked at me and he said, no you won't.
00:57:56.000And then Trump looks at me and says, if you're the United States and they think there's a 5% chance you're going to blow the shit out of them, then they don't want to...
00:58:02.000I mean, that's like pure kind of Reagan back them off the point with deterrence.
00:58:08.000What he did as actual president is very Reagan-esque.
00:58:11.000The way he talks about foreign policy is very not Reagan-esque.
00:58:14.000It's led to this bizarre split in the Republican Party where people who are perceived as too hawkish on foreign policy are now considered sort of hyper-interventionists who are willing to get involved anywhere, as opposed to what most of the battles in the Republican Party are, which are really about...
00:58:52.000And Gorbachev knew that and he understood that.
00:58:55.000And when you look at a lot of conservatives, Trump supporters are angry that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney won't endorse Donald Trump, but I mean, when you say about the primary issue of their foreign policy that Bush lied about, that's stuff that Ted Kennedy, Code Pink, International Answer was saying in those days.
00:59:15.000Reagan's former arms negotiator, Ken Edelman, endorsing Kamala Harris and even saying that if Reagan were alive, I think he would endorse Kamala.
00:59:46.000You're going to have to take your lumps and expect people like George W. Bush, who you accused of lying about WMDs, you're going to have to expect them not to support you.
00:59:58.000So when you look at sort of the future of the Republican Party, I agree with you that I think that the sort of the Reagan is dead.
01:00:03.000What did Reaganism ever do for you is just ignorant of history.
01:00:06.000And also, when you look at sort of his platform, his platform still resonates with the vast majority of the Republican Party.
01:00:12.000By every polling metric, Americans tend to be very in favor of a muscular foreign policy.
01:00:18.000They're not in favor of intervention or boots on the ground everywhere, but neither was Reagan.
01:00:21.000They're very much in favor of a private property-based free market economy.
01:00:25.000They're not in favor of heavy interventionism and subsidization of the economy.
01:00:29.000And they tend to be more socially conservative, certainly, than the left is at this point.
01:00:34.000When you look at that, it's bewildering to me, I think, why there's been this attempt to pare away from Reagan.
01:00:42.000Why do you think there has been this attempt to say...
01:00:46.000By many in the MAGA movement, as opposed to grasping onto the Reagan legacy and saying, yeah, we're a continuation of that.
01:00:53.000There's been this attempt to say, no, no, we're something completely new.
01:02:08.000In my state right now, Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, who's running against Bob Casey Jr., is constantly hitting him on gender transitioning for teenage girls.
01:02:31.000Yeah, I think so, with the right messenger.
01:02:34.000It really is interesting the way that the left has sort of retconned Reagan.
01:02:38.000So the usual critique of Reagan now, and it was at the time, but they've really sort of amped this up, is the idea that Reagan was an idiot.
01:02:44.000And if you read Reagan's diaries, if you read anything that Reagan ever wrote, if you listen to his speeches from the GE circuit, You know that that is one of the stupidest contentions ever.
01:02:55.000I mean, this idea that Ronald Reagan was some sort of complete moron.
01:02:59.000First of all, I would just point out that if you play even a George W. Bush-Al Gore debate now, it sounds like Demosthenes debating Socrates.
01:03:06.000I mean, like, every political debate from 25, 30 years ago sounds like people who actually know things.
01:03:20.000And then you watch the debates, you see him and Gore, and you're like, These are fairly substantive, and they seem like they actually know about issues.
01:03:25.000I mean, he and John Kerry, that was only 20 years ago.
01:03:31.000And with Reagan, my book, The Crusader, Ronald Reagan, and the Fall of Communism, lays out that this had been a strategy for Reagan to take down the Soviets dating back to the 1960s.
01:04:11.000And then you and I We've both been to the Reagan Ranch.
01:04:14.000The end of that film, where he rides off into the sunset with John Barletta, and they overplay his November 5, 1994 Alzheimer's letter describing getting Alzheimer's as, now I will ride off into the sunset of my life.
01:04:29.000Everyone's bawling in the theater while they're watching it.
01:04:57.000I mean, it really has gotten so much worse.
01:05:00.000Many people talk about it in sort of, again, hagiographic terms, the sort of Tip O'Neill-Ronald-Reagan relationship, the fact that they would get together and that they were friendly with one another.
01:05:35.000I was 17 years old in 1984 presidential election.
01:05:40.000And these people can't imagine that it actually was a time of unity.
01:05:44.000And everybody didn't hate the guts of the president.
01:05:47.000And in those days, just because the president had an R next to his name didn't mean that you needed to hate him and call him a racist, right?
01:05:54.000So you give them today a message of unity, which they claim that they want, and they hate it.
01:06:08.000Even if you had the right Reagan today, there'd be a lot more hate of him regardless from the left.
01:06:14.000That's one of the things that's sort of fascinating about the transition from Carter to Reagan is that Carter, who I think was one of the worst presidents in American history.
01:06:21.000I think that Joe Biden and Carter are the two worst presidents of the last hundred years, by far not close.
01:06:27.000And when you look at Carter, however, Carter was, in 1976, campaigning as a cultural conservative.
01:06:34.000Carter campaigned as a churchgoing man who wanted to restore honor and normalcy to the White House, almost in the same way that George W. Bush tried to campaign that way in 2000 against the Clinton legacy.
01:06:44.000And so in 76, by the time you get to 80, there is this backlash that has materialized almost on both sides of the aisle against the McGovernite 1960s left-wing far radical coalition.
01:06:57.000And so in certain kind of cultural ways, Carter almost presages Reagan.
01:07:48.000In fact, Prairie Fire, the Manifesto of the Weather Underground, has among the dedications in the beginning to Sirhan Sirhan, the shooter of RFK Sr.
01:07:58.000So for them, they've needed a Democratic Party that could move to the far left, which it has.
01:08:05.000It's no longer the Jimmy Carter 1977 Democratic Party.
01:08:09.000Yeah, and that's sort of my hope for the backlash that is to come.
01:08:12.000I think it is not fully materialized, specifically because of all the incoming fire that Trump has taken and Trump's pugnaciousness and all of that.
01:08:19.000Because of that, I think that no one has really been able to take advantage of the fact that the Democratic Party has moved this far to the left.
01:08:24.000And so I think that Trump positionally has tried to occupy the middle in this election in some ways that, frankly, I don't particularly like as a conservative, right?
01:08:33.000Really far to the center on economics.
01:08:35.000He's basically now throwing out proposals, various subsidies to various groups, depending on where he's campaigning.
01:08:40.000But it's very obvious what he's trying to do.
01:08:41.000He's trying to positionally grab the center and take it away from Kamala Harris.
01:08:45.000It's just he's sort of prohibited by the amount of hatred against him from ever being able to be perceived as sort of the centrist candidate in the election.
01:08:52.000But what that does say is that whatever comes next, again, God willing, Trump wins, and some sense of normalcy is restored, and he governs well, and then whoever comes after him is the person who sort of picks up Both the Trumpian enthusiasm, but also campaigns in the more optimistic and warm way that you've talked about.
01:09:09.000Whatever comes next for the Republican Party.
01:09:11.000The Democrats have moved so far to the insane left.
01:09:16.000And I, for the life of me, would be kind of shocked if Republicans...
01:09:20.000I'm a little scared of the primary process, I'll be honest with you, just because it seems to be selecting for, in many cases, some of the worst candidates.
01:09:27.000But, like, the opportunity is right there for somebody to grab.
01:09:30.000Yeah, in fact, the left is so radical about it that if Trump wins in November 2024, they should calm down because he'll be out by January 2029, right?
01:09:43.000But they're so radical, and they've so radicalized themselves with slogans like Hitler, dictator, fascist, Trump's going to destroy democracy, that they're making it sound like He's going to barricade himself in the Oval Office with the Marines and somehow not be able to be removed, right?