Chris Buzkirk's new book, America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay, examines what it means to be a vital country and what it looks like when things are working.
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00:01:20.000I'm super excited for this entire hour with one of the clearest, smartest thinkers in the conservative movement, helps run American Greatness.
00:01:28.000You run American Greatness, amgreatness.com.
00:01:30.000And I do my clear thinking over there, too.
00:01:32.000You do your clear thinking over there.
00:01:33.000Your new book is America and the Art of the Possible, Restoring National Vitality in the Age of Decay.
00:01:42.000So I, yeah, I'm trying to think what's the best place to start on the book.
00:01:47.000I guess I would say this is I wanted to write a book about what had gone wrong in America.
00:01:53.000And as I was sort of working through this, this is a couple of years ago.
00:01:55.000I started to think through it, and I realized there was something really insufficient about writing that original idea for a book.
00:02:02.000And that was I didn't want to just complain.
00:02:06.000You know, I think everybody spends a lot of time saying, well, this went wrong or that went wrong or I wish it could be this way or wish it could be that way.
00:02:15.000And there's lots of things that have gone wrong.
00:02:17.000There's lots of things that we think we could improve.
00:02:19.000I always think about, you know, that sort of like there's always that poll question they ask around elections, right direction, wrong direction.
00:02:25.000And it's kind of one of those things that's super easy to say, like the country's wrong direction.
00:02:49.000Not just, I don't like this, but like, how do you define it in a way that you could actually take action on?
00:02:55.000And that's why the second half of the book really takes those things that I've identified that I think aren't working and have defined often in a very quantitative way and then come up with some potential solutions, not necessarily to solve everything, but at least to begin to solve problems.
00:03:14.000And so that's why the use of the word vitality in the subtitle was intentional, because it was just a way for me to think about what does it mean when things are working?
00:04:04.000And so I thought about like, what would what are the things that we would want in the country in order to be able to say like we're succeeding and things are going well?
00:05:31.000I did a thread about this on Twitter the other week because, and I just wanted to draw the contrast because, for instance, I use the example of France, and this is actually broadly true in Western Europe.
00:05:42.000France's lifespans have been increasing.
00:05:44.000Like the average lifespan or median lifespan in an American right now is a little bit over 75 years.
00:05:51.000In France, it just increased, again, to like 80.3 or 80.4 years.
00:05:57.000The heavy cigarette smoking France and wine and cheese France?
00:06:01.000One in three people is a regular cigarette smoker in France.
00:06:04.000So regular cigarette smoker, I have a whole theory on cigarettes.
00:06:07.000I find them to be repulsive to be around.
00:06:10.000However, I actually think cigarette smoking was a narcotic hedge against obesity.
00:06:29.000If you have to choose a vice, like it turns out like maybe the cigarette smoking is better for you than like the seed oils and the polyoxide.
00:06:52.000You know, you're inhaling a lot of carcinogens.
00:06:54.000But countries that still, like France, that have way higher cigarette smoking populations actually have higher life expectancy.
00:07:02.000They have higher life expectancy and they have lower incidences of chronic inflammatory disease like heart disease, diabetes, et cetera.
00:07:09.000And so I said, well, in terms of when we're talking about national vitality, like one of the things that is pretty obvious, it's not just like the material prosperity.
00:07:53.000As you know, that is less true now than it has been in the past.
00:07:58.000And it is just an indicator, in my view, of what's the general health.
00:08:04.000Like if people are generally optimistic about the future, if they feel like they have opportunities, they are more likely to have a family.
00:08:13.000And if you have, and countries that are based on a family as the basic building block of their country tend to have higher social trust.
00:08:21.000And as a result, and this is another element of, like, this is like my macro version of what is civilizational or national vitality look like.
00:08:29.000It's you have the high capacity for collective action.
00:08:33.000In other words, can you identify, agree upon, and achieve big goals.
00:08:40.000So the big one for the United States historically was we conquered the frontier.
00:08:44.000Like we start off as like these 13 colonies sort of clinging to the Atlantic coast, and everybody agrees we should get to the Pacific.
00:09:03.000And everybody participated in that in this country.
00:09:07.000Not just the people in the covered wagons, not just the people who were building the railroads, but there was somebody back home who was building spikes that went into the railroad.
00:09:19.000Everybody sort of had some share in the national project.
00:09:23.000And the idea that a country, a civilization, needs to be able to, A, agree on what that goal is, like, is almost foreign to the way we act as a country now.
00:09:38.000But if we want to be able to sort of sustainably, it's a funny word to use, but you know, in order to be able to sort of sustainably achieve what we understand as the American dream over the long term, we really need to figure these things out.
00:09:53.000And what I like, I don't use the term intentionally, like rebirth or restart or return.
00:10:31.000We can honor 1790 and we should, but we need to continue doing what those people in 1790 did, which was built.
00:10:39.000You know that we are too backward facing, where in every political convention or conversation, our own included, 50% of the speakers mention World War II.
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00:12:31.000And people talk about it all the time.
00:12:33.000And this sort of goes to my theme in the book about the Capacity for Collection Act, collective action.
00:12:39.000In other words, what are the big things that a country, our country, or any civilization can agree that they need to do because they're good, because it's an existential necessity, whatever it is.
00:12:52.000And World War II was maybe the last really big thing this country did.
00:12:56.000I would argue maybe that Apollo, the moon landing, is but even that is not at the same scale as World War II, obviously.
00:13:07.000There was national agreement, but it was probably a couple thousand people that were involved in that project.
00:13:12.000It was a few thousand people, many of whom were, you know, had been involved in World War II, you know, sort of famously that NASA, NASA imports, the German rocket program.
00:13:22.000So people from both sides of the war moved to America or were already here to came here and participated in this big project, which was legitimately a huge project.
00:13:32.000But what my argument here is in the book is that people hunger for that.
00:13:42.000And what we a lot of times are seeing with the political polarization, political tension, and friction that occurs in the country is that that's sort of an outgrowth of the fact that we don't have a big national project.
00:13:57.000The example I use, or one of the examples that I use in the book, is that very often there have been religious motivations behind big civilizational projects.
00:14:08.000And you think about all of the big monuments that have been built around the world.
00:14:14.000They are very often religious artifacts, effectively.
00:14:18.000Think about like the pyramids, the Sphinx of Giza.
00:14:21.000The oldest pyramid was built in like 4,500 BC.
00:14:25.000The Sphinx was built around 2500 BC, so like a thousand years before the Iliad.
00:14:30.000The Mayan temples, you have just Stonehenge.
00:14:34.000There were all these huge projects, the ziggurats of the Sumerians and the Akkadians.
00:14:39.000These are massive projects that required really, you know, huge logistical feats, organization, but also buy-in from people.
00:14:48.000And we wind up, you know, you go to Egypt, what do you see?
00:14:54.000One of my favorite examples that I cite in the book about how a people can undertake a very long-term project and why they do it is you have the Duomo, the cathedral in Milan.
00:15:07.000So this cathedral is construction is built.
00:15:47.000Like that project is ongoing since the late 14th century.
00:15:51.000By the way, that site is built upon a very early Christian site from the Roman era.
00:15:56.000But the cathedral itself was a 600-year project to get from groundbreaking to, okay, ribbon cutting or whatever.
00:16:04.000And then they just started saying, okay, well, we continue on because like the stained glass is old and like this thing has been weather worn or whatever.
00:16:13.000And there is buy-in in Milan, in Italy, you know, and Milan has changed hands during that 600-year period.
00:16:23.000Everybody agreed that that was something that was important.
00:16:27.000Now, some of those people were Christians and some of them weren't, but they thought it was important regardless, and they continued to do it.
00:16:36.000And that is the sort of social cohesion that makes a civilization successful over the long haul.
00:16:47.000I'm a big believer in the tactile and the physical.
00:16:50.000I think that Christianity, obviously I'm a Christian, so are you.
00:16:56.000Modern Christianity is very focused on the invisible, and that's okay.
00:17:00.000The Old Testament, though, is a very tactile, tangible religion, right?
00:17:06.000And I think we lose part of that, which is part of what we are doing, in my opinion, to glorify God, should also be building temples, cathedrals, works of art, music, statues that glorify him.
00:17:20.000Because things that you could physically see, what the Old Testament equivalent of the tabernacle or the Shabbos or the Kaddush are ways that you could physically be able to keep what is holy and sacred.
00:17:32.000That's an interesting thought to explore.
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00:18:36.000For those of you that listen to our podcast with regularity, you know that I have been bashing against Gnosticism.
00:18:44.000And we don't have to go too far too deep down that rabbit hole.
00:18:47.000However, it does tie into our conversation.
00:18:48.000Chris, you wanted to pick this up about glory be to God, to do big things in the physical world that glorify God.
00:18:54.000Yeah, I think this is actually super important.
00:18:57.000Just to sort of recap, you know, one of the things that has always and every place united civilizations is some common religion.
00:19:08.000Now, I know, like, probably not with your listeners, but for some people, when they hear that, it makes them itch a little bit because they think it means like intolerance or pogroms or something like that.
00:19:17.000Obviously, that's happened in the past, but you think about like places like, I know Rome, like the Roman Empire or something, you know, Rome was actually pretty tolerant, particularly by ancient standards.
00:19:34.000Dependent on who the emperor was, but Christianity within the Roman world was kind of unique because Rome's typical standpoint with foreign gods was just incorporate them.
00:20:20.000But the point I think that you were driving at is really important is that, you know, America is a country that has a Christian heritage.
00:20:28.000It has a, if you sort of take all Christians, regardless of denomination, as a single block, as a country that has a Christian plurality, and it has Christian ethics, like even there's even a version of like very left-wing ethics, which are sort of secularized Christianity, which is, by the way, a bad idea, right?
00:20:49.000Because when you take the Christ out of Christianity, it becomes really abusive.
00:20:53.000My point here is that when you do things to glorify God, and I think this was a point you were driving at, you can undertake these big projects.
00:21:03.000We were talking about the Duomo, the cathedral in the center of Milan.
00:21:07.000People were trying to create a work, and they did, in fact, create a work of unimaginable beauty, creativity.
00:21:16.000Even when you get down below just the very sort of high element of it, that's the beauty.
00:21:22.000You think about the people whose, their job was to organize it, the logistics.
00:21:26.000Like that was people using the talents that they had been given in order to do everything, you know, for Christians think about the world this way, you do everything in order to glorify God, as unto him, as scripture says.
00:21:43.000And these are things where we should not be bashful about building things in the physical world that are good, that are beneficial, that are beautiful.
00:21:54.000What would be more beautiful if the Bible tells us looking on the face of God, which we can't now, but we will after the glorification and the consummation.
00:22:05.000But to do these things with a conscious attitude that they are being done not to glorify the maker, meaning the person, but to glorify the creator.
00:23:22.000The second half of the book is sort of my attempt at solutions.
00:23:26.000He says, well, like, what do you, like, what's the solution?
00:23:28.000He's like, tell me, I haven't gotten there yet.
00:23:30.000So, like, one, I want to temper expectations.
00:23:33.000Like, I don't have the solution because I don't think there is a single like silver bullet that says, like, oh my gosh, we have all these problems.
00:23:41.000If we just do this, it's going to be fine.
00:23:44.000But what I did was, is I went through things that are very concrete that are achievable.
00:23:48.000I would try, I'll give you an example in just a second because social trust is very important, but you don't get a country of 330 million people that spans like this massive continent that goes from sort of dysfunction and polarization.
00:24:03.000And then it's kind of like the internet thing.
00:24:05.000With this one weird trick, we got everybody to have social trust again.
00:24:10.000But rather, what I put forward in the book is plans that I think are like audacious but achievable so that you can have that sort of functioning and that sort of trust and those sort of big goals, but things that you can do at a meaningful but still kind of small scale.
00:24:26.000So one of the examples that I use in here in the book is I propose building new cities in the country and that these cities, like brand new de novo cities, like Sahilo, out of nothing.
00:24:38.000Out of nothing, but that they should exist within a different purpose-built political rubric so that they would have, they would exist within the United States.
00:24:52.000They would exist under the rubric of the Constitution, but they would be given a pretty broad latitude to try different things.
00:25:02.000And I have talked to a couple of people about this and sort of they scratch their head.
00:26:11.000They have all the rights of the Constitution, which are protected by the courts, et cetera, et cetera.
00:26:16.000But they have a much lower regulatory burden and with it, particularly within certain industries.
00:26:23.000And that's actually an opportunity for Puerto Rico.
00:26:25.000Like, I know people on the left try and say, you know, Puerto Rico needs to be a state because it's bad for the Puerto Ricans and it's not fair.
00:26:32.000And in actuality, it's actually pretty good for Puerto Rico.
00:26:35.000Like, that's, they've got a great deal.
00:26:38.000And there are, there are businesses in Puerto Rico that are just really in the past maybe five or 10 years have realized what a good deal they have.
00:26:45.000And there's these burgeoning industries down there.
00:26:48.000But my point about the cities is, you know, like these are just analogs, right?
00:26:53.000Like, if you, if we were to say, let's build a new city wherever, and I don't really care if it's in New York, Blue State, Texas, Red State, California, Blue State.
00:27:38.000It's actually one of my examples in the blog of that.
00:27:40.000I was talking about things that were built.
00:27:43.000So the Hague Sophia was a church and that it is now a mosque.
00:27:47.000And in between, when Turkey was officially secular, it was a museum for many years.
00:27:52.000But there's even under all of these different regimes, there was an agreement that it was something beautiful and that it should be preserved.
00:28:00.000Yeah, and I, let's, let's explore that together.
00:28:32.000Like if we want, this is one of the projects I say the country should undertake.
00:28:36.000Like we should state as a national priority that the median age of an American should be 100 and we should try and do that within 50 years.
00:30:04.000But I will say, for some people that are morbidly obese, I think it would be better for them to be doing a pack a day than to be eating saturated fat and McDonald's and Burger King.
00:30:16.000We believe in science here on the Charlie Kirk show, right?
00:30:38.000It's a proven appetite suppressant, though.
00:30:40.000Anyone who has smoked in their life will tell you that a substitute for a meal could be a cigarette, where now it's a crispy cream donut or a Big Mac.
00:30:51.000Your body is demanding some form of sensory saturation and nicotine with some, you know, let's just say what becomes a dopamine rush and a noreperephine rush is actually a pretty good substitute instead of I'm going to just fill my body with caloric serotonin.
00:31:46.000Gosh, a bunch of thoughts on this subject.
00:31:48.000Ida, look, the, I guess the point I wanted to drive at was like we sort of focused on the smoking, which is, I think it's, it's fun because it's, it's at least partially true and it's super provocative.
00:32:32.000And the morbid obesity, like this is, this is another part of my argument is, and this, and this, like, you think about the big projects the United States should undertake if we want a country that is both working together on something that's important and beneficial, but it's where are we getting our food and what are we eating?
00:32:52.000We've talked about this because it's so important is, you know, like there was a conscious decision made in this country in the early 70s to industrialize American agriculture.
00:33:04.000I think there were good reasons for it, to be honest with you.
00:33:06.000Like, I don't want to sort of be Pollyanna and come along 50 years later and say, like, you mean, you wanted to make sure people had enough to eat?
00:35:29.000I mean, when you, some of these folks who like on this show, and this, I think, goes to the idea of like, what's actually good for people?
00:35:35.000What's necessary when they, when they're hunting, the first thing that they eat, which is what, you know, traditional people would eat, what do they like?
00:35:47.000There are fats, and you need those for your body to function.
00:35:51.000Weirdly, just as an aside on this, one of the strategies on the show to win is there's certain people who will try and gain a huge amount of weight before they start the show.
00:36:00.000So they just store fat on their body and then they feel like they don't have to eat.
00:36:03.000And one of them actually won after gaining like 100 pounds and just let himself sort of wear down and wore everybody else out.
00:36:10.000But the point is, the point for what we're talking about here is that the idea that you are being healthier by just chowing down on grain carbs is just false.
00:36:22.000You can go with almost zero carbohydrates.
00:36:24.000They're largely unnecessary for daily function because your body can turn fat into energy.