00:00:09.000This episode I sit down with the editor-in-chief of American Greatness, and we explore some very big and provocative ideas.
00:00:15.000You're going to really enjoy this conversation.
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00:01:31.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:39.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:38.000You know, I guess there's this sort of famous phrase, like Hemingway said, you know, that's kind of the way you go bankrupt really slowly and then all at once.
00:02:54.000I mean, this has been building for a while and it's like, yeah, these particular things happened.
00:03:00.000The big donations you're talking about from Google, the tearing down of storage, statues, the revoking of the names.
00:03:07.000Well, people have been agitating to have the Redskins change their names for 20 years, at least.
00:03:13.000And I guess one of my quick takeaways on this is that it does actually show what persistence does.
00:03:23.000Like if you have a dedicated group of people who want to accomplish something, it is possible to accomplish really big things.
00:03:31.000And that's something that I know that conservatives, people on the right broadly, kind of look at the last 50 or 60 years, maybe more, and look at having lost every major institution in the country and say, okay, can you ever do anything about that?
00:03:52.000You know, because we lost all we you know, even the military, I mean, when you look at the uh when you look at sort of the field-grade officers, you know, sort of colonels and above, they're interchangeable with the board of directors of a Fortune 100 country, right?
00:04:08.000I mean, they they sort of went to the same schools, they subscribed to the same cultural beliefs and doctrines.
00:04:15.000And I look back at that and or look not back, but I look at that and say, yeah, okay, we did lose these things, but there are people who are dedicated to this country, first of all, and to the ideas upon which it was founded, which made this a great country.
00:04:34.000And we need to get to work and not just say, okay, well, we lost, let's retreat.
00:04:39.000It's like, let's actually take a little bit of heart and say that actually human action and human agency matters.
00:04:47.000And if we're dedicated and we're smart and we work hard, we actually can build things that matter and that change the trajectory, not just at the margins, not just fiddling with little things, but we have to change the trajectory, and that's actually possible.
00:05:00.000Yes, I wrote a piece for your website, didn't it?
00:05:05.000And that was one thing you mentioned in either one of our private conversations or on the podcast where you said one of the big problems is the conservative movement is not thinking big enough.
00:05:16.000Well, yeah, I mean, this is a persistent theme that I, and I try and come back to this a lot, which is there's conservatives are, you know, I just am temperamentally sort of conservative, politically, obviously, on the right.
00:05:30.000And conservatives, there's a sense in which we don't want to think too big because there's a lot of risk and we think, well, what are the unintended consequences?
00:05:43.000Like, this is one of the sort of political principles.
00:06:05.000If you're an accountant for some probably anti-American corporation that has already disenfranchised our country, I guess that's important.
00:06:14.000I mean, I guess like anybody else, I prefer to pay less taxes than more, but is that really going to solve the biggest issues that are facing this country?
00:06:22.000And then you kind of take it out and people start to say, okay, you're right.
00:06:51.000I think if a country lacks direction or a spirit of achievement, you're going to deteriorate.
00:06:57.000And I think that in certain inflection moments of our country's history, we kind of found it by mistake, accidentally, or intentionally through making ourselves think big.
00:07:07.000I mean, Thomas Jefferson, literally acquiring the western part of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, was, by definition, thinking big.
00:07:13.000Teddy Roosevelt, by commissioning the national parks, which is something that conservatives, for whatever reason, don't want to talk about.
00:07:21.000And I think it's actually one of the coolest things that a Republican president ever did was preserving Yelso National Park with Ramsey Johnson.
00:07:28.000It's one of the great legacies of any president, but especially a Republican.
00:07:32.000It's being a conservative, by definition, is conserving what you love.
00:07:36.000Or winning World War II was obviously thinking very, very big.
00:07:42.000And going to the moon, JFK, or defeating the Soviet Union, I think when we lose a pioneer spirit or frontier spirit, or what does success look like, I think societies tend to meander.
00:07:52.000And they will inevitably meander to leftism.
00:07:57.000Yeah, this is, there's actually a lot there.
00:08:00.000I mean, you think about the founding of this country.
00:08:21.000I mean, you have these different moments in history, sort of Athens, Rome, that they're, in a way, they're foreshocks as to what America would be and could be, because there was an element of thoughtfulness and intentionality there.
00:08:38.000But still, then you look at 1776 and 1789, and that's quite a unique moment in history.
00:08:45.000And it struck me as an irony that conservatives, the people who revere the founding most in this country, are in some ways the least like the founders.
00:08:57.000The founders thought, I don't like the way this is working out with the king.
00:09:03.000We have these systems of government that are already here.
00:09:08.000So we have sort of a mixed regime where we have local rule that's semi-autonomous, but we're still ultimately colonies of the crown.
00:09:18.000And they said, you know, actually, we can do this better, and we want to do it better.
00:09:22.000So we're going to just, we're going to found our own country.
00:09:25.000And then you fast forward 200 years and like sort of 20th and 21st century conservatives revere the founding itself and the documents and the ideas.
00:09:37.000Yeah, but yeah, but how many conservatives that you know, I've done, you don't have to name any names, but how many can you think of right now, these sort of household brand conservatives, can you think of that would get behind founding a new country?
00:09:55.000I mean, maybe there's a couple, but I don't know who they are.
00:09:59.000But that's my point, is that it's sort of that the phrase from the Declaration, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to exolve ties.
00:10:11.000It is a hugely, it is a statement that's pregnant with all these implications.
00:10:16.000And that's the sort of big thinking that a lot of Americans need to be doing.
00:10:25.000And, you know, and I reflect on that period of the founding.
00:10:28.000You know, Jefferson reflected a certain stream in American political thought at that point.
00:10:35.000And then you sort of have the Hamiltonians and you have sort of the people gathered around John Witherspoon, who had a more maybe a more distinctly Christian view of what they were doing.
00:10:51.000I've spent some time recently reading sermons from that era, which were very influential.
00:11:06.000It was interesting because I've read because there was some back and forth between pastors who didn't think they had the right to preach from the pulpit.
00:11:17.000I mean, there's like this whole dispute about what's the appropriate role.
00:11:21.000There's this Protestant resistance theory.
00:11:25.000The country was very Episcopalian at the time.
00:11:28.000Yeah, and particularly in Tidewater, Virginia, In New England, it was Congregationalist, trending Unitarian, which ultimately had pretty bad effects on the country.
00:11:41.000But, you know, on the, I guess my point here was you go back to sort of the Jefferson Hamilton, and then I'm just sort of using Witherspoon as a stand-in for sort of the Christian sensibility among the founders.
00:11:55.000There was a broad spectrum, and yet they were all thinking about a new country.
00:11:59.000That's my point, is that you had a broad spectrum of political opinion, and yet they were all pretty united ultimately on this one thing, which is we're going to build a country here on this, like the eastern shore of this continent, and we don't even know how far west this continent goes, really, but we're going to build a country here.
00:12:18.000What you're saying is that the founders were not thinking about how they could lower the marginal tax rate with King George.
00:12:24.000They just want to lower the T-tax rate.
00:12:51.000I mean, that is the most fundamental sort of thinking and acting that you can do.
00:12:57.000And so, you know, when I think about sort of 21st century conservatives, people on the right now, they need to be thinking in those terms, not in the sense necessarily of founding a brand new country, but in regime-level politics, what is the regime that we want?
00:13:15.000Because it will help us to sustain the type of life we want for ourselves and for our families.
00:13:21.000Well, and I have, without saying any names, there are some conservatives that in the last couple of weeks, to say I've been disappointed would be an understatement, have said America is 400 years old, and they run some of the biggest organizations out there.
00:13:35.000And I've privately sent messages to these people.
00:13:56.000Yeah, it's so the 1619 thing, obviously, I disagree with.
00:14:01.000I think I have a little bit of a different frame on this.
00:14:06.000I wrote something about this recently, and I think that you can, there's, I agree with you in the sense that the United States of America came into existence in 1776.
00:14:19.000But there's a part of our history that's important that goes to 1607, not to 1619.
00:14:25.000So you have the settlements in Virginia, and you have the first written law in North America by colonists.
00:14:34.000So you have Dale's Law written in Virginia, then in 1620, you have the Mayflower Compact.
00:14:42.000And when you go back and look at, and by the way, these are super short documents.
00:14:47.000So I'm about to say, when you go back and read these, it's an assignment.
00:14:50.000If you read both of them, it's like a 10-minute assignment, totally, to read it.
00:16:14.000And those things stand the test of time because the law has to have goal.
00:16:19.000Well, they obviously want to restrain evil of the normal kinds, murder and theft and those sorts of things.
00:16:26.000But there are other laws where what they're trying to do is they want to make sure that the people are secure and that family and worship, the ability for those people to worship in their churches, that those things are protected so that because those are the sort of the three institutions in life are family, church, government.
00:16:50.000And government exists to allow those two to function in their worlds.
00:16:54.000Now, obviously, not everybody worships, and we think that that's their right to do it or not do it.
00:17:00.000But for the people who do, the fact that they are able to do so and that the church is able to operate in its fear is absolutely critical.
00:17:10.000And for the family, too, that's a natural pre-political institution.
00:17:18.000And in that sense, government exists in order to benefit the family.
00:17:23.000Like families and people come together in political arrangements to protect each other and to protect themselves.
00:17:32.000And so that's, and all those things were really clear in those 17th century documents in the early 1600s.
00:17:40.000And then it's even when you, again, you get back to you get back to the language in the Declaration, the Constitution, saying, you know, we're going to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
00:17:59.000And that's, I think, what we really need to be thinking of in very concrete terms when we're thinking about politics is what's the end result?
00:18:09.000You know, does it benefit these parts of society so that they can do what they naturally do, imperfectly, of course, but what they naturally do?
00:18:19.000Or are we doing what we as conservatives often accuse the left of doing, which is being utopian?
00:18:26.000Like, are we just making things so abstract that it doesn't even matter what the results on the ground are because, hey, we got to say that we're free markets or something.
00:18:39.000Like, I like free markets too, but you pursue these things.
00:18:43.000Well, it's almost the idolatry of ideologues, right?
00:18:58.000But I also think it's, first of all, I think it's not always applicable.
00:19:03.000And I also think that a country can, I don't think, can sustain itself if you do not have a very clear direction of the type of country that you either want to preserve or the type of country that you want to try to aspire to.
00:19:38.000What kind of conservative movement should we have?
00:19:40.000I think what we want to do is reduce our use of abstractions because I find that they tend to be, they have become, I'll say it that way, they've become like a coping mechanism for the inability to actually impact policy, to change conditions on the ground.
00:20:07.000And so we sort of come up with these slogans, which, you know, the slogans themselves may be perfectly true in theory, right?
00:20:26.000And so I think about it, like, what do we, I think about it in these terms, like going back to what I was saying, what do we want the country to look like?
00:21:14.000Like, everybody likes to talk about privilege right now.
00:21:18.000A friend of mine wrote a piece for us at American Greatness about, and we might want to actually talk about this, about the lessons that we could learn from what happened in Russia in the 90s.
00:22:17.000Families should be getting together, you know, people should be getting together, forming families.
00:22:21.000Those families should be stable, and they should be having children enough to, at a minimum, sustain the population of the country, preferably to be growing the population of the country.
00:22:32.000Those people should be able to buy a house and afford a house.
00:22:35.000And here's the one that I've actually inexplicably have gotten pushback on this one.
00:22:43.000What a great country it would be if you could buy a house and support a family of four in a middle-class lifestyle on a single income.
00:23:16.000I don't, you know, if women are working.
00:23:18.000If women want to work, God bless, work.
00:23:20.000I'm just saying it should be a choice, not a necessity.
00:23:25.000If women want to go to work whether they're married or not, more power to them.
00:23:30.000But if women want to stay home and be able to have kids, they should be able to do that too while their husband's working and not have to go to work just to stay in the middle class.
00:23:40.000Not because you want to be rich, but because you want to be able to afford to buy a house.
00:23:46.000You want to be able to feed your kids.
00:23:48.000You want to be able to give them health insurance and put them through school and all those things.
00:23:52.000And what we've found is, and I'll give credit where credit's due here, a friend of mine, Oren Cass, who's a very smart economist.
00:24:00.000I think I may have actually mentioned this the last time we were together, but I plug it all the time because Oren did such terrific work on this.
00:24:08.000He came up with this thing called the Cost of Thriving Index.
00:24:10.000And what he found is that in 1985, the median male wage earner in this country could support a family of four, basically a middle-class life on 30 weeks of work.
00:24:30.000Yeah, and so as Oren likes to point out very dryly, with a dry sense of humor, he says, problem being 53 weeks, well, 52 weeks in the year.
00:24:40.000And so what happens is either you fall down the socioeconomic ladder distribution or you have to have two wage earners.
00:24:51.000And there's all kinds of things that happen then.
00:24:55.000Either you delay having kids, you don't have kids, you have fewer kids, the kids don't have as much time with either parent, as it turns out.
00:25:03.000And there's a bunch of polling on this that shows basically most women want to be able to be with their kids, especially when they're young.
00:25:14.000Yeah, they want to be able to probably go back to work later, but they want to be able to spend those key years, and that's sort of a moving target as to what that is, but call it 10 or 12 years or so, kind of get them into school and then be able to go back to work.
00:25:31.000But what happens is that it's really hard economically to be able to do that where we are right now as a country.
00:25:40.000And so you say, well, what should we want?
00:25:43.000Well, that's one of the things is to be able to make that possible.
00:25:46.000I think the numbers we use are all wrong.
00:26:41.000We've definitely diminished, I mean, to the point basically of belittling sort of physical labor, artisanal type of labor, and we've fetishized office work, not even something that's, you know, very, that requires like sort of high cognitive aptitude.
00:27:01.000Like it's not that we have fetishized like neurosurgery or mathematics or people who are mathematicians.
00:27:09.000I mean, those people, of course, get the respect that is their due, I think.
00:27:15.000But there's somehow a sense that's, by the way, very much reinforced by the education system and has been sort of pushed out to parents, which is you want to work in an office, like that's respectable white-collar work.
00:27:30.000But if you are somehow working in a traditional like blue-collar field with your hands or whatever, that's like somehow you're in a lower class in a way.
00:28:40.000But I said, so you guys would be okay with a higher likelihood of them going to a college to borrow money they don't have, to study things that don't matter, to find jobs that don't exist, where we know we need plumbers, especially in Winnetka.
00:30:09.000I was going to kill myself if I tried to fix something.
00:30:12.000But the point is that somehow that's not as good as, in a lot of people's minds, that's not as good as being like the assistant vice president of your pencil sharpener and working in.
00:30:23.000But for some company that probably is funding BLM anyway.
00:30:26.000But I think some of it, Chris, is I think the SAT standardized testing contributed to this negatively, which does not measure for any sort of trajectory of success in the trades of HVAC or plumbing or electrician or auto mechanic or maybe just the problem solver entrepreneur.
00:30:46.000SAT doesn't measure any of that potential at all whatsoever.
00:30:50.000And I think we have stigmatized those professions in such a unrealistic box where it's like, oh, those people are the lessons, right?
00:31:04.000But you find out also that people go through sort of primary, secondary education.
00:31:10.000They think if you want to be something, you have to go to college.
00:31:13.000And it turns out there's a college requirement that makes no sense for a lot of jobs.
00:31:21.000I mean, I did this, I guess it was at the end of last year now, but I went on like monster.com and ladders and some of the hiring websites.
00:31:30.000I just wanted to see, because I was thinking about this exact issue, I was they wanted to see like what jobs require a college degree?
00:31:40.000And it's pretty much a standard requirement.
00:31:43.000It's like it's just, I know they don't even think about it.
00:31:46.000There's like you need to know this and that and the other thing, and you have to have a college degree.
00:31:51.000And you look at these jobs and it's like entry-level sales for it doesn't matter what, you know, whatever the whatever the product is, like, why?
00:33:06.000But then I think about a friend of mine who is in the venture capitalist business, has been for years.
00:33:14.000I was talking to him a couple years ago about what he looked for when he was because he had built a software company and sold, and then he got into the venture world.
00:33:28.000I said, well, what was the type of thing that you were looking for when you were hiring programmers, coders?
00:33:34.000I said, you know, are there certain schools that have really good CS programs?
00:34:04.000Now he goes to Harvard, of course, and drops out, but because he was a genius coder, I mean, he's obviously super high IQ and very good and very good technically, but this is somebody who could have done a lot regardless of going to Harvard or not.
00:34:20.000Think about somebody like Palmer Lucky.
00:35:46.000I think this would be a fun place to take the conversation because you say we as conservatives don't think big enough of where we want to take the country.
00:35:54.000I think you and I are beginning that, but it's just not happening enough.
00:35:58.000And even the conservatives that say they stand for the founding principles and they pass out their pocket constitutions, when there's actually a call to rebel tyranny, authoritarianism, they're nowhere to be found.
00:36:08.000But I think the left made a decision in the late 90s.
00:36:11.000And I don't know if they did it consciously or if they did it accidentally or they did it.
00:36:16.000I don't think it's relevant, but they just did it, where they decided, you know, these middle-class workers, we're going to kind of take them for granted a little bit.
00:36:24.000We want to become the party of the super rich and the poor.
00:36:28.000And you kind of see that the Democrats throughout the mid-2000s and early 2010 and 2011, the Democrats decided that we are going to represent the ruling class and also the people that we're going to convince are oppressed.
00:36:41.000And Republicans, through Donald Trump, like backward backed themselves into saying, I guess we represent the working class now.
00:36:48.000And Donald Trump did a great service to this.
00:36:51.000But the Democrats have a very clear vision of the country that they want to create.
00:36:54.000They want to create a country that is really, really good for a very, very small set of people that are in the country club, if you will, that are in the prescribed group.
00:37:02.000And everyone else is struggling to barely get by.
00:37:06.000And they have so I guess the question is when it comes to the left and the country they want to create, how does that even differentiate with some of what the establishment Republicans want?
00:37:25.000There are some differences, but there's unfortunately more similarities.
00:37:31.000I mean, there's more similarities than I think a lot of establishment Republicans or sort of conservative ink type conservatives would like to admit.
00:37:41.000I guess let me start with the Democrats.
00:37:44.000The formulation I've got, which is very, very similar to what you've got, is the way that one way to frame the political divide in this country right now is that Democrats, like I had one little wrinkle to the way you have it.
00:37:56.000So Democrats are the party of true elites plus elite aspirants, people who want to be elites, but you might call them the professional managerial class, plus the permanent underclass, what Marx would have called the lumpen proletariat.
00:38:13.000And they are allied against the middle class and the working class, which are sort of in America, you know, that's like in America, you might just call it the broad middle class.
00:38:22.000It's called the Christian working middle class, mostly in the Midwest of our country.
00:38:28.000Yeah, there's a big geographic element to it as well.
00:38:31.000But it's, I mean, the really perverse thing about this for the left is that it incentivizes them to increase the size of the underclass.
00:38:41.000The more people you impoverish, the more people that you convince that they are part of some intersectionally oppressed group, you can use those people against your class enemies, against the middle class, against the working class.
00:38:58.000But all of the spoils of that go to the top.
00:39:02.000So they use the underclass basically as stormtroopers against the middle class.
00:39:12.000And that is, that's why, you know, it's an interesting frame when you start to think about a lot of the sort of woke politics.
00:39:20.000Like, in a way, there's a strand of that where that is, a lot of that is an intra-left struggle.
00:39:29.000Now, when you get to the level of obviously a lot of things that spill out into the open, it affects everybody.
00:39:34.000And it goes into schools and to HR departments, it affects everybody.
00:39:38.000But there is an element of that where what you have going on is the woke politics is that I talked about those elite aspirins, what I call PMCs, the professional managerial class.
00:39:51.000I did not make up the term, by the way.
00:40:22.000But a lot of that, a lot of like the, a lot of the woke stuff is being used by those people to jockey within their competitive set.
00:40:32.000So that's why you see all this like left-on-left violence, so to speak.
00:40:36.000You know, it's like they're trying to get people fired.
00:40:40.000And yeah, they definitely want conservative scalps, but they want the liberal scalps too, because that means that this person gets to take that person's spot.
00:40:51.000And so that's sort of an interesting element about it.
00:40:54.000I guess one thing I wonder about is is there a circumstance in which that makes that tears them apart because they turn on each other?
00:41:04.000And I think the real struggle there is the people that actually believe the Marxist nonsense versus the people that say they believe the Marxist nonsense, they just want to be the top of the hierarchy.
00:41:20.000The dividing line is the Noam Chomsky's that actually do believe in this bizarro Rousseauian world where we go back to primitive and infancy, if you will, which will not happen because it goes so against human nature.
00:41:35.000There has to be so much destruction to get anywhere near it.
00:41:37.000Where there's the people that just kind of wink and nod at it, but they're going to use it as a way to climb up the ladder so that they can be king.
00:41:44.000Well, let me give you a good example of that.
00:41:47.000Every single person who's watching right now has seen this in the past six weeks.
00:41:53.000Every corporation that you have ever done business with has been emailing you in these troubled times, please know that we stand with fill in the blank and we're doing this, fill in the blank, and we're doing that.
00:42:50.000But God forbid they go arrest the arsenists.
00:42:53.000But complete the point, because you're talking about the corporate...
00:42:55.000Basically, there's if you are one of the people who sort of is a true believer in like systemic racism and you see this movement and you're very pleased because you think that this is a very, this is like this moral outpouring.
00:43:11.000Okay, so I want to take that person who's just operating in good faith.
00:43:15.000I hope that those people are out there.
00:43:18.000Within a nanosecond, it just becomes a commercial for the Fortune 500.
00:43:35.000I think that's a really interesting point because if you point that out to the Marxists and you say, you do realize that these corporate megatrons that you hate, they're using your movement to actually maximize their profits.
00:44:26.000But there's some very, I think, people of, it's obviously a very small set of people, but they say exactly this, and they say, this is like just corporate power co-opting a movement for profit in order to exploit.
00:44:43.000And this is a point where I would say people who are conservative would say, yeah, it is.
00:44:50.000Like, we're not Marxists, obviously, but I can also see that what's happening here is that, you know, the Fortune 500 is just saying, this is a great chance for a commercial, and we can maybe drive wages down for the middle class because we don't like those people anyway.
00:45:05.000And it's like one of these weird moments where there's people here and here who can actually see what's going on in here.
00:45:28.000Part of it is there might not be huge profit upside.
00:45:31.000And I'm talking more about front-facing businesses than back-facing businesses, restaurants in particular, where they're like, oh, no, no, no, we're with you 100%.
00:46:13.000That's what corporations are there to do.
00:46:16.000But I also think a lot of these people were educated in these sort of very elite left-wing schools.
00:46:22.000And their sensibility in all things is with the left.
00:46:28.000And so maybe they're not on board, like deep down in their heart of hearts, maybe they're not on board 100%, but they're definitely sympathetic, right?
00:46:35.000I mean, that's, and this is what, to go back to the original question, you guys, well, how different are conservatives on some of these things?
00:46:43.000This is what this is what sort of the I'll say maybe sort of the people who are professionally conservative, people who somehow jobs in, you know, in media or politics or whatever, and they are conservatives.
00:46:59.000This is what a lot of those people don't get.
00:47:01.000And it is less true with the rank and file.
00:47:40.000It's funny, when that email came out, which was probably three weeks ago now, I had like 10 people email it to me because Brooks Brothers is like an American institution.
00:48:16.000And they, here's the, here's the, here's why I choose Brooks Brothers is because it's like their clothing, you know, dress clothing is super American, super traditional.
00:48:29.000Like every young Republicans meeting has like 75% of the guys there is wearing like a Brooks Brothers tie or shirt or blazer or maybe all three or the khakis or whatever.
00:48:40.000And so like this is why I got so many people emailing this to me is because every Republican is on their list.
00:48:47.000And they so, but nonetheless, they just sign up along with whatever the latest is.
00:48:54.000I also think there's a third wrinkle to it though, Chris, which is that they think we're stupid and they don't think we'll actually act or shop morally.
00:49:04.000I think they take conservative purchasing for granted.
00:49:33.000Though there was a time in the 80s, I know conservatives did a lot of boycotts pretty successfully, boycotted, a famous one was boycotting 7-Eleven to get them to stop selling porn magazines.
00:49:46.000That was maybe the last successful conservative right-wing boycott of anything.
00:49:51.000But what these large companies know is that actually you don't have that many other choices because the consolidation that's occurred in almost every industry means that, yeah, you don't like it.
00:51:27.000That has been such an eye-opener for me, and I think the chamber has played a part of this.
00:51:31.000But we were somehow convinced, and of course, I'm biased to this because of what we do at Turning Point USA and the campus work that we do.
00:51:37.000We were somehow convinced we as the general, we as a country, that somehow what was happening on college campuses wasn't going to metastasize into corporate America.
00:51:47.000And this was so foolish when you look at it over the last couple of decades.
00:51:50.000Oh, yeah, their little radicalism, their hatred of our country.
00:51:54.000It's just kind of like a nuclear waste spill.
00:51:56.000We'll just wall it off and we'll keep it in New Haven.
00:52:54.000And so that's a very difficult concept for a lot of conservatives, though, to understand because traditionally, I don't know if it was as true in the 70s, 80s, or 90s.
00:53:04.000Corporate America used to be somewhat center-right-ish, or at least somewhat pro-America.
00:53:09.000And this goes to a point we were talking off camera.
00:53:29.000I don't think a country can continue that way because you will either have an uprising or the elites will just let the country go to total wreck, just complete and total ruin.
00:53:38.000Yeah, I mean, it's there's a reason that Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters deplorable, right?
00:54:05.000He is, he basically is just the avatar of all of those people that they despise.
00:54:12.000And they don't like people who are from flyover country, who don't, who haven't learned the jargon of intersectionality or whatever.
00:54:24.000And, you know, this is like, it's the weirdest thing.
00:54:27.000This is why people go to college, they learn this jargon, and then they go back to wherever they're from.
00:54:33.000And it's not even like it has to be Wichita.
00:54:35.000It could just be, you know, Orange County, California, or Riverside or something.
00:54:39.000And they start talking in this jargon, and you find out people look at you like you're insane because they have no idea what you're talking about.
00:54:49.000And it is, this is actually, I know this is what you're asking, but I actually think this is an opportunity for conservatives to sort of expand our base.
00:55:00.000And this is why I think it's more useful to talk about sort of concrete issues than about like sort of theory and ideology.
00:55:09.000Because a lot of people don't like having those things forced down their throat.
00:55:18.000In most people's daily life, their experience isn't, oh, America's super racist and everybody's at each other's throats.
00:55:26.000It's, you know, no, I mean, like, my kids play Little League and there's people of all different like races and religions and then we go for pizzas with all the families afterwards.
00:56:09.000Then I think that's really, I think that's very powerful.
00:56:14.000But, you know, conservatives, or I won't say conservatives, Republicans still have this cognitive dissonance.
00:56:21.000We think that to be in favor of free enterprise and private property and innovation or all those things or America, we think all those things mean, well, we have to be aligned with the Fortune 500.
00:56:59.000Life is great in D.C. if you have one of these jobs where you can never get fired at a think tank.
00:57:04.000And the house you bought 10 years ago for, I don't know, whatever, $300,000 is now worth $700,000 because property values in Washington, D.C. actually do only go straight up because the main employer there is never going out of business.
00:57:17.000In fact, it's built in to grow at 7% a year.
00:58:06.000They always had very good things to say about America.
00:58:08.000And yet now you see that there's a difference here.
00:58:11.000I don't think we've seen this in American history before, though, where you have the tycoons of every single vertical of industry that outwardly want the demise of that country.
00:58:23.000The people completely reject those people and you create new elites because that's just not naming elites, but authors and figures that replace those, right?
00:58:37.000They get what they want, and they do rule over almost a Brazilian model country where you have to, you have complete and total anarchy in the streets and you have a perpetual underclass and get used to it.
00:58:47.000And so you've talked about this, though, about having better elites of the better ruling cause.
00:58:53.000I don't want to tempt the audience too much with this, but I'm super fascinated with it because I think that's one of the more troubling signs of where we are in our country.
00:59:01.000Yeah, I mean, look, one of the biggest lies that liberalism tells people is the lie of egalitarianism.
00:59:10.000And the truth of egalitarianism is that we're all created in God's image, and that has important implications for politics.
01:00:29.000You see it, I think, just in human nature.
01:00:31.000It's knowable just by reason, but also by revelation, which is that there are hierarchies and that that establishes an order that's good for people.
01:00:40.000So you see it in, you know, you see really clearly in honor your father and mother.
01:00:50.000Obviously, there are parents who do bad things, but in general, your parents are there to nurture you, to help you grow up, and to protect you when you're young and all those sorts of things.
01:00:59.000Well, that's a model for the way hierarchies should be, right?
01:01:03.000There's a responsibility that goes from superior to inferior in the hierarchy.
01:01:10.000And again, when I use the term superior and inferior, I don't ever want people taking me out of context.
01:01:15.000I don't mean that in a moral sense, but I mean that in the way that things are ordered.
01:01:27.000But it is all right for them to order your life for your good.
01:01:32.000And so the question is, how do you recognize that truth in the political sphere?
01:01:37.000How do you create those hierarchies that benefit everybody, that recognize the moral equality on the one hand, and then sort of promote things that promote people being able to achieve sort of their best version of their life and then leaving it up to those people to go out and live their lives.
01:02:03.000And that's the thing that we need to recognize that when we're thinking about elites, we want elites that recognize that order.
01:02:11.000You don't pay lip service to a sort of a phony egalitarianism.
01:02:18.000You talk about the real moral equalities and you also talk about how in the political sphere, for instance, you want government that is able to do the things that it does really well for the benefit of the country and for the people.
01:02:36.000And in the sort of the other elite institutions, I'll call them, whether it be schools or media or whatever, you want them, there's a responsibility of all of those institutions to everybody else, right?
01:02:47.000And that's something, I guess I would look at this and they say, you know, that maybe the big change that has sort of activated a lot of what we see that has harmed the country is when that sense of responsibility went away.
01:03:04.000When it became, and I think this comes out of like this radical individualistic idea that I'm just out here to like self-actualize.
01:04:22.000I mean, this is like, you know, like sort of the, I guess sort of the right-of-center version of this is that sort of libertarianism, you know, the kind of the Ayn Rand version is like, no, you absolutely don't.
01:04:36.000Like, just go and like, it's all about you.
01:04:42.000And by the way, you know, before the libertarians get mad at me, like, I loved reading Ayn Rand too.
01:04:47.000It was like a great book, but I wouldn't advocate.
01:04:51.000You wouldn't create a governing philosophy.
01:04:54.000I wouldn't advocate running my life or let alone a country around some of the stuff I read in the book.
01:04:59.000Yeah, and I think that you look at people that Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Ben, Brin, people that have amassed incredible amounts of wealth, okay, but they fund, they speak, they act completely contrary to any sort of social responsibility of America, of what we stand for, our history.
01:05:20.000And you look at the robber barons that were supposed to be horrible in the 1900s.
01:05:24.000And Tucker Carlson talks about this a lot, where you have Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan Chase, all these individuals, they actually loved the country and they knew they were in charge.
01:05:37.000They said, yes, we have the money, we have the resources, you guys can hate us or love us, but we do have a responsibility.
01:05:45.000Now, I actually think the robber baron description is a little bit overdone.
01:05:50.000I do agree with the action that Teddy Roosevelt took, and this is disagreed upon in fundamentalist circles, but whatever.
01:05:57.000But I think that if you allow that to continue itself, how will it be any different than eventually we're just ruled by the Romanovs?
01:06:07.000Yeah, look, I mean, you think about the concentration of corporate power that led to sort of trust-busting in the early 20th century, you know, with concentration of power in banking and railroads and oil.
01:06:44.000There's been some interesting things, I'll just use this as one example.
01:06:47.000People, like libertarians, love to say things like, well, you know, if like you're in, I don't know, whatever, a chemical engineer or something, you can just, like, and you don't like the conditions at your company, you're going to disagree with them, just go get a new job.
01:07:03.000Well, actually, as it turns out, that if you know, you have this, you're in a particular field, that's where your skill set is.
01:07:10.000There maybe is only two or three or four companies that do that, number one.
01:07:17.000So the set of companies that you can work for is quite small.
01:07:22.000And then they're geographically dominant, kind of like the discussion we were having about the airlines.
01:07:27.000And so maybe if you could get a job, that means uprooting your family and moving from Minneapolis to Memphis.
01:07:34.000And that puts a strain on the family because now families get, extended families get spread out.
01:07:41.000And that has all kinds of bad social consequences, right?
01:07:49.000And so it's not like the market will solve everything theory just doesn't actually hold out because there's all these hold up because there's all these other externalities.
01:08:01.000And it never, and you know, economic externalities, number one.
01:08:04.000But number two is that there's like social externalities that like that the that a lot of economists just don't take into account at all anyway.
01:08:12.000So how much of what's happening, and this is something that conservatives have just rejected.
01:08:17.000How much of the decline of the fabric of our country do you attribute to be economic versus moral and cultural?
01:08:26.000So the conservatives would always heavyweight the moral cultural.
01:09:03.000They learned all these crappy, crummy ideas, and then they can't find any job of meaning.
01:09:07.000They can't buy a home, let alone a car, let alone start a family or sustain their kids.
01:09:13.000And what might have been a prosperous economic climate if certain decisions weren't made to deindustrialize our entire country and with it bring in limitless cheap labor that disenfranchises our own workers, maybe they wouldn't be picking up the Bernie Sanders sign.
01:09:31.000I mean, and just to say that economics play no role at all in this, I think it's ridiculous.
01:09:37.000Yeah, no, it's and I don't know the numbers.
01:09:53.000I mean, you think about, I mean, like, there's tons of social science on this.
01:09:57.000For instance, when there's all kinds of bad things that happen in people's lives that happen after they lose a job, okay, and when the income goes down, divorces go up, substance abuse goes up, suicides go up.
01:11:38.000And one of the, and again, I've really woken up to this in the last year and a half and two years, which traditionally I would have said, oh, just they lose a job, pick up your stuff and go move to a big city.
01:12:24.000I think if you just are kind of sequestered to a 900-foot apartment in Brooklyn to raise a family, I think that makes you less likely to raise a family, actually.
01:12:35.000And I think that that is actually one of the most meaningful things a human being can do.
01:12:39.000And so I think the argument then necessitates itself by saying, well, then what kind of public policy are we creating to at least make it less hard to do that?
01:12:58.000And I think right now it is you have created these 12 or 13 metropolitan areas that are incredibly leftist and liberal where almost everyone who lives in those areas are high in debt, very miserable, low in church-going rates, low birth rates, low fertility rates, and they vote incredibly Democrat, right?
01:13:22.000And I think the more we concentrate power and wealth and people in those areas and we get away from any form of, let's just say, horizontal expansion, I think that it's actually very troublesome for the country.
01:14:41.000So I'm going to diverge a little bit here, but I think you're going to appreciate it.
01:14:45.000So thinking about California, because California was basically, it was in the sort of, I don't know, middle 20th century, it was like the apex of the American dream.
01:15:03.000Yeah, no, and it was, and it was great.
01:15:05.000I mean, California, in a lot of ways, California is still unique just because the geography and topography there is very unique and the weather is very unique.
01:15:14.000And there's still a lot of good things about California, though fewer and fewer in a lot of ways all the time.
01:15:20.000But it was sort of everybody in America somehow aspired to be like California.
01:19:21.000And even though it was competitive, it was also sort of like, in a way, it was like SEAL training because it was like you were really encouraged to help each other achieve whatever the next goal was.
01:19:35.000And these kids stayed fit their whole life.
01:20:24.000Yeah, it's like, let's not build a solution.
01:20:27.000Let's just not do anything and hope the storm blows over.
01:20:30.000But even more than that, like on the specific issue, like, of, of, of childhood and fitness, like, they've basically ended PE in California on Newsom's orders.
01:20:55.000You go from this thing of how we can all achieve health, fitness, which also led to higher academic attainment, which led to less disciplined problems, which led to more camaraderie among the students.
01:21:10.000You go from that to, actually, let's not do anything.
01:21:15.000Let's not even have PE at all because somebody's going to not feel good about themselves, which I think is specious anyway.
01:21:22.000But it's just such a shift in the way elites think about anything.
01:21:32.000How do we, it's like they don't know what to do or don't want to do it.
01:21:37.000In a lot of ways, it's very confusing as to why.
01:21:40.000A lot of them are probably afraid of other elite institutions judging them unfavorably because of an oppression Olympic that was created, as you mentioned.
01:22:02.000I think that we now reward political, I'm trying to think of a nice way to say this, but political creatures that have very little talent, probably low IQs, and they look nice, and they are narcissists.
01:22:37.000And the least of which being he spent the 1957 summer White House at the South Dakota Game Lodge, literally 35 minutes down the road from Mount Rushmore.
01:22:45.000However, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a lot of different ways, I can't really remember where I was going.
01:22:49.000You put Dwight D. Eisenhower up against Gavin Newsom.
01:22:52.000I don't even think that's even in the same categorical, right?
01:22:55.000But I think there's something to that, though.
01:22:57.000Where Eisenhower had direction, he had patriotism.
01:23:00.000He couldn't care less what people thought of him.
01:23:02.000His motives were pure and true, which goes to the point I really want to end with, which is a long point, which I think that one of the reasons why we get Gavin Newsom's and why we get Andrew Cuomo's and why we get the weak Republicans that we get, and I think it's structural,
01:23:18.000is that the way that we finance our political leaders and the way that someone gets to the top is their capacity to be able to trade favors, keep special corporate interests happy, and play the kind of fiddle of the donor up to the top just long enough until they're able to get elected to the highest office.
01:23:34.000And I don't think that was the case, though, in the 50s.
01:23:39.000In fact, Eisenhower, there wasn't really much campaign finance at all back then.
01:23:44.000And I'm not saying that there should be no contributions or anything.
01:23:48.000I'm not really even putting forth a policy prescription here.
01:23:51.000I'm saying it's a big problem because we have incredibly unqualified and honestly foolish people that become leaders because they're good at just basically providing favors to a subset of the population that doesn't want with the rest of the country, but best for their bottom line.
01:24:06.000And so the issue that I think is the one that we as conservatives and Republicans need to zero in on is how we finance our elections.
01:24:16.000And how we influence public policy through that.
01:24:19.000Yeah, I let me say one thing about Eisenhower first, and I'll say something about that.
01:24:26.000The 1956, so there's a presidential election here.
01:24:32.000Yeah, so the 1956 Republican platform, go read the section on labor, okay?
01:24:39.000And it is exactly the sort of thing that you and I have been talking about here.
01:24:45.000And it was basically that all of the things that Eisenhower was talking about and doing in the 50s were purged out of Republican orthodoxy in the late 60s, 70s, early 80s.
01:25:00.000And if you go back and look at that, you say, you know what, Eisenhower was ridiculously popular.
01:26:53.000I mean, this is a place where a lot of where I'll just say Democrats in general have been way better than this than Republicans, which is to motivate a lot of small dollar donors.
01:27:08.000Or even just reject the corporate money.
01:27:11.000Yeah, I think those two things go hand in hand, not just because of financial necessity, but because it represents an ethic of who you're responsible to.
01:27:51.000Now, AOC is an exception for Democrats, too.
01:27:53.000But that's the direction of their party.
01:27:56.000And what I'm trying to conjecture, though, and predict, we're going to get rolled on this issue because they're going to play the moral high ground and say, we don't take money from corporate interests.
01:28:10.000But if that purity actually does exist at any point, I think it's very hard to win against that.
01:28:17.000Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.
01:28:19.000And this is where Republicans need to, I think, be smarter and more aggressive, which is building out the base, getting our people really much more involved.
01:28:34.000And it can be something as simple as, like, Bernie was great at this.
01:28:37.000Bernie's average contributors, I think, was something like $27.
01:28:41.000That was in 2016, but in 2019, 20, it was something like that.
01:28:46.000I mean, he had a lot of people giving him small amounts of money, and people would sign up and they'd give him $10 a month, but it would be like an auto renew, and they just hit the credit card every year.
01:28:56.000And that it's not just the money there.
01:29:08.000That's a signifier of what their commitment level is.
01:29:11.000And so people, everybody knows this who's in politics.
01:29:14.000If somebody gives you money, they're definitely voting for you, right?
01:29:17.000And they're also going to tell people about you because they're psychologically, mentally invested besides being financially invested.
01:29:25.000And there's, because campaigns are expensive, there obviously is an incentive to go and get the max donors, the people who give you $2,700.
01:29:38.000But it is way more powerful if you have a lot of people giving you a little bit because those people, they get their family members to go to the polls and vote for you.
01:30:01.000I'm convinced you could win an election with half the money and a better message saying I don't take corporate money in this climate that we're in right now.
01:30:09.000And that goes to where I think things are headed.
01:30:11.000And I want to build this out to you as we close, which is I see not necessarily this election, because I don't think this election is anything we've seen before.
01:30:18.000I think it's going to be off the wall.
01:30:19.000I don't really know how it's going to end.
01:32:21.000And yes, the bulkization of American politics.
01:32:24.000Yeah, and you don't win long-term that way.
01:32:28.000You don't build a movement that can change the trajectory of the country by doing that.
01:32:33.000And that's what we need to do, is to change the trajectory.
01:32:36.000Well, and what my fear is is that we are up against another FDR movement of a Democrat who is younger, pretty well qualified, speaks well, has the ideas of Bernie Sanders and can actually explain them, is right on the money and politics issue, doesn't spit in the eye of conservatives on cultural issues, but just enough to keep the left at bay, doesn't outwardly hate the country, we would be in a political minority for a very long time.
01:33:22.000That's an incredibly dangerous proposition because the fact we're running up against Joe Biden, I mean, it's a gift, I really believe.
01:33:30.000I mean, it could have been a Democrat.
01:33:31.000I don't know how that selection could have been, but it could have been a Democrat who was not one of the radicals, not losing his mind and or as corrupt as him.
01:33:40.000Like a normal Democrat would have been very different.
01:33:53.000I mean, I think he needs to go back to basics.
01:33:57.000The things that got him elected in 2016, those things will get him elected again.
01:34:03.000I think that I mean the one the one place that I think the one issue that I think is somewhat less potent, still equally as important is immigration, but politically it's less potent this year.
01:34:13.000Though I think it is every bit as important.
01:34:19.000Yeah, but let me so I just want to add that caveat, but in terms of what is going to drive those people to vote for him that he needs to get to vote for him, you know, he's still got to win those same six to eight states and he needs to go back to things like getting people back to work, what we're talking about.
01:35:21.000But one of the questions we ask is, would you be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who had a plan to make America self-sufficient in food, energy, and health care?
01:35:49.000And people who maybe you would think are not natural Trump voters, they hear that in a way that makes them more amenable to a Trump vote, too.
01:36:00.000And so on the issues, I think it's those sorts of things.
01:36:04.000On I guess I would say two things just on the sort of the practical politics of it.
01:36:10.000Number one, and hopefully the president watches this podcast.
01:36:52.000I mean, it just, you know, at the event that you guys threw here in Phoenix a couple weeks ago, I mean, it is, you know, it's so evident that he enjoys it, and he has such a great rapport with the crowd.
01:37:05.000And for, you know, I had never been to a Trump rally before, and you don't get a sense of it by watching, even by watching the whole, you know, two hours or whatever on television.
01:37:19.000There really is a connection between him and the crowd.
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