Neil Ferguson's new book, "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe," examines our weird, ambivalent relationship with doom, and how it s become a way of life for some. He s a historian, professor, author of 16 books, senior fellow fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and founder and managing director of Green Masons LLC.
00:00:44.620And as we see over the last few years, especially in the last year, it is a way of life for some.
00:00:53.720Maybe most frighteningly of all, it is it's also a currency.
00:00:58.000Today's guest approaches doom and catastrophe from all of those angles and more.
00:01:03.600He opens the book by saying, never in our lifetimes has there been a greater uncertainty about the future and greater ignorance of the past.
00:01:14.620He is incredibly qualified to make that statement.
00:01:18.000He is a historian, professor, author of 16 books, senior fellow fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.
00:01:25.960He is a senior faculty fellow fellow at Harvard, founder and managing director of Green Mantle LLC, an advisory firm.
00:01:35.200He has won an international Emmy in 2009 for a PBS series.
00:03:35.160And each disaster, no matter how large or small or whether it's manmade or natural, has at least one or two common features beyond the unpredictability.
00:03:46.440And the one that's interesting to me is the role of of human error.
00:03:52.100Even if a purely natural event happens, like a volcano erupts, there's always some human element that determines how many people die.
00:04:03.520Like if you decide to build a really big city next to a volcano, that is going to make consequences of an eruption much, much greater.
00:04:10.740Right. And in the same way, if if the same new pathogen strikes every country in the world has happened last year, human error will determine how many people die in one country versus another.
00:04:25.600In Taiwan, hardly anybody died of covid in the United States, as we all know, more than 600000 people died.
00:04:30.940So human error is a really crucial variable, regardless of whether a disaster is is natural or manmade.
00:04:37.180In many ways, that's a false dichotomy.
00:04:39.080But you don't. I mean, we're not learning from any of these disasters.
00:04:43.860It doesn't seem like there is a learning curve at all.
00:04:48.480The same people. Let's take the let's just take war, for example.
00:04:51.600The same people who empowered ISIS and created ISIS are exactly the same people that just have empowered the Taliban.
00:06:02.840There is almost no good course anywhere in the United States to give just one example on the lessons of the last 30 or 40 years about radical Islam as a political and ideological force.
00:06:23.880That there are undergraduates, I've encountered them at major universities who know almost nothing about what led to the 9-11 attacks.
00:06:35.180In fact, I was teaching a class, sitting in a class as a guest teacher just a couple of years ago with some undergraduates and realized with a terrible shock that they knew almost nothing about 9-11.
00:06:49.600Of course, they'd barely been born when it happened, and this is something that it's always a struggle to remember.
00:06:55.160But today's undergraduates were being born around the time of the 9-11 attacks 20 years ago.
00:07:01.300I was born 20 years after Pearl Harbor, and I knew what Pearl Harbor was.
00:07:09.980Because in our generation, history was still something that had content.
00:07:15.180We were being taught about the origins of wars.
00:07:17.740Because I was born in 1964, long after the end of World War II, but I was brought up thinking all the time, how did these disasters, the world wars happen?
00:07:28.240My grandfathers had fought in both wars.
00:08:02.180It doesn't help us to understand the world we live in, and it doesn't help us to understand the world that George Washington lived in.
00:08:07.660How do we, how is it that we are so fascinated, I was born in 64 as well, we're so fascinated by World War II and the Nazis, but we don't seem to recognize the signs when they pop up again.
00:08:27.400You know, we, I've had this argument with the ADL before, what good is never forget if you can't point out and say, that's a seed, that's a seed.
00:08:39.560It doesn't mean it's going to grow the same garden, but you don't want those seeds planted in the ground.
00:08:45.260We don't seem to learn or, or I guess, recognize any of the signs.
00:08:53.220Part of the problem, Glenn, is, is almost overuse of the 1930s analogy.
00:08:58.120If everything is like Hitler, then nothing.
00:09:01.560If Donald Trump was Hitler, if everything is the Munich agreement, then this becomes devalued.
00:09:09.060Now, I think overuse of the analogy with, with the Nazis has led to its becoming worthless.
00:09:16.140It's like a kind of intellectual hyperinflation where the constant use of parallels to Hitler, that their use even against, obviously, quite different kind of political leader, such as Trump or any of the populist leaders who've been compared with Hitler over the last few years.
00:09:36.340This, this, this makes the, the whole analogy worthless.
00:09:39.180I think people on the left have constantly confused conservatism, populism, fascism in, in a way that is, has actually rendered the terms meaningless just in the same way that they have rendered the word liberalism meaningless by using liberalism to mean censorship and restriction of, of free speech.
00:10:00.940So, we, we have a problem that the categories that we used to be able to use constructively have become almost meaningless to most ordinary people.
00:10:12.840If everybody is Hitler, then, then nobody is Hitler.
00:10:15.440Take, just to give you a concrete example, the readiness of people to believe two obviously absurd things.
00:10:23.180Number one, which we heard quite a bit of late last year, early this year, Joe Biden is a transformative president who deserves to be compared, deserves to be compared with Franklin Roosevelt.
00:10:34.540That, that is an absurd claim for a whole range of reasons, but a remarkable number of people were willing to make it.
00:10:43.960It seemed to me that that was a more dangerous claim to make.
00:10:46.960And the other implausible claim is that the Taliban, after 20 years, have come back as moderates and are going to be far better stewards of Afghanistan than they were when they were overthrown by U.S. forces after 9-11.
00:11:05.100And these are two equally absurd propositions.
00:11:08.620It is obvious that Joe Biden is, if anything, the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter.
00:11:13.860That, that, that was something that I felt was easy to predict from the outset.
00:11:20.100And it is equally obvious that the Taliban will behave much as they did the last time they were in power, with brutality, with intolerance, with support for other terrorist organizations.
00:11:31.540So, ultimately, I think the readiness of, of commentators to make absurd analogies and people to believe them is, is, is the problem that we're grappling with here.
00:11:42.540Um, there was a, there was a, there was an article that was just written that talks about, uh, you know, the left fears, um, or the right fears, um, or the right fears, leftist totalitarianism.
00:11:57.320And, um, I'm, I'm, I'm, I, you know, I, I don't put Hitler into the right.
00:12:04.300You know, I look at Americans, the American society, much different than Europeans do that's left and right.
00:12:12.020But, you know, fascism and communism is the extreme on, on each side where in America it's anarchy or freedom, um, and then totalitarianism that could be a theocracy or, or any of them.
00:12:27.520Can you, can you, can you bat down the idea that, that communism, uh, socialism, that none of these people are, are from the left in America?
00:12:40.540I, I sometimes, I sometimes think the political spectrum is a bad analogy in itself, uh, that we imagine this kind of line, uh, with the political center there and, and extremes of the right out there and extremes of the left out there as far apart as possible.
00:12:56.240I think it's much better to recognize that, uh, we are dealing with something here that has a curve, that the extremes of the left and right, uh, are so close together in many ways that they sometimes meet.
00:13:08.860Remember the Nazis and the communists collaborated to bring down the Weimar Republic, even if that turned out to be a disastrous mistake, uh, by the German communist party.
00:13:18.840But they both had, they both had socialism, uh, big government as their key.
00:13:26.280National socialism and, and socialism in one country are two ways of saying the same thing.
00:13:32.260Hitler believed in national socialism, Stalin in socialism in one country, but the effects of the, the policies were remarkably similar.
00:13:41.500Uh, individual liberty disappeared, the rule of law disappeared, government became not only, uh, unaccountable, but increasingly violent, uh, towards its own citizens and towards other citizens.
00:13:54.400There was systematic discrimination of targeted, uh, minorities.
00:13:58.060If you were somebody who crossed from one regime to the other, this, this happened to Victor Klemperer, uh, a German Jew who survived the third Reich and then ended up in the communist controlled, uh, German democratic Republic.
00:14:12.620The, the, the striking thing to Klemperer was how similar the two regimes were, even in the language that they, they use.
00:14:18.940So this is an important point to recognize totalitarianism comes, uh, in different flavors, uh, but the content, uh, the practical consequences of totalitarianism are remarkably similar, whether the dictator claims to be, uh, a nationalist or fascist or a communist or an, uh, an Islamic fundamentalist.
00:14:40.140I mean, in the end, the dictatorship of the Taliban will mean restriction of individual liberty, especially for women.
00:14:49.120There will be no rule of law, uh, beyond a brutal, uh, Sharia law.
00:14:54.540Uh, and, and from that point of view, the key distinction in my mind is between societies or systems that prioritize individual freedom and all the freedoms matter here.
00:15:05.440Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association.
00:15:08.840The things that were hardwired into the American system by the founders, because they were so committed to the, the ideal of, of liberty systems that prioritize liberty are in fundamental, uh, conflict with all those systems that prioritize something above human liberty.
00:15:27.480And it doesn't really matter whether it's a fascist system, a communist system, an Islamist system, or any other system, a system that is fundamentally hostile to individual freedom has an inevitable antagonism towards our system, which prioritizes freedom.
00:15:44.380Now, let me talk about American totalitarianism, Glenn, because it's a really, really interesting phenomenon.
00:15:50.320I used to think when I was a young scholar, that totalitarian behavior, like informing on your neighbor or denouncing somebody to the bureaucracy or having a show trial or erasing somebody from the historical record.
00:16:06.060I thought that kind of behavior happened only when there was a totalitarian regime with a dictator in power.
00:16:13.320That was my conviction, but it turns out I was wrong that you can have people behave in those ways, informing on their neighbors, denouncing their classmates to the authorities.
00:16:23.300You can have the cancellation, uh, the erasing of people, uh, with a free society if we choose to behave that way and to reward that kind of behavior.
00:16:35.480The example, and you know where I'm probably going, is the way American campuses have gone from being places where free speech was encouraged to being the places in America where free speech is most difficult, where it is absolutely normal to inform on a professor or a classmate.
00:16:54.300And it is absolutely normal for the bureaucracy to act in a way that bears no relation to due process.
00:17:00.680That began to become the norm in universities relatively recently, uh, in the course of my career teaching at us universities, we've seen a remarkable change and that culture, which is, I think, everyday totalitarianism has spread out from the universities into an increasing number of corporations.
00:17:22.380It kind of began with the tech companies and publishing and newspapers.
00:17:25.720The New York times is now essentially like an Ivy league, uh, campus in terms of its illiberalism.
00:17:32.240And what is amazing to me is how many young people accept this as normal.
00:17:37.580They don't realize that it is odious to inform on a professor or a classmate.
00:17:44.460And here's an example in a survey that was published earlier this year, which was a survey of American students in four year programs.
00:17:52.020They were asked if a professor said something you considered offensive in a class, would you report them?
00:18:00.220Uh, would you report the professor to the administration?
00:18:03.16085% of liberal or liberal leaning students said yes.
00:18:08.120Asked if they would report a classmate for saying something offensive, 78% said yes.
00:18:14.080So these are people who think that they are liberals.
00:18:16.320Young people who think that they are liberals regard it as morally okay to write letters of denunciation about their professors or their contemporaries.
00:18:25.120To me, that's utterly shocking because it suggests that, that our young people have no understanding of how a free society should work.
00:18:34.760They're behaving as if they were in a totalitarian regime and they find nothing morally wrong with it.
00:18:40.280I was, um, I, I was shocked when George Bush after 9-11 said, you know, he said, well, there's a phone number to call, you know, look at your neighbors.
00:18:48.780And if there's something, and, and I remember kicking up a storm, that is absolutely un-American.
00:18:54.840Um, and, and then Obama tried to do it and we've, we've drifted into this.
00:19:01.120And the reason why I was so against it at the time was people always say when they come to America, Americans are so friendly.
00:19:09.800They're so open that's because we've never turned our neighbors into each, into the authorities.
00:19:21.320We lose something that is fundamentally American and unique the minute we start to live the way we're now living.
00:19:31.100And with good reason, the term McCarthyism is a derogatory term.
00:19:37.400We, we don't look back and, and, and celebrate that witch hunt against actual or suspected communists that occurred in the early phase of the cold war, not because there were no communists.
00:19:48.780There were the strange thing about the McCarthy era was that there really were communists who'd infiltrated, uh, the, the state department, other parts of the government and at very high levels, people who were essentially Soviet operatives.
00:20:01.940But the way in which that, that, that witch hunt was conducted has left with good reason, a bad taste in our, our mind.
00:20:11.200Neil, why is it that we, what is missing that, that little connection between McCarthyism that everybody says is wrong?
00:20:20.680Homosexuals that say, you know, I was in the closet and that is wrong for the way I believe and what I, what I am.
00:20:28.440You can't force people into the closet and yet they're doing the same thing.
00:20:38.720I think partly for what I, for the reason I gave earlier that, that we don't teach history.
00:20:44.860So people aren't taught to be aware of what totalitarian behavior is like.
00:20:49.800If you don't feel shame at writing a letter informing on someone, then it's because you haven't been taught that that is morally odious.
00:20:57.660Uh, you have no, uh, inkling of what life was like in Stalin's Soviet Union.
00:21:01.740If you did, you'd know that you've started to behave as, as if you lived there, but there's another thing going on, which I think is important.
00:21:08.540And that is the way in which social media, the whole extraordinary explosion of, uh, of new forms of publication on the internet, um, have changed the nature of our, our political behavior.
00:21:21.360It was the internet that allowed cancel culture to, to grow because prior to the internet, it was quite difficult to gather up a mob as it were, uh, and bay for somebody to be fired.
00:21:37.740But it's become much easier to do that kind of thing online.
00:21:42.600Uh, prior to social media, it was quite hard to humiliate somebody in public.
00:21:49.380Uh, you might, uh, write a letter or a postcard or, or even pin a notice on the school notice board saying a, uh, or B is a terrible person, but that didn't get amplified.
00:22:02.460And, uh, that person might be humiliated by the notice on the, on the school notice board, but that was as far as it went.
00:22:10.060But now the people who previously wrote those notices have access to the biggest amplifier, uh, the world has ever known.
00:22:18.900And if they can put their hateful message on, uh, Facebook or Instagram or wherever they, they choose to, to put it, the possibility exists for somebody to become a pariah in a matter of hours.
00:22:33.040And I think that's, that's the thing that's novel that we, when we were young people did not have to contend with.
00:22:39.140I was a pretty obnoxious undergraduate.
00:22:41.260I did and said a lot of contrarian, uh, inflammatory things because I, I was a product of two things, punk rock and Thatcherism.
00:22:50.420By the time I got to Oxford, I loved the fact that I could say, uh, pretty much whatever I liked, uh, and be, uh, pretty obnoxious with it and, and pay really no price.
00:23:02.580Uh, that has changed to the extent that the equivalents of me, the, the, the obnoxious contrarian types today have to self censor because they have to fear denunciation, uh, investigation, cancellation.
00:23:18.020Uh, people have, have their careers destroyed over things that they said five or 10 years ago on social media that, that some malicious type has uncovered.
00:23:28.640So the, the, the really big change that has occurred, I think is a function of the internet.
00:23:33.720And this is a form of disaster, uh, that is particularly interesting to me because we haven't really thought through, or at least we didn't until recently, the unintended adverse consequences of creating a giant online network in which
00:23:47.440the barrier to entry is zero and anybody can grab, uh, the megaphone.
00:23:56.140We'd all be netizens and free speech would triumph for the exact opposite has happened from what the libertarians in Silicon Valley predicted back in the 1990s and the early 2000s.
00:24:06.280But isn't, I mean, you, you, you say in, you know, in your book that you talk about how everything, every disaster really is, is, is, comes back down to humans.
00:24:22.880This is remarkable technology, but I don't think we are, we're, we're just not adult enough to be able to handle it.
00:24:32.280We're just not ready for this kind of technology.
00:24:37.220I think, and this goes back to the last book I published, the square and the tower.
00:24:41.800We didn't think through the consequences of a complete transformation of the public sphere.
00:24:47.760We underestimated the effects of creating an entirely new public sphere, uh, in which the audience would be potentially global.
00:24:58.520The barrier to entry for publication would vanish and we failed to think through what the consequences would be in the square and the tower.
00:25:07.960I suggested the analogy with the printing press when the printing press arrived in Europe and became a kind of standard mode of, of, of reproduction of printed material in the late 15th century.
00:25:18.380The initial assumption was that this was great.
00:25:23.700Uh, but of course what followed once the printing press became used for religious debate was a period of profound upheaval.
00:25:32.000We call it the reformation, but it was really a period of religious strife, civil and international that raged for about 130 years until finally, uh, with the piece of West failure, uh, it was brought to some kind of, of an end.
00:25:48.360And I think we all forgot that simple lesson that if you transform the public sphere, there will be all kinds of unintended consequences.
00:25:56.920Polarization will be, will be more rapid and perhaps more extreme.
00:26:01.440People will form very rapidly new networks or clusters of networks and then, uh, define themselves in antagonism, in opposition to others.
00:26:11.180All of that, I think took us by surprise because there was a naive, very unhistorical view in Silicon Valley that once everybody was connected, everything would be awesome.
00:26:21.340And that was the standard line really right through the 1990s into the two thousands.
00:26:25.340It was what Mark Zuckerberg was still saying, uh, as recently as, as 2016.
00:26:30.580But in reality, if you create giant platforms of the sort, uh, that Facebook is, there will be a shadow side that will be revealed.
00:26:39.040Our tendency to polarize, our tendency to be very aggressive, but we don't actually meet people face to face.
00:26:44.720The capacity to spread fake news example after the reformation, the idea of witchcraft became more prevalent, uh, and more people were put to death as witches, uh, in the period after the reformation.
00:26:57.840Then in all, uh, of previous Christianity, uh, that's a good example because it was just as easy to transmit the notion of witchcraft and witches live amongst us as it was to transmit Luther's critique of the Roman Catholic church in the internet world.
00:27:14.100We have found that the crazy fake news conspiracy theories travel, uh, faster and further than the boring old truth that should not have surprised us.
00:27:28.220I've done broadcast for 40 plus years and trying to tell good news, not real easy.
00:27:34.880Um, you really have to, or even, you know, I made, uh, road to serfdom, I think was number one on the, uh, New York times bestseller list back in the fifties.
00:27:48.160And then I, I did a show, a week long show on it on, uh, Fox.
00:27:53.580And that was extraordinarily difficult to make it entertaining enough for people to watch.
00:29:24.720Uh, COVID-19 is not the biggest pandemic.
00:29:28.360That you and I have lived through in terms of mortality.
00:29:31.320That was HIV AIDS, which to date has killed 36 million people, not least because they never found a vaccine for it.
00:29:37.920So part of the challenge is to persuade people that there is a big difference between a disaster that kills a third of humanity and one that kills 0.06% of humanity.
00:29:47.920And, and one has to bear that distinction in mind.
00:29:55.800We fought a long war in Afghanistan, but by historical standards, U S casualties were really very small.
00:30:01.980Uh, and by the end negligible because nearly all the fighting in recent years has been done by the Afghan security forces with U S support, but very few American lives were being put on the line, uh, in the final phase of this conflict.
00:30:16.100By the standards of the 20th century, both the Iraq and Afghan wars were small wars in terms of their death toll.
00:30:24.120Because remember world war one probably killed North of 10 million people in combat.
00:30:30.200I mean, or directly as a consequence of the fighting and the death toll of world war two was in excess of 50 million with most of the people killed civilians because of the use of strategic bombing as, as a way of waging the war.
00:30:43.780Uh, so sure there were wars, but to talk about the Afghan war as if it was an unendurable burden weighing down the American people is absurd.
00:30:53.620Uh, by the end, it was a, what I would regard as a policing operation providing support to the Afghan army.
00:31:00.860Uh, and that is part of the reason I wanted to write the book.
00:31:04.060People struggle with orders of magnitude.
00:37:02.900Does this, is this erased or do we find it again?
00:37:06.320The danger, Glenn, is that in a hundred years' time, there won't be properly trained historians
00:37:15.420or, for that matter, broadcasters who can convey the real history of our time.
00:37:23.220I think of there being a succession crisis in my world.
00:37:29.060I don't really know who will be doing what I have done 50 years or even 20 years from now
00:37:35.400because it's so very hard to get people to write the kind of history that I think that we need.
00:37:42.600A history that looks not only at the cultures of the past, but tries to understand the political economy,
00:37:51.580looks at debt dynamics, looks at wars, looks at how empires rise and fall,
00:37:56.520tries to make sense of American history in the broader context by comparing it with the history of other great powers.
00:38:02.580I don't think that history will necessarily be written at all a hundred years from now if we're not very careful.
00:38:08.220Because the revolution in academic life that has produced critical race theory
00:38:14.020and all of the different variants of wokeness ensures or is designed to ensure that that kind of history doesn't get written.
00:38:23.160Now, I hope that there will be some kind of ongoing attempt to train at least some people in the right historical scholarly methods
00:38:33.840so that one day the history of the last 20 years will be written in the way that I hope that I would write it if I were still around then.
00:38:43.700Let's ask ourselves how a future historian might approach this.
00:38:47.200A future historian might say that the United States having won the Cold War with the Soviet Union
00:38:52.460through a party in the 1990s, a hedonistic and hugely enjoyable party,
00:38:59.360but one that really mostly the 1% participated in and a really large proportion of the population did not share in.
00:39:09.300There was a rude awakening when 9-11 happened.
00:39:12.500Americans were reminded that the rest of the world was out there and history had not ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
00:39:19.880But the American reaction to that shock was to send a tiny number of Americans to go fight the bad guys in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq
00:39:29.560and leave most people more or less untouched by the conflict.
00:39:33.400A remarkably small number of people have a direct relative who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
00:39:38.540And so, in some measure, the party continued.
00:39:41.560The 1% continued to be the main beneficiaries of globalization and a really large proportion of the population flatlined at best in terms of their income.
00:39:50.420Then came in the financial crisis, a product of the irresponsibility of the financial elite.
00:40:28.580The Obama administration got a second term that it did not deserve.
00:40:32.020And that further four years created the conditions in which a maverick figure who had no real ties to conservatism could become the focal point of the hopes of all those people who had lost out over several decades of prosperity that went only to the elite.
00:40:49.180And that maverick figure was reviled and loathed by the elite, particularly by the media elite.
00:40:55.960And their reviling and loathing of him temporarily ousted him from power.
00:41:01.940But that only added to the bitterness of those people who had pinned their hopes on him.
00:41:07.180And the future historian will then say the one thing that the liberal elite never foresaw in the hour of its victory at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 was that the maverick figure could return to power.
00:41:19.080And that, I think, is the future history that lies ahead of us over the next the next three and a half years.
00:41:26.860The return of Trump because of the abject failure of the liberal elite.
00:41:36.900And my my question on that then is, does Trump return as the same guy he was, you know, because I've I've I've war game this out for many years, as you know, and you can't keep injuring half of the population.
00:41:59.700And that's why a lot of people said, I don't care if he's a conservative or not, he's going to put him in their place.
00:42:09.780Well, now he he tried and the the elites destroyed him for it.
00:42:17.660And I think a lot of people now go, wow, if he can't do it, if they can destroy him, they they are totally in control.
00:42:25.880Some are losing faith in that. But when the figure reappears or a new figure appears, aren't they given more license to be even more ruthless to to dig it out?
00:42:43.400I certainly think the narrative that Trump was defeated by the deep state or liberal media has a great deal of power.
00:42:52.260I think it's wrong. I think if it hadn't been for covid, he'd have been reelected.
00:42:55.880I think in reality, covid was the the thing that destroyed his his presidency.
00:43:03.340And you can't, I think, credibly claim that he handled it well.
00:43:07.780And that's why he lost, because a significant proportion of people who'd voted for him in 2016 did not show up in 2020 or even flip to Biden because they felt disillusioned.
00:43:18.540So I think it's important to bear in mind that in the end, President Trump did not handle that crisis well.
00:43:25.420And and I've thought long and hard about this.
00:43:28.500As I say in the book, it wasn't all his fault because CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, did a terrible job.
00:43:34.480Department of Health and Human Services did a terrible job.
00:43:37.160The governors did terrible jobs in the case of at least the big blue states.
00:43:40.740There are lots of people who bear responsibility for the excess mortality in the U.S.
00:43:46.320But even when you make all that allowance, he still did poorly.
00:43:49.920And I think for that reason, deserve to lose even to a weak candidate like Biden.
00:43:56.120But if he then is able to come back and he is the front runner for the nomination, just as the Republican candidate ought to win, given the way things are going, then I don't think he's going to come back as he as he was at the beginning of his administration.
00:44:13.440I worry that he'll come back as he was at the end of his administration when he had become, to my mind, almost completely reckless.
00:44:23.620If one thinks about the events that culminated January 6th, the reality is that President Trump behaved with great irresponsibility in seeking to challenge the result of the election and encouraged suggestible people to behave in ways that were truly disastrous.
00:44:41.460So, I worry that he comes back in the state of mind in which he left office rather than the state of mind in which he entered the White House in 2017.
00:44:52.980And that's a pity because if you look back on the first three years of Trump, the administration, if you look at it as a whole, did well.
00:45:04.800In national security terms, I give it very high marks.
00:45:07.860Finally, we stood up to China and the Chinese got a shock because this was an administration that was willing to put real pressure on China.
00:45:17.940So, the Trump administration, if one looks at the whole four years, had many successes.
00:45:24.700And I think it will be a great pity if he's reelected and arrives in a mood not so much as of the wrecking ball as the neutron bomb.
00:45:37.440If he's going to return to power, he has to learn the right lessons of his administration.
00:45:52.700There is much about Republican conservatism that is urgently needed and needs to be empowered.
00:46:01.320We cannot continue to run the fiscal policy of the nation in this extraordinarily feckless way.
00:46:07.780If Trump can be reelected and give talented people their head in the key departments of government, then I think the outlook would not be bad.
00:46:18.860The trouble is that I think he's convinced himself of what I'll call the conspiracy theory version of why he lost.
00:46:26.080And that is going to motivate him to tackle the wrong things and learn the wrong lessons from his four years in office.
00:46:35.160I would far rather someone else were the front runner for the nomination.
00:46:38.980I think Ron DeSantis has done a great job as governor of Florida and is a plausible contender to be the Republican nominee.
00:46:48.420And there are others, too, that it would it would reassure me to see in contention.
00:46:53.320But at the moment, there's just no escaping the fact that a significant proportion of Republican voters are deeply loyal to Trump and are ready to give him a second shot in government.
00:47:03.580Most liberals are in denial about this.
00:47:05.360As far as I can see, they're still telling themselves that it's all going great, though.
00:47:09.680I think the fiasco in Afghanistan has been a reality check for many people.
00:47:13.440But I don't think they're thinking through the consequences of this.
00:47:17.180If this is going to be the Carter administration all over again with one foreign policy disaster leading to another.
00:47:25.340Between now and 2024, you could see a profound shift in the political landscape.
00:47:30.120I think they're going to get smashed in the midterms.
00:47:32.460But I think if I look ahead to the next presidential election, the Republican candidate is going to be very strongly placed.
00:47:39.120If it's Trump, I think we're in for more four more years of chaos because I'm I'm just not convinced he understands what went wrong in 2020 and what could be put right.
00:47:50.460So when you I don't want to get into conspiracies, but there is a problem with what has been known as the deep state.
00:48:57.800I wrote about it in a book called The Great Degeneration 10 years ago.
00:49:02.220And the observation I made was that the administrative state, because I think that's preferable to the deep state, has grown in its power and size.
00:49:12.060And it is ideologically significantly to the left of center.
00:49:18.660Washington is a liberal, progressive town populated by people who do believe in big government.
00:49:26.780Now, Chris DeMuth, who was once president of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a brilliant article on the administrative state, arguing that its origins lay in the 1970s when Congress increasingly decided to pass difficult problems to federal agencies.
00:49:39.260And create a whole slew of new agencies to deal with things that were too tricky for the legislature, too politically sensitive.
00:49:47.580And that's really where it all begins.
00:49:57.220But it wasn't fulfilled until much later.
00:50:00.040The federal government was still remarkably small, even after the New Deal.
00:50:03.320It wasn't really until the 1970s that the federal executive branch acquired so many different competencies and ceased really to be meaningfully accountable to Congress.
00:50:14.780And so I think the challenge for any reforming president is how do you address this growth of a bureaucracy that is essentially self-perpetuating, that is excessively powerful and is very bad at what it does?
00:50:29.400Remember, one important lesson of COVID is that the people whose job this was, who had a pandemic preparedness plan, failed.
00:50:37.380On paper, the U.S. was the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic.
00:50:43.260And one way to come at this problem is to explore why it was that the pandemic preparedness plan wasn't worth the PDF it was saved on.
00:50:51.600And then to ask, what about the other parts of the government that are supposed to be ready to meet other contingencies?
00:50:59.120Why, if the Department of Defense is one of the most well-resourced agencies of all, was the evacuation from Afghanistan such a catastrophic disaster?
00:51:10.340I think by asking hard questions of the bureaucracy, we can start to expose where the weakness lies.
00:51:17.140But who is asking, who's asking those questions?
00:51:21.220I mean, it's one thing for the president to say the buck stops here, but there's no consequence for the buck stopping there.
00:53:08.740It's one reason that they had almost no casualties in the pandemic last year and were able to contain a wave of Delta this year really quickly.
00:53:18.680So the philosophy in Taiwan, which is the philosophy of Audrey Tang, the digital minister, is that we should use software solutions to get the public's input and to make the public authorities accountable.
00:53:34.800And so there's a whole set of platforms that essentially allow citizens to provide information, but also to express dissatisfaction.
00:53:44.940And this has created a much more nimble kind of government, a much more responsive kind of government.
00:53:50.880And I think we should be thinking along these lines.
00:53:53.860We should be going and looking at what they got right.
00:53:56.660For example, a good illustration of this.
00:53:59.480They had a mask shortage, like everybody did at the beginning of the pandemic.
00:54:03.100But instead of lying, as our public health bureaucrats did, by saying, oh, you don't need masks, masks don't matter, and then changing the story once there were sufficient masks,
00:54:12.200the Taiwanese government said, hey, we don't have enough masks.
00:54:14.840We need to ration them so that the health care workers get them.
00:54:18.280And they used a software tool to do that.
00:58:49.100And it's very hard to achieve that once you've sold something for a pittance, it's hard to renegotiate.
00:58:56.260But my conviction is that central to individual liberty is individual privacy, is ownership of your own personal data, and that that, too, is attainable.
00:59:12.060The way the Democrats are dealing with this, which is just to go down a bunch of antitrust actions, is not going to solve the problem any more than antitrust solved the problem of Microsoft's dominance of software.
00:59:23.540We've got to be much, much more radical in our thinking.
00:59:27.200And this is where I think conservative thinkers like you come in.
00:59:30.400Having made all the mistakes we made over 20 years, whether it was the neoconservatives' mistakes of overreach or the Trumpists' mistakes of failing to deal with the problems we're discussing,
00:59:44.300And we need to get on with it because the solutions that we need in the coming years are not going to come from the heads of politicians, much less from the heads of bureaucrats.
00:59:54.860It's going to be people like us who figure out a new kind of conservatism, which emphasizes the individual citizen's liberty above all else.
01:00:06.240Neil, I think one of the reasons why I haven't reached out more often lately is because you always make me feel like a mental midget.
01:00:58.440And now what they want to know is, well, what do we do now?
01:01:01.140And I think the answer probably needs to be something more sophisticated than reelect Trump and hope it works the second time.
01:01:07.680I mean, the definition of madness is keeping doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome.
01:01:11.760My sense is that we who are conservative intellectuals still have a lot of work to do to come up with meaningful solutions to the power of the administrative state and the power of big tech.
01:01:23.500I mean, I'll give you one final example.
01:01:25.960It was really clear to me after the 2016 election that the power of the big tech companies was excessive and that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was a central reason for their excessive power.
01:01:37.980Because it was essentially a get out of jail card for anything that they did.
01:01:42.240It allowed them to be tech platforms when it suited them and publishers when it suited them.
01:01:46.560We left it way too late to address that problem.
01:01:49.920It was only at the last minute that legislation began to be discussed to rewrite or delete Section 230.
01:01:57.600So we've got to be far, far more consequent as conservative intellectuals.
01:02:01.960We need to identify what is wrong with the deep state, what is wrong with big tech, and come up with some actionable solutions for the first 100 days of the next president.
01:02:51.740The decline of American power, the end of the American empire, was not difficult to foresee, even at the time of the 9-11 attacks.
01:03:03.140It was obvious that Americans had four fatal deficits.
01:03:08.660An attention deficit, a fiscal deficit, a manpower deficit, and a history deficit.
01:03:14.140They blundered their way through two ill-conceived military campaigns.
01:03:19.860They attempted a populist backlash that failed.
01:03:23.660They kept falling back on the liberal elite that had got them into the mess in the first place.
01:03:28.940And finally, an antagonist came along in the form of the People's Republic of China that, unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union,
01:03:37.740had the economic capability to take the U.S. on and win.
01:03:42.700The crisis over Taiwan in the year 2022 was as big a turning point for American power as the Suez crisis in the 1950s was for British power.
01:03:53.860The decline of the dollar after that crisis was one of the great shocks of modern financial history
01:03:59.860and exposed the weakness and reliance on foreign capital of American power.
01:04:04.980I hope I don't live long enough to write that history, Glenn, but my fear at the moment is that that is the path we're on,
01:04:13.000and we do not have much time to change course.
01:04:17.440It is always a pleasure to talk to you.