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Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
How will the Iran War shape American Politics? - with Ross Douthat
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Over the years I've written about a lot of Israeli innovations, but among those I missed early on, United Hatzalah of Israel, the country's largest nonprofit, independent, all volunteer, completely free emergency medical service. The idea began about 30 years ago with a single devastating moment. A child was choking. It took 21 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. By then it was too late. The child did not survive. That tragedy became the founding impulse for United Hatzala, revolutionizing emergency medical care in Israel by placing life saving skills and equipment directly in the hands of volunteer medics so help arrives fast and often before an ambulance arrives. Learn about United Hatzala's life saving work at IsraelRescue.org forward slash, callmeback and stay tuned to hear from a hero medic who responded to the terrible attacks of October 7th.
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You are listening to an art media podcast.
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The question for conservatives who are doubtful about the war is more have we actually achieved the strategic goals that we set out to achieve or in order to maintain the stability we have now, we're going to end up having to make a deal with the Iranians where they can say we weaponized the strait successfully and we outlasted the Great Satan. And by the way, not only has the regime not changed, but in fact, quite the reverse. It's been radicalized. There are people who have said this is like a strategic defeat that marks the end of the American empire. I don't buy any of that at the moment, but I do have profound questions about if Trump isn't going to use ground troops, if we're not going to escalate, if we are not going to push harder for regime change, then if we end up making a deal and walking away, is anyone going to look back and say, well, this was a big success? I'm skeptical, but we'll see.
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10:00am on Wednesday, April 22nd here in New York City. It is 5:00pm on Wednesday, April 22nd,
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in Israel, where the limited events of Israel's Independence Day come to a close.
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My guest today is Ross Douthit, host
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of the podcast Interesting Times, which is
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one of the leading podcasts over at the New York Times.
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Ross is a New York Times columnist.
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His regular columns are must reads.
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He's a prolific author and an incisive analyst of trends in religion and American life, in American politics generally, and within
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the American right more specifically.
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Ross has authored a number of books. The most recent one is why Everyone Should Be Religious.
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Ross, welcome to the podcast.
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C
Thanks for having me, Dan. It's a pleasure.
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B
So I want to start Ross, with the current state of affairs in the call it the public debate here in the United States over the war, not like focusing on one area, right or left, but just generally across the landscape, how would you characterize where the public debate is and the public discourse is on the war?
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C
I would say that just in terms of American public opinion, you have a pretty straightforward dynamic where support for the war correlates with support for President Trump. And that's been true roughly since the outset of the war. I'd say at the outset of the war, public support was slightly higher than it it is today. It's trended downward, although not, I think, in some sort of radical and sweeping way. But the war started at a moment when the president's own approval ratings were close to a low for his second term. It did not make him more popular. I would say it has probably contributed modestly to his growing unpopularity without creating some sort of radical disjunction in polling. But basically support for the Iran war means support for Trump's policies. And so it's mostly a phenomenon among Republicans. And if you're looking at independents and Democrats, the war is broadly unpopular, with the caveat that it has not yielded a kind of dramatic anti war movement in anything like the sense we saw with the Iraq war under George W. Bush, nor even the kind of resurgence of the protest politics that showed up repeatedly in American life in Trump's first term in 2020 and even through the aftermath of October 7th. And that I think is mostly an indicator of where American political culture is generally right now, that it's not a kind of moment of maximal protest and fervor. And that extends to a lot of issues, not just the Iran war. But it's still notable if you're trying to take the temperature of things.
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B
So I completely agree. I spoke at a number of college campuses in the US in the months and really the years after October 7th. And I've spent a lot of time with administrators and faculty and students at universities over those couple of years. And then I just recently, a few weeks ago, spoke at Harvard University and without mentioning names, I met with a number of leaders in administrative and faculty roles at Harvard. And they were all struck because when I was on Harvard's campus, it was several weeks into the Iran war and they were struck by it was like crickets. They were bracing for another post October 7th, like explosion on campus. It wasn't just lower temperature, it was virtually non existent. What do you attribute that to?
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C
A few things I would say. First, I think if you're talking about the American left and left wing politics, which is obviously the source of, let's say 98.9% of campus protests in American life. I think there is just a sort of more natural sympathy for and identification with the Palestinian cause and Gaza in particular, civilian suffering in Gaza, a lot of things that were sort of connected to the Gaza war than there is for the regime in Iran. I think you can find a kind of left wing sympathy where it's all folded into a kind of anti imperialist, anti American, anti Israel narrative, but it's just a thinner and weaker kind of sympathy. Connected to that is the fact that with a few disastrous exceptions, US strikes on Iran have not been strikes on civilian infrastructure. It has been not an attempt to sort of root out an entrenched group of fighters as in the war in Gaza. There too, you're just not generating the kind of imagery, sympathetic stories, all the kinds of things that sort of yield to anti war protest movements. But yeah, so far, I mean, I would say the narrative around the Iran war has been very focused on sort of geostrategic concerns and economic concerns. I've heard more concerns about this conflict expressed in terms of gas prices and economic consequences than I have in terms of sort of humanitarian concerns, sort of traditional anti war arguments. I would say there's also sort of a difference when it comes to Israel between the roots of criticism or skepticism of Israel on the left or center left versus criticism and skepticism of Israel on the right. And I do think this war has the potential to do more damage to Israel's sort of support for Israel on the right than on the left, precisely because on the right the anxiety about Israel is more Israel is getting the US into wars we shouldn't be in, or Israel is responsible for failed US policy in the Middle East.
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B
Right, like the Gaza war. No one could suggest that the US was fighting the Gaza war. It was like Israel dealing with its backyard.
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C
Yes, right, so you did have Israel critics on the anti interventionist right and so on, who sort of took up the Gaza war as a cause eventually. But it didn't speak directly to what I think is the actual root of right wing skepticism of the US relationship to Israel, which is much more about why are we in the Middle east, why are we bogged down here? Isn't this more in Israel's interest than our own? And the Iran war is more in tune with that argument, I think, than with this kind of humanitarian focused, occupation focused, anti imperialism focused of the left.
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Okay, I want to just stay on this for one more moment. And then I want to. Because the campuses really were like the flashpoint in the couple years after October 7th. And I've bounced this off other leaders, professional leaders, administrators at other universities, and they've all basically said a version of the following when I press them, and they don't like to offer this, but when I press them, I say to them, how much has the Trump administration's response to higher education in the post October 7th world incentivized the leadership at universities to have close to, not entirely, but close to a zero tolerance for the kind of stuff that popped up after October 7th? So it's not just the mood or the vibe, if you will, of the protesters have changed, but actually many of these universities had a much more permissive approach to this stuff after October 7th, and now they're completely, let's just say, rattled by how the Trump administration came down on them. When I press these leaders of universities, they say, yeah, I mean, they say, well, we have changed our protocols. We do have zero tolerance. We are clamping down on the stuff. So they will even go so far, by the way, as to say even in the couple years since October 7, the composition of the student body has changed because they have become more mindful of the, you know, fewer social justice warriors being admitted to these elite colleges and more, let's just say, people whose applications suggest that they won't be people building encampments. They say all these things have changed. They make it sound like it was, like, voluntary. I said, would you have made all these changes but for the pressure of the Trump administration? And then you sort of get a. Yeah, you may have a point.
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C
I think the answer generally is that the Trump administration gave certain parts of American academia an excuse or a justification for doing things that they wanted to do. But that would have been very difficult. And it enabled, let's call it, to simplify the centrist faction in American academia to say, well, we don't necessarily want to crack down on sort of ideological extremism, but if we don't, the Trump administration is going to do something even worse to us. Right? So I think you see a lot of that pattern that the people who you talk to, I assume, are being sincere in saying we wanted to make changes. We recognized that things had gotten out of hand. But it's also the case that it was useful to them to have the threat of administration action as spur. It's like either you saying to essentially the more leftward parts of academia, either do you negotiate with us? Something that we can present politically or something worse is going to happen. Now, what that looks like if there is not a Republican president in two and a half to three years time, if there is a Democratic president who has campaigned on undoing everything that Trump has done, what the academic reaction or the university reaction to that is, I think totally remains to be seen. But for now that has been the pattern.
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B
Okay, so war can accelerate political outcomes domestically. If we compare the domestic politics of February 27 to now, today, April 22, what has the war accelerated politically in terms of the political attitudes, public opinion and the discourse?
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C
Yeah, I don't think it has been incredibly accelerationist yet. I think that it has heightened certain tendencies, but not in an incredibly dramatic way. More in a. This was going in this direction already and now it's going a little bit faster. So in the Democratic coalition there has already been an increasingly Israel skeptical, anti Israel turn. There has already been sort of increasing space not just for critics of Israeli policy, but for really radical critics of Zionism itself. The space for that has widened. Right. The space for a Hasan Piker figure has widened relative to where it was three or four months ago ago.
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B
Right. He's being normalized. Think Hassan Piker being normalized on center left media platforms in a way that I think he would have been uninvited just a year ago.
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C
I mean, I've interviewed Hassan Piker, I should say, on my own podcast. So, you know, I think there's some questions about like it depends on the podcast. Right. What kind of, what is your podcast doing? Are you.
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B
Well, but I'm referring to podcasts that are you. I don't think you were interviewing him.
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The Pod Save. The Pod Save America guys.
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Yeah, they're inviting him to bring him in the tent. You weren't bringing him in any tent.
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People who think of themselves as sort of setting the parameters of Democratic debate. And it's just to take the Michigan primary, right. As, as a, as an example, this
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is for our listeners. This is the Senate, Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, which is a very important race if the Democrats have a shot at regaining the Senate majority. And there's a three way primary in the Democratic primary. One of the three candidates in the primary who is rising is a candidate who, let's just say, has extremely hostile views towards Israel and the Jewish community and I would say towards the United States and Western civilization as well. And much to many people's surprise, he just brought Hassan Piker into Michigan to endorse him and campaign for him. That's that's what you're referring to. I just want to give the context.
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C
Yes, but again, like to emphasize acceleration, but not incredibly dramatic acceleration. Right. I would say sort of putting Israel, Iran, Gaza, the Middle east at the center of the news has probably been worth five points to him in the polls. Positively right. So he's now tied for the lead in a three way race. Again, not a completely dramatic change, more an acceleration of what was already an existing tendency. On the right, the war has caused a more formal break between the administration. And Tucker Carlson is obviously the most prominent example. But we can use Carlson as a stand in for a larger anti Israel, anti interventionist form of right wing politics that was sort of part of the Trump coalition feels betrayed by Trump, by this war in particular. Again, I said at the outset that generally support for Trump correlates with support for the war. If you're looking for some huge Tucker Carlson effect in polls where a third of Trump's coalition has disappeared, you're not going to find it. I do nonetheless think those shifts are meaningful because the people who listen to right wing podcasts are often the most engaged, the most, you know, the sort of most politically intense portion of any coalition. So it is meaningful that you've had this break. It doesn't mean that Trump's support is all falling apart. It just means that there's been a kind of step change in Tucker Carlson world's alienation from the existing Republican president. And then finally, like generally and just in terms of sort of. I was looking at Pew data for something I was writing. Americans generally have become more skeptical of and critical of Israel over the last five to 10 years. There has been a modest increase in that skepticism and criticism since the war began overall among Republicans and Democrats. But it's on the order of 5 percentage points, not 25.
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This we're getting into right now in terms of what's happening on the right, what I wanted to drill down with you on. So I have had a disagreement, at least with you and other analysts about how big the problem is on the right. Let me start by saying I. There's rising anti Semitism across the political spectrum. There's obviously rising hostility to Israel across the political spectrum. The problem that I'm describing on the left is a five alarm fire. It is the base of the party, the energy of the Democratic Party right now, Democratic primaries. And I don't find anyone who really disagrees with this, including my most partisan Democratic friends, will concede this, albeit not publicly, but behind closed doors. Then these are people who are professional Democrats. These are Democrats. Who are elected officials, these are Democratic donors. I mean, everyone I talk to, they can see there is a crisis right now, a pandemic on the left of anti Semitism. My own view is that it's not, certainly not that on the right. I'm not saying it doesn't bear monitoring. It's not to say it couldn't be a problem in a few years. But before we get into that, I just want you to describe, because you are talking to a lot of the people, including on your podcast and elsewhere, who are really articulating their disagreement with the war against Iran and how it's breaking politics on the right. So I just want you to articulate what the criticism is.
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The criticism of the war itself.
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Yeah, look, when you hear people on the right saying, we don't like this war, what is the argument? And also paired with that, what is the argument against the US's relationship? And because it has radiant effects, what is the criticism of the American Jewish community? Because it's all wrapped up together. Right.
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C
So I think there are slightly separable perspectives on the war that are critical on the right. And one perspective is the perspective that again would be the perspective of Tucker Carlson. It would be the perspective of Kurt Mills, who's the editor. He has a different title, but he's the editor of the American Conservative. I had him on my podcast as a sort of representative of that kind of worldview. This is anti interventionist, anti imperial, sort of Pap Buchanan style perspective on American politics that has increased its hostility, I would say, to Israel, as kind of sees Israel as sort of a central actor in warping American foreign policy, making it more interventionist than it should be, much more entangled in the Middle East. Those are people who would be against any Iran war. They were against the strikes on Iran last summer. In terms of consistency of belief, they are a relatively small part of the Republican coalition. Then you have a secondary perspective, which is maybe closer to my own, which is skeptical or critical of the war on basically sort of grounds that are just specific to the war itself, that looks at the war and says, seems like we went into this conflict with way too much optimism about the capacity to do some kind of Venezuela style regime change in Iran. I know that the administration goes back and forth on whether they wanted regime change, but clearly there was some hope that you could do sort of a decapitation of the Iranian regime and that the administration seems just not to have had a plan for the situation that we find ourselves in with The Strait of Hormuz closed and with sort of this choice between escalation without certainty about what kind of escalation we should do, or a deal that ends up looking like the Obama nuclear deal or something that seems like we have not ended up in an ideal place. It doesn't mean that the US Relationship to Israel is toxic or disastrous. But it is true that the Israeli government supported the war, urged Trump to engage in it. And so from that perspective, it does seem like Israeli influence helped lead the US into what might be a big strategic mistake. We'll see where we are in a few months. But that's sort of a second perspective that maybe is not the Tucker Carlson perspective, but is skeptical of the war. And that's clearly a meaningful perspective on the right right now, too.
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The US has suffered 13 casualties during this war. Every casualty is obviously a tragic loss. Although many military planners I've spoken to are surprised that the number is not higher. Given the scale of military power and personnel that have been deployed, the risk of those numbers being higher was real. A B Even when I press people who are highly critical of the war on the right about Trump deploying ground troops, nobody thinks he will. Nobody thinks he'll deploy ground troops in meaningful numbers. So for most Americans, including most Americans on the right, does it possibly contribute to inflation? Of course, gas prices. But generally speaking, what you describe as what they're afraid of is not happening.
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I think there's two things. There's a fear of what escalation would mean, and there's a fear of putting in large numbers of ground troops, and there's opposition to that. I would describe it more as a concern than a sense of crisis because I agree with you in terms of the war's effect on America itself. It's not been a mass casualty war. The stock market is back up and gas prices are high, but are not at oil embargo crisis crisis levels. The question for conservatives who are doubtful about the war is more what have we accomplished here? Have we actually achieved the strategic goals that we set out to achieve, or have we created a situation where in order to maintain the stability we have now, we're going to end up having to make a deal with the Iranians where they can say we weaponized the strait successfully and we outlasted the Great Satan? And by the way, not only has the regime not changed, but in fact, quite the reverse. It's been radicalized, the IRGC is more in charge than before, and so on. Now, obviously you can argue these things back and forth. But that is, I think, the concern. And there are people who, and I've argued with these people who have said this is America's Suez crisis. This is like a strategic defeat that marks the end of the American empire. I don't buy any of that at the moment, but I do have profound questions about if Trump isn't going to use ground troops, if we're not going to escalate, if we are not going to sort of push harder for regime change, then if we end up making a deal and walking away, is anyone going to look back and say, well, this was a big success? I'm skeptical, but we'll see.
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You mentioned Pat Buchanan, and I've been thinking a lot about Buchanan over the last few weeks because what we're seeing now on the right, the part of the right that you're describing is reminiscent of Buchanan, which the reason I've been thinking a lot about it is, you know, I'm reminded this is not new. What Buchanan represented has been on the right for a long time, and I would argue it used to be much stronger than it is today. In other words, you think about Buchanan running for president against a sitting Republican president in 1992, against George H.W. bush. So primary challenge, if you look at how he did through the course of the primaries, he got almost 30% of the Republican pri.
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C
A third.
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You mentioned a third before. You haven't seen a third drop off. Buchanan got about a third of the Republican primary vote in 1992. And while he didn't win New Hampshire, it was a huge blow to President George H.W. bush when Buchanan got 37 plus percent in the new Hampshire primary. And that was a real wake up call that there's something going on on the right that is bigger than the Bush 41 team had thought or kind of planned for. So do you think what we're seeing right now on the right is worse than what we saw, the rupture in 92? Because to me, it's. Many people are hysterical about what's happening within the right. But actually, by my lights, it represents something much smaller than the Buchanan Explosion in 90.
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C
I think it depends on what you are most concerned about. But Buchanan is a broad spectrum of ideas. Trumpism sort of contained within itself a lot of elements of that, like Trump on free trade. Trump's trade agenda is a victory for Buchananism. Right. So depending on where you're looking, you could see Buchananism more ascendant today than then, or less ascendant. But if we're talking about Israel and anti Semitism and the right. I think what is different between now and the early 1990s is that there is a just a stark generation gap within the right wing coalition around Israel and around anti Semitism and sort of the zone in between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. And obviously like when one becomes the other is contested and up for grabs. But again, I'm just looking at, you know, this is Pew polling from a few weeks ago. And if you're asking the percentage of Americans who have a very or somewhat unfavorable opinion of Israel, and it's true, it's much, much higher among Democrats than among Republicans, it is 80% of Democrats and Democratic leaners have at least a somewhat unfavorable opinion of Israel, and it's only 40% of Republicans. However, 40% is not a small number. And then if you go into the generational differences, it's 57% of Republicans age 18 to 49 versus low 20s for age 50 plus. And this is just personally honestly what I see in my own interactions. People think about the world in terms of narratives. And there are narratives about the relationship between America and Israel. There's a narrative that I certainly grew up with about relationship between Jews and America. There's a narrative about the Holocaust and World War II and all of these things that were sort of central to this kind of binding that sort of held off antisemitism and sort of made the American right feel a Semitic and pro Israel and Zionist in a powerful way for a long time. And for people who are younger than me and I'm 46. Right. That's just not there Now. It doesn't mean that they're all like dyed in the wool, dyed in the wool anti Semites or anything like that. But it means that there is profound skepticism about Israel and Israeli policy that again, I think is linked much more towards sort of skepticism of what the US does in the Middle east than to the Palestinian territories.
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B
And also, let's just say a very unsatisfactory experience with American military engagement, specifically in the Middle east post 9 11. I mean, for many, that demographic you're
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C
describing, yes, they've only seen what seem like unsuccessful wars in the Middle east and across the greater Islamic world. And they're also very online conspiracy curious and just sort of in a different place in terms of their relationship to the media landscape than people were in the Pat Buchanan era. You could have elite consensus that said this person is too extreme. This person criticisms of Israel become anti Semitic and it could be enforced In a way that really did marginalize those ideas. And I think it's pretty clear that under current digital conditions, that kind of enforcement, those kind of taboos have broken down. Like how many people are listening to Candace Owens podcast. Right. As opposed to how many people watch Pat Buchanan on Crossfire many years ago. The actual podcast audiences are fragmented. They're small, but they reflect sort of people who are intensely engaged with politics and political ideas. And so they are a bellwether, an indicator about the future, an indicator about the terrain of debate in ways that should be taken seriously now. Could this all change? I think there are all kinds of reasons why the American right, people who are conservative, could be aligned with Israel and could be sympathetic to Israel. But if you're just asking me right now, where are things going, they're going towards a, a stark collapse in the traditional Republican relationship with Israel and a decline in philosemitism among younger conservatives. That is not as extreme as on the left, but it's a real trend.
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B
And you were recently on Jonah Goldberg's podcast the Remnant, and you said, I want to quote here, this war is a big risk from the point of view of Zionist conservatism. So how do you define that risk?
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C
I mean, I think the risk is straightforward in the sense that this was a high stakes decision to go to war. It was Donald Trump's decision. Benjamin Netanyahu did not blackmail Donald Trump into going to war and did not use the Israel lobby to force the president to do this. This is something that you'll hear from some of the president's former supporters who are disappointed by his decision to go to war. They'll act like he's sort of a passive spectator in his own administration. No, Donald Trump made the decision to go to war for what he thought were good America first reason. However, it is the case that this was a war and a conflict that the Netanyahu government wanted and lobbied for and argued for, as they wanted and lobbied and argued for the strikes on the nuclear program last summer. That set of strikes went well in the sense that it did not create blowback. This war is more difficult. It's a bigger gamble. It carries greater geopolitical risks. There's a lot of ways that this could go wrong. And to the extent that it does go wrong, it is a weapon in the hands of people who want to argue that all the problems in American foreign policy are Israel's fault. And the judgment of the Netanyahu government was clearly that American public opinion is turning against Israel no matter what and the Trump administration is our best chance to do certain things to Iran that we need to do for our own security and the region's security, and it's worth the risk. Maybe that was the judgment and we don't know how it ends. There's a story here that's different from the Iraq war, too. People blame the. The Israel lobby for the Iraq war and so on. That. That was always, you know, wildly overstated. The whole story of the US Involvement in Iraq is much more about our relationship to Saudi Arabia than our relationship to Israel. With Iran, it's different. It is about Israeli concerns, Israeli military power, all of these things, and that's how the war turns out is going to affect opinion on Israel, unquestionably.
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One of the things I most admire about United Hatzala of Israel is their culture. Their volunteer medics come from every walk of life, and they respond to anyone in need, Christian, Muslim or Jew. Here's Lenore Atias, a veteran United Hatzala medic who responded on October 7th.
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We treated so many casualties, so many soldiers and civilians, kids, women, men, everyone. We did our best. Every life that I found someone still have a pulse. I fight to bring him safely to the hospital and to save his life.
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What greater mission? What greater impact than saving lives? Join Lenore's mission. Donate today at israelrescue.org callmeback.
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B
90% of what Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens or to some degree, actually Nick Fuentes say about Israel and the Jewish community could come out of Rashida Tlaib's mouth. And it's just amazing to me watching now a number of these Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar characters embracing them on this issue, but then sort of normalizing them in their own way, not because they're critical of Trump, but because they're critical of Israel or Trump's policy as it relates to Israel and Iran. Do you see a political scenario in which the fringe of the right and the fringe of the left meet somewhere together in a conventional political context, like in an election, because they align against the Jews? Is the hate for Israel more of a motivating force than their hate for each other?
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C
It varies with who you're talking about. You're talking about politicians on the left versus podcasters on the right. Right. So the podcaster incentive is different from the elected official incentive. Podcasters, since they aren't running for office, can afford to have these sort of weird alliances of convenience because then you don't actually have to cast a vote, like, let's say a Candace Owens fan can listen to Candace Owens and be like, oh, you know, oh, this. If this overlaps with things that Rashida Tlaib is saying, maybe Rashida Tlaib is making good points, but they don't have to vote for Rashida Tlaib.
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B
Right, right.
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C
They just can sort of identify in. If you're asking, is there going to be a kind of stable political coalition that's kind of a horseshoe theory coalition that will be sort of defined by anti Zionism and anti Semitic conspiracy theories, I would say probably not. I think it is much more likely that there will be this sort of constant negotiation in both political coalitions between a more centrist faction and a more extreme faction. And there'll be just weird parallels in that negotiation. Right. But you've seen this already with Trump himself. Trump, he said lots of things that overlapped with certain far left ideas. And he brought very explicitly people who had been on the left, Tulsi Gabbard, in different ways, RFK Jr. Into his coalition. But then his presidency has sort of taken. Tended to sometimes marginalize those figures. And I feel like you'll see that dynamic repeatedly for the Democrats and the Republicans. You'll see these attempts to sort of speak to this kind of horseshoe theory fringe, pull people out of it, bring them into your coalition, and then once you're in, it's like, all right, well, how do we manage this? Right. But the default will be to find some kind of means of distancing that sort of satisfies your fringe or satisfies a large fringe. Right. Satisfies a large fringe, but doesn't go all the way with them. And so talking about the US Military, are we selling arms? These kind of things. Politicians like that issue because it lets them say, here's one concrete thing that we can change so that we can sort of show to our own base that we've made a change. We hear you, but then it doesn't affect us geopolitical arrangements more generally.
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B
Okay. Ross, you have written a lot about Catholicism. I'm not an expert on Catholicism, but I am hearing that at least within the new right, Catholicism is a force in some of these issues we're talking about now.
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A
That's the first thing a B We
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B
saw this flare up between JD Vance and the Pope in recent days about this whole concept of just war, just war tradition and Catholicism. My audience is largely a Jewish audience, so can you just try to explain? I know we don't have a lot of time, but I don't think my audience has heard this. What is the just war concept and what is going on with Catholicism and young conservatives?
- [34:06]
C
I mean, the just war concept is just basically the attempt by generations upon generations of Christian thinkers to figure out whether you can have wars that are considered just. Given that if you read the New Testament, Jesus seems to take a pretty dim view of aggressive violence in all its forms. And for that reason, there is an actual Christian pacifist tradition that shows up repeatedly throughout Christian history. But in Catholicism especially, there's sort of a more developed attempt to basically say, here are the situations in which it can be just to wage war, first you have to have some kind of righteous cause. But it's not enough to have a righteous cause. You have to have exhausted all methods of making peace. You have to use just methods, so you can't kill civilians or you can't kill civilians intentionally. And you also have to have good prospects for success, even if you have a righteous cause. If you start a war and you don't have a plan to win it, then you have done something unjust. So that's sort of the territory in which this debate is being carried out. And I should stress that America, American war making, while it has lined up with the Catholic just war tradition, I think in a lot of cases, I think, as I would understand it, the Catholic just war tradition would say that using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unjust. I think most American conservatives, including Catholic conservatives, would say it was just to do that. So that would be just one example of how Catholicism has a more stringent view than. Than some American Christians would have in their assessment of what we've done. The weird thing with Vance, the vice president, right, is that we know from behind the scenes reporting and just sort of common sense that Vance was against the Iran war. Right. So. And he is sort of the point man for trying to have a negotiated settlement. So he is in this excruciatingly weird position where because he's Trump's vice president, he has to be out there arguing with the Pope when the Pope criticizes the war, even though at some level, presumably the vice president shares some of the Pope's criticisms from the war. So that's just. There's nothing to take away from that, except being in politics is hard. It's sort of like the weird. It's just a weird dynamic on the Catholic front. One reality here is that I talked about how the Internet has changed sort of the landscape of discourse. You have this people in religion. This isn't just true in Catholicism. This is certainly True in Judaism as well. Right. You have a lot of people invested in a kind of recovery of tradition at the moment across religious traditions. There's a recovery of tradition under Internet conditions. That recovery of tradition is often a very do it yourself kind of thing. Right. Even relative to when I was young, we hadn't yet had the sex abuse crisis. John Paul II was Pope. There was much more of a sense of sort of like the hierarchy, a responsible, reliable guide to interpreting Catholicism that has diminished. The Internet has changed things. You just have. You have a lot of people coming into an ancient religious tradition and saying, I'm going back to the roots, I'm going in deep and I'm doing it on my own. It is not at all surprising that people doing that in the traditional forms of Christianity, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are finding elements of the tradition that were used for anti Semitic ends. And I don't think this is the biggest factor in what's going on, but certainly it's out there. You have a Catholic Church that committed itself to good relations with the Jews and Judaism after World War II and after the Second Vatican Council, but you have a lot of threads and strands in Catholic history that did not reflect good relations with the Jews. And so in a more sort of do it yourself online mediated world of religion, those threads will be recovered, rediscovered and invoked. There are ways in which I think online mediated religion can yield certain kinds of inter religious hostility that institutional churches tried to suppress and mitigate over the second half of the 20th century.
- [38:24]
B
In thinking about the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, given everything you've said, there's a big debate about whether or not Trump represents the future of the movement and the party. Post Trump and whatever Trump represents is a whole debate in and of itself. But clearly, as you said, one's attitudes on Iran align with your attitudes towards Trump. So where do you think things are going then, given that Trump has been the most dominant figure in conservative politics for the last decade? So I guess the question is, will that force be the most dominant force for the next decade?
- [38:53]
C
I think that things would have to go very, very badly in the Iran war. Not just like we walk away and it's seen as a strategic blunder, but like recession, massive ground casualties, whatever, for someone to run as an anti Trump candidate in the next Republican primary and win, I think the next Republican primary, even if Trump is very, very unpopular nationwide, it's still going to be under the shadow of Trump and people are going to be competing to present themselves as his heirs. I think what will happen though, over time, as Trump himself does recede, which at some point he will, is that the debates about true Trumpism will become very, very fractured. And there will be people who will say, well, true Trumpism was non interventionism and it was just that the neocons hijacked his presidency, hijacked his presidency. And there will people who say no, Trump was always, he was a different kind of hawk, but he was always a hawk. I think that's partially how those kind of fights will play out. I think you're not going to get another Republican president until you find someone who has the means to do kind of synthesis. The Buchananite tendencies, whatever form they take, are not going to be read out of the coalition by some future politician given the landscape of public opinion, including the landscape of independent voters and swing voters, which are themselves sort of different than they were 20 years ago. So the question is, can you have a leader or a figure who basically speaks to American war weariness, a sense of that the Middle east has been a waste of blood and treasure, anxieties about China, anxieties about the stability of American foreign policy, who speaks to those concerns in a way that addresses them, but that doesn't go all the way to where the anti Israel right has ended up? That's the question. We'll find out.
- [40:48]
B
All right, Ross, thank you for doing this. I could have talked for hours.
- [40:52]
C
Dan, it was a pleasure. I hope it was very helpful in understanding the world.
- [40:55]
B
It was, and so much so that I'm going to bug you again to have you back on. But until then, thanks for doing it.
- [40:59]
C
This absolutely. Take care.
- [41:10]
A
That's our show for today. If you value the CallMeBack podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members only show, Inside Call Me Back. Inside Call Me Back is where Nadavayal, Amit Segal and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling. To subscribe, please follow the link in
- [41:35]
B
the show notes or you can go
- [41:36]
A
to arkmedia.org that's arkmedia.org Call Me Back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar. Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti. Our production manager is Brittany Cohn. Our community manager is Ava Wiener. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor. If someone just collapsed right in front of you, you'd call an ambulance. In New York City, that ambulance would take 12 plus minutes to arrive. United Hazala of Israel often gets there before the ambulance, regularly in three minutes or less. How Innovation United Hatzala's iconic orange ambucycles ambulance motorcycles weave medics through traffic, GPS systems GEO locate the nearest volunteers and their AI driven technology helps predict when and where the next emergency will occur. This all means faster care and more lives saved. I have family and friends in Israel that count on United Hatzalah, and you can too. They'll help anyone who needs emergency care every day, fast and for free. So if you live in Israel, just dial 1221 for help. If you're looking for a cause with impact, support United Hatzalah of Israel. Donate today@IsraelRescue.com and add this number to your phone right now. If you live in Israel, 1221.