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- [00:00]
A
One of the things I really hate is when people are saying, like, I have no regrets. And I'm like, well, how can you go through life with not having regrets? Because regrets is where you learn all the good stuff. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the focus group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, and this week, we're going to talk about character. We're going to have kind of a big picture episode and wrestle with some things that I have been thinking about a lot. Part of it is because I'm not sure the voters care about character anymore. Uh, I have a chapter in my book called Character Doesn't Count. Uh, it's a lament from. For what I hear from the voters, because I think whether they admit it or not, people are a lot more willing to brush off serious character flaws than they used to be. For instance, 23% of Americans in a 2024 Gallup poll said that they could vote for a convicted felon who. Who they otherwise agreed with. But in a much bigger poll called the 2024 presidential election, about 50% of Americans did vote for a convicted felon named Donald Trump. And in 2026, Republicans have nominated Ken Paxton for Senate in Texas, and Democrats nominated Graham Platner in Maine until he dropped out last week. So I want to dig into how we got here with someone of very high character, David French, opinion columnist at the New York Times and co host of the legal podcast Advisory Opinions at the Dispatch. David, thank you for being here.
- [01:31]
B
Sarah, it's always so great to see you.
- [01:33]
A
So, guys, full disclosure. David and I are friends and have known each other for many years. But more importantly for this conversation, I want you to know that David, for me, is a true moral load star. Like, I read everything he writes and, and take it incredibly seriously as I evaluate my own feelings on things. David, now is the point at which you can say that I am the same for you, that.
- [02:00]
B
Absolutely, Sarah, absolutely. No, that's so kind of you to say. I really appreciate that. And it's funny that we're having this conversation now 10 years in to an era where I would have thought the era would have settled the argument. Yeah, if that makes sense.
- [02:17]
A
Does make sense in the sense that I think what you're saying is we know that. That voters don't care as much about character because probably the worst character person occupies the highest office in our land.
- [02:30]
B
Yeah. I would put it this way. There's been determinative events that have unfolded. One, do American voters really care about character? No. Number Two, does character really matter? Yes. And so it's sort of the perfect storm of the worst of both worlds, just as it appears that it's kind of sinking into the political zeitgeist that who are these prissy people who are caring about character so much is exactly the time when I think the consequences of not caring about character have become more and more plain.
- [03:04]
A
Yeah. Okay. That's a great way to say this, and I think you'll. You'll validate me here. When I was coming up in the conservative movement, it was run by people like you. Right. Like I followed you and Jonah Goldberg and, you know, a lot of the folks at the Dispatch and Bill Crystal. And I can't overstate how much character counting.
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B
Yeah.
- [03:23]
A
In the wake of the Clinton years was the thing that animated and held together the conservative movement. So as I was a young conservative, the character mattered thing was everywhere, and it was, like, central to what the movement was about.
- [03:39]
B
Yes, yes, that's very true. And part of this was, I think, legitimate role modeling from some of the leaders of the conservative movement at the time. And part of it was negative polarization, as Bill Clinton, quite frankly, so. And we learned maybe that the negative polarization part of it was a bit bigger, Sarah, than the genuine commitment part. I mean, this is, you know, when you're looking back, and the time when I kind of came of age as a conservative was when, you know, Peggy Noonan wrote of the time.
- [04:08]
A
Peggy Noonan. When character was king.
- [04:10]
B
When character was king. Exactly. And, you know, when you look at the context, you might sound strange for a bunch of conservatives to say. We were really centering our movement around character because we were coming of age right after Richard Nixon, when Republicans were not exactly known for that commitment to character, although some did break ranks and essentially force him out of office. I was trying to explain it to younger. Some younger Republicans, like, why. Why did character become so big? I said, let's put this in context. We were rolling out of 12 years of Reagan and Georgia, H.W. bush, and I know a lot of Democrats to this day have a lot of beef with Ronald Reagan. But Reagan's administration was an administration that really had revived sort of the American spirit. Reagan himself really put forward an image, and I believe a reality of somebody who truly cared about this, dealt fairly with his opponents, was an honest person. Now we have the Iran Contra, obviously, scandal that arose towards the end of his term. But even if you look at that, he took much more responsibility for the things that went wrong than contemporary presidents do. Then we rolled into George H.W. bush, a person of that. Not just sort of this glittering resume of public service. I mean, he's a shot down over the Pacific, rescued by a submarine, one of the youngest aviators in the Navy, a person of, you know, sort of consummate diplomatic skill, a person without controversy or scandal. And you had this for 12 years. For 12 years. And conservatives could look at that and point at that, and you could disagree with them on policy. But the idea that these men were corrupt. No, no. You could disagree again. You could disagree, but corrupt, indecent? No, not at all. They often went out of their way in that sort of head of state responsibility that presidents have, not just head of the executive branch to really try to be include in their rhetoric, all of Americans. And. And I'm not going to say it was an ideal time, but there was a lot of idealism. And then here comes Bill Clinton. And Bill Clinton is a very different figure. He is kind of a quasi populist Southern politician, you know, sort of a. A guy always coloring outside the lines, a sort of a kind of rakish personality. And immediately you have all of these scandals around women. And so for conservatives, it was not just, our ideas are better, but, look, our politicians are better too. Here comes Bill Clinton. He was impeached. He had an affair in the Oval Office. And so it's no surprise that by 2011, this was the. The core group of the Republican Party, the core constituency. White evangelicals were by far the community most likely to say that character really, really mattered in leaders. And it was part of this context. It was both a genuine commitment and negative polarization against Bill Clinton.
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A
I actually go into this quite in depth in my book around my own political journey, because I'm born in 1980. Right. And so my first 12 years of life are Reagan to H.W. yeah. And then I get to Clint. Right. Around 12 to 18. Right. For his last two years. So I'm 18 at the time at which he's having an affair with a woman. Not much. Or a girl not much older than I am. Came of age at this of. Of sort of those Bill Clinton scandals and was repulsed by them. And also sort of. I think I was too young, though, to notice the hypocrisy of, like, a. Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and like, some of the big vocal types around, character counts who were getting married many, many times, leaving women at their dying bedsides.
- [08:07]
B
Yeah.
- [08:08]
A
Just doing. Just being sort of. And being sort of awful. Like they were sort of riding the wave of the polarization and sort of manipulating the character counts for their own political benefits. So I think I was too young at that point to sort of see some of that color. I wasn't too young, though, because the focus was on Bill Clinton, to see what I saw as the hypocrisy of sort of the feminist movement defending Bill Clinton. And so, like, these things were in the mix. And then I was never a W fan, but a big John McCain fan in part because I found his service deeply inspiring. Like, his whole story about the Hanoi Hilton and not being allowed. So, like, this is my college years and like, this is why I ended up identifying as a Republican. And the character count stuff really drew me in at a time when I could just see it in. In what was a kind of black and white young moral universe. Something that spoke to me very specifically.
- [08:59]
B
Yeah, I agree with that completely. And where you were too young to sort of see some of the complexities, I was too partisan. I was old enough, you know, I was born in 69. So when Reagan is sworn in, I'm almost 12 years old. And so this was my real, first real presidency of my life. Because, you know, Carter, when you're 8 to 12, I mean, I was a nerd, but I wasn't such a big nerd that by 10, I had strong political opinions. But definitely during the Reagan presidency and I became very Republican, without question. And here's this thing that happens to your brain when you get very partisan, and that is when you see misconduct on the other side, you think, yep, yep, that's what they're like. That's what they're like. And then when you see bad misconduct on your own side, you go, well, I mean, I don't like it, but every orchard has a few bad apples. Right? When nobody's perfect, no movement is perfect. And what you're totally unconscious of is there's countless millions of Americans on the other side of you saying exactly the same thing in reverse.
- [10:05]
A
That's right. And I also. The character doesn't count chapter, like, really tries to get at this phenomenon the way we tend to wear rose colored glasses for our allies. And I don't know what the opposite of a rose colored glass is.
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B
When I was growing up, we called them manure colored glasses.
- [10:22]
A
Sure. Okay, there you go. People get the point. Yeah. But this brings us to where our relationship began was really around being some of the conservatives that opposed Trump, despite the fact that, you know, I followed you and my colleague Mona Charon, and a lot of people when I was a young conservative, but I was also sort of either coming out or sort of wrestling with being gay. And I, a lot of you guys were very opposed to gay marriage. And the gay marriage opposition also had like a tail end of the character counts thing because it was kind of related to being either evangelical or otherwise faith based and you know, how we have a well ordered society. And I like took all of that stuff seriously. Like, I read it all, I disagreed with it, but I took it seriously.
- [11:07]
B
Right, right.
- [11:09]
A
And one of the things that has been interesting me is that the people that I think I take the most seriously now are some of the people who I think have taken some of the most principled stances across the board, even if I don't agree with them. Like, you guys have a moral framework that you stand by and that kept Trump away from you. Right. You stood against Trump. And so even though there are things you and I disagree with, I have appreciated the moral commitment that you have brought to Trump because I watched just about everybody else I knew who brought the character. Doesn't the character count stuff to me abandon it.
- [11:49]
B
Yeah, well, you know, Sarah, there's a really interesting phenomenon that I think we all deal with. And that sort of is all we're all going to face at some point in our lives. And that point we're going to reach a point where values that we hold conflict. And then what. Which value proves to be superior or what self concept that we have will conflict with reality and then does our self concept survive that? So I'll give you a good example. So.