Loading summary
Transcript62 lines
- [00:04]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
John Pod Horowitz
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, Expect.
- [00:21]
Abe Greenwald
The worst, hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Pod Horowitz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, April 1, 2025. I am John Pot Horace, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:37]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:38]
John Pod Horowitz
And Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:42]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [00:43]
John Pod Horowitz
So, of course, April 1st, April Fool's Day. I'm not going to play any tricks. I don't like tricks. I don't like practical jokes. But I do want to raise some facetious topics just to discuss and give us some a different way into the news. Nothing much has changed since yesterday, the day before. We're waiting on the tariffs. You know, we have, we have the ICE admitting that they, that they did in fact deport a legal resident of the United States to El Salvador and seem to have done so maybe knowingly, which is extremely bad if that happened, and various various other things. But. So I did want to start with this question, which is just a few months ago. You may not remember this, but I just thought I would refresh your memory. There was a person named Kamala Harris who almost became president. What the hell was up with that? Christine, can you give me some enlightenment on the fact that in an alternate universe, a person who could not complete a sentence, not in the Joe Biden not complete a sentence fashion, but in the person that you talk to at a bar who can't finish a sentence, couldn't finish the sentence, almost was sitting in the Oval Office.
- [02:07]
Christine Rosen
Well, that is an appropriate question for April Fool's Day. I really can't answer it because I think looking back, I was actually reading some of the things she said when she was running for office, a transcript of her remarks at one of her stops along the way. And it was absolutely incoherent. And all I can figure is that it was the perfect bookend to a cultural moment where your identity, what you happen to be born as, looking like and where in was the only thing that mattered. And at that point we'd gone too far. She was the perfect DEI candidate. And I say that as someone who, you know, I'm not one of these hardcore right wing obsessed with DEI types. I think it's bad. I'm glad it's, it's fading. I don't, I cynically think it will come roaring back if it's not gotten rid of thoroughly and the entire bureaucracy of it rooted out. But she was perfect. She was a. She was a Democrat who'd never faced a hostile electorate because she was from a very deep blue state. She'd been given perks along the way. She'd used her feminine wiles as a very young prosecutor to get herself into politics. And you weren't allowed to talk about that either, because that would be not feminist to say. And she just stumbled. She failed upwards over and over again. And I have continued to have conversations with friends who said, oh, but she can't be that dumb. She was a prosecutor, but she was a senator. And I think that the fact that they feel obliged to state that in the face of the evidence of how she spoke, how she acted, her absolute lack of qualifications for the top job in the country was the perfect bookend to that cultural era. That's how I choose to interpret it, because then it doesn't send me down darker paths about where America is headed towards idiocracy. So I'll stop there.
- [03:55]
Abe Greenwald
I think that's a very interesting way to put it. It made me think that, yeah, there's something to her candidacy that almost makes it feel necessary. Now, in retrospect, like the Democrats and the liberals, it's like their cons and their tricks, their deceptions, It's April Fool's Day. They're sort of their fast ones, you know, in covering up Joe Biden and all the COVID nonsense. It's like they grew ever more brazen in serving up nothing and saying it's something. And then we got to the ultimate, like, you know, inflatable candidate that just popped. You know, there was. We ended up with someone with absolutely nothing there.
- [04:47]
John Pod Horowitz
I. I feel like, I think abuse sort of go with the sort of, like the end of the political shenanigans that the liberal left had adopted over the course of 25 years to maintain power or to get themselves into power. And Christine, you went with the ideological architecture that made Kamala Harris both inevitable as a vice president and then thinkable to so many people as a presidential candidate, when in fact, for three years, polling other politicians, people inside the Biden administration, everybody else were saying, as they were saying about Biden's own second candidacy. What are you crazy? She was the least popular vice president in American history, The least respected in American history, actually, according to polling, everybody who knew her thought she was not up to the job. The claim that we heard was that Biden thought it was necessary for him to run for a second term. I don't really believe this to be the case, but because she was not up to the job. And yet there would be no way to stop her from getting the presidential nod in 2024. And that she was there in the first place speaks to Christine's. The history of where liberals went. Where, having said that, it was important beginning in the 1970s, to put your finger on the scale a little for, for particularly for African American minorities, as a form of correction to, you know, hundreds of years of discrimination in the form of affirmative action and special privileges. And this was as people don't really know who aren't in, you know, sort of 50 or, or older, understand how huge an issue this was politically in the United states in the 60s, 70s. How much of the Supreme Court's time, the energy over the discussions we have about what is and what is not constitutional centered on affirmative action, on quotas, on how they violated the terms of the Civil Rights act, how nonetheless they only seem to be the only fair way to a lot of people to mitigate the damage that was supposedly being done. And how it was the. It was the physical professions. It was firefighting and the military and other things where the rubber met the road and where the court said things like, well, you can't really say that a black person should get a job over a white person. If the white person is a firefighter and is 6 foot 7 and weighs 300 pounds and the black person is 5 foot 2 and weighs 100 pounds, that doesn't make any rational sense. And then medical schools, all sorts of things happening very central to the conversation in the United States. Affirmative action was kind of rebalanced, found a new kind of. There was a place in which it started to settle down. And then came intersectional theory and the intellectualization of the idea that the problem was not remedying past discrimination. It was that there was no way to remedy past discrimination, that past discrimination was interwoven into the very fabric of our society and that we lived in a world that was white supremacist, no matter how you looked at it, no matter too many institutions were governed by it, money was dispensed and owned because of it. And, and people were living lives that were predetermined for them by their skin color. And if you won the lottery and were white, you were fine. And if you didn't win the lottery and you weren't white, you were basically regular, you know, relegated to second class status. And once. Yeah, go ahead.
- [08:55]
Christine Rosen
But this is actually, this is what makes Harris a sort of perfect example of both trends, because I think, and I can only speak for myself here, I wouldn't have cared about the fact that she might or might not have gotten a leg up in politics because she was a woman and because she was African American. That wouldn't bother me if she was competent. So her, everyone who knew her when she was a senator and a vice president said, her problem is she can't make a decision. She pulls everything. She's indecisive. She will never. Everyone will show her the brief and she'll say, oh, let me think about it a little bit. So you cannot have someone in the chief executive who is not decisive. We have sort of the other problem with Trump, which is he's overconfident and super decisive, even when he should be more thoughtful. But the indecisiveness of her, I think set her aside as a candidate. But I think what changed and the DEI intersectionality moment was important for this change, that a lot of Americans who maybe had shrugged and said, well, that seems unfair about affirmative action, but maybe it doesn't affect me. It's only, it's not that big a deal. They looked at a message that said, and they saw an elite non white, they saw celebrities who are elite and non white. They see politicians who are elite and non white. And to be sitting there having lost your job and in a blue collar factory and told that you are still at a better situation in life than all of those people who are scolding you for the fact that you happen to have been born white. That was a real shift because growing up, I remember conservative, you know, friends of my parents complaining about affirmative action sort of vaguely, but it wasn't this issue. It was the scolding by elites who themselves belied the argument they were making to white people. And that I think also really changed things for a lot of others who might have tolerated a bit of the, the hypocrisy and unfair of affirmative action, said, enough, that's enough.
- [10:39]
John Pod Horowitz
I mean, I think also when you think about the argument of intersectionality, like all, even evil arguments, there's always a kernel of something true. That is one of the things that makes it sticky. And it is true that establishments, as they establish themselves and as they become multigenerational, start even unconsciously writing rules to maintain the same kind of structures that gave them a leg up. And I mean, the one that we're all obsessed with. Park, is like, Christine and I had kids who had to go to college. Like a lot of people have the same obsession with legacy admissions at universities or the kind of the leg up that the donor class gets at universities. And if there's anything that would seem to be an issue of just elementary fairness is that you're 17 years old, you're applying to a college, you should be evaluated to the possible, to the extent possible, using whatever means can be used to measure this fairly. And it's very complicated. What those means are because you're 17 and you're going up against other 17 year olds and it's not fair if your 17 year old is the son or daughter of somebody who went to that college to have a 15% advantage getting into the college against somebody whose kid did not go to that college. And the only reason that that bias or that that structure remains in existence is because it is to the benefit of the institution or thinks the institution thinks it's the benefit of the institution itself in terms of its fundraising or whatever, or how it wants to view itself over time, that kind of thing. And so it's a, you don't have to go there. There are thousands of other schools you can go to. So it's not like it's a one to one choice. But everybody understands that that is a fundamental injustice as you start out in life. It's not a huge injustice. It's not something that anybody should like spend their lives being bitter about. That you didn't get into this school and not get into that school. But it's one of a thousand different things that is the nature of when a society has structures and those structures try to kind of maintain their influence and authority over the culture over time. And so like you say, you wouldn't be upset. Kamala Harris gets a leg up or affirmative action does it for Kamala Harris, because okay, so Kamala Harris got there this way. So somebody else got there because they were the son of a mayor, they were the son of a politician, or somebody else got there because, you know, their parents gave money or something like that. Then they got to the fit they got, they got more quickly across the starting gate because of that. And that's not fair. But they still have to run the race, right? They still, one way or another, they still have to run the race and prove themselves in the race over time. And intersectionality started changing those principle, that principle which is like, no, you still get dragged ahead of everybody else no matter how you perform. So that starts getting under people's skin and that starts saying starts then degrading somebody who's not Kamala Harris, who's Richie Torres or who is, I don't know, Byron Donald, somebody like that, who actually does have accomplishments, does do things. And yet we look at them because of Kamala Harris and some part of our lizard brain says, well, if she got ahead solely because she was black, so did they.
- [14:44]
Christine Rosen
Well, there are two. And there, well, there are two things that I think undermined on the, on the left itself, the claims to ideological purity when it came to intersectionality dei, that's the way they treated Jewish leftists because suddenly, even though you are part of a persecuted minority, you don't count as a minority because you're maybe you're successful, maybe you're well educated. Maybe actually your group has come to this country and thrived. So you don't count anymore. Even though you are receiving active, hostile, anti Semitic treatment on the reg, you still don't, you don't get to play this game. And that's what I think exposed it as a game, certainly among the feminists left, first with the Women's March and then later with dei. I would, I, I would like to add, I don't know if you all are having these conversations with friends and loved ones. I have frequently been asked the following question since January. How can you. And it's both an acknowledgment of how bad a candidate Harris was, but also sort of the situation. You can't argue now that you don't think Harris would have been better than this. And I love that framing. I actually, it really has forced me to think, I thought, huh, that's, it's good because there's a lot I don't like the Trump stump, but there's a lot I have liked I still come down on. I think she would have been worse in a different way. He's bad in some ways, good in others. She would have been good and she'd been fine in some ways, but terrible in others. But for my temperament, I come down on the side of she would have been just as bad but in different ways at this point in her career. But maybe, maybe you guys think differently. I've been asked this question four times in the last few weeks.
- [16:13]
John Pod Horowitz
It's an interesting. Abe.
- [16:14]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I think, you know, the truth is, look, we are in one eventuality now. Trump is president, but removing that, if you were just to look at them both as candidates as they were, each one is unthinkable in a different way, as was Biden. I mean, we were, we weren't. It's not.
- [16:38]
John Pod Horowitz
We were.
- [16:38]
Abe Greenwald
It's not that being faced with bad candidates, poor candidates, truly unthinkable in different ways. Trump, by virtue of his temperament Biden by virtue of his decline, and Harris by virtue of her emptiness. It was an incredible choice. So there is no how could you in this. You know what I mean? We're not in the land of how.
- [17:05]
Christine Rosen
Could yous, because choose your own existential misadventure.
- [17:08]
Abe Greenwald
Precisely. Yeah. Yeah.
- [17:10]
John Pod Horowitz
Okay. So I have no difficulty saying and saying, by the way, as somebody who did not vote for Trump, I mean, I wrote in Tom Cotton, as I've said on this podcast before, in saying that Harris would be worse today. Harris would be worse in five different areas that are of deep importance to me. She would be worse on the Middle east and the war in Gaza. She would be spending her entire emotional energy on trying to make sure that Hamas did not lose the war in Gaza in some fashion or other, or that the war in Gaza was fought to a standstill or not supporting Israel or essentially dragging the country into an anti Israel position. So that would be worse. She might be marginally better on Russia and Ukraine in terms of the larger ideological question. Of course, she would not be raising questions about whether or not Ukraine was bad and Russia was good and some of the stuff that Witkoff and Vance and others have been doing, but she would have continued the Biden policy of giving Ukraine just a little bit as much as it needed, but not enough, and turning the war into a version of the sun of the sum, or one of Those World War I battles that simply could never be resolved. So she wouldn't. She would have been better in terms of America's position in the world and how it talked about its position in the world. But the results would have been the same or worse. And you have to decide whether or not the Trump stuff that is so achingly difficult to handle is superficial or whether it is a fundamental alteration in the American contract, meaning the silliness like the Gulf of America, and the even more silliness like the we're going to take Greenland, but then getting down to the more serious, like, you know, deporting people without due process or, or, or, you know, killing NATO off, which seems to be something that he really does want to do, or something like that. Whether or not there's a lot of superficiality in the executive orders and you can take them or leave them and it's kind of whatever. Or whether they do mark a kind of fundamental change in how we view the president, how the president is going to act and is he going to suspend rules so that he can have a third term and all of that. And somehow that's kind of choose your own adventure. I choose because I don't, because I can't see the future to believe that this is not the beginning of an authoritarian age in the United States. I said. But I suppose you can choose to feel the other. Hey, everybody. Vacation season is upon us. Spring has hit New York. Got some warm weather, got some rain, but it's just making me think about the summer and the fun that I can have, fun my wife and I can have. We got a trip planned for Wisconsin in July. Other stuff we're going to do with our family later in August. And this year, I'm going to treat myself to the looks upgrades I deserve with Quince's high quality travel essentials at fair prices. And the premium luggage options and stylish tote bags they offer are perfect ways to carry all of my Quince goods. My sweaters, my polo shirts that I just got from Quint's and those like everything else you get there, priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. How? By partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes the savings on to us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. So for your next trip, treat yourself to the looks upgrades you deserve from quints. Go to quints.com commentary for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q U I n c e.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/complyment this is where I think the.
- [21:36]
Christine Rosen
Lack of recent historical memory on the part of the left is infuriating me. I'll take the example of the recent executive order about the Smithsonian Institution. And so, so I think Trump was correct to say we need to go, go through and make sure that this is a, this is a non partisan, non ideological institution. It's very important. It was that for a long time. It changed in the last 20 years and became a more ideologically infected institution that did have, did transform what you read on a placard when you went and saw something in one of its museums. I saw it in real time because I live here in Washington and I was fortunate enough to take my sons all the time to these free museums, wonderful places. And you could see the little subtle shifts here and there. You know, I would shrug as a conservative and go, of course, you know, this is happening everywhere. It's the sort of trickle down academic theory. But now when Trump comes in and says, let's restore, let's try. Let's, let's get rid of all that nonsense and go back to where we were. You suddenly have this rending of garments and tearing out of hair saying this is fascism. He is imposing ideology on an institution that's completely non ideological. So the cleanup on aisle five, which is, I think some of the good stuff Trump is doing, although he's doing it with a tone and in a, in a very heavy handed way that I don't always like. But, you know, I'm, I'm not the president. I don't get to say he is. I think his mission is true. The fact that they see that as some sort of dramatic overreach after a cultural 20, 30 year period where they got to set the tone, they got to write the placards and the only people who complained were those of us in conservative world going, you know, this is a bad idea, particularly for rewriting history. So the restoration process, I do wish that the administration was better at saying this is not new. We are restoring the norms that existed for many, many years that were corrupted by a left that wanted to see this as an ideological project.
- [23:28]
Abe Greenwald
By the way, that's precisely what they say now about the left says about, about this Smithsonian situation. I heard Jake Tapper say, well, is Trump going to erase history? As if all of the ideological gobbledygook that they have put together and that has accreted on placards in the 1619 Project and everywhere else, as if that's history and you know, no, he's not going to erase history. He's going to ideally free it from that garbage.
- [24:08]
John Pod Horowitz
Right. It's a kind of art restoring. In other words, like you, some, someone, someone's taken. I mean, the way we would look at it is that, is that these people came and they took a can of tomato soup and they threw it on the Mona Lisa and now you're taking it down and you're cleaning up the Mona Lisa and putting it back up.
- [24:26]
Christine Rosen
Now you don't want it to look like that poor fresco. And was it in Italy that got repainted in a kind of horrifying way, you don't want them to do that because that's also a possibility.
- [24:36]
John Pod Horowitz
Yeah, but the idea being that any restoration that does not take account of the doctrine that DEI is sort of like the overarching term now or wokeness or whatever, but that anything that kind of reverts things back to the time before that ideology became central to all of the cultural institutions in the United States represents an erasure of the correction that it represented. I mean, that's the fight of our time. Like, I don't know. You know, we. We have fought against this from the time that they started doing it, and the time they started doing it was really the 1990s. But, I mean, we can sort of move it forward to when it really, really took root in the 2000 and tens. And they think that what they've done here is rebalance history properly. And we think that they've thrown everything off kilter. And this is the battle for the first time, has been joined and what's by our side in the person of Trump, who is the least cultured, least culturally interested, most philistine person practically ever to sit in the White House. And yet what he is doing effectively is empowering, though it doesn't feel like it, precisely, but empowering. An entire. I don't know what you would call it. I was going to say genus, but that's not the right term. An entire tradition of conservative intellection that has said, this is the revision of history here, beginning with the largest ones like the 1619 Project, but going down to wall panels at art exhibitions and things like that is a mockery of true history. And that, you know, we had a lot of lessons to learn about being too, you know, too Eurocentric or something like that in the way we viewed our histories. But, you know, at the best, you can say this is an overcorrection. At the most, you can say it is a Stalinist revisiting rewriting of American history for ideological aims to further the interests of a radical class that wishes to indoctrinate people only recently born or not yet born in an fundamentally anti American, anti Western direction. And sometimes it's weird who the messenger is. And if Trump's the messenger, then you have to sort of cope with the fact that he's also doing that while empowering the world. The Ultimate Fighting Championships, and saying that he wants Cats at the Kennedy Center. There's nothing wrong with Cats at the Kennedy Center. You know, Katz probably has played the Kennedy center, by the way. It's been around for 45 years. And a lot of crap, trust me, plays the Kennedy Center. I mean, Les Mis. I think Les Mis is as crappy as. As Katz, and it played it. I saw it at the Kennedy Center. So you can't tell me that you can't have crap at the Kennedy Center.
- [28:02]
Christine Rosen
For our thought experiment, Harris v. Trump, you know, alternative histories. One thing that will be fascinating to watch is next summer in July is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, that the country has various celebrations that it will be having. My wonderful colleagues at AEI have a whole project that's been going on for over a year, sort of looking back on the 250 years. I feel much more confident having Trump in the White house overseeing that 250th anniversary than I would Harris. Harris and her ilk would spend all of its time, all of their time, apologizing, you know, handouts to interest groups saying, we're so sorry you weren't included in the Declaration. And this, all this sort of apologetics that even if it's not a kind of radical rewriting of the past and the way the 1619 project is, is still apologizing for something extraordinary. And I think we should accept, we should celebrate that this little experiment, this very youthful experiment still in the history of time, is chugging along even with all of our, you know, all of the darkness and polarization and all this. And he's a better person to oversee that. And he'll mean, yes, it's going to be. Whatever he does will likely be a little too gilded and tacky for some of our taste, but at least it will be a genuine celebration. I do think he genuinely loves this country and what it has done for him. So that's where I think when people say he's trying to destroy the country, he might be misguided in some of what he does, and you can disagree with it politically, but I would not question that he loves his country any more than I would question that Kamala Harris loves her country. But how they choose to talk to the country about what the country means would be dramatically different.
- [29:38]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, by the way, you know, let's pretend, let's give Kamala Harris the total benefit of the doubt and say were she to be president, she would not aggressively pursue the ramping up of the DEI stuff, whatever we want to call it, the wokeness, the intersectionality in. In of the culture, of the. Of our instit institutions, everything, right. But it would still, under her, continue to drift in the same direction. So it would be. It would get in. Four years is a lot of time to drift, even without the active pushing of it. So if you can imagine where we were, then imagine four more years of that, even without her heavy hand guiding it. It would have been very bad.
- [30:32]
John Pod Horowitz
I mean, I think your mentioning of the sesquicentennial of the United States is a very important thing because, again, not to pull age, But I was 15 in 1976 when we did, when the bicentennial was celebrated. And remember that came a year after the helicopters pulled off the roof of the embassy in Saigon and the United States affirmatively lost the first war it had ever. I mean, I get maybe kind of lost the War of 1812. I don't know how you want to count that, but it. But we affirmatively lost a war. We lost, you know, 58,000 men. We were humiliated. The country was in very bad shape. Bad shape economically bad shape in terms of mood. There was a massive drug epidemic, heroin epidemic. Things were bad. The mood of the country was bad and sour. And the bicentennial came along and it was a lift. It was a genuine two week period around July 4th when the spirits of the country, country were lifted. Yeah, the most famous image of it were the so called tall ships that, that sailed through New York harbor. These sort of old craft, right, These kind of like Cutty Sark, These giant sailboats, 19th century sailboats that came in a flotilla up the Hudson and broadcast on national television and all of that. And it was a genuinely moving moment that reminded people of the American experiment that they were a part of and the fact that they were living in this country that so many of them then, 50 years ago were just, you know, were two generations removed from having had parents who had grandparents who had had to flee here, right. I mean, to come here for whatever reason, Italian Americans, Polish Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, to find a new. And had found themselves a new home. And what's more, fought for it, Fought for it in World War II, fought for it in Korea, fought for it in Vietnam. And that this was a valuable project and that they were part of it and that it was part of them and that they were proud to be living here. And I don't think that Kamala Harris would have presided over a moment of pride. I mean, I think about the difference between. People have mentioned this before, but Hamilton, right, the Lin Manuel Moranz Hamilton came out in 2015 and as Rob Long has said, as I, you know, said, it's the greatest. It's the greatest patriotic pageant ever staged in America, still running on Broadway. And what it did that was so original though it seemed very woke at the time, as we thought about wokeness, was that it cast the founding fathers as minorities, right? Hamilton is a Latino. Jefferson and Washington and Burr are black. The Schuyler sisters, who were their paramours, are black and Latino. And the only sort of regnant white on stage is King George. And the idea is that they are Claiming. And the whole feeling of it was the claiming of the American experiment for everyone. And how did they deal. How did Lin Manuel and Miranda deal with this question that Christine says we would have to be apologizing for? And the main question that that was dispensed of is in a song sung by Angelica Schuyler when she says, I've been reading Thomas Paine and when I meet Thomas Jefferson and where he has written all men are created equal, I'm going to petition him to make sure to include women in the sequel. So it's mentioned, it's taken care of, that the women did not have suffrage. And of course, much of the show then also deals with Hamilton losing a battle on slavery and some other things, but that this is theirs and this is. And you know that Hamilton just two years later, could not have been written. Could not have been written, could not have been performed, would have had to have half an hour of apologies and that Miranda himself would not have been comfortable writing the thing that he had written two years earlier because of the change in the political climate. And so it's very important what Christine has brought up here, that Kamala Harris is not president when we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States, because we need Hamilton, not the 1619 project, as the animating feeling.
- [35:44]
Christine Rosen
Well, and you need someone who can speak to a younger. So you were talking about remembering just the sense of pride in one's country for the bicentennial. I was too young to remember that, although I remember seeing pictures of the ships that you described. But we have an entire generation raised on the 1619 project. It's completely infiltrated the public schools. They have a very particular view of their country. They lack a sense of chronology, so they're not quite sure where they fit in a broader history of the US or even of the globe. And so a scolding by a sitting president telling them, yes, it's terrible, this country you should be ashamed of, it is not a good and rewarding message for the next, the rising generation that will have to fix this country's problems. I mean, I jokingly tell my sons all the time, well, that's going to be your generation's problem to fix. We made the mess, now you got to clean it up. Actually, I usually blame the boomers. Sorry, John. I don't blame Gen X for anything, but. HE LAUGHS but the truth is he, you know, you have discussions with younger, your music stank. We have to have Chris Scalia on.
- [36:48]
John Pod Horowitz
If we're going to affect Them stunk.
- [36:53]
Christine Rosen
If we're gonna have that debate, we have to invite Christopher Scalia on as our guest who will defend defend Gen X genre. But I do think that again, it's not just a message for those of us who know our history and have a particular view of it. It's for a rising generation that either has no sense of history or quite a negative view of it.
- [37:11]
John Pod Horowitz
Of course, that generation, as with all generations, is always viewed through the prism of the loud voices and the ones who get the most exposure and attention. So it's the encampment people or it's, you know, 24 year old David Hogg or something like that. And of course, what the, what the polling shows is that while I don't think that positive American doctrine has gotten through to them, there is a rejection of the among people 18 to 30 of the propaganda that has been poured in their ears. Right. I mean, they are, yes, they're very.
- [37:53]
Christine Rosen
Skeptical of it, which is really healthy.
- [37:55]
John Pod Horowitz
I mean, they tend more toward a kind of nihilism, I would say, like a, like a, like a too early cynicism or a too early skepticism. But you know, they, they understood, I believe from what I can tell that they were being told things that were not true about the world that they lived in and that for them to get ahead or whatever, like not to get into trouble or not.
- [38:20]
Christine Rosen
Okay, can I, can I borrow a catchphrase? It's worse than that. They were told that and then they were told they could not question that.
- [38:27]
John Pod Horowitz
Right.
- [38:27]
Christine Rosen
I think that was. We were taught a certain way of understanding history, but we were allowed to ask questions about that. Like I was always like, well, when did women get the right to vote? What does that mean? Yeah, so they couldn't.
- [38:38]
Abe Greenwald
It's even worse than that. They were told that. They were told they couldn't question it and they were told that they were by birth instrumental in it. They were a part of the bad thing somehow. Right, Right. Because they're here and if they do well, they're benefiting from a crooked system and they probably can't do well anyway.
- [39:01]
John Pod Horowitz
I mean, it's weird because it's like reverse Calvinism. It's like the reverse Protestant ethic. The Protestant ethic used to be, according to Max Weber, this kind of, I don't know, potted reading of John Calvin and Presbyterian doctrine that people were driven in societies like the United States to do well because it was the way that it was revealed to them whether or not God believed that they were among the elect. And so they were driven to success simply to find out whether or not they were going to have eternal life. Now it's almost like success means that you're cursed. You know, that living a successful life means that you gotta let that your success is the result of unfairness and injustice and nothing that you did is the result of the work of the sweat of your brow. It's some kind of power structure that granted you this special privilege. And so you can be proud of nothing. If you do well in school or you do well in the SATs, it's only because your parents could pay for coaching or because you didn't have the chaotic home life that people have because they don't have enough money. And they don't have enough money because of the power structures and all of that. It's almost like a kind of. I don't even know how to describe it. It's almost like if you, if you do okay, you are bad or you're perpetuating something bad. It's a very perverse message and it doesn't make sense. And people. And it flooded the Zone before anybody understood what the consequences and ramifications of it were going to be. And just thinking about. I mentioned the Kennedy center and stuff like that, but. And the ridiculousness of. Effectively of Harris's candidacy. And the thing was that it was all coming apart on its own before Trump won the election. But if you look at artistic and cultural institutions across the country, there was a kind of Jacobin moment or period of three or four years in which they were all being collapsed from the inside. Museum after museum, dance troupes, symphony orchestras, nonprofit theaters, all of whom were having these revolutions on the inside, throwing out artistic directors, throwing out the things that they were going to do because they were too Western, saying that not enough attention had been paid to people, to people of color and minorities and underserved groups and all of that. In a world so obsessed with overserving, underrepresented groups and minorities and gay people and trans people over rep. Over correcting in the 2000 teens to the extent that they all harmed their subscription bases, lost members that paid important dues to keep these institutions going, lost donors who no longer had an interest in giving money to museums that put on exhibitions of art and, And. And things that they thought were ugly and were not anything that they wanted to see. And they did all that in order to court the beast. And the beast came after them anyway. And by 2024, you know, theater companies had closed. Most. I spent. I was a. I was an apprentice at the Williamstown theater festival in 1978 by, by leagues, the most prestigious summer theater in, in the United States for half a century. And in four years, the Williamstown Theatre Festival imploded in internal, weird, internal battles over whether or not people were mean. They were mean. Was the executive, was the director mean? Was the producer mean. And now in 2025, in the summer of 2025, this theater company is going to have, is going to perform for two weeks, six plays and it's probably going entirely out of business. And this was as respected an institution as existed in the United States. And it blew up on its own because of the internal contradictions of the cultural demands of this revolutionary movement that ate its, that ate its own. And God knows what that 250 year anniversary would have been like with those people in positions of authority all across the country, in blue states and in the federal government managing it.
- [43:56]
Abe Greenwald
You know, one absolute positive of Trump's being president, as opposed to Kamala for me, is that I can watch liberal news now because when a Democrat's in the White House, it's just, you're just hearing the talking points of the White House, right. And that's to me, far more obnoxious than watching sort of liberals freak out about Trump. And so I've been watching a lot of liberal news and which is to say most news, and one thing you keep hearing is when they're talking about the Smithsonian thing and these other educational initiatives that Trump has also signed executive orders on, is that they're saying people didn't elect Trump for this. They elected him because of inflation and the economy. And that's something that we've kind of in some sense said as well here, too. But I'm wondering, and this conversation in particular is making me wonder more to what extent did people elect him to do this stuff in some sense? I mean, John, you always talk about how there are reckonings for things that we don't know what the reckoning will look like when it will come. And we speculated a lot on what, what's the sort of, what's the COVID reckoning going to be. But there's also a kind of George Floyd season of George Floyd reckoning here. Right. And I'm not so sure that knowing it or not, people didn't vote for Trump because they want this. I think it's part of why he has the surprising leeway he seems to have on things like tariffs, which people expect to drive up prices. I think because they like this stuff.
- [45:56]
Christine Rosen
More than people realize that's the greatness messaging. I think it will only take him so far with regard to the economy. But the reason it's working now is he's, he's actually asking people to sacrifice for a greater good. And that's not something we've heard from a leader for a long time. What we usually, what we've heard from Biden is you should sacrifice so that the technocratic elite can continue to tell you how to live your life properly. Because you're not. You believe the wrong things and you act the wrong way and you eat the wrong things. And so what Trump is saying is you're going to suffer, but it's for this greater good. I think he's wrong on the policy. And I think actually at a certain point, I mean, this is not unlike what Carter said about inflation and austerity and this idea that we suffer a little bit now for a long term goal. So first of all, humans don't like, you know, it's like future Homer. That's a problem for future Homer. That's our, that's our nature. We will sacrifice up to a point. But at least there is that message and that is new. And I think that's why I've gotten a lot of hateful emails from our, from some more MAGA leaning listeners who are like, you have no idea what you're talking about because, you know, we're willing to buckle down because, you know, to restore our country's manufacturing glory or whatnot. Great. If it works, great. I'm happy to be proven wrong on that. But I, it's the messaging that's interesting to me because people are hungry for that kind of messaging. And I think it's why politicians like Richie Torres and others, when they speak, they speak in broader ideological terms. But it is a positive message. It is not what AOC and Bernie Sanders are selling on their tour about oligarchs. It's a vision of what they think the country should look like. And then we try to get there. So Trump is not as good at that as he could be. And I do hope when he starts thinking about restoring some of these norms about our history and our country's greatness that he does it with a little more nuance than we've seen in the past. I don't want the, I mean, he can have his garden of heroes and all that that he tried to do in the first term. But also, we do need a nuanced history. History is nuanced. And conservatives actually have a great opportunity here to show the country what that looks like from a non ideological standpoint, how to tell our country story with all of its good and evil issues that isn't about, you know, Marxism or, you know, entirely about race. We'll see.
- [48:10]
John Pod Horowitz
You know, this is an important point because the first history of the United States that I ever read as a teenager, like a full, like three volume history, was by the famous naval historian Samuel Elliot Morrison, who was a professor at Harvard and he wrote a three volume history of the United States. And his, his expertise was in naval, naval warfare. But, but he was a. Considered a great historian and, and in the course of the book, in the first book, he has to take up the Indian wars. I mean, not the French Indian wars, I mean the war to win the west and the battles against Indians and the creation, the defeat of Native American.
- [48:58]
Christine Rosen
Armies, removal, as they called it at the time, Indian Removal, Indian Removal and.
- [49:02]
John Pod Horowitz
The creation of the reservations and all of that. And Morrison, in an indication that history needed revision, as he was a classical historian, this is a great book. But he said, this is a very sad story. And someday an Indian historian is going to have quite a field day telling this story from that perspective. And reading that, as I did in the 1970s, even then, I was brought up short by, well, if an Indian historian should tell this story that way, shouldn't you? I mean, are you're just saying, well, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a wasp, you know, I'm a WASP here in Cambridge and so I don't have to tell the story that way, but there's another way to tell it. I'm just not going to bother with that. Somebody else can do it. And when you read something like that in this kind of like, you know, extraordinarily eminent historians telling, that's when you know, okay, there's something, you know, there's been sort of like a hundred years of this. It's not good, that's not, that's, that's intellectually corrupt or it's like, you know, this is gonna, this is gonna complicate my narrative in a way that I don't really want to complicate it.
- [50:30]
Christine Rosen
And that was precisely the, the necessary revolution in historiography in the 60s and 70s. This was a good revolution within the profession to look at social and cultural history, to have someone, and they didn't have to be an Indian themselves, Indian American at all. But the story of the Trail of Tears, the story of removal, the story of the reservation, early reservations and what that looked like from A social and cultural history perspective that was, I mean, I came of age just after that revolution had kind of become institutionalized as a grad student. And it was remarkable the things that, that we were exposed to that even a generation earlier of grad students would never have talked about or seen. It was fantastic. And that's actually the way to transform a country's story is through that very painstaking brick after brick revision by historians who are, who are looking and looking at new things and asking new questions.
- [51:19]
John Pod Horowitz
And what's so important about it is that what Morrison couldn't see, in part because he was writing sort of at the dawn of the civil rights era or just before something like that. And what a lot of people couldn't have seen is that the larger story that it tells, which is also true of the story that the 1619 Project is a desperate effort to obscure, is of a country born out of extraordinarily righteous ideas but imperfect execution and 250 years of an effort to make the execution mirror the ideas. And that this is a tough process and it takes things away from some people who don't want to lose them, and it gives things to people who don't even necessarily want to have them or it, you know, and, and this is a fight, and it's a fight over time and it's a fight for, you know, for liberty, but it's also a, you know, and so that is the American story. And the American story isn't just we sailed over, you know, Brit, Brit sailed over for, and landed on Plymouth Rock in order to have religious freedom and yada, yada, yada. There was a constitution and then there was a civil war and now we're then, now we're rich and we, you know, we won world, the world wars and are the most powerful country in the world. It is this epic tale of, and by the way, there's interesting things going on in the right, right now. I notice discourse, as we say, of the, as you might say, the blood and soil conservatives versus the, I don't you call them the ideological conservatives, which is like, enough with this idea that America is an idea. America is a country, it's a land. It's great, so ground and people live on it and they're here. And that's what America is. It's not an idea. And in fact, America is an idea because anything can be bland, anything can be land. And yes, France is, is a land. And in its governments IT has had 27,000 governments over the course of its existence as a definable piece of land from being Gaul at the turn of the millennium to what it is now and what has, what has sustained is a relatively homogeneous population. A few 23. And it meet it and no government whatsoever. Like, it's just a series of different ways that people ruled it. And America is an idea that was embodied in a land. There's only one other country like that in the world, and that's Israel. And so, you know, it is. It's okay to say that. Like, the reason that they want to say that America is land and not idea is that they want to be able to throw out, you know, illegals without due process, and yet their leaders. That's really the purpose. The purpose is to say they don't have due process, because unless you came from here and were born here on this soil, get the hell out. And whatever means we use to get you the hell out of here, get the hell out of here.
- [54:42]
Christine Rosen
Well, Trump himself, in his inaugural address, used the phrase manifest destiny, which is part of this history of an idea and where it takes us. Now, you can disagree again with the execution, but he himself invokes whether he did it knowingly or not. He's invoking the idea even as most of his followers would make the argument, you know, as you portrayed it, with the sort of blood and soil conservative.
- [55:04]
Abe Greenwald
John, it's so interesting what you're saying, because the thing about, okay, so America's an idea. And if you want to get to this core idea, I mean, a series.
- [55:14]
John Pod Horowitz
Of ideas, you know, it's a Talmud of ideas, whatever you want to call it, but it's not.
- [55:20]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, but so if you want to get to the sort of core idea, it's about individual liberty, right? And freedom. But the thing about this Talmud of ideas, as you say, is that it also therefore puts restraints on you. You see, and if there's no, if you, if you, if you get rid of the ideas, part of what the country is, you don't have the fetters, you don't have the restraints. And that's what they want. They want. It's, you know, now we're getting to philosophical argument, discussion of what freedoms and types of freedoms. But it's a sort of reckless freedom that they want, as opposed to the freedom that comes with responsibility and restraints to allow for others to have their individual liberties.
- [56:12]
John Pod Horowitz
Right. Well, ordered liberty is the term that is often used by our type of conservative, that America provides an ordered liberty and that. That is. That is to be set against license, right, which is unfettered liberty. With no reference to moral restrictions, not even legal restrictions, but to sort of moral codes that compel you to live, to draw between the lines or to live within an acceptable set of parameters that everybody agrees on, that if you set one foot outside of, there is no controversy about the fact that you are punished for doing that. So ordered liberty is the way that we talk about it. And then ordered liberty can be overthrown by blood and soil. That is, say you have particular rights and privileges simply by dint of where you were born and Americans do. There's, you can't have a country without that being the case. But if we have a country that is based on the idea of the individual and the individual's liberties, people from outside the United States are individuals as well, and they do not have the same liberties granted the citizenry of the United States in the Constitution. And they certainly don't have the liberty to break the law and then be fully subject to all of the protections of the law against their law breaking. But they are not, they can't, they must be treated as human beings with human dignity, as the Constitution says, endowed by their Creator, that that is universal. And so while I am not an opponent of the ice, you know, of ice's more aggressive efforts, if there is one person out of 300 who is throw, who is in that dragnet and taken down to El Salvador, at the very least they've now acknowledged that they did it. Now they're actually fighting the question of whether or not they have to send him back, which I don't understand. I don't, I don't, I don't get what on earth they're doing. I don't know why they want it, why they want to discredit their entire project by failing to acknowledge that mistakes can be made that can be rectified and maybe, you know, even compensation being given for, for mistreatment, which is sort of how we deal with things. When you, when you do something unjustly to someone, you, it's a tort and you can, they can sue for tortious damage and, and, and get something back for it. That's the, that's the weirdness of what. There must be some complicated legal reason that they're doing what they're doing. But obviously, in some ways, you know, like I say, coming up with large scale theories to, about what America is like in order to defend temporary policies is very bad practice. And to the extent the administration is doing stuff like that, it is going to have its hat handed to them.
- [59:26]
Christine Rosen
But it's Very much deja vu from the first term where Trump would just kind of act on his cunning and impulse. And then a bunch of intellectuals would say, well, here's the intellectual framework for what he just did. And then of course, he'd do the opposite a day or a week later and they'd say, well, they'd scramble to recraft the intellectual framework and it became this kind of bizarre whack, a mole effort on behalf of the self appointed Trump intellectuals to try to actually be consistent. They couldn't.
- [59:52]
John Pod Horowitz
You know, I had a couple of other April Fools proposals for you guys, but this conversation went so far, Phil, that I've forgotten them. And we're, we're reaching, we're reaching the end. So unless any of you can think of a good one to talk about here, like, nah, I got nothing.
- [60:14]
Christine Rosen
I mean, what, did you guys always have April Fool's jokes in your household? My parents, when we were little would actually slightly traumatize us with some joke about you like a world catastrophe the more. And we'd forget it was April Fools. It was horrible.
- [60:26]
John Pod Horowitz
I hate pranks, so, no, we never did it. And I really, really hate pranks, so I never.
- [60:34]
Abe Greenwald
I think you can only work on kids because they never have any idea what the date is.
- [60:38]
John Pod Horowitz
That's true.
- [60:39]
Christine Rosen
That's a very good point.
- [60:40]
John Pod Horowitz
Fair enough.
- [60:41]
Christine Rosen
And they're completely credulous and trusting.
- [60:45]
John Pod Horowitz
Absolutely. Well, the other thing about April Fool's Day is it's the birthday of my very good friend Rick Marin. So happy birthday, Rick. And we will be back tomorrow. For Abe and Christine, I'm John Pod Horowitz. Keep the candle burning.