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- [00:04]
Jon Podhoretz
Hope for the best, Expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Abe Greenwald
Some preach and pain Some die of.
- [00:14]
Jon Podhoretz
Thirst the way of knowing which way.
- [00:18]
Abe Greenwald
It'S going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Monday, March 24, 2025. I am Jon Podhortz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe. Hi John. Remember everybody. Abe's newsletter comes out mid afternoon Monday through Friday. Go to commentary.org, look at the top banner, see the word newsletter, click on it, put in your email address. Subscribe. You will be enriched on a daily basis by Abe's observations and also our Washington Commentary columnist and Director of Domestic Policy Studies, Matthew Continetti. Hi Matt.
- [01:05]
Jon Podhoretz
Hi John.
- [01:07]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, so this morning Axios king of the Washington Insider Newsletter business has a newsletter by the king of the early morning newsletter Washington Business. Pretty much the founder of the morning Washington newsletter business, Mike Allen, multi zillionaire from his many from his things going private and selling and so he doesn't even need to work anymore and here he is providing us with a morning newsletter. And what is it? It is a pre obit. It's like a pre written obit for the Democratic Party that he has published now called Dem's Deep Dark Hole. So let me just read a couple of things from it. Top Democrats say their party is in its deepest hole in nearly 50 years and they fear things could actually get worse. Jim Vande Hei and Mike Allen writing Behind the Curtain column. Here are the bullet points. Party Lowest favorability ever no popular leader to help improve it Insufficient numbers to stop most legislation in Congress A durable minority on the Supreme Court Dwindling influence over the media ecosystem with right leaning podcasters and social media accounts ascended Young voters growing dramatically more conservative A bad 2026 map for Senate races Democrat Senate retirements could make it harder for the party to flip the House with members tempted by statewide races. There are only three House Republicans in districts former Vice President Harris won in 2024, a dim sign for a Democratic surge because there were 23 eight years ago in seats Hillary Clinton won. Meaning I believe that there's nowhere for Democrats to grow on the map. And thanks to the number of people fleeing blue states, the math for the Dem to win the presidency will just get harder. Doug Sosnik, senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and widely followed thinker and political management, told us this is the Dem's deepest hole in at least the 45 years since Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. Sosnik said the 2024 election was at least as much a repudiation of Democrats as it was a victory for Trump and Ezra Klein. They note something that we have pointed out before on the podcast. If if current trends hold clear and the 2020, 2030 census comes out the way people expect it will, the party will lose. The Democratic Party will lose as many as a dozen house seats and 12 electoral votes, meaning those votes after the census recalibrates how many electoral votes each state gets, 12 of those electoral votes out of the 538 will shift to red states or solid red states from blue states. The Democrats dismal reality is not Republican spin. In fact, there's broad consensus among Democratic leaders that most current political, cultural, media and generational trends are cutting against them. Democrats are losing working class voters, says Ezra Klein. They're seeing their margins among non white voters erode and vanish. They're losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party. A 23 point swing against Democrats among immigrants, Democratic support dropping by 50% among Hispanics who consider themselves conservatives. And David Shore, the data master, says young voters, regardless of race and gender, have become more Republican. And that's what spooks him most. So time for a party at the rnc. Matt Continetti, because I had the triumphalism here, it's reverse triumphalism, obviously, is, I think, a little alarming to me because I don't think when you, when you see these things, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, and Barack Obama was going to preside over a generation of eternal Democratic rule for a thousand years, right?
- [05:14]
Jon Podhoretz
And you know, there is this very high profile Wisconsin Supreme Court race that will be held a week from Tuesday. And if the Democrats hold on to that seat and their majority in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, I'd expect you to see a bunch of stories saying, oh wait, the Democrats are back intensity against Trump and Musk, that that's going to help fuel the Democratic revival. So of course, the conventional wisdom changes, just like your daily barometer or thermometer of the weather. I would say, though, there is some harsh truths for the Democrats in this story because it's gathering information not just from the election results, but also from the Democratic pollster, progressive pollster David Shore, a data analyst who of course famously lost his job when he pointed out that voters don't like riots in 2020. And then he came back with an excellent autopsy of the 2020 election, an election that Democrats won, but saying that underneath the top lines there were troubling trends for the Democrats. He's back again now, four years later, and he has, as always, I think, some very important insights. I'll just name two. You briefly touched on them in your beautiful recitation of the Axios newsletter. The first is Hispanic voters, importantly, Hispanic voters voting their ideology. You know, a key to the Democratic majority was always that minority voters just were loyal to the party above their own individual ideas about how public policy in the world ought to be run. And this partisan loyalty gave the Democrats a big floor because of the demographic diversity of the country. And for the theorists who 25 years ago posited an emergency, emergency, emerging Democratic majority, the thought was that this will always hold, that racial and ethnic minorities would just be loyal to the Democratic Party because of its legacy of civil rights. And what David shore discovered in 2020, and what he's seeing now on steroids, is that among Hispanic voters in particular, as they rise in society, just like previous immigrant, immigrant groups, they're starting to vote their ideology the way they think the world should be. And that means that they're voting for Republicans because they don't like. Not many people like the progressive ideology.
- [07:54]
Abe Greenwald
We should, we should, we should dig into this. First of all, the David, the David Shore thing needs to be taken especially seriously because the data set that he is working from, people need to understand is colossal. This is not a poll of 1200 people or a survey of 10,000 people. He is collating data from 24 million surveys taken in 2024. 24 million. So you know what, even if you say that 50% of them are garbage, that's 12 million. So this isn't even a question kind of. This is a sort of as hard a piece of analysis as you can get about the, about the immigrant populations, meaning, I guess, first generation citizens or immigrant citizens shifting 50%.
- [08:50]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [08:51]
Abe Greenwald
In some cases.
- [08:53]
Jon Podhoretz
That also plays into my second point that I think people should notice, which is the youth vote, which he talks about, as well as the swing in generations. The millennial generation being a very progressive generation, but this new generation that's coming into being or coming into adulthood. So kind of the younger gen zers and then the older gen Alphas, which were, you know, they were born around 2010, 2011, I think, so they're still teenagers, but they're going to be voting in the next election. The oldest of them, they're very conservative and their conservatism is fascinating because it's a revolt and repudiation of progressive ideology because these are the young men in particular in this generation who have been just soaked indoctrinated in DEI gender ideology, anti masculinity talk, anti America, anti American revolution talk.
- [09:56]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [09:57]
Jon Podhoretz
1619 project. This has been part of their lives for their entire schooling and they're rebelling and they're embracing hyper masculinity in some cases bad forms of it, like represented by Andrew Tate. But, but in I think most cases, I'd like to think just a general idea of, you know, manliness. Whether that's ufc, whether that's Hulk Hogan at the rnc, they're repudiating dei, they, they're embracing traditional gender roles, they're going back to church. And this cohort, you know, these beliefs that you form in your late adolescence tend to be pretty sticky. And so I think those two trends, the Hispanic voters and immigrants writ large and then the youth vote, those do, I think harbing bad things for the Democrats. In addition to the flight from the blue states that's mentioned here and that will be a big factor in reapportionment after the 2030 census.
- [11:05]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, the youth vote is fascinating to me or the youth opinion is fascinating to me. I've long been saying that if the left keeps up with its sort of scolding, restrictionist ways, we're going to see something like a 1960s in reverse. And I think this looks very much like that. These are teenagers who look at the system that has nurtured them, which is this sort of woke DEI soaked system. And they are repudiating it the way that teenagers repudiated the post war conservative sort of society at the time. I think, I think there's something else fascinating. Last week there was a great discussion between David Shore and Ezra Klein. It's on video and there's the transcript of it at the New York Times. And they go through all the data and all the, and everything we're talking about and more. What the Democrats have to reckon with is that what they're talking about and the way they're talking about it, what they stand for is turning everyone off exactly what they are peddling. No one wants. The issues that are important to them are not important to other people. And the way they handle the issues that are important to other people, average Americans don't like what they're doing. That plus what I think Americans saw in the Biden Harris administration, especially at the end during the reelection and then Kamala's election campaign, the covering up, the vacuity, the vacuousness and the con game that they played, all of it came together, all of it to turn the country against them.
- [13:08]
Abe Greenwald
So let's flip this around. So you're likening the revolt of the youth in the 2000 and twenties to the revolt of the youth in the 1960s a little. And of course, there were two major events happening in the 1960s, mammoth world historical events. One was the Vietnam War, in which every young man who was not in college basically was subject to the. To the draft until 1969, when even young men in college were then placed in a position where they were. Where the next draft numbers was, were chosen by lot, by lottery. But that took seven years from the beginning of the American involvement, military involvement in Vietnam to happen. And then, oddly enough, of course, the weird fact that even so, the loudest voices against the Vietnam War were on campuses where people were protected from actually being compelled to fight for their country. But the. But that the public in general was getting this weird mixed message from the Johnson administration in particular. Right. Which is that we're fighting this war, we're going to win this war, and we're fighting this war. And it didn't feel like we were winning, and we were told we were winning, and they were putting out propaganda that we were winning. And even. And this got so bad that a victory, large military victory in early 1968 that was explained to the American people as a victory by the Pentagon. Walter Cronkite and other people did not believe that what had happened in the Tet Offensive had been successful because they had started losing the confidence of the American people, that what they were being told did not seem to mirror what they were hearing from people who were coming home or. Or what it looked like. When you watch it on tv, it looked like a mess. It looked confusing. It didn't look like any kind of battle that anybody had been through themselves in World War II or in Korea. And so there was this loss of faith and confidence in the government. And then, of course, there was the civil rights movement and the riots of 1968 and all of that. And if you then extrapolate that or turn it to 2021 to 2025, I think the Democrats believe that the chaos of the first nine months of COVID were going to be. Were going to continue to attach to Trump and the Republicans that Americans would remember that Covid began under Trump, that Trump was inconstant. And it was discomforting seeing how the administration was handling this, even though Operation Warp Speed was a success and that therefore they could try to move on from it and continue to reap the benefits of a culture that would blame Trump and the Republicans for the epidemic. And that was a terrible, terrible misunderstanding because the worst of the epidemic happened under Biden, including with Biden having the vaccine. Weird political decisions being made about the vaccine by the Biden administration seeking to privilege some citizens over others in getting access to the vaccine while everybody was being told that the only way to get out of this was to get vaccinated. And then all of the onward march of the di woke culture and the country was in a mess. It was in a inflation spiked, all of that was going on and Democrats continued to think that people didn't like the Republicans and acted as though people didn't like the Republicans. And I would say that were it not for the serendipitous arrival of the Dobbs decision in June of 2022. And I will give here Matt Continenti credit for the minute that Dobbs came down saying on this saying on this podcast that, you know, oh, you know, Republicans better probably have gotten what they wanted, you know, and now they'll see whether they got it good and hard. We don't know what the political consequences of this are going to be. They could be pretty bad for Republicans. And it's not that they were openly bad. They just they and other other events just meant that the 2022 election was not the kind of wipeout that people expected that it was going to be and that Democrats false ectopic hope.
- [18:00]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, especially considering the type of candidates that were running in key Senate races.
- [18:05]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [18:06]
Jon Podhoretz
And key governors races in 2022, I actually think that candidate selection may have been more important even than Dobbs.
- [18:15]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [18:31]
Abe Greenwald
Will that be cash or credit?
- [18:33]
Matthew Continetti
Credit.
- [18:34]
Abe Greenwald
4 Galaxy S25 Ultra the AI companion.
- [18:38]
Unnamed Advertiser
That does the heavy lifting.
- [18:39]
Abe Greenwald
So you can do you get yours@samsung.com.
- [18:42]
Jon Podhoretz
Compatible with select apps.
- [18:43]
Unnamed Advertiser
Requires Google Gemini account.
- [18:44]
Abe Greenwald
Results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy.
- [18:47]
Unnamed Advertiser
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [19:09]
Ryan Reynolds
Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [19:15]
Jon Podhoretz
See full terms@mintmobile.com I think you're right about the pandemic. And you forgot to mention school closures which persisted under Biden. And Biden defended them along with his teacher union support supporters and masking children, masking of children in, in preschool, you know, K through 6. That again, the Biden administration continued to defend. But then there's just the question of Biden as a cultural figure that Biden is wins in 2020. He wins in very, you know, we can say unusual circumstances considering there is a once in a century pandemic happening and there are all these rules about mail in ballots and everything, and people were afraid to go out. So he wins under unusual circumstances, but he takes it as a personal mandate to lead the next step in progressive evolution from FDR to LBJ to Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Right. And his view of his kind of providential role in the development of the progressive zeitgeist, as well as the, you know, Grand Canyon sized chip on his shoulder that he's carried with him throughout his entire adult life produced the presidency. That is disaster. It was just total disaster. It's incredibly unpopular to this day. People hate it. And at the time, and I mentioned this in a recent piece for the Free Press, at the time when those let's go Brandon chants started breaking out at the NASCAR rallies, the Beltway, conventional wisdom was, you know, this is MAGA crudity. This is just MAGA sometimes goes too far in its rhetoric. And here we go again with Biden. In retrospect, that was the, that was the chant of a counter revolution. That was early on, people saying, you're a phony, you're a fraud, you're terrible. And that shift, I think has powered through today where more people consider themselves Republican than Democrat. And the Democratic Party is in this awful state that we've been describing.
- [21:38]
Matthew Continetti
I think there are at least two major things that happened here with the Democrats. One is definitely the pandemic, which they treated after Biden was elected as an opportunity to say, okay, now we have you, we have your undivided attention. A lot of you are home still. Everyone's still listening to officials. So this is our opportunity to sort of re educate you. Right? And people resented that and the way that that moved forward. Part of that though, is also the Democrats reaction to Trump's first term. When Biden got into office, there was a sense of we are going to do whatever we need to do to wrangle this country back into a place where something like that will never happen. We're going to go so hard against any possibility of MAGA reemerging that it became of course, a self fulfilling prophecy. But you know, everything from the lawfare against Trump to the hard left policies, you know, Biden completely bowing to the social, the social left, all of that, they just went so far, they tried to bend the country to their will that they broke the electorate against them.
- [22:57]
Abe Greenwald
I'm wondering to get to the ideological point so that you have the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Like if the economy had been good and things had been good and we hadn't had 10% inflation, that remained the most painful, one of the two most painful spiky economic moments of the last 25 years. One was the financial meltdown and the other was the inflation spike that lasted almost two years. I mean, in its most severe way. So, you know, looking back historically, you could say, how could, how could they even think that they were going to recover from that? Like no, no political movement recovers from, no elected candidacy recovers from an inflation spiral. You, I don't think you can point to one. In the history of serious Democratic elections where candidate, where, where presidents or leaders survive an inflation spiral, it's the most destruct economic political event there can possibly be because it's the most, it's a regressive tax and it hits, you know, the largest part of the electorate worse than it hits the smaller parts of the electorate anyway. So it's an interesting thing going back like to the, as you read all of this stuff and you say it's amazing that Kamala Harris did as well as she did given all of the drags on them ideologically, socially and that, that does speak to who Trump is and the problems. We're once again, I think in a weird world in which imagine that Kamala Harris had been running against a generic Republican as opposed to Trump. Now maybe Trump created wild enthusiasm in the base that hoisted him. Or imagine a generic Republican, largely inoffensive, who simply stands there and lets everything that was bad about the previous four years attached to the Harris Biden administration without any real, you know, so in this case it would be like he had put a dog on the roof of his car. You know, imagine that. Imagine, imagine the issue set that was used against Romney in 2012, against a generic Republican in 2024. Like that Romney would have crushed Harris with the same stuff in my view. But it doesn't matter.
- [25:19]
Jon Podhoretz
That's the debate. I mean, I take the other side of the debate and I believe that Trump, Trump's connection to the low propensity voters, right, is something that any politician, look, you're probably a Democrat will struggle with.
- [25:32]
Abe Greenwald
You're probably right. And there's no sense in rerunning or even having this debate because it doesn't matter. It's like a counter, it's a counterfactual that, that, that means that the entire world would have been run differently. You know, like the Democrats would have let Trump alone. He wouldn't have been able to use their attacks on him as jujitsu to get himself. Remember, there was this moment when Ron DeSantis could really have been the Republican nominee and Democrats effectively brought Trump back to life. Trump, I mean, Trump may have been able to bring himself back to life. We don't, we don't know. Again, it's pointless to have this particular conversation, but I'm just saying, like the issue set was so bad for, for Democrats that you could say that they outperformed rather than underperformed in 2024.
- [26:23]
Jon Podhoretz
You know, the way I look at it is in the era of Trump, but even you can say in the post global financial crisis era, right, with the Tea party beginning in 2009, in the 2010 election, and then Trump's arrival almost 10 years ago now in June, the parties have essentially switched identities, right? I mean, the Republican Party is now the party of the working class. It's the party of low propensity voters. One of the points that Shore makes in that interview with Ezra Klein Abe mentions is that, you know, if turnout were higher, Trump would have won even more states. You know, and this is something that we picked up in 2020 too, that the Republican Party now benefits from higher turnout. That was one of the reasons Trump lost in 2020 was of his predisposition against mail in voting, right? And early voting in person, early voting in particular, which they corrected for in 2024. And they help and that helped them. So now turnout favors Republicans. It used to favor Democrats. Now Republicans are the party of the working class. The Democrats used to be the party of the working class. Now Republicans are the party of, you know, peace through strength. But we don't want to get that involved in the world and we need to be against open borders and we hate elites of all that was used to be the Democratic Party. The difference is that whereas the Republican Party in previous eras was basically, you know, the moneyed class, the people, the well to do country club types, and then kind of Midwesterners and then starting with Nixon in 72 and then to Reagan, more of upwardly mobile Southerners. Now class is through the lens of education. So what the Democrats have become is Republicans, except all with advanced degrees which turn them into, you know, little Marxists.
- [28:18]
Abe Greenwald
No one likes that. See, this is the important point that gets to the other. So we're talking about demographic shifts, the young and why did this happen? And the fact is that there is a congruence with the attitudes that you guys both adduced what it is that people don't like about Democrats that have moved them over and this weird congruence between being 18 years old and being a 45 year old Latino, which you would not ordinarily expect, would they? There they would share the same ideological distaste for one of the two American parties.
- [28:58]
Jon Podhoretz
Can I just add.
- [28:59]
Abe Greenwald
But they do, right?
- [29:01]
Jon Podhoretz
And just briefly, I don't want to caricature the Republicans of bygone era. Yeah, you know, I'm one of them as totally up upward elite and rich. Republicans also had patriotism and military strength and you know, for the, for the country. And that was the cudgel they used against the Democrats in the post Vietnam era.
- [29:22]
Abe Greenwald
And, and domestically. And domestically got it was military strength and crime and, and, and the, and the, and the will and willingness to use force and power to suppress criminality inside the United States just as they would abroad.
- [29:36]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, so those are still Republican strengths. Those have carried through, whereas the Democrats don't know what to do. And you know, I came across this line the other day that I'm just going to steal without identifying the author, but when I figure it out, maybe I'll correct later in a later podcast. But they said, you know, the 2024 election was similar to the debate over Obamacare in 2010. You had to elect Kamala Harris in order to find out what she believed. You know, and people just, I think kind of raised our eyebrows at that. And of course in their hearts of hearts they knew what Kamala Harris believes. Kamala Harris is a far left California liberal. They didn't want that.
- [30:15]
Abe Greenwald
Or let's turn this around again. Remember I said I thought a generic Republican, maybe a generic republic would have outperformed Trump in 2024, Harris tried to run as the generic Democrat. Now this is important because I think she did kind of run as the generic. She didn't want to pick a fight with Biden, she didn't want to pick a fight with Fetterman, she didn't want to Pick a fight with anybody. She didn't want to take positions. She was the vibes and joy and brat candidate. And so the generic Democrat lost like that. Turned out that was the losing bet, was to go generic rather than drive hard to do what Trump did. And maybe she's not.
- [31:00]
Matthew Continetti
She's a bad rep.
- [31:01]
Abe Greenwald
I know she is, but I'm saying.
- [31:03]
Matthew Continetti
But it's complicated. In an interesting way, she's complicated. She's a bad representative of a generic Democrat because we know her record is one. One thing, but also, what is a generic Democrat right now?
- [31:13]
Abe Greenwald
Well, maybe that Kamala Harris is the generic Democrat. Maybe her record is. She's. Look, everyone we could cite as a Democrat that's, like, really interesting now is clearly not a representative Democrat.
- [31:27]
Matthew Continetti
They're outliers.
- [31:28]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, that's what. What happened over the weekend in Denver and Tempe, Arizona, other places with this road show, this Bernie Sanders AOC roadshow is so interesting.
- [31:38]
Jon Podhoretz
And it also is not a good look for the Democrats. That's the problem is generic Democrat didn't do enough to beat Trump. It gave us Trump back in office and a Republican trifecta. But the alternative is Bernie Sanders and AOC and the socialist squad drawing big crowds in various blue cities and college areas. But We've known since 2020 that what they stand for, where the Green New Deal, open borders, defund the police and pro Hamas, that's completely out of the mainstream. So that's the key of the Democratic dilemma, in my view, is neither wing actually offers a path toward recovery, which.
- [32:23]
Abe Greenwald
Is why I say Kamala Harris might actually have been the generic Democrat. She was. She was. We kind of support Israel, but we don't really. We're kind of socialists. Yeah, but we don't want. We're not going to say so.
- [32:39]
Jon Podhoretz
And I'm packing heat.
- [32:41]
Abe Greenwald
I have a gun.
- [32:42]
Jon Podhoretz
I have a gun.
- [32:43]
Abe Greenwald
Don't come any closer. I have a gun.
- [32:46]
Jon Podhoretz
It's a Glock that I got.
- [32:48]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, yeah, I got. They gave me a Glock. I mean, I'm just saying, like. Like there was an effort to try to say, to file off the sharp edges of being a Democrat on the center left. And it didn't. Didn't really work. So the party breakdown was what it was. And Republicans won three seats in the Senate. They won the presidency by a point and a half. They won all seven. Trump won all seven swing states because, of course, the election takes place in swing states. But even more important than that, and I do. I don't want it, since I started this by saying, I don't want to overestimate the meaning of all of this date because things can switch back really quickly. I'm still just the map that gets me is the arrow map, the country arrow map of every county with the arrow either moving blue to the right or, excuse me, red to the right or blue to the left. And that if you look at that map, overwhelmingly, and I'm. What I mean overwhelmingly, I mean, like, 95% of the country shifted toward the Republicans, and 5%, 5% is in very populous areas. So don't get me wrong, like, if you shift toward the Democrats in a, in an area of 10 million, it means more than shifting toward Republicans in an area of 27,500. But nonetheless, that map says to me that there was this, what we see in this Axios newsletter, this wholesale repudiation of where the Democratic Party thinks America is or should be.
- [34:36]
Jon Podhoretz
So I just want to add a reason for conservatives and Republicans to curb their enthusiasm here, because I recall, you know, in 2008, after that election, the Obama election, and the Democrats maintaining and, in fact expanding their hold in Congress, a lot of Republican despondency. Where does the Republican Party go from here? And Fred Barnes told me at the time, he said, you know, your writings become very sour. Don't worry, Republicans will be back. And what he meant by that is it applies to either party. The pendulum always swings, the wheel always turns, and so the Democrats aren't done. The question is, you know, what will bring them back? And in the Republican case, they were brought back into power in the House of Representatives two years later after this Obama landslide in 08 because of Obama's overreach. And then it took them six years to get the Senate back in 2014 again because of Obama overreach. But the reason that delay had taken place was poor candidate selection also because, you know, some of the Tea Party candidates, just like the squad, are just too far in a different direction than the median voter. Right? And then finally, of course, eight years later, the Republicans come back with Trump and they have a trifecta in government from 2017 to 2019. So what will bring the Democrats back? Will it be Trumpian overreach? Perhaps that could get them the House of Representatives next year. And that will be another lever of party. Will it be some type of movement surrounding a candidate? That's also possible. I mean, you see this kind of lurch to the left among the Democratic base, affecting Democratic congressmen and senators. I mean, the rage directed at the Democrats in these town halls is actually significantly higher and in my view, more authentic than what the Republicans at the town halls are facing, which is usually people who are part of this group indivisible, going into the town halls to yell at Republicans. But then the problem is if it truly moves, the Democratic Party moves to the socialist left, I think it just carries them further from the mainstream of society in America today.
- [37:11]
Matthew Continetti
Well, Matt, it's, I think it'll take something that you've said before. A person among the Democrats who takes on his own party.
- [37:22]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [37:23]
Matthew Continetti
That, that, that's the person.
- [37:25]
Jon Podhoretz
It can't be Rahm Emanuel. You know, I mean, it's got to be someone young.
- [37:29]
Matthew Continetti
And Gavin Newsom's, you know, you see.
- [37:32]
Jon Podhoretz
Newsom trying to do it. Yeah, right. But you know, it's going to be. And it's hard for him considering his own record. So, yeah, I think a fresh face. You know, Clinton wasn't really a fresh face. He'd been around for a decade, but he was.
- [37:47]
Abe Greenwald
No, but look, the examples are perfect. Okay. Clinton is at low ebb in 1989, right. He had embarrassed himself at the convention and he was at low ebb. He was thought to be the future and he gave a terrible speech and people weren't thinking about him. 2005, nobody, I mean, some people loved Obama's speech in 2004. Obama just been elected to the Senate. I know, like, okay, and then 2015 at this time or you know, whatever. 2013, Trump was on no one's radar. Okay. So the only person who. And 2017, Biden was on nobody's radar. I mean, that is Biden retired for all of that. So the idea that we see who is going to be The Democrat In 2020, we don't have a clue. And if you make a list, don't make a list. Like, there's no sense.
- [38:50]
Jon Podhoretz
Oh, I remember in making a list, Mark Warner on the COVID of the New York times magazine in 2005, the headline, the Democrats Only Hope.
- [39:01]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. Let's talk about many people. Like there were. There are people who were like built to be nominees over the last 25 years, including Jeb Bush. Not in 2016. Jeb Bush was supposed to be the candidate in 2000 for winning an election in Florida in 1994 that he ended up not winning, whereas his brother won. So he was the candidate also on Nobody's list in 1993, by the way, or 1997. He was already on the list. If we're using the four year. We're using the four year Period. But George Allen, sensational candidate for president. Killer.
- [39:40]
Jon Podhoretz
Total killer National Review cover. Yep.
- [39:44]
Abe Greenwald
No, I mean, Scott Walker. Scott Walker Demon Slayer. Like you mentioned, the, this, this race in Wisconsin that you mentioned, Matt, for the Supreme Court. This is all part of a process that Scott Walker's election began in 2010 in Wisconsin. And then Walker turned out to be a dud. Everybody that the great mentioner tends to mention turns out to be a dud, because what they have is a resume. What they have is something that is. Looks great. They don't have the thing, the indefinable thing that catches candidates on fire. The weird starter element that catches candidates on fire. And so, you know, we just don't know who that's going to be. And by the way, that Republicans should keep their powder dry about 20, 28. Also, Vance is looking very solid, but it's only two months. And who the hell knows? You can't know. You know, I mean, you just. It could be a writer. No. No one thought Pat Buchanan was going to run for president in 1989 and, and, and expose the soft underbelly of George H.W. bush. Like, there's a lot of weird stuff to happen.
- [41:02]
Ryan Reynolds
Mother's Day gifts at Bath and Body Works. It's kind of like my favorite scent.
- [41:07]
Jon Podhoretz
Ooh, this was good.
- [41:09]
Abe Greenwald
This is literally the perfect gift for me.
- [41:11]
Ryan Reynolds
So don't just give Mom a kid gift. Thank you so much.
- [41:15]
Abe Greenwald
I love it.
- [41:16]
Ryan Reynolds
Thank you.
- [41:17]
Abe Greenwald
Best Mother's Day ever.
- [41:18]
Ryan Reynolds
Give her a moment. Only at Bath and Body Works.
- [41:22]
Abe Greenwald
The ideology question is paramount. And that goes to a couple things we need to talk about. But I do want to mention something, and an important column that Ross Douthat published yesterday, I believe, or over the weekend, which he called, it's about ideology, not oligarchy. Because Democrats are starting to coalesce around the message that the Trump administration is essentially now an oligarchy. It's being run for the benefit of its Cabinet. Its cabinet is worth $60 billion. Aside from Elon Musk, who isn't even in the Cabinet, who then add Musk to it, it's $160 billion. And all these policies are being structured to help them and not to help the working class. And that is why Republicans. And it's all nonsense, because that is not what is bringing Republicans together, and it is not what is bringing Democrats against them. What is bringing Republicans together. Ideas. And what is bringing Democrats together are ideas. Now, you can say oligarchy is an idea if you want to, but as Ross puts it, if you start with the crusade against wokeness and dei, a fight spreading beyond the federal bureaucracy to everything. State policymaking, university hiring influenced by federal funding. Is this a central oligarchic agenda item? Not exactly, since he points out that corporate people were totally happy starting DEI departments. If that was going to be what was going to be politically helpful to them. Once it stops being politically helpful to them, if they're oligarchs, they'll stop be they'll stop doing it and do something else. But the ideas are very powerful. And that's why I'm going to go to the two major stories of the weekend in this world, in the world of the larger kind of Trump expanding out the meaning of being an ideological war from politics into businesses and to the to the academy, because he scored two major executive order victories this week, Thursday and Friday, one against Columbia University and one against the law firm of Paul Weiss. So, Matt, your alma mater.
- [43:42]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [43:42]
Abe Greenwald
Columbia is, is said to have caved to the $400 million suspension of its federal grants in the form of a, an agreement with the Trump administration.
- [43:55]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah. An agreement that includes a ban on masks at political protests, more campus resource officers to enforce rules against trespassing and vandalism, putting the Middle east studies department into a receivership, which I think is a great idea. These are some of the things to which the Columbia University leadership agreed to or acceded in order to receive this federal funding. You know, for me, we'll see how Colombia actually enacts these policies. I hope they do enact all of them. I think they need to get tougher than even the policies they've agreed to. But what's important here is a precedent has now been set. And for the administration, it saw that Colombia has agreed now to change its policies based on the threat of losing federal funding around the same time. Not as hyped because I think for partisan reasons. But the University of Maine stepped down in its fight challenging the Trump executive order on biological men and women's sports. This was, of course, the famous blow up between the I don't know if she's still the resistance hero, Governor Mills of Maine, but she became a resistance hero when she told Donald Trump during a governor's luncheon that you shall see him in court. Well, apparently not, because it looks like Maine is folding. Also, University of Pennsylvania is now under the spotlight again for policies about the Title 9 thing. So with Colombia, you have a deal that maybe even the Columbia administration was kind of happy to take the deal because now they can say, well, we're doing these things Because Trump forced us to, rather than being the bad guys or the toughs, you know, in actually doing the right thing and making their campus safe for Jewish students. But they're taking the deal. And now it sets, I think, a positive precedent for Trump's other efforts to reform higher education. One, to make campuses safe and to restore order on our campuses. But two, also to push higher education in this country back to its original function, which was to instruct students either in ways that are going to increase their professional capacities or teach them in the best that thought that's been thought and said, rather than what the universities have become, especially in the last 10, 15 years, which are just places of ideological indoctrination and dumbing down America, which we can see every day is happening.
- [46:50]
Abe Greenwald
Colombia is interesting because this isn't over yet in the sense that Columbia agreed to do various things. You mentioned the ban on masking. It's not exactly a ban on masking. So here's the. Here's what has to happen according to the agreement. As I understand it, someone's wearing a mask. Someone comes over and says, please take off your mask. They are obliged to take off their mask or there will be disciplinary action. But what happens if they don't take off their mask? Then you gotta bring in the security forces to arrest the person or whatever, detain, do whatever it is you're supposed to do. That's the proof of the pudding and the eating. And the one thing we know about the Trump administration is they got no reason to back down from that fight. One person doesn't take off their mask, and Colombia does not. Does not exert its disciplinary authority over them. And that funding is going to get suspended. Right. Again. Right. One break in the treaty. Right. It's basically a treaty between. A peace treaty between, you know, it's Appomattox and Katrina Armstrong. The interim president of Columbia is Lee, and Trump is, you know, Grant. And so here we are. And so, you know, don't. Don't fire a gun, don't fire a shot back at the north, or the war is going to begin again. So there's that. And that's an interesting sort of wrinkle. I just want to. I have an interesting experience, which is that I took my. I have two daughters, I have a son, but I have two. A daughter in college, and I have a daughter who is about to go to college. So I did college tours in 2021 and early 22 for my oldest daughter, and I have just completed a round of tours in 2024. And 2025 for my middle daughter. And it is like, not. I'm. The tours earlier were Covid tours, so they were already all full of weird. There's so much talk about how the protocols for Covid interfering with stuff. But the di Ness of the early tours was very heavy. Land acknowledgments, talking about ways in which diversity was homepo, how this worked, where, how different gender studies departments, all of that. Okay, so 2024, 2025, zip, zippo. With the exception of Brown University, which started its tour with. With a land acknowledgment, which I think I talked about before, which cracked me up, because it's the land acknowledgment that they seized the land from the Narragansett Indians. So it's like, hey, you got a $20 billion endowment. Why don't you just give the land back? You have enough money to build another. You know, buy. Buy more space somewhere from a private land, a landholder, and build a new campus. Go right ahead. Kind of hypocrisy is this land acknowledgment, you know, or pay rent? Are you paying the Narragans Indians a billion dollars a year in rent? You could do that. Okay. Anyway, aside from Brown going around a lot of the places that we went, it's like, here's how you're going to get a job after school. Here's how you're going to get a job after. Here's where we're going to help. Help you get internships. Hey, want to travel abroad? Here's how you travel abroad. You know what your advisor does? They help you to write a paper, go to the writing center. We're going to try to get you through this experience and get a job at the end. That was not the emphasis, but according.
- [50:31]
Jon Podhoretz
To the president of Princeton University, what you just described is the new McCarthyism.
- [50:35]
Abe Greenwald
I am aware of that, and that's Christopher Eisgruber. This is one of the things that cracks me up. So Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton has a piece attacking the Columbia agreement with Trump in the Atlantic. Who is Christopher Eisgruber? Just one thing. There is an effort inside Princeton in the Classics department at Princeton, of course, Princeton being one of the original universities of the United States. States. All it was was a classics department and a divinity school. That's all it was, was it taught Greek and Latin and you studied the Bible and you read Horace's odes and memorized them, and that was what university was. And from inside the classics Department came an effort by a radical, pretty crazy young minority professor to destroy the Classics department from the inside. That was opposed to by a classics professor from the inside also, who was then pursued, hunted down, star chambered and driven from campus for the sin of attempting to defend the Princeton's historic commitment to teaching Greek and Rome and Roman, Greek and Latin. And that was done by Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton, who is now attacking Columbia for agreeing to bring restore order to their campus so he can go hang and they can go hang. And getting lectures from Christopher Eisgruber on the proper conduct of a university and how it behaves itself when Princeton is destroyed is literally allowing a cancer to grow inside without treating it. And in fact sort of like doing things to make it more potent.
- [52:30]
Matthew Continetti
But you know, it points to something larger, which is the Trump situation with Colombia is very good in that it's an attempt to tackle campus life. And regarding the Middle east studies department in receivership, there's some movement there in terms of education, but really the larger question is about education in all these schools, masks or no masks on campus, what are the. If the professors are teaching these kids radicalism and continuing to indoctrinate them into this program, we still have the same problem.
- [53:15]
Abe Greenwald
We do. And there's. I mean, that's an important. But you know, you got to start somewhere and at least safety.
- [53:21]
Jon Podhoretz
Right?
- [53:21]
Abe Greenwald
Is it. I mean, it's like the classic rule. Richard Thornburg, the Attorney general under. Under George H.W. bush, started a group. I remember because I thought, oh, this is silly. This is just nonsense. Called the First Freedom. And his idea was the first Freedom was to fight for renewed harsh penalties for criminals. And I met him in 1989 when, when he left office, he did this thing and it was like, oh, this is just science. F. This is ridiculous. Like, you know, we're not going to. We're not going to get there. Like we're just going to have to live with the crime rate that we have. And of course, four years later came sort of the revolution in policing and all kinds of things that show that he was on the cutting edge, not know that he wasn't that. That, that this wasn't science fiction. So you got to start somewhere. And if the rot is so pronounced in education, though, it's hard to understand how you break the rot, but rot breaks itself. So, you know, we'll see. Once you put pressure on it, who knows, who knows what will happen? Okay.
- [54:27]
Jon Podhoretz
And a lot of the. Just. Yeah, just a quick point. But a lot of the majors that lend themselves most to indoctrination are in a state of collapse.
- [54:36]
Abe Greenwald
Right, too. No one is studying it.
- [54:38]
Jon Podhoretz
No one's studying them yet. The departments are being.
- [54:41]
Abe Greenwald
Someone Sent Me. Someone Sent Me was fascinating, actually. Listen, friend, Dear friend, listener pod Daniel Cass sent me the list of the 2024 approved PhD theses at Yale. And there were like seven, maybe six, and they were, it was like a parody. I mean, I don't remember what they were. You could go look them up yourself because it was just Googleable. But it's like reading a Kingsley amos novel from 2024 about the Academy, reading the topics that were the subjects of these, of these dissertations. So, yeah, it's kind of amazing. Now, let's move on to the thing that is outraging everybody and is very worrisome, I would say, except for my own schadenfreude, which is the deal that Trump has struck with the firm of Paul Weiss. So Paul Weiss, one of the most profitable law firms in the history of the planet. White Shoe Wall used to be called White Shoe, but it's like huge grossing law firm, leans very Democratic, was basically providing all kinds of legal services to anti Trump efforts during, not only during, from 2017 to 2021, but during the, you know, during the lawfare period after he was out of office. And Trump said, okay, here's my executive order. Nobody from Paul Weiss gets a security clearance. Nobody from Paul Weiss gets hired by the federal government. Nobody from Paul Weiss can enter a federal building. Paul Weiss, you tried to destroy me. I am now going to try to destroy you. And Paul Weiss and its managing partner cried uncle and made a deal and said they would provide pro bono services to conservatives and said they would spend $40 million on and they would fight antisemitism and some other stuff. And boy are people are going like, David French, this is, you know what? We are time to go into the bunker. Because Paul Weiss has agreed. And, you know, this is, this is villainy and it's terrible. And here's the thing I agree. That is there's something horrifying about the President, United States bullying a private firm into sort of, you know, in this way. But the line that is being proffered by French and a lot of other people is the institutions are all collapsing. Columbia's giving into Trump and Paul Weiss is giving into Trump. Paul Weiss should be standing firm for principle, but instead it's chosen the path of expediency. How dare it. And I swear to God, if I'm going to get lectured by people about how big law is supposed to represent principles. These are people who will take anybody as a client. And I'm not, I don't want to now sound like, you know, Matlock or like, I'm on. But, you know, like, they'll take a polluter, they'll take a mass murderer. They'll represent anybody. As long as someone pays their clerk $1,000 an hour to send one email, they'll do anything. And the whole line that I was taught provides the moral justification for defending the guilty, which they do a lot of the time, is that everybody deserves their best defense, not that they stand on principle. If they stood on principle, they would reckon with whether or not their defendant was guilty or not, and then. And then not represent them.
- [58:26]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, I mean, the stand on principle argument did not arise when the Free Beacon was paying attention to which law firms were representing Al Qaeda terrorists, you know, there. And it was like, well, we don't choose our clients. We're just, we have to uphold these. Everyone deserves a defense. We're not going. But now, now it's, oh, why aren't you, why aren't you fighting now? We should also mention, though, Perkins Coy, another law firm targeted by Trump is fighting.
- [58:56]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [58:57]
Jon Podhoretz
So Paul Weiss is.
- [58:58]
Abe Greenwald
So they should enjoy different path. Congratulations to Perkins Coy for its, you know, stand on principle. I would still like to see their client list and see where they're, where, where they have stood on principle before, because God knows, you know, when these firms, they make settlements, when they know people are innocent, they pay, they pay settlements to people they know are guilty or arrange for that. That's all fine. I'm just the idea that what they're supposed to represent is the moral probity of the American establishment. I'll take it from a lot of people, but I'm not going to take it from ambulance chasers and, you know, and, and these sleaze bags, because I don't. I love lawyers. Many lawyers are on our board and I, and I support their work. And I do not think that they are bad people or doing bad things, but I'm not getting lectured morally by them for getting paid $1,000 an hour by, by somebody who may or may not have dumped bad things into the river.
- [60:09]
Matthew Continetti
No, you know, I mean, I do also agree with you that there is something horrifying about Trump doing this. But at the same time, I have to say, it's not as if Democrats don't go after private industries. Right. And private companies after defense contract individuals and drug, drug companies and, you know.
- [60:27]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, yeah, no, but. Right. Or, or the attorneys general of, of, of, of states. All, all of whom. Most all of. All of whom were and have been Democrats levering their political power with junk lawsuits that they collect together into one to bully entire industries into providing them with gigantic slush funds. Now, maybe you think that's good, maybe you think it's good the tobacco companies came to that massive settlement, because tobacco companies are bad. But yeah, what sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. And I don't see what's so terrible about the deal, by the way, that Paul Weiss struck, except that you're not supposed to strike a deal with the President because he's mad at you and is going to punish your firm, I guess, is the one principle. And yes, should establish, should the establishment stand up to ill behavior on the part of, you know, major institutions. Absolutely. So maybe they shouldn't have joined in horseshit suits that Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis and Tish James are bringing. How about that? Where were they then when they knew perfectly well that these suits were crap? They just wanted Trump dead. And so in that sense, he may be a bad steward of this argument because he has, he's implicated in it and he's using powers that a president shouldn't use. And I do think that's really bad. And I am worried about this commingling of all of this together. But again, I'm not getting lecture. You know, don't, don't throw them up as the people who are supposed to be the ones to take a firm moral stance in this country against what is going on here. Just like I'm not listening to the people who destroyed the universities like Michael Roth at Wesleyan and Christopher, I screw or ed Princeton and all of that talk about the authoritarian frame of the Trump administration. So where were they when they never hired a conservative for 30 years? Where was. By the way, does Paul Weiss ever hired somebody who was head of the Federalist Society at their college? Not sure. I don't know. May. Probably they did, maybe they haven't. I do know that many lawyers in Republican administrations, from Reagan to Bush to Bush to Trump have left their positions, high level positions in legal, you know, of counsel or at the Justice Department or something like that, when they were not at firms and could not get hired because those firms did not want to hire Republicans. So again, I'm not getting lectures from them.
- [63:17]
Jon Podhoretz
John, I hear you have a recommendation today.
- [63:20]
Abe Greenwald
I do have a recommendation today, and it's an unexpected recommendation. It comes because somebody mentioned it last week and I looked it up. There is a mystery writer of the 1950s,'60s and 70s named Stanley Ellen E L L I N who was best known for writing. We talked about this world of vanished short story mystery short stories that were then. A lot of them were adapted for the Twilight Zone or for Alfred Hitchcock Presents or other shows that did those kinds of anthology things. But. But Ellen was also wrote novels and he wrote a novel about a private detective firm in New York City in the late 50s called the 8th Circle, which is about a case young. A young guy who's taken over this private detective firm who is our hero. And he is. He ends up becoming a leg man on a case involving a cop who has been falsely accused of taking a bribe from a bookie. And it is a sort of wholesale portrait of the world of the police, the world of private detectives, the world of sort of white shoe law and fixers and wealthy New Yorkers and Upper West Siders of the day. And it is fun and delightful and sobering and very morally complicated. And I really, really recommend it highly. That's the Eighth Circle by Stanley Allen. So that's our show for the day back tomorrow. For Matt and Abe, I'm John Podhoritz. Keep the candle bur.