Progressives and Fire

Summary

Summary of "Progressives and Fire" Episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Release Date: January 10, 2025

Hosts:

• John Podhoretz – Editor of Commentary Magazine
• Abe Greenwald – Executive Editor
• Seth Mandel – Senior Editor
• Christine Rosen – Social Commentary Columnist

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1. Introduction

The episode, titled "Progressives and Fire," delves into a range of contemporary political and social issues, primarily focusing on the intersection of progressive ideology, governance, and crisis management. The hosts engage in a comprehensive discussion, interspersed with insightful quotes and critical analysis.

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2. Trump Sentencing and Supreme Court Decision

The conversation begins with an analysis of the Supreme Court's recent decision regarding former President Donald Trump's sentencing.

• John Podhoretz ([00:56]): Highlights that the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 margin, rejected Trump's claim to halt his sentencing, emphasizing that the case is a state matter and does not necessitate intervention.

• Seth Mandel ([06:01]): Discusses the potential for Trump's legal team to delay the sentencing process through appeals, potentially extending the legal proceedings for up to four years.

• Christine Rosen ([10:19]): Points out the political implications, noting that despite Trump's conviction, the American electorate re-elected him, underscoring a disconnect between legal outcomes and voter behavior.

Notable Quote:

• John Podhoretz ([08:24]): "He's putting himself in the Hobson's choice of pursuing it and thus distracting himself from the powers of the presidency or accepting the verdict in some fashion."

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3. Comparing Governance: DeSantis vs. Newsom

A significant portion of the discussion contrasts the leadership styles of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and California Governor Gavin Newsom, especially in handling natural disasters such as wildfires.

• John Podhoretz ([11:32]): Critiques California's handling of recent wildfires, suggesting that media coverage fails to attribute blame effectively, unlike historical precedents like Hurricane Katrina.

• Seth Mandel ([15:43]): Highlights DeSantis's proactive approach to disaster management, contrasting it with Newsom's perceived lack of effective response.

• Christine Rosen ([19:54]): Emphasizes the importance of practical governance over political posturing, arguing that Newsom's focus on political agendas detracts from addressing pressing issues like homelessness and infrastructure management.

Notable Quote:

• Seth Mandel ([17:13]): "What does it mean to be managed by these people?"

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4. Progressive Ideology and Governance

The hosts critique progressive and liberal ideologies, arguing that they often lead to inefficacious governance despite high-minded promises.

• John Podhoretz ([24:37]): Criticizes the progressive movement for fostering a sense of hopelessness and for relying heavily on government intervention without delivering tangible results.

• Christine Rosen ([36:48]): Discusses the pitfalls of progressivism, particularly how it shifts responsibility to the government while absolving it of accountability when policies fail.

Notable Quote:

• Christine Rosen ([48:53]): "Do you want to understand both the best intentions of human beings, but also their worst intentions?"

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5. Firefighting, Empathy, and Toxic Masculinity

A nuanced discussion unfolds around the culture within firefighting communities, touching upon themes of masculinity, empathy, and institutional priorities.

• John Podhoretz ([50:49]): Shares an anecdote about a female firefighter highlighting the tensions between traditional firefighting roles and evolving gender dynamics.

• Seth Mandel ([53:31]): Explores the balance between empathy and traditional masculine roles, questioning whether changing perceptions of masculinity affect the willingness of individuals to take on high-risk roles like firefighting.

• Christine Rosen ([60:50]): References studies indicating that increased diversity in communities can lead to lower civic participation, challenging the progressive narrative of the melting pot.

Notable Quote:

• Abe Greenwald ([31:50]): "The left has tied itself to insoluble issues and by design, because then you never have the fight."

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6. Conclusion

The episode wraps up with reflections on the state of modern governance, emphasizing the need for practical solutions over ideological rhetoric. The hosts advocate for leadership that prioritizes effective management and accountability, rather than succumbing to theoretical or politically motivated agendas.

Final Thoughts:

• John Podhoretz ([57:54]): "Progressivism suggested that the kinds of impulses that lead to someone being a firefighter... are the logic of military training. It's the idea that one of the ways that you get an army to fight for you isn't to invoke wonderful notions, but that you are in this foxhole with five other guys."

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Key Takeaways:

• Supreme Court's Stance on Trump Case: Emphasizes state jurisdiction and rejects federal intervention despite Trump's presidency.
• Governance Comparison: DeSantis is lauded for effective crisis management, whereas Newsom is criticized for prioritizing political agendas over practical solutions.
• Critique of Progressivism: Progressive policies are accused of fostering ineffectual governance and contributing to societal issues rather than resolving them.
• Firefighting Culture: Raises important questions about the evolving dynamics of traditionally male-dominated professions and the impact of shifting societal values on such roles.

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This episode provides a critical examination of current political dynamics, especially highlighting the contrasts between progressive ideologies and pragmatic governance. Through detailed discussions and illustrative quotes, the hosts offer their perspectives on the challenges and shortcomings within modern American leadership and policy-making.

Transcript

[Abe Greenwald]

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

[John Podhoretz]

Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.

[Seth Mandel]

It'S going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best.

[John Podhoretz]

Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, January 10, 2025. I am Jon Pothoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

And I'm now gonna announce no longer media Commentary columnist, but rather social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. We'll explain more of that in due course. Hi, Christine.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi, John. I was still, I'm still holding out for Tsarina, but it's okay.

[Seth Mandel]

Life is okay.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, you are certainly the Tsarina of this podcast. Podcast.

[Seth Mandel]

So she's still writing media columnist on all her checks.

[John Podhoretz]

I tried to, you know, I imagine explaining the joke about the writing the previous year on all your checks to a 20 year old now, as I tried to do to my daughter, since she actually has had a checking account for several years because she's at school and has never written a check, of course. So.

[Seth Mandel]

That's right.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, it's like saying dial. It's like using the, it's like using the, the verb dial with a phone. What does that refer to as?

[Seth Mandel]

I, I took my. We took our kids to see at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra recently their live version of the Princess Bride where they play the movie and have the orchestra play along. And it was wonderful. And I told my kids afterwards that I watched the movie so much as a kid, but I had taped it off of TV airing. And so I had the VHS tape.

[John Podhoretz]

And it's like you were speaking Swahili.

[Seth Mandel]

He had commercials. And I told them, I remembered every spot that would have been a commercial break because I always. And their faces were black. Commercials.

[John Podhoretz]

Vhs. Vhs.

[Seth Mandel]

That nothing.

[John Podhoretz]

I said, yeah, I mean, it is fascinating. Anyway, so I was just gonna say we're not gonna talk much about the Trump sentencing because we don't know what's gonna happen in it. But I did want to point out that the Supreme Court last night, I think completely understandably, since it's a state case and not a federal case, did not reject it, though by a 5 to 4 margin, rejected his claim that they should intervene and halt the sentencing in the, in the case, saying basically that since the judge had announced, Judge Mershon had announced that he would not sentence him to any time and that he wouldn't be bothered by it, it was not a big deal that the process could continue in the appeals process continue in New York, and that that was fine. It was Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts who concurred with the liberals on the court that this was okay. Now, I just want to read to you what, what Ari Hoffman of the New York sun, who has a law degree from Stanford, what he writes here. Five justices would have been required to halt the proceedings in New York. Majority of the court instead reckoned that the sentencing, quote, will impose on the President Elect's responsibilities a burden that is relatively unsubstantial. They also reasoned that the alleged evidentiary violation at Trump's state trial can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal. And then Hoffman says president Elect will now presumably pursue that appellate course from the Oval Office, something that has never been done before. His attorneys had argued that sentencing the 45th president during his presidential transition would, quote, inflict grave injustice and harm to the institution of the presidency and the operations of the federal government. Trump said, by the way, I read it and I thought it was a fair decision, actually, so I'll do my little thing tomorrow. So he clearly doesn't want to get into a brogus, as we would say, with the Supreme Court on its finding, and thought this was a Hail Mary play himself. However, there are two arguments about presidential immunity, one of which is that the president has immunity from these kinds of things because of his unique position at the head of the national justice system, that because of the structure of the Constitution, it flows from him, and so therefore he's indicting himself. He would be charging himself. This is irrational and doesn't make sense, and that these things can be dealt with after, after his term in office? The second, though, is a more practical thing, which is do we want presidents to be disturbed by individual court actions rather than focusing the entirety of their attention on the job that we have hired them to do to run the executive branch of the government and effectively sort of be the leader of the United States and the leader of the free world. And therefore, on the second charge, by saying that this is relatively insubstantial. Relatively insubstantial. Unsubstantial, actually. Which is a weird word, verb. I'm not sure that unsubstantial is a verb. So maybe Sonia Sotomayor wrote it. Is that right? Like, I don't know, Even an unsubstantial burden is a burden on the presidency.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, going to jail is a burden.

[Christine Rosen]

They can probably, through various, you know, through the appeals process, get this delayed for four years, effectively. It's pretty, it's. It's Certainly possible to do that in any sort of appeals process. So if Trump's lawyers want to just keep it out of his, off of his plate for the next couple of years, they're, they'll, they're delaying tactics they might be able to try.

[John Podhoretz]

But that's not, that's not what, see that it's actually works in reverse. If Trump wishes to close this out with the case being thrown out on the grounds that material was improperly the appeals claims that he is making, he wouldn't want to delay delaying it for four years is what Mershon is offering. Right? He's saying, I'm not going to sentence you to time, I'm not going to impose any penalties on you. Just take it. You're a convicted felon, take it, stuff it, everyone can use it against you. So he is put in the Hobson's choice of pursuing it and thus distracting himself from the powers of the presidency or accepting the verdict in some fashion, which he clearly does not wish to do. And therefore, that's where I think there is something inconsistent in the Supreme Court's argument that fundamentally, whatever it was that made Barrett and Roberts go in with Jackson, Sotomayor and Kagan, that they are not taking account of, as I say, the more practical question of whether or.

[Christine Rosen]

Not president is that if what they're looking at is his ability to actually do the job as president, he still has the choice of whether to accept the con, you know, accept, like you said, he can just go, okay, this is it, it's over. I was sentenced. I'm not. My freedom is not taken away from me and my ability to do the job as president, a second term is still there. So in a broader sense, they're not inconsistent in allowing him to make the choice. He has the ability to make the choice. Now, whatever choice he makes, he might be imposing some limitations on his own attention and time, as in his second term. But it's not the court insisting that he be deprived of that freedom anymore.

[John Podhoretz]

It just raises, it means that he is being offered, he is being tempted to deny his own constitutional or whatever procedural rights to appeal on the grounds that he just doesn't, he just wants to not bother to pay attention. When I think in this case he clearly believes, and I think a lot of us clearly believe, that this is a trumped up case, if you'll excuse the unintentional pun and that, and that he should not, you know, sit and take it. But Abe, I'm sorry, on a practical.

[Abe Greenwald]

Level, not a legal level, the Burden now imposed on him is nothing compared to the burden imposed on him the first time he was elected in the Russia collusion investigation. Right, yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

You mean time, distraction. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

And intrusion, you know.

[Seth Mandel]

You know, I think the easiest way to test it is to say, would he be making the same choice if he weren't about to take office as president? And if the answer is no, then it's a burden. Right. If it changes his answer on whether he accepts the verdict or whether he fights it, then I think by definition, the circumstances show that it would be a burden on his presidency.

[John Podhoretz]

I think that's my point. And not a violation of his rights or anything like that, but as I say, sort of putting him in a position where Mershon is saying, I'm going to make it as easy for you as possible to accept that the fact that you will be a convicted felon, even if you don't believe that your conviction was just. And it deserves to be overturned. I am putting everything. All we want after years of this litigation, is the bragging rights to claim that you were convicted of these 34 felonies. That's all we want. You're not going to go to jail, you're not going to pay a fine, nothing. We're just going to screw this on. We're going to stamp this on your forehead.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, and the political implications of that have already been decided, which is that the American people don't care. They reelected him anyway knowing he was a convicted felon.

[John Podhoretz]

So, okay. As I say, I just think it's an interesting debate. It doesn't matter now because it is what it is, and he'll make whatever decisions he makes, and it's the fact of his life going forward. I just thought that this question is rather more complicated and that Mershon has conducted himself in a sleazy fashion, doing everything he could to secure this end. And he didn't care because since the procedure did not end up denying Trump his reelection or, you know, ending his public life, he's just, he's settling for scraps. And the scraps are convicted felon Donald John Trump. Like, that's that. That's it. And it's, it's a good, pretty decent scrap for him at the age of 74 to end his career on and then go sit on boards and gives me getting, getting standing ovations at the New York Bar Association Annual Dinner and whatever else is going to happen for him.

[Christine Rosen]

There are a lot of.

[Seth Mandel]

The joke is on Merchant because Trump signed the First Step Act Sorry, go ahead.

[Christine Rosen]

I was just gonna say there are a lot of these public figures like Merchant, and we should talk a little bit about Biden's attempts to craft a legacy in these waning week or so that are failing miserably because the transparency of their efforts to do so are still overwhelmed by the absolute inanity of some of the policy choices they made while they were office.

[John Podhoretz]

Fair enough. Okay, so. Okay, so let's move on. And back, sadly, to the disaster, nightmare, horror of California. It's kind of a remarkable moment. We're back in the kind of second era of the man that Ron DeSantis is tough and interesting as a counterweight to everybody else after his sort of the failure for his presidential campaign to come alive. Last night, I think he was at Mar a Lago. I can't quite tell where he was or was in a ballroom or something. And somebody said to him, do you think it's fair for people to be criticizing Gavin Newsom right now? And DeSantis was like, you have got to be kidding me. If the mayor of Los Angeles were a Republican right now, every one of you people would be going at his jugular and trying to destroy him. Your behavior is sickening. You are playing blocking tackle for the Democratic establishment in California, which has been warned forever about the possible threats to, you know, everything from the water crisis. And, you know, you are, like, beneath contempt or something like that. It was really striking because I didn't quite put together. We're hearing, you know, that, oh, you know, Sky News or somebody, you know, like, confronted Karen Bass at the airport and made her answer this question about was she going to apologize to the people. But it is true that there is a. There is a large contingent of people who are, who are looking at what's going on in California and saying, this is a massive governmental failure. California went through two massive fires in 2017, 2018, showing that their land management, their forest management, their fire management was disastrous. The campfire fires were the largest in American history. And look what they've done. And here they are now with this fire in la. And that is happening. You're hearing it, you're hearing it on social media, you're hearing it everywhere, but you are not seeing it covered this way in the mainstream press. If you watch CNN again, if you watch msnbc, if you read the New York Times, watch the network news, watch the morning shows, they are. It's all the tragedy impacting the tragedy, and, oh, the tragedy and all of that. And the. And the cause or the blame or Anything like that, which would, you know, as Hurricane Katrina showed instantaneously, would come at a Republican who would be blamed for every single death and every single house burned down. They would just, they tied the two together.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. So they would. In Katrina, they covered the tragedy aspect extensively and tied it at every step to the federal government, to Bush at the time. Right, right.

[John Podhoretz]

As Matt said the other day, that was not, in the end, how the people of Louisiana saw it. Who completely overhauled the state government and its ideological, and the state's ideological coloration in the wake of Katrina. Democratic mayor voted out. A year later, Democratic governor voted out in favor of Bobby Jindal. That is now a red state. You know, the, the, the, the failures of Democratic governance in Louisiana in 2005. The voters rendered their judgment. I'm now talking about what the elite in the United States are doing, which is doing this bizarre effort to say that any, anything that happens now atmospherically is the result of climate change.

[Seth Mandel]

I mean, I think that's. That the comparison with Louisiana is instructive, though, because the question about Ron DeSantis and whether it's fair to criticize and all that brings up a different comparison between Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom and in general, Florida and California, which is that Ron DeSantis stake handles natural disasters much better than Gavin Newsom state does that. We had these fights over the course of the election, especially when Biden, when they were, there was talk of maybe replacing Biden with someone not Kamala. There was all this competition. Gavin Newsom was one of the Democratic governors who was, you know, making sure to stay in the spotlight in case he were called upon. And the fights that he picked with Ron DeSantis were come to my state because you can say gay. You can say gay in California. You can't say gay in Florida. Come to my state. And it was the same thing with other, with other, you know, the Illinois governor picking the same sort of fight. You know, we don't ban books in our libraries. The overarching point was that people, the people governed by these states, were not thinking about saying gay. And all the books that were or weren't in the libraries, they were thinking about the fact that hurricanes hit one state, wild wildfires and earthquakes occasionally hit another state. What does it mean to be managed by these people?

[John Podhoretz]

I am, I think it's very, very well put to go back to bashing the media. So last night I had on CNN and Daniel Dale, the infamous Trump fact checker, who of course did no fact checking of Biden.

[Christine Rosen]

He was on vacation, John, during the Biden term. You have to.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, he was. Anyway, he's back. He's back, baby. And Abby, Phillip said to him, Trump claims that Gavin Newsom is at fault because. And then played this clip of Trump saying, you know, I told him not to do this, but they're letting the water. They're letting water that's gathered nor they run into the ocean in order to save a little fish. And you know, that water is very useful. Why are they letting it run into the ocean? This is crazy. And Dale said. Then she turns to Daniel Dale and says, and Daniel Dale, tell us, how true is this? And Dale said, I spoke to a scientist and he explained to me that these were two entirely different things. One is happening in Northern California. What is happening in Southern California and in Southern California. And I believe this is incorrect, by the way. What Daniel Dell said here was the reservoirs were full and the hydrants were full. It said the hydrants on the streets of Placet were not intended to fight a giant, you know, conflagrationary fire. They were intended to fight individual houses set under catching on fire the way you would ordinarily use a hydrant. And the reservoirs were full. This was just an overwhelming thing. And everything that happened in the north with water is something different. But that. So once again you have the weird refusal to connect the dots. If you mishandle water and forest management in the north of the state in 2017 and 2018, leading to two different massive fires that cause collectively about $30 billion in damage. The campfire. And then I can't remember what the. What the. What the other one, the name of the other one was. And then seven years later, there is another fire that is going to cause $50 billion in damage. And that you learn no lessons from the fire in the north about how to proceed or to prevent the kinds of things that might happen in the south, maybe you get to get some blame for the way you deal with water, fire and dryness and conditions of drought in California.

[Christine Rosen]

But this is where. This is a good example of how politics works. Now in a way that's detrimental to the point that Seth was making about proper management. So if you're a serious person who's involved in resource management, for example, you understand that a lot of these issues, whether it be earthquake prevention or fire prevention or water resources, which out west are a very important resource, that's, you know, often there's often droughts and whatnot that requires a lot of compromise and negotiation. Right. Developers want to have More resources. People who are worried about keeping open land free from development. Don't you negotiate? That's what politics is for. Politics at a level where, you know, you have to talk about zoning and regulation and all these resource management questions. Our politicians used to be one of the voices in those conversations in those states. DeSantis is in Florida. He is involved in all of that. When it comes to, you know, how you rebuild warehouses are allowed on the shoreline, all kinds, you know, re bringing dredging sand and bringing it back to rebuild beaches. His administration has been very good at being part of those conversations. The Gavin Newsoms of the world aren't interested in the details. They are interested in using it to score political points, which is why people are now the culture shifting. People are worried about money spent on things like DEI programs and $350,000 salaries for people who talk about DEI programs rather than replacing, for example, all of the fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades and around L. A that have been stolen and sold for scrap metal or the homeless population problem. We had a report yesterday that one of these fires was arson that was started by a 30 year old homeless man. So those things, the reason people are now asking these questions in the defensive posture of people like Newsom are a direct result of people looking around and going, you know, some of the things you've been emphasizing over the last four to eight to 12 years have actually caused harm and you haven't done the one thing you're supposed to do. And that's a really healthy conversation for people in California to be having.

[Abe Greenwald]

I'm reminded a little bit when I hear Newsom and other California officials now trying to explain with their sort of dog ate my homework answers. It actually reminds me of the New Year's terrorist attack on Bourbon Street. Right. Well, our fire hydrants aren't meant for this. Well, why, I mean, that's a terrible answer. This is California. Well, the bollards on Bourbon street are being, are still being repaired. Why? That's not, that's what we know. You're stating the, the problem. That's not actually an answer.

[Seth Mandel]

My kids, my kids do this where I'll say, I'll say, hey, stop it. And the kid will say to me, but I was just. And then repeat what they were doing. I know that what I was telling you to stop, but if you put the word exactly in front of it, it's not really. Well, the bollards were just still under construction or whatever. You know, it's like, yeah, that's, that's what we're talking about. The other thing is there's, I remember back when Sandy, superstorm Sandy as it hits in New York, you know, Hurricane Sandy, which had long lasting effects on public transit, right. Jersey transit was, you know, the temples under the tunnels, excuse me, under the Hudson. This really set back public transit in the most important artery for public transit really in the, in the north, in the Northeast for sure, and probably in the country. And Bloomberg went out and said, and I remember writing about this at the time, Bloomberg, you know, was out there saying, we've been, we've been telling you that the climate, you know, I've been flying to conferences in Europe for years saying that, you know, the, the climate is changing and who's surprised that the seawalls weren't high enough or whatever to stop downtown Manhattan from being washed away and all this other stuff. And my response was, you were in office for 12 years. You added, you got yourself an extra term in office above and beyond term limits so that you could be in office for a dozen years. So if you knew all this, what did you do? Exactly? And I think that there's an element of that too, which is stop telling us I told you. So if you thought that there was something you knew that other people were wrong about, where was that put into play along the way in the process?

[Christine Rosen]

That's so important because like we're pundits, we get to point to the problem and say, you didn't do it. Their job is literally to fix the problem. And they are becoming more like pundits and less like the people fixing the problem.

[John Podhoretz]

The existence of issues like the climate, the global climate is a crisis. There are 204 countries on the planet Earth contributing to a global climate crisis. And it is therefore a problem that you can't suggest that one little guy who was the governor of a state of 38 million people on a planet of 8 billion can do anything to fix what's broken because of this supposed global climate crisis, which some of us have many issues with, how it is characterized or what its causes are, what the effects are, or anything like that. Similarly, in social terms, we've seen this incredible pessimism rise on the left in the last 10, 12, 15 years because of the way they characterize problems, social problems in the United States and on this planet, which is like, if your idea is, look, there are these barriers to racial harmony, legal barriers, and even some, you know, social attitudinal barriers, we need to remove those barriers and then let things happen naturally. But if the idea is this country was evil from the beginning, that white supremacy is so ingrained in the national consciousness and the way that everybody thinks that it is unsolvable male domination of whatever misogyny exists so powerfully that the idea that women can achieve proper egalitarian status with men is unsolvable. And so it is no wonder that liberals and progressives who believe that if they were just given the levers of power they could kind of fix everything are now passive, pessimistic, hopeless about achieving solutions, or believe that the only solutions are wildly radical and incredibly unrealistic changes in human behavior that cannot be mandated by fiat or by a conference that you fly to where elite people in NGOs all agree that the problem is that China and India and the United States really need to have a smaller. Need to have smaller economies, like, good luck to you. So I think one of the things that Desantis represents against Dusso, like this really stark contract is contrast is Newsom is saying, there's nothing I can do. And Desantis or people like Desantis or whatever are saying, yeah, well, there was a hurricane problem. We can, you know, as you say, we can dredge, sand and rebuild the beach or, you know, when the Seaside Tower collapsed as a result of, you know, terrible construction policies 40 years ago. Well, a. Those policies have been altered so that new buildings aren't going to do what happened to that condominium building. But there are practical things we can do to shore up the buildings that now exist, and that's what we have to do, because we've seen the catastrophe, and now we can use that as a lever to figure out how to make sure that prophylactically we save people and buildings and everything like that from these kinds of disasters. Whereas it's learned. It's what the. What shrinks called learned helplessness. Liberal and progressive ideology has now encouraged the kind of learned helplessness among public officials who are like, oh, is there inflation? Well, it's transitory. Oh, it's not transitory. Well, we didn't do it. It was Covid. Well, is it Covid? No, it's not really. I don't know. Every other country has worse inflation. Don't blame us. Don't look to us. We're not responsible for anything because the problems are too big. And that was what progressivism was literally supposed to answer was the idea of saying, the problems are too big. No problem was too big. Right. They could convene a panel of experts and fix it. That was the promise 100 years ago of the progressive movement was they could use science and all manner of modern, funky things to make sure that we fixed everything. And now they fix nothing. And these practical politicians who believe in, you know, like, practical solutions are going to eat their lunch for the next 10 years. So the holiday rush is over.

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[Abe Greenwald]

By the way, I think, I mean this is such a big point and I think it's, it's so true, the extent to which really I'm thinking of the left, not even, not even just liberals, but the left is, has tied itself to insoluble issues and by design, because then you never, you never don't have the fight. And I'm thinking here of colonialism, anti colonialism most. Right. What is, what is it that the anti colonialists say they want to, quote, deny future the futurity. Colonialism. What does that mean that they want to reverse history? Is the, is the only answer, is the only acceptable answer that every, every population in every country that wasn't there indigenously goes back to where it came from? Right. This is a massive never going to happen. But it's also when you have, when you tie yourself to these insoluble problems, it's why there's always the recourse to violence. Because if you can't, if there's no actual solution to institute, well, there's always force. Right.

[John Podhoretz]

You know, Andy Ferguson told me Andy Ferguson was going to write Newt Gingrich's memoirs at one point, help him write his big book that he got a big contract for in 1994 after the contract that was then canceled because people said that Gingrich was profiting unfairly from his electoral victory. But for like a week, he was following Gingrich around, was going to do this. And he went to a meeting with Gingrich and a Congress member named Martin Hoke from Ohio. And I'm pretty sure it was Hoak and Gingrich. Ho came in and Hoax said, okay, we're, you know, we're going to convene the House something or other committee and we need the, you know, agenda off the Contract with America. We're going to do it. So Gingrich said, here's what we're going to do. We need to revitalize the American connection to our revolutionary spirit. We need to find a way to connect the ideas of the future to the past. And we're going to, we're going to show people a path to house a limited government combined with entrepreneurship can blah, blah, blah, blah. It sort of makes this speech and Hoke is standing there with his notebook and he's listening and he's nodding and all that. And then he says, okay, but what do you want me to do? What am I supposed to do? Meaning it's going to be the 21st of January. What Bill am I introducing? What is it going to say? How am I going to rally votes for it? Now that's Newt Gingrich. That was one of the reasons that Gingrich ended up being an ineffective speaker of the House, though he had been an unbelievably effective person at getting the Republicans into the majority because he was a big thinker and when you get down to it, government is a lot, government at its best is a lot of little thinking is literally like, how do I feel, you know, from how do I fill this pothole? Or I get a report that there's a pothole, can we get it fixed by noon? Do, is there a truck? Do we have the asphalt? Is there a worker on, on duty who can go fix? And then this is, this is a.

[Christine Rosen]

This is one of the conceits of our modern political era, even compared to say mid to late 20th century, which is that the thoughtful politicians then, whether they were on the right or the left, understood that there were these visionaries outside of politics to whom they should appeal for, for suggestions and big, big picture items and then they would try to implement some of that vision. Our problem now is that our politics want to be the visionaries. So they don't want to do the detail oriented stuff. And so that's actually left to a hodgep, know, nonprofits, some of which are good, some of which are nefarious, or to just ordinary citizens. And so when everything collapses, that's why to the earlier point, everyone's looking around saying, well, it wasn't us, because it literally wasn't. They weren't the ones fixing things for a long, long time. And maybe this will prompt some more thoughtful reevaluation of what our politics should look like. Whether we're talking about, you know, the speaker of the House, who. This is one of the reasons I like Johnson, however successful or not he'll be. He seems to me like the guy who just wants to figure out what bill to write, not the guy who's going to bring back the dinosaurs. Newt wanted to do so. I, I prefer the former to the latter.

[John Podhoretz]

I think that's my point. I think everybody in the end prefers the former to the latter. You look for vision in our political system. Let's just say you look for vision from the president. Like that is actually either either this is just has become ritual or custom or it's, it's innate in the structure of the, of our political system. That's where there is one person that everybody votes for as opposed to one person that 435 districts votes for or two people that, you know, in, in states that people vote for a governor or whatever, right? One person in the country. And so he is tasked with being some kind of a voice for the country. He is the only person in our system who is given that task because of the structure of our system and who, and who he is, we don't look to the speaker of the House to be a visionary. He wasn't elected, but he was. Newt Gingrich had this problem. I'm just using him as an example. I don't want. I don't mean to just sort of go back to the. Well, but when Newt Gingrich got it into his head that he was kind of the representative, the CO equal to Bill Clinton, he had gotten 110,000 votes in DeKalb county, or I think it was DeKalb county in Georgia, and Bill Clinton had gotten 50 million votes. In the end, when it talks about who's representing whom, Gingrich misunderstood his constitutional place. He was only speaker of the House negotiating with the President because the House Republican caucus, because 250 of them voted for him, not 250 million people, not 50 million people, not 1 million people. And so that's not who he was supposed to be. He can be that. He can write books. He can be thoughtful and visionary, but in terms of the job that he does, that's not who he's supposed to be. And governors like DeSantis or Newsom are not supposed to be visionaries. That is a functionary position where you are running a state government with a lot of different responsibilities in. In often places that have cities and suburbs and rural areas. And. And there are a lot of competing interests inside those. And you're supposed to be able to work with the state legislature to harm, figure out what needs prioritizing and what doesn't. And. And in the end, after four years of your term, people say, I guess things are better or they're about the same, or I didn't really expect you to make them all that much better. So I guess you can have another term or not, something like that. It's not. What is your vision for California? Right. DeSantis is the ultimate example of this in a positive sense, because he was like, okay, I came in, I said I was Trump. I did these slavish commercials about trying. You would have thought that I was just going to come in and, like, be MAGA and all of that. And I came in and I was like, how are we going to solve the sugar runoff problem in the Everglades? What are we doing about this? I remember a friend of mine who worked with, was working, you know, on. In internal Republican politics, who said when Covid started, there was a reason why DeSantis was incredibly solid when it came to dealing with COVID or why he was so authoritative, which is he's unbelievably wonky he sits around reading, reading social science data reports on who's getting sick where and like sitting with a pen and like, making calculations about how many orders of, you know, vaccine would need to go here versus need to go here. That's who he really is.

[Seth Mandel]

And in the end of that thing saves lives in the right position because he didn't have the nursing home problem that New York and New Jersey had because he had been studying up and reading and his administration had been studying up and reading what to do about isolating elderly, vulnerable people in the midst of a pandemic. And he wasn't just shoveling them into nursing homes and stuff like that. They had figured out that they need this. They'd have to have a separate place besides for nursing homes. They have to have or a separate wing or whatever things were there waiting to be used. They had prepared ahead of time.

[Christine Rosen]

He was criticized for his nursing home policies when they were first enacted by people in Florida. They were saying it was draconian. I can't go see my grandma. And it turned out actually to have saved many, many lives, as we now know. But he also was able, because he understood what his role and function was as the leader of that state. He was able to take the hits and remain consistent and just, you know, see it through.

[Seth Mandel]

Criticize for getting the vaccine to scene to. For prioritizing seniors for vaccine. He said he. They didn't like the deal that he struck with the statewide pharmacy chain. You know, stuff like that. I mean, he was, he was three, three moves ahead of the game where it was. They were always just sort of playing catch up.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, I don't mean to use this as a sort of like a fanboy, you know, to like have a fanboy episode about, about Ron DeSantis. I'm saying that these are two different models of government and things have flipped. The promise of progressivism and liberalism was that they could fix what was broken in the way that America governs itself. That was where progressivism began. That's where what Woodrow Wilson promised, that's what the, you know, that's what the New Deal was. These were all ideas that, you know, we would leave, we would make everything better because we would use modern techniques and not be burdened by. Be unburdened by what has been and find new ways to make things work.

[Christine Rosen]

But the devil's bargain of progressivism is that it made the government the one, both responsible and supposedly accountable for those changes. And what we've seen is that the long arc of progressivism is that it's still often the one responsible or people look to the government when they probably shouldn't and they're also not accountable when things fail. And so this is sort of the worst of both worlds.

[Abe Greenwald]

And the funny thing is the ironic things, progressives still champion expertise, right. Whether or not they apply it.

[John Podhoretz]

Trust the science.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yes, right. You're still supposed to trust the science. You're still a rube if you don't believe the, you know, conventional institutional wisdom on something yet institutionally we failed. But don't be stupid. Trust us. And we, we've got the smartest people.

[Seth Mandel]

And something that people were saying about the, about the approval process and the challenge process for brush fires and, and managing dry brush. Right. Which was the, which was, goes exactly to that point. Which was something the effect of like, well, if you start a program to manage the brush in this area and have it prepared for the foot for wildfires based on the current fire cycle, it'll take, you know, four years to get into that state. However, three and a half of those years will be in court first with no movement.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

In other words, you have, you can do this in four years and be ready in four years, but only if you don't spend the first three years in with, you know, environmental challenges and things like that. We saw the same sort of thing with, you know, again, we, we had the Hudson plan, remember before Sandy, Chris Christie canceled that, you know, the, the plan. This, this is the sort of thing. And he was, and did it because costs were ballooning and people were, and the challenges were going to make everything cost three times as much and take three times as long. And this is an expert thing. The experts say, well, if you do this sort of brush clearing, here's the cycle, here's how long it'll take. Go ahead and do it. And the progressive governors are saying, no, go ahead and do it.

[John Podhoretz]

Then, then that's one thing. And then we have the ideological aspect. So there are environmental challenges, whatever, because there will always be environmental challenges. The idea of doing controlled burns was an idea about how we, here we are, we're living in this place, there could be a lot of fire. There's a lot of, there are developments relatively near the campfire, you know, obviously the Palisades, whatever. And we need to do this, we need to take control of excess dryness and forest so that they don't, you know, conflagrations don't happen. And the answer is no, no, no, no, no, no. We have a much better solution. Nature is self healing we call it Gaia. Control nature.

[Christine Rosen]

We call her Gaia.

[John Podhoretz]

Gaia, right. But we think that we can control nature, but we can control nature. And nature knows best. And so if there's a lot of dry leaves, you know, where the campfire conflagration happened, nature will make rain and then the rain will dry, will wet the leaves, and then they won't be so. Or if there's a fire, nature will somehow magically control the fire. This was part of how ecological thinking in the United States became weirdly pagan. You know, had this started having this weirdly pagan quality that, that the Earth is self correcting. Except of course, that we don't believe that anymore because of climate change, because the Earth would be self correcting if we weren't warming it with our evil capitalist overproduction and pollution and things like that. And so now it can't be self correcting. So but we're the villains. Humanity is the villain. Well, you know, maybe we are the villains. Maybe we're the villains because in a better world, there would only be 2 million people living on the planet and everything would be wonderful and there would be no development. But there are 8 billion people living on the planet and we are living here. And we're more important than a dead leaf, you know, or the, or the, or the life cycle of a forest, you know, one, it's that question like one baby, how much, how, how many acres going up are worth one baby dying in a fire. You know, I mean, that's actually where you go when you think about this as a, in a, in a moral framework and not an effective altruistic framework. Right? You, you, these ideas which are also, I think, kind of catnip if you think about it, because if you can say nature's gonna fix it, then you also don't have to spend the money that you wanna spend on homelessness, on forest management. Right? $22 billion has been spent by Gavin Newsom in the course of his term in California on homelessness. And apparently if you do the stats, there's now 4% more homelessness in California than there was when he took office after spending $22 billion to combat homelessness.

[Christine Rosen]

But, but this is like the same conceit of universal basic income which has now been studied and tried many times over, every time with the same result. It doesn't help. I mean, the most recent report I read about is hilarious because it said, well, the people who got the universal basic income check had, you know, maybe $100 more at the end of the experiment. And they'd also purchased a lot more cigarettes, which I thought was hilarious. Like so. So there. Whatever incentives and misunderstandings of human nature are at work in some of these broad minded, and I think in many cases well intentioned progressive policies, they often fail the conservative litmus test. Do you understand how people actually behave? Do you want to understand both the, the best intentions of human beings, but also their worst intentions? Because you have to weigh both when you're thinking about broad policy decisions.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, that's an important point. You know, there's this piece of footage going around of this female firefighter in Los Angeles who says she can't carry an adult male. She would be unable to carry an adult male out of a fire if he were overcome by fire inhalation. Right. Which is one of the reasons that until very recently, the idea was that you prioritized height and physical strength for somebody who was going to do this. And I would also then add, since we're talking about that, you know, it takes a particular kind of sensibility or consciousness to be a firefighter, as my friend Bob McManus used to say. Also obsessed old boss. Or was he? Maybe he wasn't. But anyway, he was. My colleague at the New York Post and then my successor as the Trope Edge editor would say, to think about a person who runs into a fire, that's a, that's a, that's an unusual duck. That's like an odd duck. And we need them, and we need them desperately. But, you know, you can't assume that somebody who says, I really like to be a firefighter is the kind of person who will run into a fire. Every human instinct you have says, don't run into a fire. Or there are people who are like, I'm running into that fire. And they are not numerous and they are exceptional and they should be treated as though they are exceptional. And then.

[Abe Greenwald]

But John, get to the. What, what the, the female firefighters say.

[John Podhoretz]

So what she said was, well, look, that guy, if he's unconscious in the house, he's. He, he got himself in the wrong place.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Not my fault. Right. If he can't walk out. He got himself in the wrong conscious.

[Seth Mandel]

In a fire. He's unconscious.

[John Podhoretz]

This is a firefighter in Los Angeles place. Now, I. Obviously an outlier. Obviously not a. I don't know that.

[Abe Greenwald]

I'm not saying firefighters, but it's a generational thing. I mean, I think this gets to a point that Christine makes in her book the Extinction of Experience, which is also the extinction of empathy. In the generation, good luck finding the future firefighters. Those particular odd ducks in, in coming generations.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, they're there just if you get, if you grind them down and tell them that the impulses that they have to do this kind of thing to be, you know, what was it Aristotle said that, you know, courage, there's recklessness. Right. That courage is a balance between recklessness and prudence. That is to say that if you're reckless, you, you, you'll do anything. And if you're prudent, you might not do, do, do anything. But courage means that you understand the fear or you experience the fear of doing something dangerous, but that you do it anyway because this is something that needs to be done and that's what, what, what courage is. Similarly, but if, if you're talking about this world of firefighters which was mostly, you know, it was an entirely male world until five minutes ago, you were talking about people who it was understood there was a certain type of man who was this type of person and that you were lucky to have them and that if you were going to professionalize firefighting, which used to be a volunteer, mostly a volunteer I think still in a lot of the country, still.

[Christine Rosen]

Is in a lot of parts of the country, a lot of people will are volunteer firefighters called up. Indeed.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. But, but, but you know, in a, in a major city like New York or Los Angeles, something that you're talking about somebody where, someone where it's not a single house, you know, it's like a, it's a multi unit apartment building. There are techniques and strategies to get people out. You don't have if you have single family dwellings and things like that which are present a different challenge that maybe volunteers can deal with anyway, not to get so overly detailed but if you tell young men that they should be more, you know, that, that, that what makes them testosterone crazy in a way that would mean that they would like to run into a fire to save somebody from a burning building. And you trash that human quality that some men have the way other men can, you know, like do higher math and higher quid and can build a computer or you know, create space X. But, but can't run into a fire. If you treat them as though they are subhuman or they're less than good or that they're the sort of people who are going to do terrible things, then they're not going to surface themselves to go and be firefighters.

[Seth Mandel]

And that's also the irony.

[John Podhoretz]

They're going to do it in a video game and not in real Life, Right.

[Seth Mandel]

That's also. That's the irony with the empathy point that Christine was making, which is like, if you. Let's stamp out toxic masculinity and replace it with empathy. So is empathy a guy who will carry a baby out of a burning building or the guy who thinks that the guy who will carry a baby out of a burning building is insane? And the problem with our culture, right? I mean, that's. That's where. When we judge these sort of, you know, empathy, what. We're also applying a one size fits all thing to a society where we have all sorts of different people and they have all sorts of different instincts and skills, and you get everybody working in, you know, in. In harmony as much as possible, and you can do great things. And if you tell everybody that, everybody has to think a certain way. But my uncle. My uncle was a firefighter, and my. And his son, my cousin, also fought fires, and he was sort of raised at the firehouse. My cousin, who I was close with in South Jersey. And it would be like, matt, where are you watching the Super Bowl? At the firehouse. And this is when he was a kid. We were kids. But his father understood that he wasn't supposed to look at what his father did as sort of like, well, he wears a cape, right, and flies around and saves people. I want to do that. That's cool. It was like, this is what life is like when you fight fires. You're going to be in the firehouse, you're going to hear the alarms. You're going to see people exhausted, covered in soot. You're going to see people, you know, in all stages of this process and what it takes, and then you can. You can make that decision for yourself. But it wasn't quite like, well, my father is a doctor, so I want to be a doctor. And that's not anything against doctors, obviously, but the point is that, like, it's not an academic pursuit, I guess, is my point.

[John Podhoretz]

No, but I think even more important than that is, again, this thing that progressivism. I think ideologically, though, we're, you know, 100 years into the progressive era and failed in many ways and all that. But what progressivism suggested was that the kinds of impulses that lead to someone being a firefighter, which is to say, in koate senses of connection to a bunch of other men who are in a room together, they lay their lives on the line together. It's the logic of. Of military training, Right. It's the idea that one of the ways that you get an army to fight for you isn't to invoke wonderful notions of how free America is and all of that or how wonderful your country is, but that you are in this foxhole with five other guys and you want them to like you and respect you and think well of you, and they want the same. And so you are all ballasted in this band of brothers community. And the, the. This is a. This is a human ethic dating back to the deepest, you know, our deepest and most primordial understandings of how to be a social creature. And all of that was supposed to be rewritten by the age of the expert, because that, the age of the expert is we don't care about human nature. We don't care, as Christine would say, we don't. We don't care the way people interact with you. We don't care that, you know, most people want to live around people who share their same opinions or like go to the same church or, you know, have the same habits or things like that we're gonna make. Where we're, you know, or that they want to. Their kids to walk to school so that they can come home for lunch or all that. We're going to make their kids go on a bus to a, you know, to a school 45 minutes away in order to create an integrated atmosphere. We're going to make you do that. We're going to make you live in a different way in order to reform you from these pre modern nonsense ideas about how community is built and also take.

[Seth Mandel]

Take away the option. Right. Of having those. Which is the other thing about the culture. A lot of people now would denounce the culture of the firehouse as, you know, some toxically man, you know, misogynist, whatever the culture of it. But I, you know, my. Since my cousin and I are about the same age and so we went through the stages of life, you know, together. So I watched him sort of be raised through the culture of the firehouse and nothing went wrong with like he, you know, he turned into a fantastic person. Husband, father, firefighter, work. Like literally, he was brought up in this very much a man space, but it was a man space of the kind that John, as you described. Like at my uncle's funeral, the firefighters came and it was like a military funeral. Yeah, it was, it made me think of that when you said like a band of brothers.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, well, there are two different kinds of cultures, right? Let's take two different kinds of man. You have the firehouse or the precinct house or the military or these Very, you know, classically or you know, historically male dominated spaces. And then you have like the Wall street trading floor, which is also right. What's more admirable, like these people we're talking about here are people who are toxically masculine. God knows what kind of jokes they tell about women. God knows what they pinned on the wall in the firehouse from, you know, in the 80s from Playboy, right. They would run into a building and save people from fires. They would risk their lives on a daily basis for other people.

[Christine Rosen]

But this is, this is one of the conceits of the progressive mindset when it comes to diversity. Human nature tells you you should not care if your fire department looks like America. You should care if the guy's strong enough to get you down the ladder out of the burning house. That, that was sort of the ethos, that was an accepted thing. And the flip side was that we also maybe accepted that they had, how quaint, a Playboy centerfold pinned up somewhere in the firehouse. We made that bargain. It was a good bargain. It delivered men of courage and great grit and strength and it kept people safe. The difference is, and I was thinking, because there's a big article in the Atlantic this month about how people spending a lot more time alone and I thought of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, right? Remember, this was this clarion call about loneliness and an epidemic and in the Culture came out early 2000, I think Putnam did a follow up study about diversity in neighborhoods. And that study was fascinating because what it found is that the more diverse the neighborhood, the lower participation in civic life, the higher the mistrust. So he set out, I think, hoping it would find the more diverse, the more everybody gets along. It's the melting pot. Isn't America great? Yay, America. He found the opposite because human nature, as we've been discussing, people like to hang out with other people like them, is that human nature is tribal, right?

[John Podhoretz]

Human nature is fundamentally tribal.

[Christine Rosen]

Study received almost no publicity. People, social scientists will occasionally bring it up and go, remember this, this, Anybody want to talk about this? It's immediately, no, no, we don't want to talk about that. Because it, there's a, there's a wishful thinking aspect to the progressive movement that's always been there. Sometimes it leads to really thoughtful change. But too often in our current culture it leads to denial of reality. And that's, I think, what we're talking about with some of these and to.

[John Podhoretz]

Bring this back to the fires. And one of the reasons that we're talking, even though it's been implicit. I just mentioned that one video of the firefighter saying, well, you know, I, it's his fault that he was in a fire. Was that the fire chief of LA said in 2022 or 2023 that her, her top priority was DI and diversity. Not. I am going to have the best firefighting. We are going to have the best department that saves the most lives and does the best job at keeping people dealing with people who are in this, in these enormities and these horrendous disasters. That's my job. I will think that I've done a good job. When I look back and I say that our department saved so many lives and I should not, as I think, Christine, you should not care how many women are in the department. You should not care. Like, in fact, it's like you should be offended at the idea that you are supposed to care about that because that is not the job. Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

Reminds me of Obama's pick to head NASA who said that his top priority was, was, was diversity in NASA women.

[Christine Rosen]

To put women in space.

[Abe Greenwald]

We ended up his top priority. We ended up relying on the Russians to get to space.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. And now Elon Musk. Right. So here we are.

[Christine Rosen]

Now we have our, now we have, we should still mention. Because shout out to these poor folks. We still have astronauts stuck in space. Nobody wants to talk about that. They occasionally pop up on, on a story.

[John Podhoretz]

I see.

[Christine Rosen]

But you know, I hope they're hanging out.

[Seth Mandel]

And by the way, the.

[John Podhoretz]

Who's going to save them?

[Seth Mandel]

And the pilots. Like the pilots right now Musk is.

[John Podhoretz]

Going to save them, right?

[Seth Mandel]

Oh by the way. Well, Starlink also is, is helping with the fires. Right. Because it's helping connectivity to places that, you know, don't have connectivity, don't have Internet or phone service at the moment. We're also watching these pilots fly low bank over a fire. Watch these videos. They're not flying up in the sky.

[John Podhoretz]

They're no, they're 250ft. They're 250ft off the ground. Spielberg, Spielberg and Dreyfus called always. Yeah, yeah, about, about, about, yeah, about the plane. The guys who fly planes. And, and yeah. And yeah, he becomes an angel and it's a whole Holly Hunter.

[Christine Rosen]

Very weird movie.

[John Podhoretz]

Very weird movie. Because it was a movie. It was an adaptation of a great World War II movie called A Guy Named Joe which is about a pilot, a war pilot who gets killed and then comes back as an angel trying to, you know, he can't separate himself from the woman he loves. But then there's a new pilot whom she loves, and he has to reconcile himself. That's a great movie. A Guy Named Joe. I'm gonna recommend that. Today. Commentary recommends A Guy Named Joe. With Spencer Tracy, not always with Richard Dreyfuss, who makes it. Not a very credible Montana fire.

[Christine Rosen]

He was badly cast in that role.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so since we got to the recommendation, I think we're gonna. We're gonna close out here. So have a wonderful weekend. We'll be back Monday for Abe, Seth and Christina. John Ponvorous. Keep the candle burning.