Loading summary
Transcript73 lines
- [00:00]
Narrator
What is dadication?
- [00:01]
Father
The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Dariona. We call him Dae Dae for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge. And there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he's no longer under my wing that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we worked together. We did a good job.
- [00:22]
Narrator
That's Dadication.
- [00:23]
John Pothohar
Find out more@fatherhood.gov brought to you by.
- [00:26]
Narrator
The U.S. department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.
- [00:33]
Matt Ebert
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of.
- [00:42]
Seth Mandel
Thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, June 27, 2025. I'm John Pot Horace, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:06]
John Pothohar
Hi, John.
- [01:07]
Seth Mandel
And senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:10]
Narrator
Hi, John.
- [01:11]
Seth Mandel
So I'm, of course, consumed as I think Abe is consumed, as much of the Jewish world is consumed, but very parochially, in a certain sense, with the candidacy of Zoran Mamdani in New York City. And I don't want to bore people in the ambit of my voice by like, dwelling obsessively on this matter. I will point out two things about Zoraham Hamdani or three things about Zoram Hamdani in the last 24 hours. That is making this a very interesting candidacy in the sense that if there were a viable alternative to him right now, I would be saying that viable alternative would slaughter him in a general election. Thing number one, asked on some show or other whether or not he liked capitalism, he said no, he has a lot of criticisms of capitalism. He wants to be mayor of New York City. New York City's, I don't know, 25% of New York City's tax receipts and business involves finance. Finance is, of course, the. What would you call it, the arterial system of capitalism. And so you have somebody who is openly declaring himself hostile. It would be like going to, you know, I don't know, Alaska and saying you hate salmon and you. And you don't believe in fishing. So that's thing number one. Thing number two is that he put out a statement about how what he believed, or his campaign put us statement saying about what he believed in terms of economic policy was that richer and whiter neighborhoods should be taxed at a higher level than other neighborhoods in New York City. So he not only said richer, which I suppose is fine, as part of a general consent that you want to raise taxes on the rich, he said whiter. So a person who born in Uganda, comes to the United States, becomes a citizen eight years ago and is trying to mesh himself into the power of the one of the two parties in the country, in a country that is, I believe, 72% white, has now declared himself officially some kind of a race warrior against white people. I mean, maybe you could say it's not war to say that money that is white money should be taxed at a higher level. But he said it, I didn't. I'm only the Messenger. And then third, at 4:42 this morning, his first tweet of this day, as you know, you may have heard that, you know, he really focused like a laser beam on the affordability crisis in New York City and on the problems of affordability. And he wants to do this and he wants to do that and he wants to. What was his first tweet at 4:42 this morning? An anti Israel tweet from that notoriously fair anti Zionist Jewish publication called Haaretz with an absolutely astoundingly ludicrous claim that IDF soldiers are firing purposefully on unarmed poor Gazans waiting in line for food. So, so focused is he. People keep saying to me, well, he's surely he's going to moderate his views now that he is, he's going to move to the center, he's going to Etch A Sketch, he's going to try to make himself more palatable to the largest number of people. The first 72 hours since he won the election is demonstrating that he is fully intending to run as who he is on the issue set that he believes in. And that is anti capitalist, anti white and anti Semitic in a city that is capitalist. 12% Jewish and pretty white, actually. I mean, you know, it's like 51% white if you count Asians as white, which I guess you're not supposed to anymore. Anyway, that is my, that is my roundup of Zoram Hamdani is Thursday into Friday morning. And so that's why I say I think he is very vulnerable. But on the other hand, he's not vulnerable at all. So can we discuss.
- [06:10]
John Pothohar
Well, on the not liking capitalism, I mean, don't socialists by definition not like capitalism? I mean that, that, that I'll just sort of take that one first as the least, as the least surprising, certainly the least offensive and probably makes him weirdly, you know, the Least vulnerable.
- [06:35]
Seth Mandel
Have you ever heard a political candidate for office in the United States say that they don't like capitalism? He's breaking, I mean, maybe 80 years ago when there were actually two communists in the House of Representatives, maybe people said it then, but generally makes sense forming capitalism. You don't talk about disliking capitalism.
- [07:02]
John Pothohar
That it makes sense to even ask the question now is representative of the strange world we are in politically.
- [07:14]
Seth Mandel
I think it's a bigger deal than one realizes, because I don't. I know that polling has shown over the last 10 years or something like that, that particularly among the young, that socialism, the word socialism, is in better odor than it has ever been. And that obviously the idea that capitalism is an unjust system is very fashionably up to date. Obviously the famous hugely successful book by Piketty and Schmickety and his colleague Bickerty, capitalism sucks a 600 page rant. But that was like 13, 12, 13 years ago. So I understand that, you know, socialism is a, is a more positive word than it was for, I don't know, 75 years in the United States. Still, all in all, do people blame the system of capitalism? Even here? If you're like a working class guy who owns a, you know, like a car repair business, do you blame capitalism? The whole system is work hard and you can actually do pretty well. And he is basically writing those people out of his coalition.
- [08:38]
John Pothohar
You know, I just keep getting this feeling that what we see as, you know, warning signs and alarms on various fronts, just so many of our certainly fellow New Yorkers, but even Americans don't see as shocking and terrifying.
- [09:06]
Seth Mandel
Is it Americans, though? That's what I'm asking. Because that's where we start getting into the weirdness of his, of his coalition versus what we would view as a standard, even liberal, even leftist political coalition, which is that they have the purpose. They may not, they may not disagree with his intentions or his purposes, but they have generally, generally put up a smokescreen or a series of, or use a series of euphemisms that do not challenge the fundaments of our system.
- [09:42]
Narrator
Now granted, I mean, the Democratic leaders have been making, bringing this about for a long time. No, because Mamdani is young, right? And his coalition is thought of as young. And people talk a lot about, well, if you were young today and you've, you know, you've lived through, you know, the 2008, 2009 financial collapse, you know, and then all this other stuff and whatever, you were born during the Iraq war and then the financial System collapsed and all this other stuff. How much faith would you have in the system, blah, blah, blah. But all these talking points have always ignored the fact that life is actually pretty good for the people who are complaining. And so Democratic leaders have spent years telling younger people to complain, encouraging them to complain about the economy, and encouraging them to see things in a very skewed manner because their lives were actually pretty good. And this was something that came to light, of course, during Occupy Wall street when, you know, people would get out of their, you know, downtown brown, their, their, their parents, brownstone downtown, walk across the street to Zuccotti park and protest capitalism and then go back home for dinner across the street. But, you know, it was, this was like, these people ought to know that they have it pretty good. And in the, in the, in world history, both geographically and, you know, timeline wise, they are the 1%. The rest of history is the 99%. And these guys, and they've grown up in an atmosphere where they really haven't, you know, I'm not going to say nobody has challenges. That's not true at all, but that's normal. People sometimes struggling to find jobs is a thing that happens, you know, but they've been encouraged by their elders to see it as unique, to see it as, for the first time in history, people, young people are having trouble finding a job and suddenly they're, what was it? Quiet quitting. And there, this, there were all these terms for like just being miserable young people and finding excuses not to show up. And they were encouraged. So, you know, to me it's like Mandani coming along and saying he doesn't love, he doesn't like. Capitalism is sort of, sort of inevitable because of all the people who claim to like capitalism, who came before him, who were just like shoving negativity in his coalition's brain. And then his coalition grew up and is of became a voting age.
- [12:13]
Seth Mandel
So I grew up in the 1970s and I went to a New York City private school. And it was not until 1978, when I went to the University of Chicago, that I understood that capitalism was not necessarily a dirty word, but was rather a description of an economic system, that it was not an epithet, but a summa, like, you know, stand in for free markets and sort of the fact of private ownership, the right to, the right to negotiate your own business terms and make deals and however you want to summarize the idea of capitalism. So I'm familiar with the world that you were talking about from my own youth in an upper middle Class New York City setting. That was very much the case with the 60s radicals and the draft dodging 60s red diaper baby, loathsome people who taught me high school, but who were only, you know, who basically spent 10 years in graduate school to avoid the draft and then the only. And Never finished their PhD. So they ended up teaching in New York City private schools. And so, and they were pretty good teachers, but they were, you know, but that's who they were. So I'm, I'm familiar with this, but they did not have spokesman for their views in practical American politics. Almost none. Right. That's why Bernie Sanders was such a unicorn when he won his seat for the Senate in Vermont, because he said he was a socialist. And there had not been a person who said I am a socialist and had one office in the United States in decades and decades. I mean, as I said, there was a communist or two like actual communist congressman from New York City, from Harlem and elsewhere. I think there were two. I should remember their names. But maybe there was only one. But this was a novelty and of course makes sense, he's been now there for what, 30 years or something like that. So he was a novelty then. He's now 87,000 years old and he can still shoot a basketball and is, you know, drawing crowds. My point.
- [14:56]
John Pothohar
Got AOC in the mix now too. I mean, so he's not, he's not.
- [15:00]
Seth Mandel
Singular either, you know, but it's not, they're not, they're not. Q. They're not this movement. You know, I just read something about how the Democratic Socialists of America had a banner day on Wednesday or Thursday here in New York City because they gained 3,000 new adherents. It's a city of 8.4 million people. 3,000 people signed up to become Democratic Socialists. I wouldn't exactly call that a mad dash to. I mean it's better than nothing and it's a sign of growth. But this is still very much a fringe set of positions in the United States that now has this election that is going to be a landmark in the journey of these views from the fringe into something like the Democratic mainstream. Or at the very least a warning shot across the bow of mushier Democrats who are now going to have to fear the energy, enthusiasm and single minded focus of this crew of ideologues looking over their shoulder, raising money against them, all of that. So I don't know what to make of this except to say that when this is reared its head 50 years ago, the country was still inoculated against the idea of saying that I'm a socialist, because either there was the Soviet bloc over there saying they were socialists and they were. No matter how much people said they were Maoists and stuff like that in the radical she classes, we were still organized as a society with the idea that our singular adversary on the planet were nations that call themselves socialist. So that's why I say we're in this conundrum, which is that Mamdani is handing the planet all of the means and materials the planet needs to deny him this mayoralty. But denying him the mayoralty is a practical challenge that is very, very hard to overcome because of the extremely problematic nature of the two candidates who could or three candidates who could deny him this position. Courtesy with the Republican nominee for mayor ran in 2021. He got 320,000 votes. Then Eric Adams got 700, who is running as an independent, got 720,000 votes in that same election to win the mayoralty. He's now running as an independent. And Mario Cuomo, who is may run, though I think he won't, but apparently isn't willing to say he's not going to run, got about 350,000 votes on Thursday night. Tuesday night. So there you have the anti Mamdani vote. It's about, you know, if you add it all up and these are all people who either didn't vote for Mom Dani or voted affirmatively, voted Republican, it's about 900,000 to a million votes. And Mamdani got 500,000 votes or somewhere in the range of 500,000 votes. And, you know, so he's assuming every one of those votes voted. So even if the vote against him were to coalesce, I still don't know how the natural advantage of being the Democratic candidate in a highly watched election with a candidate who generates enthusiasm like Mamdani does, can overcome. And there will be at least two of these alternatives. Cuomo may drop, but this, there's this delusion abroad that Curtis Sliwa, who is the Republican candidate, will drop somehow or get a job in the truck Trump administration and leave the field open for Eric Adams. There will be a Republican at the top of the ticket running for mayor of New York City. There are all kinds of technical, logistical reasons why the Republican Party in New York City cannot allow that slot to go unfilled or to have that race unchallenged. There may be money considerations. There's questions of ballot access in full future elections if not enough votes are garnered by the Republicans. In this contest, there are all kinds of things that I don't even know about in election law that mandate and require one of the two major political parties to have a candidate at the top of the ticket. If sleep were to disappear, Abe could go at the top of the ticket. You know it doesn't. They'll have to in someone will be there. Like if Slee would drop dead tomorrow, the Republican party would put somebody in that slot. So there will be a Republican candidate and then there will be Eric Adams and maybe there'll be Cuomo. And so the end result will be that the anti mom Danny vote will be split between two people and then he'll sail in one way or the other. Then there's the final idea which is being floated by people like Bill Ackman who suddenly got political consciousness after October 7th and seems to be one of those people who thinks that money solves everything. That he can get a lot of money together for somebody to very charismatic whom he doesn't name because nobody knows who that is. To run a write in campaign. The most successful write in campaign in American political history was for Lisa Murkowski running as reelection in the Senate in Alaska when insurgent Republican knocked her off in a primary and she ended up doing a write in campaign. That is a state with like 175,000 voters total. So having a write in succeed in that state is not like being in a city where there are 4 million people eligible to vote and you have to get them to write in the same name.
- [21:17]
Narrator
And even her, even her victory highlighted the problems of a writing campaign because she had to go to court to fight for like the people who wrote Lisa Merca Merkowskovsky with no W. Yeah. Say like. Well obviously they meant me. Like that's what you have to do as a write in campaign winners. You have to go through everybody who.
- [21:34]
Seth Mandel
So imagine multiplying that. Imagine you have a successful write in campaign. So somebody gets a million write in votes. Imagine the ballot challenges they're going through. A million. It's like you know, hanging chads times a billion. So okay, end of my rant. Yes, here's the thing.
- [21:51]
John Pothohar
So it seems as if the circumstances around the New York mayoral camp election are peculiarly favorable for Mamdani and that. So where he. So if he wins because of them, it will nonetheless be taken nationally by Democrats. His campaign is a sort of model that this is what you have to do. But I. And I. The thing is I think while the particulars are particular to New York in some general sense, it is representative of a more broad problem. No, it's not about the Cuomo who got, you know, nationally. It's not that every establishment Democrat is Cuomo or that or Adams who got pardoned by Trump who had these particular problems. But there's some version writ large of the establishment just being bogged down in all sorts of things that make them unappealing and the upand comers having the energy and no matter how radical they.
- [23:12]
Seth Mandel
Are hey John here with a word or two about Brooklyn Bedding. Brooklyn Bedding makes mattresses and other things, but mostly mattresses. They sent me one as a sample for one of my kids beds, put it on her bed. She was out for the weekend. I slept on it to sample it and thought it was so extraordinary that I got two more mattresses for my other two kids. That's how serious I was and am about the value, the quality and the sheer pleasure of sleeping on a Brooklyn Bedding mattress. They've been around for 25 years. They're known for top of the line comfort and quality without the luxury price tag, different firmness options, heights, dimensions, even non traditional sizes to fit right into your life. They have been designed and custom made by the best master craftsmen in the industry with free shipping in the US from their factory in Arizona. And don't forget, as I did, I didn't forget, I did it to upgrade to the cloud pillow top. The Glacier Tex cooling technology leaves you cool and comfortable all night long, bringing you next level comfort matched only by actually floating on a cloud. So go to Brooklyn betting.com and use my promo code code commentary at checkout to get 30 off site wide. This offer is not available anywhere else. You have to use my promo code commentary on the very last page of checkout to get this discount. That's BrooklynBetting.com and use my promo code COMMENTARY for 30 off site wide. BrooklynBetting.com promo code COMMENTARY hi everyone, I'm.
- [24:58]
Matt Ebert
Matt Ebert, CEO and founder of Crash Champions. Welcome to Pod Crash on Podcast. We'll dive deep with leaders and game changers because we want to uncover their secrets to success. We're going to explore everything from building trust, building a rock solid team, to champion blue collar work. And we also want to talk about creating explosive growth in your business. You'll hear actionable advice, real leadership and business lessons along with what's worked for these incredible people throughout their career. We're even going to go in depth into what I call a champion's mindset. This is the very philosophy that I use to champion people and take Crash Champions from a single shop to over 650 locations today. And now I want to share that information with you, watch or listen to pod crash on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [25:51]
Seth Mandel
I just, you know, I don't mean to sound pessimistic. I'm being realistic. I think that Mamdani is unelectable under almost any other circumstances aside from the ones he finds himself in. And let's, let's. If we go back a year and Curtis basically runs unopposed as the Republican nominee for president for mayor, let's just make the point that serious politicians who leave a sweet spot open because they're too afraid to upset their own apple carts. If a serious Republican had run for mayor of New York City, I don't know who that is, but you know, if Lee Zeldin, maybe he doesn't even live in the city, but if Lee Zeldin hadn't run for, but had run for mayor instead of becoming what is he's EPA administrator or something like that under Trump and he had just been sitting there as the Republican, then one of the reasons you run for office is the guy who you're running against could blow up, could literally like, you know, commit political suicide. And then you walk into the race like there are many ways in which people win elections and, you know, none. But the brave deserves the fair. Who dares wins. The fact that every serious prospect to possibly win this election stayed out of the election and Curtis got the nomination for the second time after losing 72 to 28 in the last election is a sign of a real vision problem for not only Republicans in New York City, but in American politics in general.
- [27:44]
Narrator
And it's at odds with the Republicans having been doing better, we should say statewide in general.
- [27:50]
Seth Mandel
Republicans have not come better, have come.
- [27:53]
Narrator
To life in New York state and in parts of New York City.
- [27:56]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [27:56]
Narrator
Not the mayor.
- [27:57]
Seth Mandel
That's exactly right. And there is this amazing pew like granular study of the 2024 electorate that came out yesterday that shows the extent to which Trump's gains among Hispanics and Asians and, and African Americans are real and see that, you know, like gain double digit gains based on his bay, on the, on his base vote in all of these categories and in cities and things like it's not enough to win the election or win an election that's not like, but it is suggestive of the future that, you know, if, if there are Republican successes and if Democrats fall off an ideological cliff, the growth of the change in the American electorate is real. It also makes perfect sense. Like the FDR, FDR was elected 94 years ago or 96, 97 years ago. You know, the idea that the FDR coalition remains the backbone, that's. It's one third of the. It's. It's like, it's. I don't know what it is. It's like 90 out of the 240 years of, of American existence that what this one electoral coalition remains the potent force that helps define the parties. That's not right. That's not. That's not American politics. It makes. It doesn't make any sense anymore. So things should be shifting and breaking and tectonic plates should be moving. We're a dynamic country and. But I. So, you know, that's normal. And then. But politicians are. Some politicians are leading indicators and most politicians are the opposite of leading indicators. They're fighting the last war. They're part of the last consensus. Okay, so Mamdani has a chance to lose. But I don't see. But you can only lose to someone, and I don't see who. That's how that's going to work. Because the dynamic here is creating a split opposition to him, number one. And number two, the candidates who are up against him are the disgraced governor who was humiliated on Tuesday, a kind of flaky Republican nominee and a disgrace and a mayor who Mom Donnie can spend five months talking about how he was Trump's puppet because Trump pardoned him and everything.
- [30:33]
Narrator
You know who's. Yeah, go ahead.
- [30:35]
John Pothohar
I was just gonna say and everything we'd like to think that would be for Mom Donnie and own goal will not be.
- [30:44]
Seth Mandel
Right. Well, he has to run away from his views for you to go. Aha. He's running away from his views. He doesn't listen. He's not going to run away from his views. So he's saying, take me sports and all, or take me as I am. And by the way, the other thing, I think we talked about this a little yesterday, is the political advantages that are represented by that in New Jersey and in New York this year and next year. Every day Mamdani talks about hating capitalism and tweeting about the glories of Hamas is a day that Jack Cittarelli, the nominee for governor in New Jersey, half of whose state is in the New York. What would you call, what do you generally call that? The broadcast area or the. They listen to the same talk radio?
- [31:37]
Narrator
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say also that. I would say also that they've. They've Kamala is a kind of model for this, right? Because Kamala Harris ran and Republicans brought up her old statements and tweets and all these things that she said that were ridiculous. You know, all sorts of stuff about, you know, trans issues and some of the things that were really trending against Democrats. And she didn't really fight them off. She didn't really, she didn't seem to be prepared to, you know, to either denounce her past positions or even explain it. She was caught really flat footed by it. Mamdani is probably not, you know, he's so much the better politician than she is, and he's probably not going to be caught flat footed, but that's going to be the model. People are there, you know, people who run in New York and New Jersey, not just against mom Donnie, people who run in New York and New Jersey are going to say, like, look, you know, his whole Twitter feed is still up. You know, he's still got, he's still got all this stuff. And they're going to ask their opponents, you know, here's the guy you're running against, the guy who wants X, Y and Z. Question is how Mamdani is going to handle positions that he didn't run away from so much as ignore. You know, he has, he has in the past, he just kind of didn't bring up all these silly things that he used to tweet about. And he brought up different silly things like I'm going to freeze rent with my bare hands, you know, and silly things like that. But the question is whether he's going to just say, you know, yeah, you know, that was kind of silly of me to say, defund the police. And I don't really believe in defunding the police and all that stuff. And if he gets bogged down in that stuff or if he's willing to walk away from it because he wasn't willing to walk away from globalize the intifada. He was willing to go to the mat for it. He was willing to defend it in every interview and he was not willing to back off of it. And so if he's confident now, has.
- [33:37]
Seth Mandel
Not backed off to fund the police, he has said, I, I want to bring about public safety in New York City using, you know, different and exciting methods of public safety protection, social workers, Social workers and putting homeless in subway stations and all. So if he has calculated or is about to calculate that there is no point in running away from his views, he doesn't want to. It's not in his wheelhouse to do that. He has very little electoral experience outside of running, you know, for the assembly in a safe district and being an assemblyman. So the idea that politics involves compromise is not really in his personal experience and that, and that everybody said he couldn't win and look what he did. And he's just going to do this. He's going to run the campaign he wants to run and not the campaign that you want him to run. So he would be doing America a favor, doing, even doing New York a favor. It's like, you know, what you got when you elected this guy now live with the consequences of it. Unfortunately, like I live here and I don't want to live with the consequences of it because they're going to be personally very injurious to me. They'll be injurious to my, to my, you know, the value of my one asset, which is the apartment that I own and the public, the safety of my, my children and my wife and me on public transportation, which I use almost exclusively. You know, I'm not a limousine liberal. I am on the subway every day and I live in a neighborhood where there are literally two halfway houses two blocks from my house. It's not like I don't live with the consequences of liberal social policy. I do already and I don't need that on steroids. But, you know, having, having these test models. The problem is that the test models haven't convinced voters enough. There's this, let New York see what happens if Mamdani wins and then they'll know. Well, Los Angeles was an experiment in disastrous left wing governance, particularly as regards homeless problems from 2019, from 2020 to 2024. And then Karen Bass won the mayoralty as opposed to the guy who said, I'm going to not be that person. I'm going to change policies. Brandon Johnson had a very serious contender against him in Chicago in 2024, got pushed across the finish line and won the election. And he now has a 6% approval rating. But it's not like he didn't tell everybody in Chicago who he was. Mayor of Boston, mayor of Philadelphia. This is serious stuff. Like people have had test cases of the horrors of living under this blue state rule. And they're still voting. They're not voting out the blue state rule people. Right?
- [36:45]
Narrator
They're not. Well, they're not voting for somebody who's not blue. Right. The they are recall, they are recalling district attorneys in very deep blue places.
- [36:58]
Seth Mandel
One, some but one places one places.
- [37:01]
Narrator
One place one they had and There.
- [37:04]
Seth Mandel
Was a ground in Philadelphia. The one in Philadelphia was not. Larry Krasner was not replaced.
- [37:09]
John Pothohar
No, he wasn't.
- [37:11]
Seth Mandel
Specific recall election against, against, you know, terrorist Nepo Baby, Chesa Boudin. And he, he was ousted in San Francisco. But that's really the answer.
- [37:23]
Narrator
But there was, there were these moves against them and the, and the. My point is just that, the moves against. To replace them with another Democrat, another liberal prosecutor. In other words, they were not looking for Rudy Giuliani to replace Larry Krasner. They are in these places. They want to get rid of the guy who's doing a bad job and put another Democrat in his place. That's the cycle, right?
- [37:47]
Seth Mandel
Okay, so the blue state model is not being rejected by people in blue states. When Walter Russell Mead came up with the idea of the blue state model, that was like 20 years ago. And the idea was, this model isn't working. The blue state model isn't working. These states are going broke, their taxes are too high, they're losing population to more dynamic places in the United States, in the south and the Southwest. They're getting older, their unemployment rates are higher. The, the, the kind of, the net pension burdens are getting worse and all of that. This model is not working and the public is going to reject it. And the only place the public has rejected it is at the top of the, the very top of the ticket A couple of times in, you know, electing Trump in 16 and 24 and otherwise, it's not working. You know, the blue, you live in a blue state and you're still electing people who are blue state model politicians. So the theory that Walter was adducing, which is that this model would prove itself unworkable and would be replaced by something else, has simply run, run to ground. Maybe that's because the red state model, as represented by the financial meltdown and some other, not the red state model, but the anti blue state model ended up coming crosswise of the financial meltdown and other problems in relation to how you felt about Trump and all of that among the people who might have moderated themselves or moved somewhere else and moved to the center. So, so that, that hope, the hope for reform from the center to the left is now completely exposed as an illusion. There is no reform. It's quite the opposite. The party is moving decisively to the left. So no matter, no matter what, no matter what the result, no matter what.
- [39:53]
John Pothohar
The practical result, there's no reform and there's no split. You know, sometimes people talk about the Democrats being split and you know, where, where's to be split? You need more than the one half to be John Fetterman.
- [40:11]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, yeah. One out of.
- [40:12]
Narrator
Right. There's Democrats, Democrats aren't in disarray if Chuck Schumer is kissing Zoran Mamdani's ring.
- [40:20]
Seth Mandel
Right. Okay, so, so this is, this is, this is where, you know, this is where we are. Can we. Okay, Seth, you mentioned the 1% kids at Zuccotti park and the, the who are knocking. Who are the volunteer door knockers of the Mamdani campaign and all that. They're miserable. Like, they're miserable. They're unhappy. They think the country is unfair. Their rent is too high. You know, they're, they can't, they can't get a grip on things and all of that. And this dovetails with a couple of things this week or you know, that these polls that now suggest Jonathan Haidt has been looking at them and various other people. American conservatives express a higher degree of contentment with their lives and overall happiness than liberals. And the numbers are not even close. Like you ask a conservative, is their life good or are they happy or whatever. The numbers are 60 to 70%. The numbers are like 30 to 40% among liberals. And this I think strikes everybody as surprising because of course liberals are supposed to be having more fun, right? They have more sex, supposedly, though they don't anymore. More sex. They're dead. They're, they're out, they're, they're doing, you know, they're, they're like, they're 60, they're fun. It's all about personal growth and expressing yourself personally. And you have no ties and you're, you do whatever you want. It's self actualizing and it's, you know, to go hiking and they have tattoos and they're, you know, and they grow their hair is whatever they can be whatever they want to be. And the net result of that stuff as opposed to conservatives who are like, they're mean and they're worried about the future and they're racist and they hate, they hate minorities and, and they, they, they make their kids go to church and they, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're full of anger and they like Trump and it's awful and they're way happier. So there, there was this thing in the New York Times on Wednesday which was called something like motherhood should come with a warning label. And it was a video interview with a bunch of mothers conducted by Jessica Gross, the parenting columnist of the New York Times. And it was these women saying everything about motherhood is terrible. No one told me that it meant that I would have to. I would have to put my ambitions in a drawer or like that. How am I going to afford things? And it's so expensive and it's not fair. And they're sobbing and they're weeping and they're crying about how awful their life is. And I'm like, why would anybody. Why if. Why would you want to be any. That person? Why wouldn't you want to be? I don't know. Bethany Mandel, wife of Seth, mother of six, homeschooling parent, grew up in a trailer park.
- [43:41]
Narrator
This is something that. This is something that Bethany and others in her circle talk about a lot because. And I see it also Emily Zanadi, another friend, you know, online, that a lot of people in the conservative world know, they have conversations like this a lot. And Emily, Emily's point repeatedly is, I mean, she says this a lot, that we have to stop talking about motherhood in a way that's convincing people that they don't want to be parents, right? That, like, motherhood has, like a PR problem in America, strangely enough, because the people who are talking about it are the, like, the people who are complaining about it and the people who are happy about it are the people who are just doing it. Right? It's like the whole thing about, you know, you're always going to get three times as many complaints about something, something as you get compliments or something like that. But it's like it has a PR problem. That's. That's their complaint. So I do see that.
- [44:33]
Seth Mandel
But it isn't a PR problem. It's so much deeper than a pr. You're right. And the point here is that the liberal line that has been retailed for the last 25 years is the planet is melting, our economic system is unjust, our domestic arrangements are horrible. We are not who we appear to be. Because even though our genes may say that we're men and women, so many people think that they're born in the wrong bodies, that we have to do something to allow them to say that to, to adjust their bodies and their hormones and their physical morph to conform with some deranged, psychotic idea that they. That, that. That the fullest expression of their being at from six weeks of zygotism onward is not who they are. And all of this, these messages then boil down to get down to the practical life, is what. What are we as people? We're. We're meant to reproduce to keep the race going to the race. The. Our cyber. What is it? It's our entire existence as to keep the human race going. And it's mean and I don't enjoy it and I don't like it. And parenting is many complicated things because it is the most complicated thing you do. And it's also the longest. The thing you do in life that lasts the longest, God willing, that something tragic doesn't happen. And, you know, it's like life itself. It's full of joys, and then there are sorrows and things like that, but not liking being. The liberal message board says we're destroying the planet. Our lives suck. Marriage is terrible. Men are mean to women, and patriarchy is horrible. And being a parent is awful. They're like, why would anybody want to be a liberal?
- [46:49]
John Pothohar
There's also. Because I'll take up this part of it because I'm not a parent. We're put on earth to do two things. Have families and work. They're against both. So if. So if you find the only two things that we're supposed to do in our existence loathsome, of course you're going to be miserable.
- [47:14]
Dr. Rob Williams
You know that one friend who somehow knows everything about money? Yeah. Now imagine they live in your phone. Say hey to Experian, your big financial friend. It's the app that helps you check your FICO score, find ways to save, and basically feel like a financial genius. And guess what? It's totally free. So go on, download the Experian app. Trust me, having a BFF like this is a total game changer.
- [47:41]
Emily Zanadi
Hello, this is Dr. Rob Williams, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation. Survivors of the Holocaust have long been the bravest voices speaking out against anti Semitism and all forms of hate around the world, whether it's European anti Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s or the anti Semitism we see on our streets and campuses today. We'll explore it on the USC Shoah Foundation's new podcast, Searching for Never Again. We'll hear stories that are heartbreaking and stories that are inspiring every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever fine podcasts can be found.
- [48:17]
Narrator
I find for myself as a guy, I can't. I can't speak for women, but I can speak for guys. I feel. I find that it's actually very important for us to have obligations. I find obligations are very healthy for us. And I would. I. I would venture to say that's probably true for women also. Although I'm not going to, you know, be There.
- [48:41]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, but.
- [48:42]
Narrator
But oblige. But, you know, But. But at least, you know, so I don't get jumped on for speaking for everybody. But at least I could say obligations are very healthy things. They are not a ball and chain necessarily around your ankle. You know, one of this. One of the stories that I've told and maybe I've told in the past on podcast is, you know, when we were. When Covid hit and I had a past job, I had. Employees were younger than me, and. And at first, Covid working from home seemed like the greatest thing in the world. You know, they were like, this is great. And I. And then I had young people say to me things like, I can't. I can't play Call of Duty anymore. I'm losing my mind. Like, I can't. Like, when Covid started, it was like, I'm going to be. I'm being paid to play Call of Duty. And then a year later, it was like, I cannot be paid to play Call of Duty. I cannot live this way. And they were like. And so I think, you know, they were the same sort of people who are like, you know, what are we. What are we getting out of all this? And, you know, what motivates you in the morning? And I remember saying, like, I didn't have the problem of still looking for the motivation part because I had a family and a mortgage and all this stuff to take care of, and that's enough. Like, my job was a privilege because, you know, I was getting out of bed in the morning for this world that I, you know, had to sort of manage and take care of, and I didn't need more. More personal. Rewarding this out of, like, work and stuff like that. Like, people are looking like, what. What do I. What do I'm chasing? You know, some sort of personal meaning or whatever, you know, and work. And it's like, I'm lucky because I have found meaning in my work. So I'm careful about, you know, speaking for people who have it. But a huge part of work in any sense is what your. What you are sustaining, and not the work in itself necessarily. And I found that Covid showed that to a lot of younger people who thought that, you know, if they just had a certain type of job that made them. That gave them everything they ever wanted, then everything else would fall in place. They would have this spirituality, they would want to have a family, they would want to have all this other. They were sort of waiting for this instead of building it themselves. And they realize that when you just Sit around, it doesn't. It doesn't come. And it's lonely.
- [51:23]
Seth Mandel
I mean, I think Abe. Abe's. The importance of. Abe's point is, yes, we're made to reproduce ourselves, but there are plenty of people who don't have children, right? And can't have children or don't, for whatever reason. You're one of them. And that's not to say that life can't be great. It's all a question of how you.
- [51:44]
John Pothohar
Wait, wait. Just to be clear, I'm not one of the people who can have children. I just happen not to have children.
- [51:49]
Seth Mandel
No, no, no, no. So you haven't had children. So what I mean. What I mean to say is. What I mean to say is that it's all about what it is that you think you are on this earth to be or to do. And most people don't think abstractly about that question. Like, that's not something you sit around. That's what philosophers do. Why are we here? Why are we here? What is it? What does it mean to be human? 95% of people aren't going to engage in questions that abstract or philosophical. But in practical terms, there are all kinds of things that have happened in human history that provide that answer without people understanding that the question is being answered. And religion is the number one example of that. Whether you're. Whether you. You're childless or you're not childless, whether you're married or single, whether you're widowed or you're in deep straits. And it goes to this point that Seth was making about obligations, that obligations may feel like burdens or they may feel like a liberation. The great analogy to this is the sonnet, right? You're a poet. There are two kinds of ways of being a poet. In the 20th century, you can write free verse in which you. There are no rules. There's no metric rules. There's no rhythmic rules. You don't have to rhyme. You do whatever you do, whatever the hell it is, and you call it verse. And then there's the sonnet, right? 14 lines, 10 syllables per line, rhyming unbelievably strict rules within which transcendence can come because you are limited rather than given the entire frame of reference of all language to play in. You are, it said, this is how you do this. You can write something else. It just won't be a sonnet. If you want to write a sonnet, here's how you write a sonnet. There's no breaking the rule. There's no. There's no breaking that rule. Otherwise it's not a sonnet anymore. And, you know, it's like the religious. Religious traditions or any kind of life of tradition says, here are the boundaries. Live. If you live within the boundaries, then you don't have to worry about what's going on outside the boundaries. You just ignore that and focus on your patch of garden and try to tend to your garden. Right. That's the end of Candide. Spends his entire existence trying to figure out what the meaning of life is. And it turns out that the meaning of life is, tend to your own garden. Don't go around the world trying to fix everything. Tend to your own garden. I don't know. This is a very. It seems to me that the classic problem of liberalism now, or leftism or whatever is that it is all it offers is dissatisfaction and.
- [55:03]
Narrator
Right. Well, and a sort of antagonism on the Abe stuff. Right. And again, not speaking for Abe, but I know Abe very well, and he doesn't go around saying, I don't want to be a parent because the planet is on fire and how dare I bring someone into this fallen world? You know, he doesn't walk around like a doom and gloom with a. Wearing a sandwich board. But I think on the left, culturally, everything has become, you do it because it's right politically. And therefore the people who don't have children drag parenthood, and the people who do have children drag non parenthood. And they're constantly facing off like, we don't come on this podcast and we're like, abe, you're a terrible person. How could you not be, you know, how could you not already be be furthering the human species and whatever. We don't live like that. We, you know, I, I pursued the family that I wanted to pursue, and we, we pursue the lives that we pursue. And everybody, you know, everybody does what, you know, makes. Should do what they, you know, makes them happy to that degree. Not, you know, happiness is the final goal. But, like, we don't concentrate so much on whether we should drag what other people do in order to feel better about ourselves or our choices or our situation.
- [56:27]
John Pothohar
I just interject because I'm being used as an example, and there will be speculation out there. I just happen not to be a parent. I'm not. There's no, it's not, it's not like.
- [56:38]
Narrator
That was my point. That was my point. You are not ideologically opposed. You don't, you don't have any.
- [56:44]
Seth Mandel
But I'm not opposed to the people. But the people that I Started talking about, here are parents. They're not, not parents. They're parents appearing on screen, on camera, on New York Times for their children to fight in 20 years from now, talking about how horrible it is to be a parent. It's like these people who write blogs about how horrible it is to write books about how horrible it is to be a parent. And it's like, first of all, oh my God, your kids are going to read this someday. Mazel tov to you. Good luck, Good luck with those conversations when you're ready to have them, when your kids are old enough to Google you and read what horrible things you wrote about how, how, how grindingly difficult it was to be your parent. That's number one. But number two, like, they're saying that they made a life choice that they're unhappy with in some fashion or other. And then if they didn't make that choice, and this is where things I think get deeper, I feel like if they didn't make that choice, then they would be unhappy with those, that choice also, because liberalism now, and this is, I like, we're basically liberals here, by the way. In, in human history, we would count as liberals, classical liberals believing in personal freedom, you know, economic freedom, whatever. But 20th century American liberal progressives believe in a philosophy that says that the world is and they can't get away from it. And so what happens when the world is. Well, I don't even know what. And if you believe that, then everything that happens is kind of bad. And the only thing you get excited about is moments when you can focus your ire on something. Cops or climate change or Trump or being a person who says something that you don't like about minorities or a comedian who makes a joke that offends you or something like that. And I don't know what to quite make of this, except it's the one thing that makes me feel deeply sorry for them that they feel this way. I mean, my life isn't perfect in any way, shape or form. I have a lot of, you know, woes and anxieties and neuroses and I live with people of robos and anxieties and neuroses and my children have good days and bad days. And as a parent, I have good days and bad days and all of that. But, you know, then I just call back in my head to like, what my life would have been like if had I been me in the 18th century. And I think about how I might have been dead by 40. I got a cut in my leg and the leg is going to, you know, get cut off without anesthetic because, you know, I'll get sepsis and die. And I probably get sepsis and die. When they cut off my leg with that anesthetic, my children will all die. You know, half my children will die. If I'm lucky, it'll only be half of them. And I'll have. And I'll be living on $300 a year, according to Deidre McCloskey. So that's who I. That's a blink of a historical eye that was like, you know, 1797, you know, your life wasn't worth a plug nickel. And here we are, 230, 240 years later, and everything sucks, according to Zoram Hamdani's voters and Zoram Mamdani himself.
- [60:39]
John Pothohar
Well, you know, this is, this is.
- [60:40]
Narrator
Why we take our kids to. I was gonna say.
- [60:42]
John Pothohar
But if you look at the other side, you know, at the conservative approach, you know, something that Yuval Levin has said is that conservative conservatism begins with sort of gratitude because it's about conserving what's good, not letting that erode. You know, it's about defending that and, you know, keeping it from the hands of those who would want to tear it down. And that spreads, you know, but the, the flip side for liberals who think everything is garbage is that they say, you know, on, on their, you know, wellness posts and whatever else, what do they always talk about? Gratitude. But it's a, it's just a buzzword. It's just a, it's a signaling term for them. It's not actual gratitude, which is, is lived, not broadcast.
- [61:49]
Seth Mandel
Right. Well, gratitude is a. Gratitude is a. You can say, I'm grateful. Doesn't matter what you say. Gratitude is a condition of soul. Right.
- [61:59]
Narrator
I mean, you hope that they can talk themselves into it, I guess, but. But what you said before is why we, we love going to Mount Vernon because we, you know, you have this like, palatial estate of George Washington's and he's a larger than life character. And they're like, he was tall for his age too, and he was big and strong. And you walk through and you're just floored by this like, king of a man and the Super Soldier and all the other stuff. And then you pass his bedroom, they're like, this is where George Washington died of a sore throat. And I'm like, you see kids?
- [62:30]
Seth Mandel
So his bedroom is smaller than their room.
- [62:33]
Narrator
Yes, right.
- [62:34]
Seth Mandel
That's the other thing is go, go to a 19th century American house of a rich person. Unless it's. Unless it's a Gilded Age house, you know, from the end of the 19th century when the rich got very rich and started getting ostentatious, you know, I went to Martin Van Buren's house just outside of Hudson, New York, and you know, like, not very nice, it's fine, you know, I mean, it's. Rooms are small, you know, and then there was this sort of description of what it was like. Van Buren was a dandy and he liked to change clothes four times a day, go to the basement, there is this giant pot hanging from the ceiling, and it's the laundry. It's the hot water laundry pot. And basically four times a day, his staff had to wash his clothing. And washing his clothing was no, you know, this was like. This was like examining fordow. I mean, it was like three people had to put the thing in, take it out, they had to read, they had to dry it, they had to iron it. They had to, like the simple labor that was. Had to be taken to make dinner, to keep the house clean, to do all that. And this is where the ingratitude of liberals, I think not everybody maybe, but, you know, the taken for grantedness of the craziness of our lives. You know that people say that the poorest person in the United States, on balance, lives a better life than the king of France in the 18th century. Eats better food, has better health care, you know, like, knows how to. Yes. Like, can take an aspirin. No. And they have headache, stuff like that. And. And no matter how much money they have, they're still, you know, it still takes them three days to go from Versailles into Paris practically. Even though Versailles, like 40, 40 minutes by train. The roads are, you know, you get nauseous if you take a carriage to ride a horse. Someone steals your horse. Like, being a rich person, we're poor people in America are the rich people of 200 years ago. And nobody seems to know that or care. I mean, I care. And I don't think nobody knows that. I think every immigrant who isn't from Somalia or Uganda in the Congress are gonna be mayor of New York comes here and says, I'm here to live a life better than the life I could have lived at home here in 2024. Like, I don't wanna live in India, I don't wanna live in Pakistan. I don't wanna be a doctor in India. Or I could be a doctor in India. High status, great. I wanna be a doctor in America. What does that tell you about how Americans feel about America when they say we're on the wrong track or everything is terrible? Like, all these people are coming here, particularly if they are high performing or high achieving, because they know better than we do that the best of the life that they can live where they come from is not as good as the life they can have if they're here. And we think the life that we have here. So many people here think the life we have here is bad. It may be. It may be spiritually bad. It may be that they are. There's a hole in their souls because there has been this. There is this spiritual collapse that is really, really dangerous. But that's not the material. That's not the thing. If they're ungrateful for their lives, it's for them to find that spiritual answer to cure the holes in their souls, I think. Okay, well, this got very. This got very flowery. And I just want to say Abe. Abe is a wonderful person and has a wonderful life. And whether he has kids or not, I'm not saying you have to have kids to have a wonderful life, believe me. You know, talk to me in 2021 about whether having kids meant that you had a wonderful life. Of course. Course, nobody in 2021 was feeling like they had a wonderful life. And that's one of the reasons why it's great that Andrew Cuomo actually got humiliated on Tuesday because he was one of the reasons that I was living a crappy life in 2020 and 2021 under his psychopathic, fascistic governance that mamadani would, by the way, want to continue, because as Bill de Blasio said, hey, I don't know why everyone's so upset about freezing rents. We froze rents when I was mayor, by which he was referring to Covid rent restrictions under emergency. Under the. Under the national emergency. That. Great, let's live like that forever, shall we? Let's have national emergency conditions in which the government orders private employers and then to do everything that went Great. Got to 10% inflation and, you know, and lack of freedom, and people were being thrown in jail for going to the beach. Fantastic times. Okay, we'll be back on Monday. For Seth and Abe, I'm John Pothor's Keep the Candle Burning.