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- [00:04]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die at.
- [00:14]
John Podhoretz
First the way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:22]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to this holiday edition of the Commentary magazine daily podcast. I am Jon Bodhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:34]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:35]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:38]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:38]
John Podhoretz
Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [00:42]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, John.
- [00:42]
John Podhoretz
And Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:45]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [00:46]
John Podhoretz
So we have been taking your listener viewer questions to keep you entertained during this holiday week and holiday season. And we got a couple more for you today. So Zach Silverman writes in the following I'm a former Democrat, obviously, with the turn from Israel, I cannot bring myself to call myself a Democrat anymore. Thousands of Jews agree. Beyond that, I feel as though, given how much control, the extreme wings of both parties are controlling them, is there a possibility for a new party to arise? There hasn't been a new party created, nor has there been a significant realignment in some time. I've always believed the third party could never rise, but I feel like it's almost necessary at this point. Would love to know your thoughts, if it's possible. Thank you for all that you do. Zach Silverman. Christine, as our resident PhD in American history, not that that was your topic, the parties were not your, your the topic of your, of your dissertation. Nonetheless, I thought we would credential you to answer the question of whether or not we might be seeing a third.
- [01:57]
Christine Rosen
Party seriously disappoint you with my credentials, but go ahead.
- [02:01]
John Podhoretz
That's it. That's all I got for you.
- [02:02]
Christine Rosen
Okay. Look, I will, I have, I'm the person who often says his observation that we haven't had a new party sort of form and challenge the two existing ones and reshape our political system is correct. But I would, I would disagree in the wake of the most recent election that a major realignment hasn't occurred. We're seeing some realignment between voters for one party versus the other. But there are the thing I think is worth watching in the near future are the registrations of Gen Z voters, because a lot more of them are registering as independents. They do seem to have a kind of weary cynicism about both parties basically being the same. They're both terrible. So let's find a third way. But our system is very, very heavily weighted against a third party having much dominance, particularly if you separate it from any sort of national crisis like a civil war. So I Don't. And I love all the earnestness and good feeling of these Third way efforts and, you know, people trying to find that, that middle ground. But I don't see in our current fractious political moment that being something that can legit logistically happen as well as, you know, unless the younger generations really do want to separate themselves from both the Republican and the Democratic parties. So that was an unhelpful answer, I think. But I do think the realignment we saw in terms of voters, particularly non college educated voters, shifting to the Republican side in this most recent election is worth watching, right?
- [03:33]
Matthew Continetti
I mean, the realignments in American history since the creation of the Republican Party happened under the surface of the party contest, not among the parties as a whole. And so there's been a huge realignment over the past hundred years with the south, leaving the Democratic Party the solid south of the Democrats and eventually in a decades long process, first voting for Republican presidential candidates and then now voting for Republicans down ballot. And the reddening of the south is never clearer than in the 2024 results where you see Florida, which was, which was a swing state just a quarter century ago, becoming deep red. Same with Texas and now places like Missouri, Iowa too. So that realignment's happening. And as you mentioned, Christine, there's also the realignment along lines of educational attainment, realignment of Hispanic voters seemingly progressing much like many previous immigrant diasporas beginning as Democrats, reliable Democratic voters, but as they assimilate to America, spread their votes between the two parties. I would say that the rise of independence is real, but it doesn't necessarily augur for a third third party or a new party simply because independents often don't agree amongst themselves. So how do you create a new party in America? Well, you either have an issue, right, the Republican Party was born because of the resistance to the expansion of slavery in the territories, or you have a leader. So the modern Democratic Party basically created, begins with the followers of Jefferson and the opponents of Hamilton, then becomes swept up in the Jacksonian populist revolution there at the beginning of the 19th century and then institutionalized by Martin Van Buren in the wake of Jacksonian ism and Jackson's presidency. So one possibility for Zach is that as the Republican Party becomes the Trump Party and is institutionalized after Trump ends his presidency, that could, that could mean that there's become some fissure or space between people who are part of the Trump Party and then people who are feel left out of it. That hasn't, that fissure hasn't emerged yet, but it is a possibility in the next 10, 20 years.
- [06:21]
Abe Greenwald
I just want to say, I think it's. I. I share your doubts about the possibility of the emergence of a third party. But something else that does happen that changes our politics, not just the realignment, is that the parties themselves do get remade almost into new parties on the left and the right. And that I think is something that you can't necessarily predict in what ways these parties under the same labels will change their shape and what issues they will take on, and in what ways.
- [07:05]
John Podhoretz
The oddity of the American, even though it's not odd, because we're now pretty much the oldest functioning political system on earth, but the word party as it is understood in almost every other country does not describe our parties. Our parties are coalitions in parliamentary systems. Parties are either entirely geographically, ethnically, or religiously or ideologically driven. And they are kind of pure, are homogeneous. And then after the elections, they have to form themselves into a coalition that can govern the country in this weird, semi dictatorial way that parliamentary systems have, where the executive and the legislative branches are united as one thing, with almost no checks on their. Their power. Our parties are coalitions from the get go. So that you had in the 1930s and 1940s, you had segregationists in the south and blacks in the north, in the Democratic Party together, which, you know, like to our ears sounds like having, you know, Nazis and Zions, Nazis in the south and Zionists in the north in a party together. And that is, that is the nature. The nature of the American political experiment is we have a horror of parties. It runs through the lifeblood of the understanding in the Federalist Papers, for example, that parties as they are understood in the European terms are bad. They're faction. It's bad. This is not how things should run. And we don't really function that way. Our parties are too big to. And these fights over what has primacy and what is secondary or tertiary happen inside a very big messy coalition, a messy national coalition. And there has been a colossal realignment of the parties in my lifetime. I mention this all the time on the podcast, but people I think don't really can, can't really get it in their heads. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan got 50% of the vote and won 40 states, if you ask the American people what party they were in, 44% of them defined themselves as Democrats and 22% of themselves defined themselves as Republicans. So nominally, the Democratic Party was twice the size of the Republican Party, which in that election its leader got 50% of the vote, more than 400 electoral votes, and brought 12 senators in with him, despite nominally the American people saying that only 22% of them were part of the party that had just won that election. So the person, the American personal connection to parties is very tenuous, which is really not the case in other countries where it is one of the defining qualities of your life, whether you are a member of the Christian Democrats or the Christian Socialists. Like that is a. It helps define your friendships, it helps define where you go on to what pub you go to on Tuesday night and what you do for a living and how you work and all of that. And now the parties are at relative parity, around 30%. And the independents who don't want to align with either party make up the rest, the other third. And so we don't need party, we don't need a new party. These parties do remake themselves and they.
- [11:00]
Seth Mandel
Remake themselves who want third new parties tend to mistakenly think that those new parties are for the less ideological among them. Right. You have a lot of people who say, I, I'm politically homeless because I find myself somewhere in the middle and I don't, you know, these parties are going to extremes. And the truth is that I think that third parties and small parties emerge. They are hyper ideological and that's the only thing that gives them the force and the fuel to be able to emerge in a political system with enough momentum to exist beyond one election cycle. And so you sort of need that fuel. You sort of the other, the, the other side of that coin is you look in Israel at the centrist parties. There's always a centrist party in Israel, right? And it comes and then it goes. This is a long history.
- [11:58]
John Podhoretz
And then it's replaced by another centrist party. And it always gets about a sixth, it always gets about a sixth of the vote and cannot then get the other, cannot get to 50%.
- [12:10]
Seth Mandel
Like the party itself doesn't stick around, right?
- [12:14]
John Podhoretz
Because it doesn't. It's not defined by anything except not being the other parties. And it's not a great system and it's been very unstable and we have the most stable. This is the thing about people who complain about the parties and everything needs to be replaced and all that is, you know, France is about to go through what might be its seventh republic or sixth republic or something like since 1945, like rewrites its constitution, this, that and the other thing. Britain's party system may start to fracture now into four parties which will make it almost impossible to create A governing coalition. All of that. We, with the exception of the Civil War, which is the big exception, we have the single most stable political system in the world. It functions with these parties that exist in place. The parties are integrated, by the way, technically into our electoral Systems. In all 50 states, a lot of what is needed to get people to the polls and to run polling places, and all of that is essentially deeded to the Republican and Democratic parties in at states and local levels who are. Who are often paid or given authority or responsibility to do things like register voters, bring them in to run polling places, all of that. Getting rid of that system would be almost impossible. It's not even a system. It's literally a series of things that happened over time. To be more efficient and to actually create the conditions under which you could have a functioning system with multiple parties, you would have to have a kind of constitutional overhaul of the United States to mean that those rules were deemed unconstitutional and that things had to be run essentially from the federal government, which itself would be anathema to us, because in the Constitution, who has the right to structure the. As a place, manner and time of elections? States. Federal government has no authority over elections except the date of the national federal elections, which is fixed in the Constitution. So it's a. We have a pretty good system, actually. And as. As this moment of the last 30 years, where we have actually had balances of power shift all the time. You can say that's destabilizing and terrible, and it gives the extremes too much power. And we're in. So just so dysfunctional. But maybe it reflects where the people are. They don't like Clinton, so they bring in Gingrich. They don't like Gingrich, so they reelect Clinton. You know, they don't really want Democrats to have a huge amount of power, so they kind of keep the Republicans in power. They give George W. Bush a very big majority after 911 because they like what they did after what he did after 9 11. They take it away from him in 2006 because they don't like what he did after 9 11. Four years after 9 11, Obama comes in. Obama's handed his hat, you know, then Trump comes in, Trump's handed his hat, and then he's handed his hat again. And then in 2024, Trump wins. That may reflect where the American people are at any given moment. That's not so terrible. I mean, that. That is a defining quality of who we are right now, as reflection, oh, 250 years.
- [15:37]
Christine Rosen
So can't be that bad.
- [15:38]
John Podhoretz
Exactly. So let me move on to Mr. Genghis, one of our. Paul, again, just one of our most prolific correspondents and a big fan of the podcast. So there are two very broad questions and we'll try to answer really fast. First, what is your best case scenario for the next four years? So you want to be very broad and very simple here, because what is your best case scenario for the next four years?
- [16:14]
Matthew Continetti
My best case scenario for the next four years is that inflation is tamed while incomes continue to rise, the southern border is secure, and we do something about antisemitism on our college campuses and we restore American deterrence for a more peaceful world. That's a lot to ask. Right, but you asked the best case.
- [16:40]
John Podhoretz
Seth, do you have a best case?
- [16:43]
Seth Mandel
My best case scenario of the next four years is one Jets super bowl. And my, my worst case scenario is the status quo for them. So. No, I, I think that's fine. You got to keep your expectations low. No, I, you know, I think that the main question that we're going to face is do we consider the trends, the political trends that the winds that blow through, do we consider them temporary or do they sort of latch onto things? And so the things that are happening on campus and, you know, the rise of that, is that going to be a sort of 60s and 70s thing and go away and come back? Is it cyclical or, or have we looked at some of the things that are happening and been so accepting of them that they just stick around and that will change the way things go? So we usually in America, we're able to sort of, you know, the bad winds blow in and the bad winds blow out. And the worst case scenario for the next four years is that something has changed in that regard. And the best case scenario is that nothing has changed in that regard and that the bad winds will blow out just as soon as they blew in.
- [17:53]
John Podhoretz
Abe, you got something?
- [17:54]
Abe Greenwald
I, I share Matt's essential bullet points for the best case scenario. I'd add. I would like to see, since we're. This is best here. Yeah, I'd like to see a change in the conduct of our leaders. That would be really welcome. Less performative, less maximalist, maybe. As we've said a few times toward the end of this year on the podcast, Trump in less seems to be less in fighting mode. Perhaps if that were to hold, it might have a cascading effect. I don't know. That's a hope. I think the worst case scenario is.
- [18:41]
John Podhoretz
Well, let's. We haven't Gotten to the worst.
- [18:42]
Abe Greenwald
Okay. Okay.
- [18:44]
John Podhoretz
Christine, what you got?
- [18:46]
Christine Rosen
I second the list that Matt gave. I also second what Abe just said. I would add leaders who are less online, which might help with some of this. And one other thing which is my hope, best case scenario is that politics recedes a little bit from daily life for most Americans that everything they do and say and consume need not be hyper politicized any longer. Now that's a choice people have to make for themselves at some level, but particularly in the realm of cultural consumption. Just a lot less politics, a lot less culture war is my best case scenario.
- [19:21]
John Podhoretz
I want to boil down the Abe Mat thing to one. One thing because I think that the knock. The knock on consequences and the gifts that will emerge from it are. Are could be so vast that we. It's hard to calculate what they might be. It could also be true of the unintended consequences of it. But I don't really see that many bad consequences from it which is that together with the, with the United States, Israel takes out Iran's nuclear program and ambitions forever and cripples its oil its oil exporting abilities and potentially leading to regime collapse. Right, but the regime collapses itself. In my estimation here in terms of the modesty of my approach, almost secondary. I mean it would be good morally a wonderful thing and a good thing and the ultimate way you could suggest to people in the future that this down this path lies your eventual destruction. We've now seen it in Syria, we could see it in, in Iran. But that the. But that the after 45 years of the death to America, enemy number one, enemy of the United States destabilizing force in the world with this ambition to destroy the Jewish people and the Jewish state undone completely that the 10 years that follow, including with our leading adversary in the world, China, the message that that would impart about what the United States is willing to support and to do to ensure world stability and that bad actors pay prices for destabilizing places that they have no reason to have truck with could be just colossal and domestically could also have the effect of America has reestablished deterrence and has re established its standing to say that there are rules that the world will follow and that the economic consequences of a weakened confused America about how it stands in the world as the leading economic power in the world will clear up to some extent. Worries about America's currency will clear up and our ability to go to places like China and say okay, time to behave, let's do this right, because what you're doing is wrong could have very, very, very positive consequences.
- [22:07]
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- [22:16]
John Podhoretz
I kind of prefer the act where.
- [22:19]
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- [24:28]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so worst case scenario.
- [24:33]
Matthew Continetti
Worst case scenario is that as we've been fearing, we are actually in the beginning of World War Three and that deterrence is not restored and that America becomes involved in a shooting war that would be not confined not just to the Middle east where our forces are engaged, but also Ukraine and Possibly Taiwan as well. That I think is the outcome that needs to be avoided. And the way to do it is to strengthen America the best we can. Not just in terms of spending more money on defense, which we need to do, not just in terms of exercising force in certain targeted areas, particularly in the Middle East, I think, but also getting rid of this green fantasy and developing our oil and natural gas to such an extent that the oil weapon which Russia uses and which fuels the Russian war machine is no more. I think if we pursued those three prongs of a strategy, then we could avoid the worst case. But there's no question in my mind that there is the possibility of World War Three and we, we have to avoid it not through appeasement, but through strength and coherent strategy.
- [26:02]
Christine Rosen
Can I would add to that, that is a good summation of the worst case scenario I can imagine, which is that all the stress testing that China has been doing of the United States over the past 10 years ceases and they act, they act in a decisive and aggressive, hostile way for which we must respond. And we might not be ready as for all the reasons that that lays out. So that, that, yeah, China is the thing that worries me the most in terms of worst case scenarios.
- [26:32]
John Podhoretz
Abe.
- [26:33]
Abe Greenwald
I think the worst case scenarios, as we've seen recently almost by definition come out of the blue are the things that totally take us by surprise. If you think of October 7, 9, 11 Covid so it would be something that would, as I said, by definition I wouldn't know, but some huge paradigm shifting event or eruption that would completely catch the civilized world flat footed. That's my fear. And there have been a lot of them recently and we could use a break.
- [27:17]
John Podhoretz
Seth, you got one?
- [27:18]
Seth Mandel
Yeah. My great fear is the, is that we've encouraged the collapse of the nation state system, honestly, because I think the way that we've dealt with wars over the past several years has been kind of yawning at, for example, what is still Ukraine and what is now Russia but wasn't before. I'm not sure most people could answer that question and I'm not sure that most people in the government could answer that question. And it might change again after this current war. And I think that the level of support we've seen from the UN and from the public around the world for these carved out mini states within a state like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which is not the Palestinian Authority, and all these places, the Houthis in Yemen, we sort of shrugged at the fact that we're just Kind of allowing the idea that states are growing states like tumors on them, that these mini states act like states. And, and what it really means is that there's no such thing as Lebanon. There's no such thing as Syria. There's no such thing. And I worry that we're actually sleepwalking into a. It's not exactly clear what Ukraine is either. And that I think is going to be a very big blow. I think that the nation state system and border and sovereignty is much more important than we have acted like it is. And this could be a boiling frog situation where things just start dissolving and we no longer really care about states and state sovereignty as much anymore.
- [29:03]
John Podhoretz
My fear actually has been triggered. I mean, it's not triggered because we've been talking about it on and off for 10 years, but it's really been triggered by Luigi Mangione's assassination of Brian Johnson, the health care executive, which is that we are heading into a period. Thompson, Thompson, I'm sorry, I apologize. Heading into a period of domestic political violence of a sort that we really have not seen in half a century. And that though I don't want to be hyper partisan here, that the Democratic Party and that the liberal establishment is preparing itself to be. To serve as an apologia machine for a world in which leftist revolutionaries, mad men who then take on the coloration of leftist revolutionaries or gangs that take on the coloration of leftist revolutionaries, are defended or supported in their criminal actions and terroristic behavior on the grounds that whoever it is that they target had it coming to them. And that is the horror of the polling that we see showing young people supposedly with a more positive than negative feeling about somebody who literally on our own screens shot a guy in the back twice on a street as he was walking into a building. I mean, I don't think I'd ever seen anyone shot to death. I mean, 63 years old, I wasn't in the military. That may have been the first moment in my life that I actually saw someone shot to death in front of me. I'm never. I, you know, it haunts my dreams. It's haunted my dreams since I saw that little piece of footage. The fact that people look at it and see a first person player, video game or something like that, sickening. And are able to take that in is very frightening. And my worst case scenario is that the Democratic Party, I fear, has very few antibodies to protect itself against this vanguard idea that, you know, in a world in which healthcare is so unevenly distributed, how do you expect People are going to respond when they have no outlet. We need to fight these people.
- [31:25]
Matthew Continetti
Airdrop Gary Saul Morrison's literature across the country.
- [31:30]
John Podhoretz
Yes.
- [31:30]
Matthew Continetti
Required reading. You have to study Gary Saul Marson's body of work about the intelligence and the conditions of revolution and how intellectuals begin to apologize for the complete eradication of civilization.
- [31:45]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [31:46]
Matthew Continetti
Because he, he's the antibody that people in the Democratic Party so desperately need.
- [31:51]
Seth Mandel
But the way to do that is not to make it obligatory. The way to do that is to cancel Gary Saul Morrison.
- [31:56]
John Podhoretz
Right. That's true. That's right.
- [31:58]
Seth Mandel
If you really want to be edgy. If you really want to be edgy, you would read people.
- [32:03]
John Podhoretz
Get him on Rogan. Yeah, we need to get Saul on Rogan. Get Morrison on Rogan. I do think that it's important to say that what I'm describing happened in the United States. It's not without precedent. This was the early 1970s in the United States when I was, you know, in, in my early teens. And on that, 1200 domestic bombings, bank robberies, Patty Hearst, the Black Panthers, leading to the general psychosis in San Francisco that finally I think brought the 1960s and 70s to a close. Not in San Francisco, but in Guyana with the Jonestown mass suicide, which was itself the result of a far leftist political figure with a nonsense church in San Francisco taking a group of people over whom he had such sway that he, he, he had them all kill themselves after they shot to death a congressman who was going to investigate what on earth was going on there that happened in 1979. It brought this decade of psychosis to a close. We. If I'm right and, and Mangioni is the beginning of something. This is a long. Now everything's sped up. But I mean, this is something that could go on for a very long time. And as I say, the problem is that one of the two major political movements in the United States does not seem prepared to cope with doing something to extirpate this cancer that seems to be growing within, within it. Because what I'm talking about is all happening on the left. This is not stuff that is happening on the right. That's a dodge and nonsense. There are problems on the right. There are problems with domestic terrorism on the right and all that, but they're not what I'm talking about here. So that's my, my worst case scenario.
- [33:56]
Christine Rosen
No way we're ending with this question. I hope we're not.
- [33:59]
John Podhoretz
We are not.
- [33:59]
Christine Rosen
Holiday cheer, please.
- [34:01]
John Podhoretz
We're not. Okay. If you had to choose one sitcom from the 1970s. I'm sorry. Because maybe we'll just make it one sitcom because you guys are two. One sitcom. As the high water mark of the genre. What would it be?
- [34:17]
Matthew Continetti
This is a John Pot Horace question.
- [34:18]
John Podhoretz
But I, you, I, I watched 70s.
- [34:23]
Matthew Continetti
On reruns.
- [34:25]
John Podhoretz
That's why I'm remove, that's why I'm removing the set.
- [34:27]
Matthew Continetti
But clearly this was intended for you to answer.
- [34:30]
John Podhoretz
Okay.
- [34:30]
Matthew Continetti
Okay, so you should begin. What Is your favorite 70s?
- [34:34]
John Podhoretz
My favorite 70s sitcom is the Odd Couple, but there are many. But I, I'm not sure that that is artistically defensible as to say I have. There are many reasons why the Odd Couple has this powerful meaning for me personally that, that there are probably better shows and better, you know, but it has speaks to me very personally. I do think that the single greatest episode of television ever was an episode on the Mary Tyler Moore show, which is Chuckles Bites the Dust, which is, which is about a. At the TV station that Mary Tyler Moore and her colleagues work at, there is a children's show featuring Chuckles the clown. And Chuckles the clown gets killed in a parade by an elephant who steps on him and kills him. And the entire episode is about how the newsroom and Mary and everybody deal with this astounding jaw dropping event and how all they're doing is making jokes about the fact that Chuckles Mary Tyler.
- [35:43]
Matthew Continetti
More streaming anywhere because it is. I think I need to watch this episode.
- [35:47]
John Podhoretz
I think it's on Paramount plus.
- [35:50]
Matthew Continetti
Okay, good, so.
- [35:51]
John Podhoretz
Or but if you just search anyway, it is Bites. Chuckles Bites the Dust, I believe Mo I. This is not a controversial opinion that Chuckles Bites the Dust is the single best sitcom episode ever recorded. And I don't want to say any more about it because it is so. But there is by the way, one other one comparable WKRP in Cincinnati, which is from the late 70s early 80s had an episode where as a promotion again for a radio station, it's Thanksgiving. And the newsman, Les Nessman, the ridiculous newsman, decides the going to do a promotional event where they. They drop turkeys from the sky in order to for Thanksgiving. Les Nessman not knowing that turkeys are not aviary birds. So it did feature the line, the immortal line, as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly. So those are the two greatest among the two greatest episodes of television.
- [36:56]
Matthew Continetti
I have a suggestion which is the question made me think if I had to put a sitcom in a time capsule for the far future human beings to open up and to get a sense of what Americans were like, what we found funny, maybe slice of life. It would have to be the Office, the American version of the Office. I think if you look. And it's not my favorite sitcom of all time, by no means, but I did enjoy it. And I think, though, that the personal dynamics of the show, the different social roles represented within the Office, the kind of the romantic social codes that are explained and kind of made fun of over the course of its seasons, I would definitely say preserve the Office if people want to look back and see what life was like in America at the turn of the 21st century.
- [38:03]
John Podhoretz
I just have one other thing to say as I'm thinking about this, that in terms of shows that are unlike any other, that were never like any other, there will never be another one like it. And that I know from my own family, and I in my 60s, my wife in her 50s, my oldest daughter 20, my. My second oldest daughter 18, my son 14. Over the course of the last 10 years, that the show that really blew us all away and that has this entirely unique quality is the Good Place, which is four seasons, and it's about everything. It's a show about what happens when four people go to heaven who really shouldn't be in heaven, and what happens after they. It turns out that they're all in heaven under false pretenses and the world and how they disrupt perfection, being human. And then how the cosmology of the universe is way more complicated than it appears at first. And it's funny, it's moving, it's brilliantly acted, and they're real. And it genuinely engages with the most serious philosophical questions there are, which is not something I like to say about TV shows, because I hate that. I hate it when they get all pretentious. But there really never was and will never ever be again a show like the Good Place. And if you haven't seen it, it's 48 episodes. It's absolutely astonishing. Okay, moving on. Got just two more.
- [39:46]
Seth Mandel
Can I end? Can I. Yeah, just, just, just say. I think that TGIF has to be in the conversation in some key way. The ABC Friday night block of shows was also unlike anything that came before or after it. The sort of wholesomeness of these sitcoms that we grew up on are. It's like watching something from another planet. But, you know, Perfect Strangers and Full House and Family Matters. These are. These are, you know, Boy Meets World. I don't know if was Boy Meets World on. On tgif, but it's one of the great shows step by step. But this this was. This was just like. There was a real heyday of sitcom for slightly younger viewers.
- [40:38]
John Podhoretz
Embarrassing the way that the Disney sitcoms of the 2000s and 20s.
- [40:42]
Seth Mandel
Disney sitcoms and that weren't like Gossip Girls or whatever young preteens are watching now. There was a period where it was. This was the wholesome period. And I'm not sure there's been a block like that on TV dedicated to that specific type of thing for younger people, viewers.
- [40:59]
John Podhoretz
Okay, Abe, I got one for you. Okay. Steven Spielberg or Billy Wilder?
- [41:06]
Abe Greenwald
Oh, man. Billy Wilder. Billy Wilder. I. I'm. I'm torn on Spielberg. While recognizing his many gifts, I. There's a. Kyle Smith once wrote something great for us about Spielberg, and he said, I'm going to. I'm going to mangle my. The paraphrase. But it was something like, Spielberg makes two kinds of movies. Movies intentionally for children and movies for children. It's wrong. I have the line wrong, but it's something like that.
- [41:50]
Unnamed Speaker
Right.
- [41:50]
Abe Greenwald
And I always do feel that somewhere running through it.
- [41:57]
Matthew Continetti
Heavy descent. Heavy descent.
- [41:59]
John Podhoretz
Go ahead, please.
- [42:01]
Matthew Continetti
I mean, there's no greater Hollywood filmmaker in cinematic history than Steven Spielberg. From the technical proficiency to the creativity to the sense of story. I. I would. I would definitely go with Spielberg over. Over Billy Wilder.
- [42:24]
John Podhoretz
I would say this, which is that Billy Wilder, Spielberg never made a movie as great as the Apartment, but if you actually look at their, Their. Oof. Their. Their common ubers, Spielberg made many more good movies than Wilder did. So in that sense, even if you sense in sensibility terms, I prefer Wilder and his cynicism and his deep understanding of the foibles of human nature to Spielberg's often mendacious positivity. Spielberg is just a more reliable. If you see that something was made by Spielberg, you're probably going to have a better.
- [43:02]
Abe Greenwald
I have the quote. Can I just. Now.
- [43:03]
John Podhoretz
Okay. Yes.
- [43:04]
Abe Greenwald
Given his views, one could make the case that nearly all of Spielberg's work falls into two categories, Children's films and disguised children's films.
- [43:14]
Matthew Continetti
So this is in reference to what film, though, that he's writing? This.
- [43:18]
John Podhoretz
Well, all right.
- [43:19]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [43:19]
John Podhoretz
His oeuvre.
- [43:20]
Matthew Continetti
Well, I think. I think what's happened is people's perceptions of Spielberg have changed, beginning with the period where he began. A lot of beginnings. But when he began collaborating with Tony Kushner, his films went in a certain direction that were kind of left agit prop, and they have not been as.
- [43:45]
John Podhoretz
Effective, with the exception of west side Story, his remake of west side Story, which Kushner wrote. I am not a fan of Tony Kushner. And that is a brilliant screenplay, and that is a brilliant.
- [43:57]
Matthew Continetti
But it's also not. It still retains a lot of the original. It's not. When I read that movie or see it, I don't see Kushner trying to make a political point, which he does in most every other of his screenplays for Spielberg. And so I do feel if you think if you just go back to the original, to Spielberg, from even Duel. Begin with Duel.
- [44:19]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [44:20]
Matthew Continetti
Up through E.T. there's. I mean, that period alone, there's no comparison. I think.
- [44:27]
John Podhoretz
Okay, is. And we'll end on this. Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?
- [44:35]
Christine Rosen
Oh, that's an easy one. Of course it's a Christmas movie. Nakatomi Plaza is decorated. It's absolutely a Christmas movie.
- [44:42]
John Podhoretz
Okay, anyone dissent from the view that Die Hard is a Christmas movie?
- [44:47]
Christine Rosen
I'll fight you over this one.
- [44:49]
Matthew Continetti
I think this is, may I just say, my friend of many years and colleagues, the terrible Sonny Bunch, he is more responsible than anyone for shifting the overtone window on Die Hard as a Christmas movie.
- [45:09]
John Podhoretz
It is true.
- [45:10]
Matthew Continetti
This is something Sonny Bunch began in, I think, 2010. Yes. I mean, over a decade ago.
- [45:18]
John Podhoretz
And the world has never been the same.
- [45:21]
Matthew Continetti
The world has never been the same. And it caught up to him. So that Christine's view is really kind of unchallenged on this panel.
- [45:28]
Christine Rosen
Thank you very much. Thank you, Sonny.
- [45:30]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. It's clearly a Christmas movie in that it's set at Christmas. John McClane is in it captures of Christmas.
- [45:41]
Christine Rosen
John. This is why it's a Christmas.
- [45:43]
John Podhoretz
Okay, okay. I. It's fine. Sonny Bunch also deserves credit for creating the 10 year Twitter controversy over whether or not a hot dog is or is not a sandwich.
- [45:58]
Matthew Continetti
You may say many things about my friend Sonny Bunch, but you cannot deny he is one of the world's greatest trolls.
- [46:05]
John Podhoretz
Oh, he is. He invented. He invented trolldom at its best.
- [46:11]
Abe Greenwald
Yes.
- [46:11]
John Podhoretz
Sonny is only a troll for good. He is not a troll for evil.
- [46:16]
Matthew Continetti
Correct.
- [46:16]
John Podhoretz
And the hot dog is a sandwich question is a perfect thing on which to end our year here at Commentary, because, of course, a hot dog is a sandwich.
- [46:30]
Seth Mandel
A hot dog. In fact, a hot dog is a Christmas sandwich.
- [46:34]
John Podhoretz
Fair enough. Okay, well, thanks for listening. And for Abe, Christine, Seth, and Matt, I'm John Pothoritz. Keep the candle bur.