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- [00:00]
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- [01:12]
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- [02:13]
Charlie Sykes
Well, welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. As I wrote in my newsletter yesterday, yes, it is real. It is not a parody. The President of the United States actually sent a bug butthurt note to the Prime Minister of Norway complaining, and I'm sorry, I'm really not making all of this up, but you know this by now. He sends a note to the Prime Minister of Norway complaining about not getting the Nobel Prize again, which he was of course never going to get, and then linking this to the fact that, well, now that I didn't get the prize, I don't have to care about peace anymore, which is why we're going to do what we're going to do to Greenland. In case you have not heard this, which I'm sure you have by now, Dear Jonas, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Prize for having stopped eight wars plus fact check bullshit, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant. But I now think about what is good and proper for the United States, and then it goes on. I mean, how bad is this? Don't ask. Well, we have to ask, because, of course, we are now in this weird simulation where Donald Trump's infant neediness and his recklessness shaping the world that we are in. And by the way, I really should start every one of these recordings by just reminding you that there's probably something, you know, even, even more horrible that's happened since we recorded all of this. So I apologize for that. But again, that's just the way things are. So we have a full plate again today. Joining me to go through all of the stuff that's happening in our world, the legendary journalist and author Joe Klein. The most importantly, the author of the Substack newsletter, Sanity Clause. Good to talk with you, Joe.
- [04:02]
Joe Klein
Good to be here, Charlie.
- [04:05]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and of course, what we have to do is we have to start talking about movies. I want to talk about movies. No, seriously, I think Joe Klein and I have some movies that we want to talk about, because we both did. I'm not sure that it was psychologically healthy. You know, I've been binging movies about Nuremberg and you and I have been corresponding. There is the new movie about Nuremberg with Russell Crowe. There's the legendary movie, you know, back from what, 1961 or so, judgment at Nuremberg. And then there's Norwegian film as. As well. So are you up. Yep. For talking about Nuremberg movies. Should we start with all of that?
- [04:39]
Joe Klein
Yeah, yeah.
- [04:40]
Charlie Sykes
It's kind of timely in a way, right?
- [04:42]
Joe Klein
It's very timely. And I think you and I had kind of a mind meld a week or so ago because we both watched Nuremberg and we both, you know, flipped back to Judgment at Nuremberg, which was film from 1960. 61, black and white. Always interesting to me that the most important, when I was a kid, back then I was coming into political consciousness, the most important serious movies were done in black and white, which were always not black and white, but shades of gray, which was kind of. Kind of appropriate. But to me, the striking thing, and I think, you know, you. You and I may agree on this, I found that judgment on Judgment at Nuremberg was a far more powerful and important film than Nuremberg. Nuremberg is, is, yes, where he plays Hermann Goering. And most of the action involves the efforts of an American military psychologist, psychiatrist to figure out what Goering is about and how the Nazis could have done all this. The difference is that there's a kind of very 21st century moral relativism about it. Goering's a really charming guy. The shrink is at times a bit of a putz. In the end, this isn't held out as something special or awful that the Germans did. It's held out as something that all humans could do. I dispute that. The difference between that and judgment at Nuremberg is that in the latter you have a figure of moral authority in Spencer Tracy who is one of the judge. And this is one of the lesser trials of Nazi criminals. They are judges and they are judges who put people to death. And I think you have. I'm going to cede to you the crucial moment here.
- [07:01]
Charlie Sykes
Well, again, I agree with you. First of all, the new Nuremberg movie was very, very disappointing. It tried to pass itself off as having deep psychological insight and it did not. But this is the moment that I think both captured you and I. And again, this was a star studded cast. Bert Lancaster plays the best of the worst. He plays a. He plays a Nazi. No, he plays a judge who went along with the Nazis. Although he, you know, unlike many of the others, he knew exactly what the evil that he was doing. And when he appears on the stand, he makes it very, very clear that, that he, you know, he conscience. And so near the end of the movie, he invites Spencer Tracy to come to the prison and he tells him that he made the right decision by convicting him and he's been sentenced to life and that this was good. But then he makes this plea and there's this exchange post.
- [08:05]
Joe Klein
Millions of people, I never knew it.
- [08:09]
Charlie Sykes
Would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it. Hey, Yana. It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death, you knew to be innocent. Wow, that one really hit me. That is one of those great moments that I think that where you understand the importance of one human life, but also of the moral choices people make. And you know what? Rewatching that movie reminded me how much that movie actually shaped, I think much of the intellectual and moral thinking after the war about what your obligations were, whether or not simply obeying orders was, was legitimate. And the thing about this movie, unlike the modern movie, is you get those nuances of the moral choice. You get the nuances of conscience and how people can rationalize, tell themselves that they are doing their duty, they're doing the right thing while they are committing those crimes. And so, I don't know, I think we had a mind meld because it feels as if those kinds of issues are very much relevant to the kinds of things that are playing out and the decisions that people are having to make about what role they play in our current environment.
- [09:43]
Joe Klein
Well, for me, the terrible coincidence was that I watched the film the night before Renee Goode was murdered. I am very close to the U.S. military. And when the landscaper in LA, who has three sons who were U.S. marines, was chased and grabbed and tossed to the ground and is still in prison in Los Angeles, I thought it had come to that. But the question arose in my mind when I was a kid. I was 14 years old in 1960, and I was just coming into my political consciousness. And I was a big John Kennedy fan, and I was a big Martin Luther King fan, although he was just beginning to show his face. Civil rights was an important issue to me. I wanted to join the Peace Corps, but by the time I was old enough to join the Peace Corps, I thought the government of the United States was a criminal enterprise because of Vietnam. Not that I ever, ever did anything illegal or would. But it seems to me that back at that point, when you watched Kennedy's inaugural speech, when you watched Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, which was a movie about the Scopes trial and in Nuremberg, there is a really clear sense of moral authority in the world. There was a really clear sense of moral authority among religious figures. I remember at the school, high school I went to. William Sloan Coffin, who was the chaplain at Yale, came and spent a week with us, trying to recruit us to go down to St. Augustine to integrate a swimming pool. But I remember, I'm sure our.
- [11:48]
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- [11:49]
Joe Klein
Our teachers, my parents certainly weren't thrilled about having to put the cuffs on me to prevent that. But there were these moral presence. And look, we know that this country has its imperfections, lots of them. But this country also, I still believe, is the greatest in the history of the world and is the greatest collection of people, most of them here voluntarily, in the history of the world. And yet at this moment, when you have the president, a president, doing the sort of crazy shit that you started this podcast off with, I mean, I've known the guy for 40 years. I'm from a lesser part of Queens than Donald. He was from the hoity toity part of Queens. I was from Rockaway Beach. And so I know outer borough culture, and there's a certain amount of arms and elbows to it. There's a certain amount of pointedness. I mean, in my neighborhood, it was Jews and Irish and every and everybody hated each other until their kids became teenagers and started screwing and married each other. And there still is a certain sense of humor where you can make fun of black people, you can make fun of Italians, you can make fun of Irish, you can certainly make fun of Jews. But then there would be, there would be the, you know, the dads out on the street at card tables in the summer playing pinochle together. We did. We were able to do both. And Donald Trump doesn't get the love part of this. Somehow I don't think he was exposed to the Internet inter ethnic sensibilities that formed me, that made me an American idealist. Well, first of all, I'd like to add I've been admiring your work for years, and I've especially admired your break with the Republican Party, which kind of mirrors my own break with the Democratic Party. But how did you get here?
- [14:17]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you know, can we come back to that? Because I really want to stick with, but I really do want to answer that question because, you know, the whole question about moral authority and who has moral authority. I mean, Donald Trump's mind, his psyche, his soul, I think is broken in so many fundamental ways. You know, was he raised watching Spencer Tracy and the moral authority? What did he think about John F. Kennedy? I mean, there were those moments that did shape it. But you're making this point, though. There was a sense of moral authority. There was a sense that America, despite all of its flaws, was exceptional, that we were the good guys, that eventually we would get around to doing the right thing. And that feels broken at the moment. It feels extremely complicated. But who has the moral authority now that existed then? And you made a point in our conversation that we had before all of this. I think a lot of us remember that moment during the McCarthy hearing, Army McCarthy hearings. Joe McCarthy, who was sort of, you know, a, you know, he and Roy Cohn were the, with, with a Trump and Stephen Miller, before Trump and Stephen Miller. And of course, he was demagoguing. He was demagoguing, you know, communists. I mean, a real problem. But he demagogued it. And then, you know, during the hearing, they were trying to destroy the reputation of, I think, an army private. I mean, he was no big deal. And the attorney, Joseph Welch, famously. And this was like one of the moments of the Decade said to him, something along the lines, senator, have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last, have you left no sense of decency? And I think for the last 10 years, we've kind of been waiting for that have you no shame moment? Is there some red line that you've crossed? But in order to, to have that kind of a moment, Joe, you have to have some moral authority, right? You have to have a sense of shame, and then you have to have moral authority. So we're waiting for something that is probably not going to happen, because on a daily basis you would say, have you no shame? And the answer is no, we have no shame. And who's going to stand up and say, yeah, this is just wrong, this is evil. This is not what America is supposed to be?
- [16:37]
Joe Klein
You know, my life as a journalist has been to get the education I never got myself in college in the 60s because I was doing fun things. And it's been a sequential process. It started with learning about race and about the cities. The first big story I covered was busing in Boston. And I went in as a classic liberal, but then I couldn't find any black parents who were in favor of busing. And so I began to realize that there were some things, social engineering projects that the government really couldn't do. And by the end of that decade, I found myself in Beirut, Lebanon, which had been an incredibly civilized city, but was now in the midst of a civil war. There were over 50 militias fighting in the streets. They were fighting over the Holiday Inn. I saw people, militia members firing RPGs into the holiday Inn. And I thought, wow, civilization isn't as firm as I've been brought up to believe. And then came 9 11. I had just retired. I was studying first century Christianity at Columbia University, of all places. And 911 happened. And I figured I got to get to know the military. It seems to me what I learned about the military was that the military code of honor had created a sense of community that the rest of us had lost. Which is a long way of saying that. I think that if the moral authority exists to challenge Donald Trump, it's going to come from two, possibly three sectors. One is the military, who have been trained not to challenge him. Number two is prominent Republicans who should know better. The third possibly is the religious community, especially the evangelical community. And I'm incredibly frustrated because I know really fine people. I'm on the advisory board at this point. I told you of the bipartisan military caucus in the Congress. We have 35 members almost evenly divided between Dems and Republicans in the House. And we have 11 co conspirators in the Senate. And I keep on waiting for them to stand up in a bipartisan way and say, no, we're not going to do this thing or that thing or the other thing. And I also know a fair number of Republicans, not just members of the military. By the way, there are military members who have stood up and said that. One of them is Don Bacon, who was one of the founders of Aracakis, but who is leaving, who was leaving the Congress. And Mark Kelly has done it. But I have mixed feelings about those six, all of whom were members of our caucus, by the way, the six who said you don't have to follow in a legal order, which was absolutely true. But was it necessary? Because it put an awful lot of pressure on the Republicans in our caucus. You know, it's controversial, Charlie, these days to even be member of a bipartisan anything. You're, you know, if you're a Republican, you are in danger of getting primaried because you're a member of the bipartisan military caucus.
- [20:37]
Charlie Sykes
Tell me about it. No, I understand.
- [20:41]
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- [21:46]
Charlie Sykes
So on this issue of moral authority, just very, very briefly, you know, I've also been, you know, very frustrated by what's been happening with the evangelical churches. There are some significant voices, you know, Russell Moore, Christianity Today. I hold out and I've described it as my perhaps Irrational hope that the new American pope and the bishops and the cardinals will really, they're obviously already stepping up, that they will be able to have an impact in challenging pro life Christians. Just yesterday, you saw the three highest ranking cardinals in the United States issuing a very, very strong statement about the moral challenges that are facing the country. You know, in case, you know, people think that we are exaggerating. I mean, what was the, what was the language here? I think, I think I have it here somewhere. But there was basically the, the language was, you know, we face this moral crisis of, you know, foreign policy and what America stands for. So I'm hoping they do. But let's go back to the military, because I think one of the big questions, you know, as particularly as Donald Trump moves into the full Mad King phase, is will the military, would the US Military follow an order by this president to launch what is clearly an illegal and immoral attack on our allies in Greenland? Do you have a sense of that? Because you're right, there is that moral code the military has had, but it feels as if, well, we're kind of waiting on it. What do you think is going to happen? How will they respond?
- [23:19]
Joe Klein
I can't imagine him attacking Greenland. I think that there would be a buffer between the military and that happening, and that would be the Congress. I think that you would get a bipartisan majority, you hear it already, of members of Congress who would just absolutely flat out oppose this. At a certain point.
- [23:44]
Charlie Sykes
You would, you think Republicans would. You think that that would be the red line for Republicans who have voted for. Well, they already are everything.
- [23:50]
Joe Klein
Well, some, you know, tentatively, some, although I just thought, you know, John Cassidy, who said this was industrial strength, stupid. Trump is going to oppose him in a primary or put up a candidate against him in a primary.
- [24:06]
Charlie Sykes
He gets his reward for trying to suck up to Donald Trump. Casting the vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A little bit of karma there. Karma still is rich.
- [24:16]
Joe Klein
I mean, I thought that our members in the Senate were going to block Pete Higseth, but they did not. You know, we had at least three. I thought that were going to do it, but I think that the answer to that question is, I don't know. The military is this incredible culture. You know, the three groups of people in this country who call each other brothers and sisters, evangelical Christians, trade union members and members of the military. And there, one of the things I learned, I spent an awful lot of time dealing with post traumatic stress. In fact, I wrote two books about it, one about Vietnam veterans and one about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. And in the end I realized that post traumatic stress wasn't just about what they saw and what they did over there, although that was certainly part of, was about the loss of community when they came home. There was a woman I know who I wrote about, Natasha Young, who was a gunny sergeant in the Marines and from the area north of Boston. And she had one of those great Boston accents. And she said, when I was mustered out, I retired to Camp Couch and my mos, my military order specialty was stay on Camp Couch. And her life was changed by a good friend from the Marines who got her involved in an organization called the Mission Continues, which gave six month public service fellowships to returning wounded veterans. That sense of community is something that we've lost in our country. With it, I believe the sense of moral authority has been lost as well. You don't get to be a democracy for free. You can't have a democracy without citizens. And we've been trying to do that. We've been pretending that sitting on your couch playing video games or watching, you know, watching the news and shaking your fist is being a citizen. It's not. Service is being a citizen. And that's why my faith is in the military. Now, let me just say as a caveat, there are an awful lot of very conservative, even right wing people in the military, but I do believe that the officer corps and a good big fat slice of the NCO corps are great American patriots and they just have it in there. They're running for office now and they should be supported. I don't care if the Republicans are Democrats.
- [27:29]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I certainly hope you are right. And I've heard this from people like General Hertling or Paul Rykoff who talks about that culture. And obviously it feels as if one institution after another has been undergoing a massive stress test under Donald Trump. And many of those institutions that we counted on have crumbled, have failed. And these, you know, whether. And again, it's a stress test for, you know, the Congress stress test for the court stress test for universities, for law firms, for media companies. And of course, this is a massive stress test for the military. And we don't know what's going to happen at some point. And so I certainly hope that you're right about this. But I think at this point this is the big question mark that we're having to ask questions that we never had to ask before, including the, I mean, we're asking questions we never had to ask before because. And you asked how did we get to where we are right now. I would never, at any point in my political life, have imagined the United States would change sides in the world order in the way that it has, that we would abandon the Western democracies, line up behind the thuggish autocracies, that we would turn our backs on the people who had stood with us. I never imagined that we'd actually be having a serious conversation. In fact, still, even like today, part of me is like, are we actually having a conversation about the United States possibly swallowing or coercing or extorting, you know, our allies to, you know, so that we can take over or conquer Greenland? You know, I. When I was a much more conservative and you'd hear people on the left talk about, you know, imperialist America, I would roll my eyes. And so we wake up today in 2026, and what do we have? We have the ugly Americans who are quite explicitly talking about their imperial designs. So a lot of this is something that we never could have imagined was going to happen to the United States.
- [29:37]
Joe Klein
Charlie, could I ask you a question about that?
- [29:39]
Charlie Sykes
Sure.
- [29:40]
Joe Klein
In my mind, there is. Knowing Donald Trump, I don't think he's capable of theorizing. I think he acts in the moment. And yet you see a possible theory unfolding in a global sense, and that is the sense of a new tripartite world where we get the Western Hemisphere, Russia and China get their aspects of it. This would speak to whatever quiet arrangement Trump and Putin may have, but it just seems too conspiratorial for my, you know, rational taste. Do you. Do you buy that? There's. But there are people around Trump who have the capacity to theorize in that way, especially the folks who came up with the 2025 report.
- [30:41]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and then they also came up with that national security document which said all the quiet things out loud. So, yeah, this is part of the paradox. And I shared this with you. I mean, Donald Trump is not a strategic thinker in the sense that he has great concep. He's a man without principle who really, I think, moves from news cycle to news cycle. On the other hand, there are people around him who are serious people. I think they're seriously wrong. And they do have a worldview and they do have a strategy. And they do see, perhaps attracted by this new sphere of influence, this Don Roe doctrine, where Trump gets the Western Hemisphere, Putin gets Europe, you know, Chinese get. Get Asia. Problem, of course, is that there are a lot of other countries that might have some. Some say in all of this. But this is the Part that you know, I think makes the world so dangerous right now. And Robert Kagan has a really scary article in the Atlantic about this, this New World Order. He says Americans are entering the most dangerous world we have seen since World War II. One that will make the Cold War look like child's play and the post Cold War world look like paradise. In fact, this new world lot like the world prior to 1945. With multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict, the US will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. Now, maybe that overstates it, but you know, you and I both had our formative years in that post World War II world that did largely keep the peace for 70 plus years. And we're watching that disintegrate right in front of us in real time.
- [32:30]
Joe Klein
Yeah, as I think I told you before, we're packing up after 50 years in New York. And part of the unpacking I did to pack was I found my dad's old Navy uniforms and he was an officer in the Navy. I was extremely proud of that. It really, it really helped form my sensibility. It helped form his sensibility after Pearl harbor and his years in Hawaii where he did planning for the supply planning, he was addicted to pineapple. And I think a whole generation of Americans became addicted to pineapple as a result of that. There were things that we did as a country even in 1960. I mean the idea of going off in the Peace Corps, of serving our country. I couldn't see myself carrying a gun, but I could see myself serving our country. That's one of the reasons, one of the things I've been in favor of and I've been beating the drum on and people say I talk too much about is the importance of national service and of using serious service like Teach for America or my favorite one was, was called the Police Corps where you got six months of or six weeks of, of of training where you were in dormitories and you had to be incredibly fit. You know, most police shootings happen because someone who looks like me tries to chase a 17 year old kid and pulls his gun, or in recent case a 37 year old mom. But I think that the police corps existed during the Clinton administration who was killed by George W. Bush. It existed in 17 states, including I think Wisconsin. And they were the best trained police that American police that we ever saw. Everything was done exactly the same. Oh, and this brings us to ice. It was all the training was Done exactly the way the special ops training is done in the military. It was all situational. There was no shooting at targets. Targets don't move. There were paintball pistol scenarios where you're climbing a staircase and someone's coming down and reaching into their pocket and what do you do? And to become a cop, you had to pass this training. And if you flunked it, they dropped people. I saw someone get mustered out the last day of training. And it seems. And you know, which is why my first thought when, when I, when I hear about ice is how are these folks trained? Not at all.
- [35:27]
Charlie Sykes
This is, this is a very important question. I mean, they're not being trained that way. They are actually dumbing down the training process, shortening the training process. How they being vetted? It's very clear they're not being vetted very, very carefully. And of course, how are they being recruited? Who is signing up right now to be an ICE agent? Who's watching these videos and going, I want to be part of that. I want to be part of that crew. I want to be, you know, following Greg Bovino down the road with my other masked guys. I want to be able to be told by Stephen Miller that I have absolute immunity no matter what I do. You know, I want to be part of this gang that, you know, 20 people who will converge on one photographer and beat the crap. I mean, this is what's really scary. You know, every single day you see the agents of the federal government behaving in a way that no police, no well trained police department would tolerate even for a few hours. Am I wrong about that?
- [36:25]
Joe Klein
No, you're not. In fact, the officer who did the shooting would, you know, it was six months after he had a really traumatic experience, a life and death experience. He was dragged along by a, you know, in a. An illegal immigrant. And I think both of us can agree that the, the illegals who've committed crimes don't belong here. But he had this tremendously traumatic experience, and yet six months later, he's on the streets with a gun, facing a similar. My heart goes out to the guy, and he served our country. He was in Iraq, but I don't think he's a criminal. I think he was placed in a situation that he shouldn't have been allowed to be in and that he did something that was a criminal act. You know, there's nothing. This isn't manslaughter at most, and the women in the car were being silly, but the fact is no one should be. I mean, the Use of a gun is the very, very, very, very last resort of a well trained police officer.
- [37:48]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, I am, I am substantially less sympathetic to him because of his behavior and the fact that those second two shots, which were clearly not in self defense, and yet the women, may have been silly, but silly is not a death penalty case in the United States.
- [38:03]
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- [38:04]
Charlie Sykes
And I think to me, if in fact it's his voice after he has shot her, calling her a fucking bitch, I'm sorry, all benefit of the doubt is off. But again, as somebody who has in the past, I've been supportive of the police, supportive of law and order. I push back on people who say that all law and order is somehow a racial dog whistle. I think it's legitimate to support, you know, significant order. And I think one of the problems on the left has been a tendency to downplay the dangers of crime, the need to be forceful in doing it. But watching this, I think, brings out the libertarian in me, which is that there's a reason why we have rejected the idea of a police state in this country. It's one thing to be supportive of good policing. It is something different when you have a police state that is acting in a. What feels like, you know, with complete lawless impunity, because that is terrifying. And I'm kind of hoping that maybe we will have a rebirth of some sense of, like, why those things mattered. I think there's an entire generation of people who are, you know, you know, realizing, hey, there's a reason why due process is really important, why we don't want to lose due process. So to me, there's. That's a little hopeful thing that as people watch this, we have to have to come back to some of these first principles.
- [39:33]
Joe Klein
Well, yeah, and I harbor those same hopes, but I don't know how optimistic I am. I'll talk briefly about another organization of veterans that you may have heard of called Team Rubicon, which does disaster relief around the world. There are like 100,000 veterans signed up, and I've gone on deployments with them. And you should, you know, it's something you could do. Charlie. I did the tornadoes in, in Oklahoma. I would recommend this to anybody. And my, my team leader was a former first sergeant named Mike Washington from Seattle. He's a firefighter. He was a firefighter. He just resigned. Retired. But he was a source of ultimate moral authority. I would have followed him anywhere. I'm still in touch with him. I stay in touch with a lot of these people because they're so Extraordinary. But the fact is that we started by talking about moral authority. Moral authority comes from training, and it comes from belief. And at a certain point, and our generation is kind of at the heart of it. And this is kind of at the heart of Nuremberg, the more recent movie that we stopped believing in absolute moral authority. The left in this country began to believe in relativism. There was another movie from that period, west side Story. And do you remember the lyric, we're depraved on account of we're deprived?
- [41:22]
Charlie Sykes
Yes. Oh, yeah.
- [41:23]
Joe Klein
And the left began to believe that criminals were victims. They're not. They're criminals. You know, I spent a lot of time. In fact, I've spent much of my adult life living in black neighborhoods or integrated neighborhoods. And, you know, when I heard lefties say that, it infuriated me because I knew all these kids, these high school kids, 70% of them now, who were trying their best, who were graduating from high school, and they were not victims. And they knew who the bad guys were. And their lives were threatened on an almost daily basis by the bad guys that liberals celebrated. It became impossible for me to continue to be a Democrat as long as things like defund the police or abolish ICE were in the air.
- [42:18]
Charlie Sykes
Knock knock.
- [42:18]
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- [42:19]
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- [42:27]
Charlie Sykes
This isn't a joke.
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- [42:32]
Joe Klein
Okay.
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- [42:35]
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- [42:48]
Charlie Sykes
We will answer your call as soon as we can.
- [42:51]
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- [44:04]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, no, I mean, so you asked where we came from and so can I just answer your question a little bit? Because, you know, I think there is a through line here. I think that I have always been kind of a classical liberal, but that manifests itself differently at different times. So when I was a young kid, my first, I think I was telling you, my first presidential campaign was for Eugene McCarthy, who was the Democratic Senate senator from Minnesota running as the anti war candidate against Lyndon Johnson and actually later against Robert F. Kennedy. My dad was at one time president of the Wisconsin Civil Liberties union. He was McCarthy's state campaign manager. I got to fly around on the campaign plane with Eugene McCarthy. I got to know Eugene McCarthy. I was spoiled because he was such a principal, decent man. And then I think I underwent something similar to you. I had been, I just thought of myself as this guy's kind of a liberal, ish Democrat, but you know, especially during the late anti war years and my father was a World War II veteran, but it was very much opposed to the Vietnam War. But during the campus upheavals of the early 70s, I think he was, he was really put off by the thuggery of the, of the militants. They tried to shut down his classroom. He wouldn't have anything to do with it. They trashed the student newspaper. And he's saying, you know, you guys remind me of the Brown shirts coming in here and trying to silence dissenting voices. When I became a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, I covered urban issues. And what I saw was that many of these well intentioned social engineering programs were backfiring. They were not having the effect. The intent was not playing out. School busing was an absolute disaster. And when I started being skeptical about this, people said, well, you're starting to sound like a conservative. And because I'm an only child and a contrarian, I said, well, I don't care what you're calling me, and if that's what it is. And so at that time I started reading More. I started reading people like Charles Krouthammer and George Will and even Buckley. And frankly, they were countercultural. And as weird as it is, I think maybe you'll remember this. There was a period in the 70s where I think liberalism had become kind of orthodox and sclerotic and self, you know, kind of smug.
- [46:27]
Joe Klein
It wasn't just the seventies. Boy, no, no, no, we're gonna get Mich Dukakis. Michael Dukakis was a card carrying member of the aclu, if you remember. He said no.
- [46:38]
Charlie Sykes
Well, but I guess part of it was that back then I actually began to think that people, the conservatives, were the party of ideas. That seems bizarre to say this now, which is why when I wrote how the Right Lost Its Mind, it was. I had this maybe several decade long delusion that the intellectual conservative movement was actually the real conservative movement. I understood that there were the crackpots out there in the fever swamps. I thought that was a recessive gene. And I took the think tank world and the belief in principles and all of that seriously. I had no problem with patriotism. I really did like the idea of America being exceptional. So that was the kind of. That was the kind of conservative I was. I'm gonna obviously shorten this up. Obviously we get sucked into a lot of the tribalism, and I was certainly part of that and contributed to all of that on talk radio. But then Trump comes along and it was like, okay, this is going to be a repudiation of all of the virtues, values, principles that you claim to support. Surely you're not going to go along with this. And it was this soul crushing experience watching people that I thought cared about these ideas going along with this demagogic orange clown. And that's when I realized that there was a real difference between the ideas of the conservative movement and the actual visceral reality, which was more about identity. And that's the short version of all of this.
- [48:16]
Joe Klein
See, I was lucky. Yeah, I was lucky, Charlie, in that I was in, in. In the mid-1970s, I was still the Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone magazine and, and got to do some fun things then. But one of my good, good friends, we both came from similar backgrounds, was Tim Russert. And this was before he became a TV star. And we shared little schlockadika, that's Italian summer places together with our wives. And he introduced me to his boss, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And Daniel Patrick Moynihan became my mentor. And like most good mentors, he gave me reading lists and the bottom line with Pat was that he was a classical liberal, I think, but he also was somewhere beyond ideology. And what Pat said, the most important thing he said is that the central conservative truth is that culture determines the strength of a society. And the central liberal truth is that government can act to modify that culture. Of course, as the decades passed and Pat and I became closer, I think he began to lose a fair amount of faith in the liberal ability to change the culture. But culture is where it is, and culture demands a certain amount of rigor. And I think that this might seem a lefty point of view, but I think the triumph of marketing has been a very anti American development. Because what's the basic principle of the United States e pluribus unit out of many 1. The central principle of marketing is you slice and dice and you sell to the niche. So instead of having Velveeta cheese, you now have 40 different varieties of cheese. And instead of having three networks, you have a thousand TV stations. And instead of having three flavors of ice cream, you probably remember they would vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. Now you have how many ever. It's wonderful.
- [51:04]
Charlie Sykes
This is great, though. This is letting a thousand flowers bloom. Joe this is not. This is the quintessential America that we have these choices and this innovation and this diversification.
- [51:18]
Joe Klein
But it also came with a downside. And of course I would never want to turn back the clock, but it came with a downside. And what happened in that was the loss of commonality. When, when I was a kid, I don't know whether you watched Leonard Bernstein on Sunday afternoons or Omnibus or any of those. Everybody watched Walter Cronkite or whatever. And it was something we had. It was something we had in common as, as a society. And now we don't have very much that we do in common, which is why I think every American kid should go through a boost boot camp.
- [51:56]
Charlie Sykes
Well, the fragmentation of society is. I mean, it's hard to ignore in the fact that we're now siloed off from one another. And I think that's going to get worse and worse and worse where, you know, I mean, you go out in public and there was once a time when I think people might actually interact with other people in real space. Now everybody's like in their own little world, right? They're on their own headphones or on their own phone. And that's just like the tip of the iceberg for the level of fragmentation that we have. But, you know, you're talking about these fundamental conservative values. There's also the classical Liberal value, I think of respect and restraint that has been lost. And I am hoping, and people say, well, you know, what are you now? And I am a political orphan. I don't want to be tribal. I want to push back from the buffet table of both parties that I don't have to believe everything I believe. But I am hoping that there is a recognition at some point, particularly with my friend, my more progressive friends, on why it is a good idea to limit government, why it is a good idea to have a constitution that tells the government, you cannot do this, you do not have the power. Maybe we'll have a little bit more skepticism about the ability of government to pick winners and losers. This is something conservatives had been talking about for years. You don't want government controlling markets or picking these sorts of things. And now of course we've, in this doppelganger world, Donald Trump is, you know, picking this whim. But this is why things like states rights, local control, individual rights, private property are all basically bulwarks against excessive concentration of state power. And this, our time right now is like a masterclass in why we should be suspicious of the concentration of state power. And that's a classical liberal position, used to be held by many conservatives. But I'm hoping that other people are open minded about and saying, okay, maybe we don't want an all powerful government, a government that can bend culture to its whim. Maybe we ought to leave culture in a sphere of its own. What do you think?
- [54:16]
Joe Klein
Well, I think that you and I have come to, amazingly enough, I didn't expect this something of a disagreement agreement because, because I don't think you can have that sort of limited government without a sense of civic responsibility, without a sense, without a sense inherent in the, in, in the, the, the soul of every American, that we each owe the country something. We owe the government should be something that we each do for a couple of years rather than something we pay each other people to do for all their lives. Government. Except, except in the most specialized, you know, for the physicists and the biologists and those guys. But, but I do believe that you cannot, that, that libertarianism is, is, is a, is a limited road if it doesn't include responsibility.
- [55:15]
Charlie Sykes
And oh, I don't, we don't disagree. This disagreement is fizzled.
- [55:20]
Joe Klein
But I can't tell you how many libertarians scoff when I talk about the importance of national service. And let me ask, we've been going for a while. Let me ask you two really basic questions. First question is we're Both orphanaids orphans. And we're living. I love the orphanage that we live in. Andrew Sullivan and I have been saying for decades that we're both members of the same political party that doesn't exist. Should there be? Could there be? Is there any hope of a third party?
- [55:56]
Charlie Sykes
You know, people have been asking me that question for the last 10 years, and one would think so on paper, the real politic answer is that the duopoly is too deeply entrenched. However, I think that if you could find a way of breaking that, and I don't have a roadmap to do that, I do think that we need to have a place for orphans, because I think there's more of us than we think. There are more of us that don't want to buy into the orthodoxies or see, I guess I'm an only child. By the way, I did Andrew Sullivan's podcast, lengthy podcast last week, and I talked about that. Basically, the most formative thing about me is that I'm an only child. Okay? So I grew up in a contrarian household. So as an only child, I don't feel that desire to be on a team. I don't feel the tribal sense. But that is incredibly powerful in American society. But there is a sense that we're reaching a breaking point. I mean, my big fear is that the system has become so unresponsive that, in fact, people are losing their faith in liberal democracy itself, which is, again, part of Donald Trump's success. If you don't deliver, if you can't function well, history tells us that people turn to the strong man on the white horse. So, anyway, to your question, I would like to say the answer is, yes, I would join that party, but I would have no hope that it would necessarily lead to these sunny uplands of electoral success.
- [57:24]
Joe Klein
Yeah, I think that if there's going to be such a party, it's going to grow from the bottom up, not the top down from individual candidates in congressional districts or even smaller than that. And I suspect, as you do, that it's not. But the question is to bring the whole moral authority question around. Are there any Republicans out there now who you believe should exercise their moral authority, who have it inherently and should be the leaders of a movement that would oppose Trump? I mean, I think about Republicans I've known over the years, people like Lamar Alexander and others who are very decent human beings, but they're silent. I mean, what does he have to be afraid of? I hate to. Lamar, I'm sorry to single you out.
- [58:26]
Charlie Sykes
Good question. No, there's a long list of people who have what do you have to lose? What is the point of this at this point? You know, I mean, I understand and at least I understand, you know, if you're a United States senator, you like the perks, you like the job, you want to be able to keep it or anything, but the people who have left. Look, Joe, as you know, this is something that I have been talking about and writing about for now, a decade hoping and originally I just simply assumed that there was going to be a remnant of principled Republicans who would stand up, that there were people with moral authority when Mitt Romney stood up, when John McCain stood up, when a variety of others push, push back. But the reality is they're all gone. They have either self deported, they have been exiled, they've been excommunicated, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger no longer in Congress, but have spoken up. Part of the great disillusionment, I think, has been watching some of these. The Republicans who ought to have considerable moral authority, have exercised that moral authority, have warned about Donald Trump in the most explicit terms possible and they've been ignored and they've been rejected over and over and over again. Even Mike Pence, you would think, would have the absolute credentials. And look, he's having more of an impact than I would have expected. But the reality is that this party has become a cult and it does not recognize the moral authority of anyone outside that cult. So I wish I had come up with more. But you and I both know we can make a long list of names of Republicans who, you know, Ben Sasse could have been made a big difference at one time. Maybe Paul Ryan could have made a difference at one time, but now I.
- [60:12]
Joe Klein
Think Don Bacon, I hope Don Bacon still can. You know, he's leaving the Congress, but I think he's going to run for a statewide office in Nebraska. And I think Kinzinger is going to be back. But I can go through the same list, starting with people I know in the military, starting with, with people like, well, David Petraeus is someone who takes it as a matter of honor not to be partisan. And you know, and to a certain extent, Even though the HR McMaster, another guy I've known, he served with for Bush, but he did it in the least partisan possible way. And I would wish that he and Milley and a lot of the other generals, oh, I so much would come now. But also there are some Dems that I think need to speak up. Democrats have a much bigger job to Do. Because I think that they were at the heart of destroying people's faith in government. It was a bipartisan effort. Democrats did Vietnam. George W. Bush did Iraq. But. But I think that the Democrat descent into identity politics starting in the late 1960s has been disastrous for the country because I think it's un American. But there are some young Democrats out there now who I really have hopes for. Some. Some of them I mentioned before.
- [61:53]
Charlie Sykes
Give me some names.
- [61:55]
Joe Klein
Two members of our military caucus, Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger.
- [62:01]
Charlie Sykes
Of Virginia, Governor of New Jersey. Now, right.
- [62:03]
Joe Klein
Jake Auchincloss, Congressman from Massachusetts. When Donald Trump brought off the successful attack on the Iran nuclear facilities, Auchincloss was the only member of the Democratic Party who said, well done. And he, of course, is a veteran as well. And then there's Wes Moore, who I've known for 15 years. And the state legislature in Maryland passed a resolution to study civil war reparations, which would accomplish absolutely nothing except to divide us further. And Wes vetoed that. I want to see how much. I want to see how far west Moore will go in this way against the identity politics that has destroyed the Democratic Party morally over the last 25 years. I can name others. Alyssa Slotkin. Boy, she is tough.
- [63:03]
Charlie Sykes
This is a good list. Yeah, she is tough. And you know what? As you start going through the list, and I guess part of it is it will require a little bit of courage for them to have what we used to call Sister Soulja moments, I think, because every once in a while, I wanna write an article about some of these extreme things that are going on in the Democratic Party, what I call my tough love. Break out of your bubble. You understand that these things are not going to serve you in resisting Donald Trump. But the problem is that right now you see this incredible reluctance to criticize people on your own side because the other side gives you so much material that you feel that that distracts from what you ought to be doing if you criticize. However, the entire story of the collapse of the Republican Party and some of the problems the Democratic Party has been having is exactly that. Reluctance to call out people on your own side.
- [64:00]
Joe Klein
I don't have a double shirt.
- [64:02]
Charlie Sykes
No, no, no. But because that's not pushed back from the buffet.
- [64:05]
Joe Klein
I don't have that problem for one simple reason, because I believe the utter stupidity and ideological myopia of the Democratic Party gave us Donald Trump. I don't think that that's where most Americans are. I spent so much of my career doing road trips across the country For Time magazine and for other people talking to folks. I know who they are, and so do you. You live out there. And they are not the people that the democr Democratic Party imagines they are.
- [64:41]
Charlie Sykes
So, so, so just, you know, that we're gonna get. You're gonna get a lot of blowback from people in the comments section for what you just said. But I would urge people. And again, you know, I've never promised you a safe space here. And the tough love is we are living in Donald Trump's world right now. And at some point, Democrats have to ask themselves, how come we did not. We were not able to beat this guy? How come he was able to come back into power? If you do not, it's sort of like, do you feel like a coach of a team or a team that has just been blown out in the playoff games? Do you say that everything we did was absolutely perfect? Or do you go back to the films? Do you ask yourself the tough questions? Do you have the After Action Report? And there's this incredible reluctance to do all of that. Now, you may disagree with this, but this is exactly the conversation that you need to have, because right now so much rides on whether or not the Democratic Party will have the ability to stop Donald Trump in the midterms and then stop MAGA in 2028. So this question, and if you think everything is fine and keep doing everything you've been doing up until now is fine, then I think there's a flaw in that argument. So, again, I understand the blowback we're gonna get on all of this, but this is what you do if you want. I don't care either, obviously. Right. That's why we're contrarian.
- [66:00]
Joe Klein
You know, David Petraeus was another one of my mentors, and he brought me out to Fort Leavenworth when he and his team were doing the counterinsurgency doctrine. And one of the institutions at Fort Leavenworth, at the Combined Arms center, which is the Army's think tank, is the lessons learned section. Every last battle battle is looked at. In retrospect, it is an integral part of the process. And the Democratic Party commissioned a lessons learned report about the 2024 election, and they're too chicken to release it. I mean, these people do not have. You know, the other thing I think that was the crucial axis of the 2024 election was strength versus weakness. And the Democrats I mentioned to you before, I think are all pretty strong people, but the Democratic Party is a party of weakness. And until they begin to understand how Important the notion of having a strong moral leader is to most people, they're not going to get anywhere.
- [67:22]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, this was. And this was. Wasn't that the insight from Bill Clinton that if the. If it was a choice between strong and weak, the strong will always win? Well, this is why reading your substack is always a bracing experience for if people actually want to break out of the bubble, you ought to subscribe to the sanity clause from Joe Klein. Joe, thank you so much for this wide ranging discussion. Can I just throw in one other movie, though? Since we started with movies. Okay. So what really disappointed me about the new Nuremberg movie was it was about Goering and they sent a psychiatrist to try to, you know, figure him out. And I don't think it actually worked. I thought it was kind of a mediocre. If people want. I think one of the best movies ever made about this was the Norwegian movie Quisling. And Quisling, of course, was the Nazi. He was the puppet ruler of Norway during World War II. And in that movie they sent a minister to talk with him. And it is the moral depth and the sophistication of that movie puts the American movie to absolute shame. So I actually think that the Nuremberg movie with Russell Crowe basically kind of ripped off some of what they were doing in Quisling, but they failed badly. So again, Quisling is a Norwegian movie. It is brilliantly acted, brilliantly written, morally complex, and quite courageous. But also this insight, insight into how people can rationalize evil, how they talk themselves into it, how they go along with all of that. This is something that we need to think about and talk about a lot. Joe Klein, thank you so much for being so generous with your time today.
- [69:03]
Joe Klein
Hey, Charlie, thank you for what you've been doing. Thank you for your voice. It has been a clarion voice in a muddy and sewage filled time. And let's do it again sometime.
- [69:19]
Charlie Sykes
Well, coming from you, that is high praise. Thank you all for listening to this episode. I'm Charlie Sykes. You know why we do this, why we are going to continue to do this? Because it is so important in this particular age, particularly, it feels like today, to remind ourselves we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
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