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Foreign.
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Welcome back, everybody, to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute and the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. The Trump administration wants automakers and other American manufacturers to play a larger role in weapons production, reminiscent of a practice used during World War II. Senior defense officials have held talks about producing weapons and other military supplies with the top executives of several companies, including General Motors and Ford Motor. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is interested in enlisting the companies to use their personnel and factory capacity to increase production of munitions and other equipment as the wars in Ukraine and Iran deplete stocks. The talks were preliminary and wide ranging. The sources said defense officials said American manufacturers might be needed to backstop traditional defense companies and asked whether the companies could could rapidly shift to defense work as they did in World War II. Walter, is this news or FO news?
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It's news. It's news. It would be bigger news if we knew what the manufacturing companies were saying. But the news that the administration is looking around for new sources of weapons production, you know, top level terrible news, it means the world that we live in is getting more dangerous and the whole world is going to be shifting more toward defense production. This is, let's not kind of pussyfoot around here. This is bad news. It means the world is getting worse. Major war is getting more likely and not just in this country, but in every serious country on the planet. There is going to be a move toward preparing for war. Bad, bad, bad. On the other hand, the only thing maybe worse than preparing for war when you need to is not preparing for war when you need to. So from that perspective, I'm glad they're waking up. It's also, I think it's going to be interesting, unlikely to make a dent before the midterms, but who knows? There's likely to be a fairly popular policy in states like, oh, I don't know, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Tennessee. The idea that the government is going to aggressively be acting to expand manufacturing in America, I mean, that's what a lot of the Trump voters thought they were getting. And if we put this together with Trump asking, President Trump asking for essentially a 40 to 50% increase in defense spending, and here's some guidance that a lot of that is going to try to go toward jobs for blue collar manufacturers in America, you know, that's not a lot of things you can say about it. But stupid politics is probably not one of them.
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The historical analogy the administration is drawing on here, with allusions to Franklin Roosevelt and the arsenal of democracy and Bill Knudsen being deputized to build it and all that, I mean, I don't actually know enough about the history here. Is it the case that FDR was able to persuade these titans of industry to commit their fixed assets and their factories to the national defense? Or was this kind of done coercively and they didn't have a choice? It was wartime and they had to do what the government said?
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Well, these things are often not either or. I brush my teeth in the morning cause I like my teeth feeling clean and also because I don't want them all rotting out of my head. Trump does not have FDR's war power until. Unless he actually declares war on somebody, gets Congress to declare war on somebody, doesn't have that power. But on the other hand, when somebody comes at you and has, you know, says, look, here are some very large pallets of cash that I am prepared to give you in exchange for you doing X and Y. And by the way, I've just put in an order for 50% more pallets with more cash for next year. My guess is that a surprisingly large number of corporate executives are willing to take your call and sit down and enter into some constructive conversations about how we can work together for the good of the whole country.
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All right, our second story. Driven by a recent increase, young men in the US have now surpassed young women in saying religion is, quote, very important in their lives. Gallup's Latest data from 2024-25 show 42% of young men saying religion is very important to them, up sharply from 28% in 2022 23. By contrast, during this period, young women's attachment to religion has held steady at about 30%. Although young men had previously tied young women on this key marker of religiosity, young men now lead by a statistically significant margin. The recent increase among young men also contrasts with minimal changes since 2222 23among older men and women. Walter, is this news or fo news?
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Well, we, we probably should wait for a couple of more polls that confirm it to be 100% sure here. But. But on the assumption that this does reflect reality some degree, it is, again, big news. You think about it, 28 to 42%. Well, that's an increase of 14%. And since 14% is 50% of 28%, that is, there's been a 50% increase in the number of young men who tell a pollster on a given day that religion is very important in their lives. Doesn't tell us, of course, which religion, doesn't tell them why religion is so important. Technically, it could be. I hate religion more and more every day.
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That's how important it is.
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And until I've strangled the last priest in the entrails of the last king, I'm going to continue thinking about it. But, but my guess is that's probably not what's going on. There's been a lot of anecdotal evidence, or at least conversation around a revival in religion, specifically among young men for some time. People keep saying, I see all these young men in the, in the church where I go, certainly here at the University of Florida, I see an awful lot of young men who are, you know, seem very intensely focused on religion in a way I don't think you did a few years ago. So something, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence, but up until now, we weren't really seeing that showing up in polls. Gallup is a pretty good pollster. And so here we have what could be the first real concrete evidence that something big is going on. I honestly think that if this is what's happening, this could be one of the most positive things that could happen in that historically anyway, when young men start getting involved, caring more about religion, at some point at least they start looking at how should religious teachings influence my life. They start taking themselves and life more seriously. Increased religious observance, religious focus can help young men develop the kinds of behaviors that make them potentially good fathers, good breadwinners, good citizens, good pillars of the community. This is, I think, actually quite good news for young women. We see a lot of talk about disliking the hookup culture for young women, how, how much, how abusive that can be, how difficult it is for young women who are trying to find life partners to find somebody who really is kind of willing, able and ready to get on with it with this job. It looks to me like the pool of potentially great husbands maybe have increased by about 50%. That would be good news.
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All right, final story of the week. Donald Trump has become so politically toxic in Europe that even his closest ideological allies increasingly view him as a liability. Quote, we need to keep our distance. France's Marine Le Pen told her fellow right wing populist national rally lawmakers at a meeting this week. According to Politico, Europe's right wing populace had been pulling away from the US President even before Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban suffered a blow bruising loss in Sunday's parliamentary election. AfD members in Germany's Bundestag have likewise spoken of the need recently to gain distance from Trump in the eyes of German voters. While for Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni, Trump's recent attacks on Pope Leo were a breaking point. For Meloni, siding with the Pope was also a matter of political convenience given her support base and the fact that Europeans from Bologna to Budapest are blaming the US President for everything from the conflict in the Middle east to the rising cost of energy. Walter News or FO News Mix?
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There. You know, that last sentence struck me, blaming him for both the Middle east war and the rising cost of energy. Those are basically the same. Excuse me. It's like again, this feels more like a journalist somewhere, just like reaching so carelessly for sticks to beat Trump. He doesn't realize, you know, it's like it's the same stick, you know. Again, the quality of editing in the mainstream media is in free fall these days. But that's not news.
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I did see someone at a major paper refer recently to Trump's wars in the Middle east and the Persian Gulf.
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Well, there was that headline in the New York Times about the North American Treaty Organization. But this again, if you stop teaching a generation things in school, they won't know anything when they get out of school. On the other hand, to our regular readers, listeners, you say that hardy minority that keeps reading books, keeps thinking, keeps trying to learn, you're going to have immense advantages as you go through life. So keep it up. The far right parties in Europe are historically and traditionally very anti American. The French right didn't like the Marshall Plan, particularly the European right has always been suspicious. It's a much more anti capitalist, pre modernist kind of movement and it sees American power not putting, perhaps inaccurately as a threat to European power. During the Cold War, they thought that bad as we were, we were probably less bad than Russia and certainly farther away. But they are, I think they've never really wanted a strong America in Europe. And I don't think that's changed. I think what's happening is that for a while, because Trump hates the Brussels establishment and on some of these social issues, Trump and Vance seem to be closer to the sort of some of the organizing ideas of some people on the European right. Could this ideological affinity overcome the sort of very deep seated cultural and geopolitical gulfs between the American, the MAGA right and the European far right? I think the Hungarian government, Orban's Hungarian government really wanted the American right to keep thinking that and did a lot of things to try to encourage a sense in the American right that they've got some fellow travelers over there. The combination of the sort of revelation of the scale of Trump's ambition to make America number one in a way that doesn't leave a lot of room for European countries and at the same time, his kind of just tremendous egotistical. It's all got to be about me. Everyone has to praise me all the time. That, and you add to that Orban's recent defeat. And so I think the foundations of this transatlantic right are in much weaker shape than, than people thought. Now, again, myself, I never really thought this was the kind of factor people hoped it would be. And so I think its weakening won't make as much a change. Populism will continue, I think, to gain ground in Europe and certainly Maga. Whatever happens here will remain a very strong force in American politics, but they will not necessarily be seen as some sort of allies in a grand cause.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's talk more about Arbonne in the big conversation. Walter, you wrote this week about Viktor Orban's defeat and his legacy and what his long tenure in power might have to teach us about contemporary politics in the West. So tell us more about it.
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Well, I think Orban Orban put his finger on some very real issues. Let's, you know, he lost this last election, but he was in power for 16 years in Hungary and then he had a term before that. So he is, you know, by the standards of European politicians, he has had a brilliantly successful career. And although he has lost and lost big this time, as Enoch Powell said, all political careers end in failure. You can add, they tend to end actually, as my reading of history would say, either in assassination or failure. Take your pick. But I think we also have to understand that while there are some ways in which Orban touched on real issues, I think above all migration and a certain populist hostility toward the, quote, Brussels elite in terms of real policy, I don't know how much he changed in the sense that a lot of incessant talking about Hungary as a representative of Christian values, they're not going to church in Hungary, in particular, a family friendly policy, a lot of focus, a lot of money was spent. Hungarian birth rate is one of the lowest in Europe. The population is declining. There really isn't much sign that he had any impact. There was a little sign before COVID Maybe something is happening. Covid comes along, and it has declined. So he did not reverse the flow of Hungarian history. He's not leaving behind him a kind of a, you know, a changed nation, say, the way FDR changed America or Conrad Adenauer changed Germany or Charles de Gaulle, for that matter, changed France. He's not of that. He's not that consequential in terms of his achievements. But what he has discovered, what he discovered in terms of political method is remarkable. First of all, he didn't really achieve all that much, and yet he was at the center of world and European politics for 16 years. As one thing, if you're Donald Trump, you got the world's most powerful military, the world's biggest economy. It's not actually that hard for Donald Trump to be. To lead the world's newspapers every day. He has a lot of cards to play. The prime minister of Hungary, all right, has to work a lot harder to get people to even pay attention to him at all. You know, you don't. I mean, your nightmare if, if you're prime minister of Hungary is that people will think of you as gateway to Slovakia or something. You know, it's just not, you know, western Slovenia, eastern Slovenia, I guess it just doesn't really work. So he managed. He overcame that. And how did he do it? He did a lot of things that Trump does, a lot of things that we see some other successful politicians do, but he did them really well. And one of them is the art of trolling your enemies. If you're going to want to be at the center of world politics, people really have to hate you. They have to not be able to not think about you. They have to be, you know, they have to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking about how much they hate you. And he knew how to do that. He didn't. He didn't just say, I oppose the Brussels elite. He went after them in ways that hurt and in ways that got their own voters to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, what about this? What about this? Right? So we made an impact that way. But as. And I quoted this in my journal column, Samuel Johnson once said, you know, fame is a shuttlecock. If not struck at both ends of the room, it falls to the ground. That is, you know, if you just have one side, the we hate him, we hate him side is hitting the shuttlecock. It doesn't come back. It just falls. You need people who love you and who hate you to be constantly screaming at each other and talking about you, arguing about you again. In America today, we see the perfection of this in what Donald Trump has managed to do in our political and cultural life. You know, sort of siblings and family members and school classmates and colleagues everywhere like, and some people hate him and some people love him, but, you know, that mix of hate and love supports his position in national life. Okay, Orban also did that, and he did it with less resources. Now, one of his really smart ideas was he understood that non mainstream right intellectuals were an underserved market. You know, for those of us in this public intellectual racket, and I'm probably going to, all my colleagues are going to come after me now for saying it's a racket, but what, it beats working. But in this public intellectual racket, a lot of the rewards are, well, how do I put this? If you run a business, you can measure your success and your effect on the world by how many people are buying your toothpaste paste or how many cars did your factory make or whatever You've got, you've got some kind of objective standard. If you're in the opinion business, what is your, you know, what is your, how do you measure whether you're success succeeding or not? And one of the ways that this works in, in this business is there's a zillion conferences. At almost none of them does anything worthwhile ever happen. Of course, course. But that's, that's a different story. But, you know, people swan from conference to conference at which everyone is so generous. Oh, my esteemed thinker so. And so his reputation transcends. Blah, blah, you know, so this wonderful. It's like you're the ancient Greek and Roman gods smelling the sweet incense of the sacrifices that your worshipers are making to. You can go. And far right intellectuals weren't getting any of this. They're not getting invited to the World Economic Forum, they're not getting invited to the German Marshall Fund events, they're not getting invited to Aspen seminars. All of these, like, places where your grade A, grade B public intellectuals can go and just be surrounded by their adoring fans. Right. Orban provided this in Budapest so you could go and be, you know, the most distinguished visitor to Danube Institute thing or whatever. I don't mean to single out any institutions here, but you, you know, it was, it was sweet. And it was sweeter because it was rare. And in this way, with relatively small, you know, by, by government standards, expenditures and so on, you're able to have a tremendous impact because in fact, these, quote, far right intellectuals actually do have a major public following Right. You know, they may not have the esteem and the respect of the, you know, of the, you know, the sort of upper middle class that some of these other folks do. But actually, what they think often matters politically more than what some of this would, you know, conventional, respectable intellectuals are thinking. And so for a very little bit of money, he's able to have real impact. Okay, that's not stupid. You can call it many things. Stupid is not one of them. And so you pick a term. He, you know, at one point, he talks about Hungary as illiberal democracy. Well, it causes a massive explosion. Oh, it's a liberal democracy. This is just the word. It's like Putin. It's, you know, the whole. And, and you know, unfortun, again, we live in an age where so many of us are so predictably triggered. You know, we've, you know, push that button and you will get, you'll get. You'll see 15 different public intellectuals sort of erupt with exactly the same language and horror and hysteria. And it's on the right as well as on the left too. This is not trying to do this in a partisan. We become incredibly predictable group thinky. And so he's able to get. So somebody like Orban that wants to manipulate can do so very easily. He understood this, he applied it, and he turned himself into, you know, from being the prime minister of a not particularly impressive central European country with a not particularly impressive economy, he turned himself into a world figure. Not bad.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter Chris from Raleigh, North Carolina writes in to ask, quote, who is the journalist you most respect, living or dead?
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Hmm, good question. And I guess I'm going to pick a kind of unconventional journalist. A lot of people don't think of him as a journalist. Something of Tom Wolfe, a lot of people think of as a novelist. But what he did in journalism was he sort of applied the techniques of fiction writing to journalism. And it has had a tremendous impact on how journalism is practiced even today. In many ways, our modern concept of the profile was sort of comes out of his work. But some of his most wonderful writing is in fact journalism. I think of MAU Mauing the Flat Catchers, which was this great back in the 60s, sort of early limousine liberal era. You would have all these kind of radical Black Panther type groups or whatever, and they, you know, sort of talking about injustice and all, you know, I'm not saying there was no injustice. That's not what this is about. But but they would go to the fl. What Wolf called the flat catchers. That is, they're not talking to the people, the. The real power brokers. They're talking to people who get paid by the real power brokers to kind of like sit there and take the abuse. And so MAU Mauing the flat catchers. But what was it? The electric. Gosh, I can't even remember.
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Kool Aid acid test.
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Yeah, the electric Kool Aid acid test. Absolutely brilliant on Ken Kesey and the LSD experiments. You know, the sort of emergent counterculture. Tom Wolf was a great writer, a great journalist and, you know, great taste in clothes. Those white suits. Not since Mark Twain had an American writer known how to. How to get so much mileage out of a white suit as Tom Wolfe.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Alex Katanov at Hudson and my co host Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.