Bulwark Takes - Trump's Exploitation of the Charlie Kirk Assassination (w/ Jay Nordlinger) | Bulwark on Sunday

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Bill Kristol is joined by Jay Nordlinger to discuss the legacy of human rights struggles, the dangers of demagoguery, and the role of leaders in times of crisis. They look at Putin’s Russia, Trump��s America, and why the future of liberal democracy depends on choices made by both presidents and citizens.

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Ontario. Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to Bullwork on Sunday. Very pleased to be joined today by my former colleague a long time ago and but continuous friend since then, Jay Northlinger, who has just, who has left the National Review a few months ago, set up an excellent column and podcast on Substack, onward and upward, which I highly recommend, and is joining. I think I'm allowed to break this news, Jay, am I, that you're joining. the Renew Democracy Initiative, headed by Gary Kasparov. I'm actually on an advisory board, which means I don't do much, but except get to come to some meetings, but it's a very impressive organization, and Jay is joining as a senior fellow, and we'll be contributing to their podcast

and publication, The Next Move. So congratulations on that, Jay. That's really great. Thank you so much, Bill. Very pleased. A great cause, the renewal of democracy. And you've known, Gary, over the years, I think, because you've been so, active in the helping human rights and dissident movements around the world. Say a word about that.

I'm just why that's been so important to you. It's really striking how much time you've written about it. You've attended so many meetings and promoted

somebody of these wonderful, so impressive, courageous dissidents and human rights activists from everywhere. Well, I once was in a Q&A with John Miller years ago and he said,

why are you so interested in human rights? And I said, I don't really know. I don't know whether we can choose these things. I grew up in what turned out to be the last stage of the Cold War. I was very impressed by Soviet dissidents and Cuban dissidents and those in China, Eastern Europe, elsewhere, a lot of brave South Africans.

I was just very impressed with the courage of these people and their idealism. And that has never left me. I read Soldier Nietzhen early on. I followed the struggles of Sokharov. And, of course, when Sharanski's was released, that was thrilling. And I read his great memoir, Fear No Evil, Armando Viadaris from Cuba. These people always touched me. Oh, well, that's great.

And it's great. It speaks well for you that they did, and it speaks, and it's important. I mean, it's so, I remember, I think people address it. The anti-communism, I'm at least a decade older than you, so a little war, I think. So, you know, I go back a little further in sort of the Cold War and the anti-communism and have memories. And I think it's written correctly, of course, described as the geopolitical struggle. And there were a lot of foreign policy experts and national security experts involved. And there was the Kissinger world, so to speak, and the various disputes about this.

But I think people have always underestimated how important for people like me, at least, just growing up in the 60s and then go to college and grad school in the 70s, how important the human rights and dissident side of it. was. Maybe, again, I like you, maybe that was just my inclination. I was a Scoop Jackson, Pat Moynihan guy to some degree. But more than a Nixon, Kissinger guy, I guess. But I don't know. I feel like that's underrated and people thinking about that. Well, I'm sure you thought a lot of Watslef Havel and Czechoslovakia and so many of them, really. They were so inspiring. And they set a great example. I remember I shook the hand of Yuri Orloff, the physicist, when he came to visit the campus I was on. And, you know, it was just, it moved me to meet him, to hear him, and so on and so forth.

And later, I was able to interview Yelena Bonner, the widow of Sokharov. And she told me something so interesting. It made perfect sense. She said, Sakharov didn't like to talk about human rights in general. He found that very distasteful. He liked to talk about individual cases that he could relate to and others could relate to. Because otherwise, it's too abstract, too gauzy. But if you know about a person and what he or she is enduring, that makes a big difference.

And that's very true today, don't you think, at some of the cases of Putin's victims and those he's terrorized and so forth. Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Karamurza. I mean, these are great men of our era. Yes. You've done several interviews with Karamuzzi, right? Yeah. Yeah. He's writing a prison memoir now.

and I imagine it'll be on about the level of Sharanski's memoir, Fear No Evil. And Shiransky and Karamurza have long been in close touch. They're birds of a feather. I mean, one was a refusnik who wanted to leave the Soviet Union. The other is, you might say, a Russian patriot who wants to democratize Russia. But they're cut from the same cloth. They're both incredibly brave. Yeah, I know.

It's really something. And it was good to have American presidents who, in different degrees and in different ways, thought they were on the same, put themselves on the same side as these people who were that way. They were different ways and different, and some were more so, and some willing to sacrifice human rights and democracy concerns, a little war to geopolitics and all. But until Trump, honestly, I don't think we ever had a president who just turned his back on this entirely, you know. Well, I'll tell you this, that I'm a great Reaganite, and you, of course, served in the Reagan administration. but Jimmy Carter, Andre Grumiko, the Soviet foreign minister, went to see Carter in the White House. Why the foreign minister was actually dealing with the president, I'm not sure. But Carter brought up the case of Scheransky, then Anatoly Sharansky.

And Grimiko was puzzled by this. He said, Mr. President, we're talking about these big issues, nuclear weapons, the fate of the world. You bring up this one Zek, this one prisoner, as he put it, according to Stuart Eisenstadt and his memoirs, this microscopic dot. And it's up to the United States to be concerned about microscopic dots, individuals. You and I love Lincoln's eulogy of Henry Clay. Yes, Mr. Clay loved his country because it was his country, but mainly he loved it because it was free, and he was for freedom for all.

Yeah, that is really remarkable. That's so deep. and those who rewrite American history to pretend that wasn't always fundamental, I think, are wrong. So now we have a president who's different. And I thought one thing we could talk about, we talked about this privately the other day, and I was so struck by your remarks, is how much leaders matter. And we can leave aside from it, maybe the whole movement and the whole culture and all the many, many problems we have in terms of defending liberty and dignity and decency here at home.

But I think Donald Trump personally matters, and you were very interesting talking about how you can, came to the view that leaders do matter so much? Well, I was foolish. I guess I was naive. I heard when I was coming of age that the president sets the tone in the country. And I said, come on, we're a big continental nation from sea to shining sea, as Bill Buckley would say. You know, we had, I think, at the time, 220 million people. We pride ourselves on being a bottom-up society, not a top-down society. We're a nation of rugged individualists. What do you mean the president sets the tone? He's one guy in one office in the executive branch. Boy, was that dumb.

A president has a lot, leaders have a lot to do with the fates of nations. And maybe that's bad. I think it probably is bad, but it is a fact. And our Mr. Lincoln talked about appealing to the better angels of people's nature. You can appeal to worse ones, too. And what you decide makes a big difference. We were really lucky to have Lincoln as our 16th president. And really lucky, you know, with charity toward all, malice toward and all that stuff,

you know, I wouldn't have been that big. But he was the right man for that moment. We're really lucked out with him. And so, yes, it may seem ridiculously elementary. Gee, Jay Nordlinger discovers in his 40s or 50s that leaders matter. They matter more than I knew and more than I would like. Yeah, that's such a last formulation is so interesting. I mean, I do think a lot of the time they don't matter that much,

because society has its trends and its currents and its structures. And a lot of leaders float along. That's not quite fair, because they can be perfectly good leaders, but they are part of that. They're not, they don't challenge it much. And therefore, they're thrown up, as it were, put up, you know, by the society, that they reflect it, and they don't change it much. But one does think, especially at critical moments,

how much these individuals matter. And, you know, obviously the 20th century with Churchill, 19th century with Lincoln, but many others, though, It was one level of slightly less grand, but very, very important still. I mean, go ahead. Well, think of the 2020 election. What Trump could have done and what he chose to do after the election, could have conceded defeat and geared up to run again.

But he went on another path and brought about half the country with him. And about half the country joined him in this claim that the election had been stolen. And it roiled the nation. On Thanksgiving Day in the White House, I was just recalling this. in 2020, he referred to the Secretary of State of Georgia as an enemy of the people. And that man, Raffensberger, I think his name is, and his wife had to have 24-hour protection. Stephen Richard in Arizona in Phoenix, another election official, had to have protection because of lies told about him by Rudy Giuliani and Trump.

Stephen Richard had volunteered for the Giuliani for president campaign in 2008. He was a diehard Republican like me. And here he is with 24-hour protection. So it trumps choices in 2020 and all that followed. It was all hugely important. You made the point we were talking that, well, this sort of slides, leadership mattering and individuals mattering slides into the contingency of history, right? Something you've thought and written about also.

And you and I think are both sort of on the side of contingency as opposed to determinism or inevitability. Definitely, yeah. Yeah, you were talking about that with me about, I think it was something Vladimir Karamutzer said to you. He did. He did. He said, what a difference it made, that Yeltsin, at what turned out to be the end of his presidency, elevated Vladimir Putin and not Boris Nemtsov. A hugely consequential decision.

Putin is perhaps the major figure of our time politically. Nemtsov was, of course, assassinated within sight of the Kremlin in 2020. 2015, Nemsov was a genuine, what would you call him, liberal Democrat, advocate of decency, advocate of the rule of law, advocate of individual rights, and Margaret Thatcher admired him a lot. Boris Nemtsoff was a great man. This brilliant physicist, he had a Ph.D. in physics and Russia or the Soviet Union, as it probably was then when he was 25. That's early. His professor, his advisor was a professor, Ginsburg, I can't remember his first name, who'd won the Nobel Prize.

Ginsburg said to him, Boris, you're going into politics? You could have a great scientific career. But Nemsoft made that choice. And, yeah, Nemtsov was a great man who didn't make it. And Putin was a very bad man, very talented man, who was ruled that country and royaled the world now for decades. I came across this blog post by Putin's favorite flagship. philosopher, I think it's fair to say, Alexander Dugan, who's a, I mean, beyond Putin is a prominent fascist is the easiest word. He really is a fascist and very self-consciously. So I think he maybe

doesn't like the term for something. But he is, you know, anti-liberal and in the most fundamental sense, kind of a modern version of Karl Schmidt, with a Russian flavor because he believes in Russian greatness in a way. But, but he, and this post was interesting, it was after Charlie Kirk's death, murder. And it was, uh, and it explained to, his readers that Magas, they don't, Magas not great on everything and, you know, he would do it a little differently, but they are fundamentally on the same side of the civilizational fight. That's a fight against people like us, and I don't mean us, you and me, but us broadly, the people who believe in liberal democracy and freedom and individual rights. And I was, it's very, I really

recommend to people that they read, he's on substack, he's on substack, there's an emphasis on substack, you are a substack, the boat works on substack, and, and, uh, I wouldn't have expected can honestly, Alexander Dugge is on substack. And he has conversations you can, I mean, he speaks mostly by he speaks Russian, but this piece, I suppose, was translated by someone. Maybe he was helped by it. It reads a little bit. I've read a tiny bit of his, quote, philosophical work, which is somewhat dense and impenetral.

This is a much more clearer, you know, or journalistic essay. But very unflinching in its endorsement of MAGA, but also in explaining what he thinks MAGA amounts to, which is a fundamental assault on American liberal democracy as it's been practiced from the beginning, really. Yeah. And the admiration goes both ways. I mean, some Trump administration officials have said horrifying things in praise of Putin. These aren't just random internet commenters.

One's a man named in Grosia, I think. I think he's the presidential White House liaison to Homeland Security. There's a man named Darren Bedi, or Beatty, I think, who is the assistant secretary state for public diplomacy, just unblushing Putinists. I mean, it's just all out there. One of them called Putin the leader of Christian civilization or something like that. This is true belief. And I do appreciate the honesty more than the covering up and the cleverness, you know, let it all hang out, say what you think. That's better than subterfuge. So we know what we're facing. And Trump's exploitation of the terrible murder of Charlie Kirk

is, I've got to say, of a piece with what authoritarian before him have done in all kinds of circumstances and sometimes people thought they arranged the murder. That was not the case this time and was not the case.

Actually, often, though, but they're pretty quick to exploit this and turn the hatred against whatever group they want to be demonizing and the like. It really is to see it happening though in real time here. It's one thing you read about it, right?

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to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. It's a very dangerous moment for the country, I think. I mean, that murder was just so disgusting, sickening, revolting, an instance of evil, an evil done to Charlie Kirk, an evil done to his family and friends, just a horrifying evil. But also an evil to our society, our nation at large. And how people react, how people respond,

will make a big difference. You can choose the road of Donald Trump. You can choose the road of Governor Cox in Utah. Many disgusting things have been said about this murder from the left, broadly speaking, and the right has its own problems. This is something human beings have discussed for so long, but an individual gunman shouldn't have so much power. you know, like that bastard from the Black Hand Society in 1914

caused all that trouble. And, you know, John Wilts Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald and, you know, why can one man with a gun or another murder weapon cause so much trouble? But they can, and it's just something that human beings have to grapple with. And President Trump himself was almost murdered in the summer of 2024. I mean, these things are just so there are close calls and then just these awful assassinations.

And you mentioned the other day in print, you had a moving thing about that honest, horribolus, however, you say that in proper Latin, 1968, the murder of MLK and RFK. Do you have any memory of that, Bill? Yeah, no, I remember. Pretty well. I was in 10th, near the end of 10th grade, I guess it would have been.

So that was the spring of 68. And so, yeah, I was interested in politics. I actually was a Hubert Humphrey supporter. But I remember, yes, everything felt like it was utterly falling apart. As you say things, you know, assassinations of major, major figures. And, you know, Robert Kennedy was obviously hugely major. Well, M.L. Luther King and Kennedy were hugely major. Yeah, two of the biggest figures in America.

Yeah. And one really just felt, and after John, I kept Kennedy's assassination five years before, one just felt, as you say, these are three. isolated instances, individuals who were not parts of bigger conspiracies, maybe had a couple of Confederates in one case, at least in the King case, but it still makes you feel that everything is going to court. And things can spin out of control, I guess the World War I instance is a good example of that, even if leaders were trying to be somewhat responsible, World War I's more complicated with the Kaiser and so forth. But I do think, though, that the history of authoritarian

or want to be authoritarian leaders exploiting tragedies, assassinations, murders, even just accidents, the Reichstag fire. Well, there wasn't an accident that was set by an individual anarchist. I think people now think the Reichstag fire.

But then exploited by Hitler, I mean, the exploitation is blameworthy. History is contingent and accidents can lead to terrible things. But purposely, and as president of the United States, I mean, I don't think that we've never seen. I mean, we've had presidents who were, you know, more of usific.

or maybe a little of those things in denouncing individual acts of violence. You have presidents who've turned away a little bit, certainly in terms of civil rights and in the South, from really facing what was happening. But nothing like what I think we now have of Trump going on national television before he knew anything and tarring, I don't know, half the country or at least a good chunk of the other half of the country that didn't vote for him as radical left and charing every, I don't know,

every organization on the left, so to speak, is being responsible for this one guy who's, I don't think whose views we really didn't seem to have much in the way of political views and we don't know them anyway and there's no evidence of him being connected even if there were, incidentally. It doesn't really matter, no. Yeah, you can't blame

organizations and putting out critiques of whatever of Trump or MAGA to any more than if you can blame organizations putting out critiques of the Democratic Party. But I mean, the degree to which Trump and MAGA are all on board, not all, but mostly on board in exploiting this. The idea that

Governor Cox seems like a lone figure among Republicans is what's so striking. He's always been very good on this. I remember quoting him in 2023 because Mitt Romney had to hire, and he could afford it some pretty expensive personal security for himself and his large family. Other public figures can't afford that kind of security. A couple of them quit Congress in their 30s, I think of Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Anthony Gonzalez from Ohio. Threats to them and their families weren't the only reason they left Congress, but these threats played a part.

And Cox was very good on this back then. Very good. I wish we could have, we Americans could have a blanket, a policy of just blanket condemnation of political violence from whatever direction that the violence is. Most of the Democrats' industrial reaction. I mean, see real Democrat office holders, not flaky people. lefties on online. They said that. We condemn all political violence. Some of them then went on to say that I have problems with Charlie Kirk was saying. Some of them didn't even address what he was

saying. Most of them didn't want to get into it. So they just left that as a loan, which is fine, incidentally. But there, I think we are, that has been the norm. When Steve Scalese, the Republican was attacked, I don't know. All of his Democratic colleagues said this is appalling. Trump really is unique almost in this. In terms of the high, in terms of serious people in America, George Wallace, who was a very, you know, problematic figure. When he was shot in 72, I haven't gone back and looked, but I'm willing to bet that pretty much everyone, the people running against him for the Democratic nomination,

Richard Nixon from the other party, even civil rights leaders said this is wrong. You know, you can't have assassinations. So it's pretty bad. And then the blaming, in my view, of the transgender community reports that apparently his roommate was transitioning. We don't know that we know this for sure. Or as if that, so what?

I mean, the person who murdered the Minnesota state legislator and her husband, Melissa Hockman, I think her name was, really, apparently very admirable person. But either way, just state legislator, totally, that was ideological. That was a list of Democrats. He wanted to kill. He had a wife, you know, and she, to her credit, seems to have been not known about that he was going to do this and to have cooperated with the prosecution and so forth. as maybe the roommate has in this case. But no one said, oh, my God, see, this proves that if you have a wife and if you go to church, which I think they did, this means you're a threat to society and you need to be demonized.

I mean, I find that so appalling, very dangerous, really. It was the transgender people. I mean, that's a small and vulnerable group, obviously, of Americans. Yeah, yeah. Demagoguery is a very powerful tool. Yeah. And demagogics, especially talented demagogical. are very famous.

They walk around with matches and a society filled with, you know, dry wood. And I think of all the, when I spoke of a blanket condemnation, I was thinking of all the sniggering about the near-murderous attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the then-speaker of the house, and not from just Internet social media ghouls,

but from public figures and some pretty major public figures. And this is just, it's just despicable behavior. And I think my expression, many of us grew up with, where you're raised in a barn? I mean, where are your manners? Why do you think you can behave this way? Is it merely the advent of social media?

I mean, does this kind of media bring out the worst in us? And does it reveal some sort of American id? I don't really know. But you find out a lot about people. Yeah. And it may, it may make it easy. easier for the it to come out, so to speak, but people still have agency, right? So plenty of, you know, you're on social media and you're not behaving the way these people are.

And Trump chose to make fun of the attack on Paul Pelosi, which was a very dangerous, terrible attack and very dangerous. Yeah, you almost died. And you were, I think we're coming back, we were talking about also about speaking at colleges, campuses. I don't think you want to usually speak to crowds of many thousands outside in that kind of environment. We speak in auditoriums to a couple other people or whatever. but I think you heard about this as you were flying back. I say a word about what you're finding. I'm just curious now about more broadly, though,

on the atmosphere on a college campuses among, quote, conservatives, who presumably is what the other people who might have been expected to come to, what if your talks? Yeah, right. Just curious what you found out. Well, it is self-selecting, so I don't claim to have some great sample. And I'm no George Gallup. But I am heartened when I meet with young people.

people. They're bright, balanced, inquisitive, good. They seem to be sort of genuinely seeking, trying to find things out, open to different ideas, weighing things. I find myself quite buoyed, usually, when I meet with the young. And I was just coming back on that terrible day when Charlie Kirk was murdered from Cedarville University in central Ohio. It's an evangelical Christian university. I think they'd use the word evangelical. I'm not sure. And before that, I walked around, it's about 10 miles away, Antioch College, the famous radical institution. And I was just thinking about, it's just such a beautiful illustration of American pluralism. You know, each of these traditions has quite a history in America. Both of these are strains in American life. And I just love that they can coexist in this beautiful pluralistic society of ours. And I have to say, I realize this is not quite college campuses, but I was talking with our friend Mona chair this morning. And she said, you know, we're destroying a kind of paradise, you know,

a paradise of liberal democracy and prosperity over what? Why? I mean, you could say about the civil war that its underlying cause was slavery. But why now? Why this? How can we do this to ourselves? No, it's, I've thought a lot about that too. We all have, I think, what, and even, you know, in the 20s and 30s, you'd had World War I, an unbelievable catastrophe, and then followed by turmoil in the 20s and then the Great Depression and again, one doesn't excuse people, but it's understandable that people reached for very extreme solutions and lost their bearings, so I could put it that way. Sure. A little hard to understand it. I think now, yeah, I agree. Especially in the United States. I mean, you know, I understand there are problems, but is it that bad? Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Let me throw something at you, Bill. I confess to, it's not that I quite roll my eyes at him, this man I loved. I didn't roll my eyes at him. But when Reagan said over and over, freedom is always one generation away from extinction. I thought, oh, come on. You know, and Adam Smith says it was a great deal of ruin of the nation, so it's a really, and I thought he had a good point, but it was sort of put in extreme terms. But then I see the example of Venezuela. That really was a generation. Here is a kind of model of democracy and prosperity in South America, and along comes this incredibly talented demagogue, this sort of wizardly populist who bewitches a nation, and then just batters it with socialism.

And now it's a starving police state, from which there have been about 8 million refugees and exiles. It happened so fast. Yeah. Now, obviously, we're in a much different country. Our institutions are stronger, guardrails, blah, blah, blah. But the old man, Reagan, but the way, he seems less old to me now, the older I get.

He had a point, and I looked this up recently. He said it his whole career. Yeah, no, I had the exact same reaction, hearing him say, maybe even a personal answer twice, you know. I'm sure you did. I'm sure you did. Yes, that's, of course, in principle, it's true. The founders believed it. Everyone's always believed it. Lincoln warns in 1838. I mean, everyone understands it can go fast, but somehow it just seemed, yeah, especially once we had won the cold, and he was saying in the context of the Cold War, and there was kind of about the communist threat. And then after we won the Cold War and Soviet Union collapsed, it seemed, well, fascism wasn't, and there were a little fascist. things happening, you know, Melos Mishish. Just a fringe. And communism was pretty much gone

on this, not in communist China, obviously, but in Europe and this hemisphere except for Cuba. And so, yeah, it really, I also had a little bit of that attitude. I think he was more right than we were. One last thing, and this is just, I'm curious what you think of this. You and I've talked about this over the years and recent years,

and I sort of don't quite know which way to go on this. On the one hand, I'm struck when I go to, I speak to young people and go to campuses. There is a fair amount of interest in, among conservatives or Republicans, like a former, whatever you want to call them, conservatives. That's interesting in Trump and in the movement. I think it's natural. It seems to be on the ascendancy.

There's bin Laden said people like the strong horse. There's a guy young. You want to be ambitious. You want to be a player. You want to be part of something. Honestly, the Reagan movement and even the Gingrich movement, I would say that he's benefited from that. I saw that quite up close and personal.

People, I had been, you know, I think a somewhat contrarian, anti-communist in my generation before most people were. But by the time Reagan won a re-election and then Bush won and then Gingrich takes everything in 94, it was, if you were just kind of inclined towards some kind of conservatism, you think, okay, this is the movement. I'm part of it, you know, and all these old rifts, a lot of them went away and the Rockefeller Republicans, the Bush Republicans, the Scoop Jackson Democrats kind of disappeared. everyone was a Reagan night, which was okay and benefited, honestly, the political things I was involved in and probably helped weekly standard and national review and so forth. But I've seen that phenomenon of jumping on the bandwagon. So the one I'm curious now, how much of that do you think is happening? And how much of the opposite?

I mean, one thing that attracted me to Bill Buckley personally into National Review, even though I was more of a scoop jacks and democratized, I say, in the kid in the 60s, I guess, when I started to read it, a young teenager, kind of, was the standing authority history yelling stop. I just admired the fact that he was willing to take an unpopular position. So that cuts the opposite way from the bandwagoning to the popular side, right? But Whitaker Chambers, I fear that I think I'm turning the losing side, but he did it anyway. We all loved that.

Leaving the winning sides of the losing side. It was a big part of what it meant almost to be a conservative, I think, at one point. I don't know. Maybe you were a little younger, but I think it was. even true in your day. So which is, these are two opposite, I would take it, human instincts or tendencies. I'm just curious what you see out there, maybe especially among younger people, but in general on either side. One of my least favorite expressions in life is binary choice. So tired of that expression. It's got to be one or the other. Either you're a Democrat or you're

Republican, and a lot of people see that. And so they're enthusiastic Trumpites or more reluctant Trumpites, but they're Trumpites. And this man has been nominated for president by the Republican Party three times in a row. No one else in history has ever been nominated by the GOP for president three times in a row. Nixon had to take a cycle off, I think. And so he is the dominant Republican figure of our age, the dominant American political figure of our age. How old do you have to be to have voted for another Republican presidential nominee other than Trump? My math isn't fast enough to figure that out, but it's been a long, long time. So it's what they know.

And another of my least favorite expressions, along with the other one I mentioned, is a new normal. And so Trumpism is so normal, it has ceased to be a new normal. You might even call it the spirit of our times, but there are people who, I hesitate to use the word dissent because, I mean, that builds them up too much, like, you know, dissenters in the Soviet Union and Russia, but there are people who are skeptical of all this, who are quiet about their skepticism. And it's up to, frankly, the likes of us to encourage them or allow them to be bolder. And one thing I very much dislike about our country now is that there seems to be a lot of fear in it, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of making the wrong move, just so much fear. And I think people ought to state their views forthrightly, honestly, and we should behave as well as we can. And I'm sorry for those sort of treakly platitudes, but it's about the best I can do. I'm just curious in your own case. And was it, I always, I don't know if you're at,

I'm not there for you to discuss this really when you were young and became interested in conservatives and conservatism and Bill Buckley. How much of it was the standing of thwart history? I mean, you were in Ann Arbor, weren't you, as a kid? So presumably there was a sort of, as there was for me in the west side of Manhattan, kind of enjoying being in a minority almost. Was that the case? Oh, my gosh, yes.

Desquely wish that you were part of a majority. Oh, my God. No, no, that's some, you know, I had sort of the Groucho Marx attitude about country clubs when it comes to that. There's a very popular bumper sticker in my town, and I think throughout America, question authority. And it was a lefty bumper sticker, but in my environment, to question authority meant to question the left. And I found Bill Buckling, these guys, absolutely thrilling and daring and countercultural. And, yeah, and I appreciated their boldness. And they also, they stood for

kind of higher civilization and high culture. Yeah. Yeah, that part of it is another conversation, but you're such a, of course, you do such excellent classical music reviews through your criteria and elsewhere and on your own substack. And yes, and so I think that is an underestimated part

of the early national review. I found that as a young person. You read about some novelist, sometimes conservative-ish or cultural, and one wouldn't have heard of that person maybe or had it assigned in my school in Manhattan. And so it was interesting to see that part. But they were very, but Bill and National Review

were pretty undogmatic. They didn't try to say that because some novelist was a lefty, you know, that he wasn't a great novelist or poet or composer. Alan Ginsberg came to on our parties. Is that right? Jeffrey Hart thought that he had a heck of a lot of talent. I mean, my goodness, I put my queer shoulder to the wheel.

I mean, my goodness, got a lot of talent. Bill Buckley had him on Firing Line. Wow. Yeah, no, I dislike the, I mean, I was struck. Yeah, Jack Kerouac on Firing Line. Recently, a conservative think tank. And I think this was well-intentioned. And I know the person slightly who ran this little program,

and it was, you know, advice for conservative parents about which colleges they might send their kids to. And some of that's harmless. Some of it's useful. I mean, if some place is really intolerant and hostile, don't want to send your conservatively oriented 17-year-old there and have an unpleasant experience. But I always thought it was, I benefited quite a lot from going to a predominant, from being in predominantly liberal environments in school, high school and college and being forced in a sense,

hold my ground and not just coast along. Now, it's easy for me to say that. And the culture then on the left was more tolerant of dissent, even though it was pretty overwhelmingly on the left, sort of like Ann Arbor, right? So therefore I sympathize with some of the people in the last 10, 20 years, and when they really was more of a cancel culture on the left. But maybe that's been exaggerated too, but whatever. But anyway, I do think this notion that we've got to find a safe space for conservatives everywhere is not entirely healthy.

Well, I look up my window here up Broadway in New York, and I can almost see the building of Barbara J. Fields, the historian, who's been at Columbia for many years, but she was my beloved teacher in Ann Arbor, and she was on the left. She's conservative in many ways, but I would haunt her office hours and to pour out my incipient conservative beliefs and so on,

and she was so patient and she cajoled me and she teased me. She was just wonderful. And I had another teacher, Emily Cloid and English teacher. She taught Johnson and Boswell on their circle. And I quoted to her Bill Sapphire's line, I have to go down to the corner newsstand and buy a Hustler magazine, in order to have something respectable to hide my national review in.

And she told me, you know, you won't believe this. But when I was in graduate school at Columbia, a lot of us felt that way about the Nation magazine who's kind of looked down on. And so she sympathized with me and being kind of a political or philosophical minority. And these teachers are worth their weight in gold. Yeah, I'm struck in the, I'll let you go, in the anti-Trump fraud movement, some of the most effective and I think perceptive people are,

people who've fought government a lot. You know, and so that's, I find, like, among some lawyers, the people from the ACOU, the NAACP Defense Fund, legal defense fund, they've always been against the government, basically. And so now they're against the Trump administration. It doesn't shock them to find out that they're not on the same side of the government. A lot of our more centrist liberal friends, who I'm probably closer to on substantive policy, can't quite adjust to the moment that, you know, we are in opposition to this movement. therefore, and this movement controls the U.S. government and controls it pretty thoroughly and

ruthlessly. And therefore, you're not going to, you know, wishing that the Justice Department were the way it was under Biden or even sort of under Trump one, but certainly under, you know, Bush and Obama and so forth. That doesn't get you anywhere. I know. Some old-fashioned skepticism and that government is healthy. I so admire the people at the organization fire. That's an acronym. them. I admire that free speech group. And I love civil libertarians like Ira Glasser, who went head of the ACLU. He was just for his principles and he was against anyone who wanted to violate, to curb those principles. And he and Bill Buckley were great friends.

Ira took Bill to his first baseball game. I think it was a Yankee game. And then when Ira asked, Bill, you want to go to a Mets game? He said, no, I've seen one, said Bill. But he went to Shea Stadium too, and it was a wonderful friendship. And they had a lot in common those two. One was on the left, one was on the right, but they were allies, in a sense, in that they prized an atmosphere of ordered liberty. And that's the name of the game. Both the adjective and the noun are important. Liberty is important, and the ordered part is important, too.

And that's, I mean, you're the political theorist. me whether that's us or it ought to be well it was mostly most of the time not perfectly god knows in in america and i think we were approaching actually a better version of it over the last 30 40 50 years due to be fair to both the left and the right i think each contributed something there you know in a sort of slightly dialectical way and then but now unfortunately i think we moved away from it on and i do think the damage that's being done is very great and uh and i this moment is a particularly worrisome one because Again, not simply because things can spit out of control, that's also true, but just because the pretty self-conscious, very self-conscious exploitation of the fear and the anger and the grief, which is very dangerous, very dangerous.

Bill, I realize we're closing here, and I don't want to go way over time, but I wonder, do you, are you still a believer in American exceptionalism, or is the human material the same everywhere? I mean, it seems to me that we're vulnerable to the same ills that the old world was vulnerable to. And the American founders believe that. And Lincoln believed that the Lyceum speech. She doesn't say Americans could never fall as prey to a Napoleon or a seizure. The whole point of the speech is literally that we could have that happen here too if we give up on the rule of law and give up on civil liberties and decide that the passions of the moment should override everything. So I think American reception was a very misunderstood term. It was a sociological term that was supposed to explain.

as a matter of why we didn't fall for communism and fascism and basically in the 20s and 30s and I believe the term American exceptionalism began as a complaint from the left or well or at least as an analysis by I think some of these German sociologists picked up by people like I see where Martin Lipset here is a kind of well we have a bigger middle class we had the frontier it was always kind of a it didn't mean Americans were better I find one of the most offensive things I've turned against the so I was you know sort of interested in the question that American exceptionalism raised. I don't think I was either for it or against it. The takeover it by Fox News to become a kind of triumphalism was, you know, distasteful, but okay, if people are proud, that's fine, and a little bit of post-9-11. That was understandable and healthy, you can say. Yeah. But then it became this kind of boastfulness.

And I have often said this to people who are going on about it. Well, what exactly, are you, do you deserve credit for this? Your grandparents died, you know, fought in World War II. That's fantastic. Other people carried the torch through the Cold War. Our ancestors did amazing things. Some 25-year-old is going around preeding because of American exceptionalism. What have you ever done?

And if anything... Exactly. Yes, you were sort of saying earlier, the people who were resisting in Russia and who were fighting right now in Ukraine and who are trying to build better societies in places that are authoritarian or threatened by authoritarianism to serve more admiration. So, no, I'm hostile now. Honestly, I'd never thought of maybe I'd quite say it this way. The invocation of the phrase American exceptionalism was a country.

a boastfulness that's based on not much often to boast about. And that covers up a multitude of sins, I would almost say. Don't you think? Yeah. I said a few years ago, because some people of Romney were sort of going on about, you know, Midwestern values and Heartland values and how, you know, we're so much better than, you know, people on those coasts, you know, I thought, well, humility must not be a Midwestern value because my fellow Midwestern is, you all are just thumping your chest constantly about how great

you are. Yeah, yeah. No, I see what you mean. And, you know, I talked about our man Reagan and his one generation away from extinction. But think of the founders, you know, Republic, if you can keep it from Franklin and John Adams. And he says, and I always say that a New Englander would have thought of this image that, you know, bad men in high office, he'll burst through the cords of our Constitution like a whale through a net. Yeah, that is.

And I now think differently about the so-called guardrails, and I realize that their paper arrangements can do only so much. The real guardrails are flesh and blood. Mike Pence acted as a guardrail, I think, on January 6th. For example, paper protections, they'll get you only so far. Which is very much paper parchment, parlias. Now the founders also tried to devise separation of powers and checks of balances, but even they, of course, understood that the people are fundamentally. important. And it gets come back to our original point. I just, yeah, the individuals matter.

You know, individuals in high places, the regins in the world, but also in everyday places. So that's maybe a good theme to end on. Jay, thank you so much. It is on us. Thank you for, yeah, that's well. Good thing to close on. Thank you for joining me today. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you all for joining us on World Work on Sunday.