Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - That '70s Show - with John Podhoretz

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

The 1970s were a tragedy – inflation, rising crime and crumbling cities, American humiliation abroad from the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to Moscow’s geopolitical advances right in our backyard in Latin America. But here we are again, in the 2020s – with inflation surging to a four-decade high, a new crime wave and new decay in our cities, American humiliation in Afghanistan, ongoing Iran deal negotiations, and a new war launched by Russia. Are we living through another version of the 1970s right now? What can we learn from that era? John Podhoretz returns guest to the podcast. John is a writer, public intellectual and culture critic, He is editor in chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary’s critically acclaimed daily podcast, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, and author of several books. He is also a film critic – formerly for The Weekly Standard and now for The Washington Free Beacon.

Where people don't have attention deficit disorder is over feelings. Feelings require no attention. They're there. They sit there in your soul. So if what you're feeling is anxiety over inflation, you're not going to get distracted from that. What solves that problem is the feeling going away, and the feeling goes away when the macro problem is getting resolved. In a memorable observation, Karl Marx said that history repeats itself. The first time, he said, is tragedy.

The second time, as farce. Well, the 1970s were indeed a tragedy. Inflation, rising crime in crumbling cities, American humiliation abroad from the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Moscow's geopolitical advances right in our backyard in Latin America. I could go on. But here we are again in the 2020s with inflation surging to a four-decade high, a new crime wave and new decay in our cities, American humiliation in Afghanistan just last summer, and the ongoing Iran deal negotiations, what could be further humiliation, and of course, a new war launched by Russia. This is certainly not farce, at least as Marx would have us think. As our friend Neil Ferguson said, sometimes you just get two tragedies in succession. Are we living through another version of the 1970s right now? What can we learn from that era? It's a topic I've been kicking around with John Podhor. It's a return guest to this podcast. John is a writer, public intellectual, and culture critic. He's editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine and

host of Commentary's critically acclaimed daily podcast. I highly recommend it. He's a columnist for the New York Post and he's the author of several books, including one of my favorite political books, Hell of a Ride, about his time in the first Bush administration. John is also a film critic, formerly from the Weekly Standard, and now for the Washington Free Beacon. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome my friend, John Podhortz, to the podcast. Hey, John. Hey, Dan. Great to be with you. As it is always great to have you on my podcast, it is equally great for you to have me on your podcast.

Yeah, but I think when I was on your podcast, I got COVID. So I'm not... Yeah, but I didn't get COVID, which is really the most important thing. This is true. But I want you to know that the day after we recorded your podcast in Palm Beach, maybe two days after, I did a, I recorded a podcast with Ron Dermer in New York. And it was the first time really I can think of in the last year or so that we had done an in-person podcast. We did it in a little studio. And Ron and I sat two feet

apart from each other face to face and talked for an hour and a half or whatever it was and i made the stupid mistake early in the podcast of saying ron isn't this great we're really our post corona now we can do this in person we don't have to do all these things virtually and then that night i tested positive so here we are again oh the irony yes all right, yes. I want to talk about the 1970s, which, you know, a lot of my guests have a lot of views on the 1970s. And don't view this as an ageist comment, but not all of them lived through the 70s and have very vivid memories and strong views on what the lessons are of the 70s for these 2020s. And you and I have talked about this outside of the context of the podcast, and now I want to bring the conversation onto our podcast.

So in 1970s, you were growing up in New York City? I was growing up in the Upper West Side of New York City on 105th between Broadway and West End, which was the blue perfect combination of upper middle class, professional, largely Jewish people living in rent control department buildings, some of which went co-op during this period, thus providing pretty feckless and impecunious Jews

for the first time with financial security in the form of extraordinarily cheap equity in apartment buildings that they would then, like my parents, find a gift from God. And then a lot of working class and poor people living in tenements and projects, just you know a stone's throw away a lot of dominicans a lot of cubans a lot of puerto ricans a lot of haitians um so it was a very mixed uh neighborhood uh both uh culturally uh ethnically and in class terms.

And in the 1970s, and I want to get in, we're going to get into inflation, we're going to get into some of the foreign policy issues of that decade, but just life in New York City at that time, you know, did it feel like New York City was, was it like Escape from New York, the movie, or did it feel like a city on the move, or did it feel like almost schizophrenic, like it was both? Like it was a city mired in urban decay, and yet a city that had tremendous promise.

Okay, so this is a great question, and it's a great question, and it's it's a it's a great question and it's an interesting one because in fact new york not only in feeling but in actual uh economic and social terms was very stagnant not only was it stagnant but it was shrinking in size it was receding in size uh we know this because in 1970 there were 8 million people registered in the census in New York City. And in 1980, there were 7 million. Population of the city shrunk by a million people in the 1970s. The experience of living in New York in the 1970s, as compared to every other period, and particularly even now, was of a city in stasis. There was no construction. There were no sheds being built,

blocking buildings because buildings were being renovated. Businesses weren't moving in. Nothing was being built. There were a third as many cars on the streets of New York I once discovered in 1975 as there were in 2000 so it's not like traffic was crazy and you know the city was bubbling and bouncing and booming the city was in decline it's unquestionably in decline and running on fumes it was it was kind of grubby it was dirty there was not a lot of upkeep famously you know central park

uh there was no budget in the parks department for reseeding lawns and grass so central park became a kind of dust bowl mud bowl uh you know it was not until the 1980s when a private conservancy took over management of the park that actually the park was reseeded with grass um so it looked like any city that you go to in the world where uh where the infrastructure was basically being allowed to crumble because there were no resources to maintain it or keep it up and and unlike what happened once the 1980s hit in new york and wall street shot up like a rocket and went from, you know, 770 or whatever the Dow to 3000, you know, three years later. And it's of course now in the 30 thousands. Wall Street wasn't throwing off all this money, you know, filling the city's coffers. The city

basically went bankrupt in 1975 and 1976 because it had a lot of social obligations and it did not have a lot of tax revenue and tax income. So it was in bad shape. The subways were covered in graffiti. So the subway, so where people, like right now, or up until the pandemic really, you have young and not young professionals who are making lots of money, people making millions of dollars

or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year who ride the subway every day and don't even think twice about it. That wasn't, the subways weren't bustling who are making lots of money, people making millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, who ride the subway every day and don't even think twice about it. The subways weren't bustling with people at all steps on the income ladder. No, no, no. If you could afford it, you stayed out of the subway. If you could afford to take taxes everywhere, you stayed out of the subway. They were grubby.

They were sordid. They were covered in graffiti. There was a lot of begging. There was a lot, you know. Violence. Yeah. covered in graffiti. There was a lot of begging. There was a lot, you know. Violent. Yeah. But of course, the city, and then was much more a city of the middle class,

much more than it is. Certainly Manhattan was a... So explain what that, I mean, how that fell. Okay, so the employment in New York City was employment in middle class professions. You know, even professionals who worked at law firms or accounting firms or whatever worked in Wall Street, most of them were middle level managers and they were affluent by American GDP standards

or per capita income standards, but they weren't living the high life. They weren't rich. The dominating sort of life was a middle class life small shopkeepers small businessmen single family homes you know that were often multi-generational or houses that had been in the family for a long time all of that so it was a middle class city it wasn't you know people came to come to new york to work in the arts or be you know live bohemian lives or stuff like that but it was not a playground of

the rich uh in the way that it that it became and so of course in those circumstances people then are are captive uh to the exigent circumstances of the world they live around like they can't they can't pay enough to escape the streetscape right you can't pay enough to get out you don't have enough money not to take the subway so you walk or you take the bus or uh maybe you have to you have to take the subway because you work in manhattan and you live in brooklyn and there's no way in otherwise and then you live a kind of life of menace and sordidness and all this and that's why a million people left a million people fled the city,

and we haven't even talked about crime yet, but a million people left the city because they could, because life had become untenable or they decided that things would be better, and they didn't go to Texas. Now, people go to Arizona and Texas and Florida. They went to Westchester.

They went to New Jersey. They went to Nassau and Suffolk counties. They voted with their feet. they thought the city was dying, and they went to get themselves a nice house, you know, somewhere where they weren't going to feel like at any moment they could get mugged. So I do want to move to more national issues in a moment, but before we do, let's talk about crime then. So this past week we had this awful tragic shooting uh in

brooklyn on the on the subway you know multiple people shot hospitals you know the sense of the city kind of shut down and it it felt that way and when events there have been other events throughout the last couple years that have been smaller versions of that. When it happens, these events had, at some point, felt like outlier events, that they were like a shock to the system, because we view New York City historically, or at least in my adult lifetime, as the safest big city in the world, and then these events happen and we're like, how are the wheels coming off in New York when you see that? Whereas, it sounds like in the 70s, these weren't outlier events.

Okay. So there's a real... So the classic pop cultural portrait of New York City in the 70s is Death Wish, is the movie Death Wish, which is about... Charles Bronson. Yeah. A guy living in my neighborhood, architect, upper middle class architect, liberal, very liberal, bleeding heart.

He's called in the first scene. His wife and daughter go to the supermarket to shop on Broadway. Supermarket is now Fairway, which is like the iconic supermarket of Manhattan. Then it was at D'Agostino's or something.

They come home. They're walking back to their building, which is at 75th and Riverside. Interestingly enough, a building that George and Ira Gershwin lived in when they wrote their great songs. Walked out and crossed the street from the Manhattan Day School, for you fans of Jewish trivia. They walk down the block. They go into their building, and they are pursued.

They're followed from the supermarket by a multi-ethnic gang of four guys, including Jeff Goldblum, who, there's a Puerto Rican, there's somebody white, there's somebody black, and there's somebody who's indeterminate. Somehow they get into the back elevator, they go up, or they announce they're delivering the groceries, they break into the apartment, they the daughter they kill the mother and then charles bronson comes home to find his family ruined and destroyed and in his grief and sorrow

he starts going out on the street and hunting down muggers first he does it with quarters he puts in a sock and he goes up to one of them and he smashes them in the head with this sock and then he starts shooting them. Death Wish. Death Wish was like a documentary. I'm not joking when I say Death Wish is explicitly structured as a western. It's like a western in New York. He's being pursued by a marshal, by a cop who knows that something is going to happen.

But he is like an avenging gunfighter who has come into town and is hunting down the bad guys. But it was, one of the reasons it was such a sensation, and it was a huge cultural sensation, is that it had the feeling of some kind of bubbling up of the collective unconscious about what was going on in America, not just in New York, but sort of everywhere, a sense of menace and things had jumped the rails and of course it was after the 1960s uh when you know crime in america went crazy in general and

there was all this crazy crime right there was like crimes in san francisco you know the the i'm getting the time out of joint here but you know bombings of army recruiting stations white people being hunted by black panthers on the streets of San Francisco just shot for being white Patty Hearst you know like

the Manson the Manson family girls shooting at Gerald Ford everything seemed to have gone bananas and there was just a general sense of menace. So that was Death Wish. That was New York City. It was obviously a melodrama and very extreme,

but there was some deep sense of accuracy to the emotions that it was engendering. And the difference between now and then is that the sense of menace was uh that you could get mugged at any time walk down a block somebody comes up to you and pulls a knife or pulls a gun and demands your wallet or if you're a kid another kid could push you down and grab your bus pass which was like a kind of free money thing or something like that and everybody got mugged i mean you didn't know a person who wasn't mugged at some point or other you didn't

kids every kid was mugged by another kid like it was it was a common experience later in the 1980s it would be that if you owned a car somebody would smash the window and take your radio that happened to everybody it was like that so um that was menacing and horrible, right? But it was explicable. It was economic crime. Somebody wants your money, they take your money. What is different about today and what's going on in New York and why it's so unnerving is that the crimes

that are consuming everybody and terrifying everybody are crimes of insanity, not economy, right? It is someone standing on a subway platform, somebody comes up to them and hits them 125 times with a hammer or pushes them on a subway track. Or kids are going into the station in Brooklyn to go to school. A guy comes in in an MTA vest. He drops a smoke bomb, and then he just starts openly firing on people. I'm sure we're going to find out his motives. His motives are hatred and black and white racial hatred and all of that. But clearly, insane, right?

This is insane. There's a lot of off-the-chain insanity. And in terms of homelessness and then the overlap between mental illness and homelessness, which City Hall and the health authorities in New York City are constantly telling us that our big problem of our homeless problem is a mental health crisis and vice versa. So it sounds like that is now, that was not the 70 well there was some of it right the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill started in new york city in like 1972 1973 and so what you saw if you lived where i lived there was a block away from my apartment building on 104th and broadway there was a single room occupancy hotel that then got filled with people who were being

discharged from mental institutions and you could tell when they stopped taking their meds uh you know they took their meds they're wondering if they didn't they started walking up and down the street screaming at the top of their lungs and one day in front of the supermarket on my corner there was a young hippie kid who got stabbed and he got stabbed and he was lying there we were all sort of standing around him waiting for the ambulance to come pick him up and he said i don't know why anybody would do this to me and the guy who had stabbed him was a schizophrenic like he wasn't he didn't stab him for no he stabbed him because he got messages in his head telling him to do that right so that was going on but the overwhelming feeling in new

york now is of um is of a city that has loosed the chains of civil society altogether and so the streetscape and the subways and stuff are being dominated by uh the emotional domination of these places is by uh people who want to destroy society or are elements of the destruction of society it's not ordinary people you know jamming the subway cars first of all it's the subway cars aren't that jammed which is one reason that things are bad the platforms aren't that jammed which is one of of the reasons that these experiences are so dominating. And it's scary in a different way. I mean, it just is.

Like, it's like... Well, you can't game it out. It's harder to game out because there truly is a randomness to it. Right. So when I was a kid, everybody learned how to walk around New York, okay? If you're on a long, dark street, if you had to walk down a long, dark street with a lot of doorways that didn't have doormen in them, you walked in the street.

You figured out you walked in the street. Because there weren't that many cars driving, it was a lot safer. But if it was, you would walk in the street. Or you would go to a block that you knew had a lot of doormen on it so that you weren't walking on a street that had a lot of doorways that were unoccupied that someone could jump out at you from or you know you you learn techniques to make yourself safer right there's no way to make yourself safer from somebody um who is in the middle of a schizophrenic break and and and there's

no defense against it in some fundamental way like i think we understand that and this is what the crime drop of the 1990s involving all these theories about broken windows arresting people for minor offenses because any people who committed minor offenses also commit major offenses and you can get the major offenses to stop even if you bust somebody for jumping a turnstile in the subway because chances are he's a violent criminal who's on probation for something else and he's already not obeying the laws and the rules and he should go away, right?

So he can go away. Then there's one less criminal on the street and then if you multiply that by 5,000, there are 5,000 fewer criminals on the street and that makes a real difference. In this case, you sort of get the sense that absent a gigantic change in policy toward the mentally ill there's nothing to be done i mean eric adams the new mayor of new

york understands that he needs to do something about what is going on here or the city is finished and he is finished politically so what was his first gesture his first gesture was to say we are going into the subway and we're going to clean the subway out of the mental ill. How he did it? He sent in social workers. I mean, he increased the number of cops from the NYPD into the transit police and did that. But basically, he had people going into subway stations,

going up to people and saying, can we take you to a shelter? Can we get you some medication? Can we this? Can we like? And you're not, you know know it's not like you're going up to somebody you know who's who's depressed and anxious and you know saying can i give you you know a xanax like you're talking to people who have already been in and out of these systems for 10 000 years and they're not whatever it's not so you get a sense that they don't know how to get a handle on it and the weird thing

about what happened in the crime drop in the 90s not that we're talking about the 70s is suddenly rudy giuliani and a bunch of other people said we got this i think we know how to handle this we're going to track we're going to use computerized data to track where crimes are and flood the zone so that the criminals go somewhere else and make this place safe. And then when they move somewhere else, we're going to go there. And then we're going to stop them there. And while we're stopping them, we're also going to stop people and fix them and take the guns that they would use for crimes. And we're going to arrest people for minor offenses.

And we are going to see who they are and then we're going to we're going to we're going to revoke their parole or we are going to bring them back to a judge and say this is the second or third crime they've committed send them away they are a danger to society and you know what in the space of a year a year and a half the crime rate in new york city dropped by 30 percent and over the course of giuliani's eight- mayoralty it dropped by 80 percent so it turned out somebody had a solution it took a long time it took 30 years for that solution when the crime dropped the crime surge began in 1964 it took 30 years for somebody to actually say I think we have a way that we can do because nobody thought that a crime was ever going to go away like it was a kind of it was like uh It was like having a low-level chronic condition, an illness that you just lived with, and that was American life with crime.

So living in New York in the 1970s was about managing low expectations. It was sort of like, the streets are dirty, no one's picking up the garbage. Walking in the middle of the street as a kid is a perfect metaphor i mean that that that that that that became normal yeah and it was it was just what you had to do so you let you lived you you lived with lower expectations i remember in the late 80s early 90s um richard thornburg was the attorney general of the United States and he resigned to run for governor of Pennsylvania. He lost.

So he started, this is like late 91, he started a new non-profit group and it was called something like the First Freedom Foundation. And I knew the guy who was his deputy and the question was what is the first freedom and he said well it's you know freedom from fear where our purpose here is to talk about you know crime like we're gonna lower crime again this is 91 this is just a couple of years away from the crime drop and i was like get out of town what are you talking about lower

crime like there was a there was a crack epidemic you know the crimes in in major cities peaked in 1993 like if you look at the numbers they got worse and worse and worse and then in the late 80s when the crack epidemic really broke open and not not only were there gang wars, but this was a, crack, of course, was a stimulant. And so it led people who were using it to act out violently. It was terrible. Like, the numbers were just gruesome, right?

And so the idea that you would actually, you know, like, decide you were going to do something to try to lower the crime numbers. It was like, where are you going? You're going to con people out of their money to give you donations so that you guys can have a nice office and get a job?

That's how pessimistic one felt about the possibility of doing something about this problem that had existed really from pretty much a couple of years after I was born until I was 30. I was born in 1961. The crime surge starts in 1964, and it basically ends in 1994. So the course of my entire life, from the time I was three till the time I was 33, I lived in a world in which violent crime and burglary and all that was kind of like a given.

So this was all against the backdrop of, at least from the mid-70s on, a national economic mess, which was inflation. So Jimmy Carter's elected in 1976. At the time of his inauguration, inflation was at 5.2 percent. By the time Reagan was elected in 1980, inflation had skyrocketed up to 14.6 percent. Now, we talk about these numbers, and we hear stories about lines at gas stations, but you've told me people don't fully appreciate how much the challenge and the incredible difficulty of living with constant rising prices for gasoline, for food, for everything, just permeated life. It permeated every conversation. It permeated every political debate.

It permeated popular culture. It permeated every political debate. It permeated popular culture. So talk about that. Okay. Johnny Carson, the host of the late night talk show that was... By the way, you're the first person on this podcast, when I've ever raised a question about inflation, the first two words to come out of their mouth was Johnny Carson. So here's why.

So, I don't know, 25 million mouth was Johnny Carson. So here's why. I don't know. 25 million people watch Johnny Carson every night at 11.30. And I think if you went back and you watched his monologues from 1974 to 1979, the monologues were probably seven or eight minutes long. And then there were little skits and things. I'm sure a minute and a half of it was dedicated to rising prices every night so in some fashion or other in other words we're talking about we talked

about inflation the way we talk about covid i mean in a funny way it was really that it was that well it wasn't it wasn't because again it wasn't because nobody thought there was anything you could do about it. So you mentioned Carter getting elected at 5.6 and then going up to 14. 5.2 going up to 14.6. Okay. But a year earlier, Gerald Ford, inflation was such an issue in the United States that Gerald Ford, the president in 1975, began an entire campaign that he called Whip Inflation Now, W-I-N, buttons. The White House produced 100 million buttons to send out to Americans so everyone could wear a button that said Whip Inflation Now.

Now, how is he supposed to do that? I don't know. I have no idea what they actually, I mean, they had various gimmicky policies in hand. You know, somebody said the point about the inflationary spiral, the economy was already in bad shape by 1973 when the Yom Kippur War started. It was already in bad shape. Their wage and price controls had been put on by Richard Nixon with very weird effect and all of that. And then you had this exogenous shock, which was the Yom Kippur War, and then the Saudis and OPEC instituted an oil embargo,

which instantly raised gas prices fivefold i if i have this these numbers right five fold so in my living memory i remember driving with my grandparents who lived in saint paul minnesota and my grandmother would bypass a station where the gas was 23.9 cents a gallon to go to a station four blocks away where the gas was 22.9 cents a gallon in order to save the extra penny on the gas right just think about that for a minute so what was she saving with a with a tank of a tank of 15 cents she was saving uh if she had to fill up for 15 gallons okay so that was where gas prices were in 1972 when i was there and And then in 1973, they were a dollar. Right.

Or something like that. They were five times what they had been. And that's before the revolution in Iran and when things also went up in the late 70s. Right. Well, that was the second oil embargo. Right. So there were two in the first oil embargo. And that was when this sense that everything had gone, I think, this general sense that everything was now out

of the hands, that the economic system and the political system was failing the ordinary person because prices were out of control and there was nothing really to be done about it. Some of it was exogenous, like I say. This was a power flexing by a newly potent bloc that was no longer afraid of the West and did not think that anybody would do anything to them if they held the West hostage and price gouged this way. And they were right, obviously. But did people have an explanation for it? I mean, now it's interesting. I'm struck by, like, the freewheeling nature with which people who spend no time thinking about economics, nor should they in an academic or policy level, use terms like supply chain.

You know, oh, yeah, pressure on our supply chains. I hear this all the time from, like, random people. You know, the labor market's really tight. You know, you hear people talk just – I mean, lay people who actually, to their credit, they really do understand something's wrong. Right. But because of their access to information, and I do think that the pandemic focused these debates,

so people actually do, I think people can really visualize how the pandemic and the shutdown of the economy, at least during the first year of the pandemic, really kind of broke a part of the economy, putting all these pressures on supply chains and whatnot and the labor market. So people can articulate it. Was it like that then,

or was it just something people learned to live with? Absolutely not. And that's the reason that I mentioned sort of Johnny Carson or like sitcoms of the 1970s where there were jokes every five minutes about, oh my God, I went to the supermarket again today and it was $20 more than it was last week.

Like, I don't know how I'm going to make ends meet. It wasn't, the understanding wasn't present. No one was wonkily trying to explain it. I mean, people were furious with the Arab oil states. And there was a real sense that we were being mistreated

by the Arab oil states and that a war was being declared on us by the Arab oil states. But it was just more like, man, things are not going right in this country. Right. But when you think about that, because then you describe what the urban situation was

like, and crime was like, and then prices are right. And people didn't have... You yourself said, yeah, good luck fixing crime. You just learned to live with it. I said that 15, 16, 17 years later. I know, but I'm sure that was the mindset even in the 70s. So what did people do? That's what I'm saying.

In New York, so you had various... So in New York, people went to Westchester, right? In America, there was nowhere to go to get away from inflation. Right. You know? I mean, you know, a supermarket, you know, if toilet paper goes up 20 cents a roll in California, it's going up 20 cents a roll in Texas.

It's not, you know, in that sense. So there was no escape from inflation, but I think there was a real sense of powerlessness. And you got a sense of powerlessness from the political system, right? Which again, throwed up these gimmicks or said, okay, so Nixon said, okay, I'm instituting wage and price controls. It's something that is so unthinkable to me now. I mean, the idea that an American president would unilaterally control the wages and prices of the entire American economy is now, you know,

Bernie Sanders wouldn't even attempt to do it. Like, it's bizarre. And one of the reasons that you wouldn't do it is that it didn't work, among other things. I mean, it had, or had or you know all it did was sort of freeze everything in place which was really not helpful because as we now know the only real solution to certain types of economic stagnation problems is growth and the last thing you're going to get is top-down government intervention is not going to cause growth in that way and so

I think there was just a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness and America was in a very bad mood and it was losing in Vietnam. It had these countries going to economic war with us. Crime was bad. We had a crooked president who was running a crooked scheme out of the white house uh then we had a sort of a you know a kind of stumble bum bumpkin and then we had this a stumble bum guy who no one even voted for ford and then and then we had this kind of oleaginous you know uh guy who said i'll never lie to you and then just you know didn't seem to know what he was doing either so that was america

in the 1970s okay so then let's go to july 15th 1979 for jimmy carter's famous malaise speech so he gives a speech and from the from the oval office he actually never used the word malaise right if i'm correct in this malaise was a word that had been used by Christopher Lash in his book that was the culture of, the camera with the name of it, I'm losing control of myself, but basically the idea that America was in malaise was the inspiration for the speech, the sociologist Christopher Lash. So it was a speech that was supposed to be, it was going to about national concerns the energy crisis reorganizing the government our nation's economy and issues of war and especially peace and then he he says in the speech it's jimmy carter 1979 it's clear

that the true problems of our nation are much deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages deeper even than inflation or recession. And then he goes on to say, we are confronted with a moral and spiritual crisis, a crisis of confidence strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.

Our people are losing faith. And he goes on and on and on. This in history has been regarded as like a political suicide note for Jimmy Carter, this speech. But at the time, it was actually well received. If you look at the news coverage immediately after, immediately after, he got a little bit of a pop, didn't he? Okay, but the entire destruction of the Carter presidency

was writ small in that speech. Because what did Ronald Reagan do when he ran for president against Carter? The ultimate, the meta-message of Reagan was, there's nothing wrong with you right he's to blame he he's going to you and saying your problem is you're in a spiritual crisis because you've lost your confidence and you're you're you're bad there's something bad wrong with you because you aren't you've been you you're you're you're sick you're sick in the soul this

country is sick in its soul and reagan basically said there's nothing wrong with this country that making me president can't fix yeah his his his critique was i quote here reagan i find no national malaise i find nothing wrong with the american people right the american people are fine it's the political class that failed them it is not that this was Carter's. The great horror of this speech in American politics is that Carter was saying, you failed me. I'm here.

I'm working every day for you. And you just don't have enough confidence in me. And you really need to look deep in your heart and wonder why it is that you're so sick and he got 40 of the vote uh in in november of 1980 having you know having won the presidency like this is no joke like basically american people looked at him and said screw screw you buddy you know he lost 40 states he got 40 of the vote the vote. And it was a very, it's important because, like I say, I think the American people felt powerless, and they felt as though all kinds of things had turned against them.

We'd lost the war. We were, and then getting into 1980, like we had hostages taken in Iran by a regime that was actively sponsoring people, you know, shouting death to America, hundreds of thousands of people shouting death to America. And we do nothing. We sit there and do nothing. The greatest national humiliation this country has ever known or ever experienced. And this guy is saying that they did it? That the guy, the person who suddenly is paying three times as much for gas

and has to stand on ration lines to get their gas because this country's reputation had sunk so badly and our ability to affect world events had gotten so awful that people were not scared of us sufficiently to make sure that uh they weren't going to keep the gas from flowing like that that that was that was the end result of the that was the sort of the culmination of this the disease of the 1970s was an epic failure of American elites. It was not the failure of the American people. The elites failed to run a justice system

that protected people. They failed to sort of win a war that they had started. They failed to protect the country abroad because then we got our people who worked for the US government in an embassy taken hostage with no consequences and all of that and it was their failure that reagan said you're fine you're just fine you're just you're you're the victim you are the victim of these people they are not the victim of you so in major cities you had the the crime and urban decay urban decay crisis and then

at the national level you had inflation and you are talking now about these foreign policy national security crises that that really hit like a peak in 1979 so let's go through them you mentioned the iranian hostage so the iranian hostage taking of the u.s embassy was in the end of 1979 so if you go to the beginning of 79 the pahlavi regime which had been in power which the u.s had been supporting was deposed that was february 11th of 79 and then by april i think they the iranian people had quote-unquote voted for quote-unquote voted for an islamic regime to come to power and then um by the end of the year uh uh khomeini i told khomeini was uh made supreme leader so that's that's just iran and obviously christmas christmas or sorry november of uh of 79 um the

hostage taking you're talking about the 52 hostages. So that's Iran, okay? Right. And then the end of the year, 1979, same year, Soviets invade Afghanistan. And the year before that, they had, the Soviets had been backing a secular pro-Soviet client, effectively client state government in Afghanistan, which was having a hard time secularizing its large Muslim population population afghanistan and there was obviously the mujahideen

uh repelling the soviet presence in afghanistan and so boom they sent in you know the brezhnev sends in what like a hundred thousand troops and it's a full-on invasion uh that went on for about 10 years now we ultimately know that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a total quagmire for the Soviets, and Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, is looked back on as having been sort of semi-senile when he made this decision, and he was talked into it by hawkish advisors

and comrades within the Politburo. But at the time, it didn't feel like it was a mess, right? It looked like everyone else was on the move, and the U.S. wasn't, right? So in 79, you have Pahlavi out of Iran, Khomeini and the Islamist revolutionaries taking over, the hostage-taking, the 52 hostages, the humiliation, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

It did feel... You got more. You've got the sandinistas taking over in nicaragua and then also at the end of the year the discovery though it turned out that it had been there for a lot longer than we knew of an actual soviet brigade and soviet missiles in cuba on on 90 miles off the shore of the united states so the soviet brigade and missiles in cuba not missiles but like not not not not nuclear missiles or something but sort of the an actual soviet standing brigade in cuba a soviet client state

on the american continent a soviet backed um uh um guerrilla force in el salvador on the march um and then a bunch of other things that weren't really about us or not about us but you know in england you had uh the winter of discontent where um a leftist so a leftist prime minister found himself you know the country it was reported had England dropped so far that its annual per capita income in Great Britain was lower than on the island of Puerto Rico. Strikes, four-day work weeks. The Prime Minister of Italy was assassinated by a terrorist gang, the Red Brigades. Aldo Moro was assassinated by the Red Brigades. And there was a lot of bad stuff going on domestically in the United States also.

Three Mile Island, there was a meltdown at a nuclear reactor. There was a terrible chemical spill on Love Island in upstate New York. It was like the wheels were coming off Western civilization. Oh, the boat people. A million and a half people coming out It was like the wheels were coming off Western civilization. Oh, the boat people.

A million and a half people coming out of fleeing re-education camps in Vietnam. And even into 1980, you had, I mean, Reagan wasn't elected until the end of 1980, obviously. So you had the Iran-Iraq war start in 1980. And I'm not sure exactly when it was, but you also had the Mar iran-iraq war start in 1980 and i'm not sure exactly when it was but you also had the mariel boat lift uh when 125 i believe the hundred 125 000 cubans were allowed to depart cuba on boats um and hit and hit the shores uh of the of the united states So there was just a general, the world just seemed to have been spun off its axis. And that was the culmination of this decade of horror. Okay, so now comparing that to now. Yeah, right.

So Carter's response to all of this was to, I mean, if you look at his major policy response, I mean, one was an operational response, which was Operation Eagle Claw in April of 1980, which was the operation to rescue the hostages, which obviously failed because one of the helicopters that was intended to evacuate the hostages malfunctioned or- Crashed. Well, crashed in the desert.

Yeah, right. So, and eight Americans, I think, were crashed in the desert yeah right so and eight americans i think were killed uh in the in the transport uh aircraft but his main response to both the afghan crisis and the iran crisis was sanctions right i mean that that was it right i mean if you go through well we didn't go to the olympics right we didn't go to the Olympics in 1980 in Moscow. He placed an embargo on shipments of commodities such as grain to the Soviet Union. He, you know,

the Carter administration suspended high-tech exports to the Soviet Union. And he also withdrew from the SALT II treaty. Withdrew it from consideration by the Senate. And with Iran as well, he imposed all sorts of sanctions. I think he froze something like $8 billion in Iranian assets,

and he imposed a trade embargo. So it was all economic squeeze, economic squeeze, economic squeeze. Now, you know, there are aspects of what the administration, the Biden administration, has done in response to the Ukraine crisis that are surprisingly positive and yet when you think about the lead-up to the russian invasion of ukraine the administration was saying they were going to threaten russia and putin with sanctions we're going to broadcast the intelligence we're learning to show them that we know what they're up to. And we will hope the subtotal of all of this will deter Putin.

And of course, you know, they didn't impose the sanctions, they threatened the sanctions, they imposed the sanctions after. So how would you compare, I mean, I don't want to oversimplify it, but how would you compare how biden is managing these global events and how carter to how carter did well i think the the ultimate comparison here is is is um more is is less directly policy and more um sort of the after effects of of national disgrace. By which I mean, the Soviets felt empowered after 1975 by our bug out from Saigon, by the helicopters lifting off the roof of the US Embassy, by the fact that the United States had sacrificed

58,000 people to this war that we then fled. The communists then took over and imposed a Stalinist regime that involved sending millions of people to re-education camps and hundreds of thousands to their death. And again, not only did we not do anything, but we stood by mutely,

including while many people who had worked with us and worked for us and been part of our effort had their lives destroyed and we did nothing and the soviets therefore felt like they had a much freer hand than than they had ever had before and that it's impossible to believe that a more active a more self-confident a more uh involved america in the world, that the Soviets would have thought that they were in a position to invade Afghanistan with no consequences,

or to push this effort to install friendly regimes way outside their near abroad, right? Angola, Nicaragua, South America, El Salvador. gondola nicaragua uh you know um uh south america uh el salvador like you know this was this was a very serious um uh set of of aggressions that had they been more more fearful of us and what we might have done to them they did not take on and i think that as as things accelerate in our in our much faster day uh you cannot understand the invasion of ukraine without understanding the meaning of the pullout from afghanistan that biden executed in august of 2021 you just can't like we bug out there are these incredibly similar images of the hysteria and the scenes at the airport. Hundreds of Americans are

still left in Afghanistan, you know, unable to get out. And Putin looked at this and looked at this longstanding ambition that he had to swallow up Ukraine and said, now's the time. This is my moment. What are they going to do? Biden says he wants everybody to come home. Biden said, I'm the president who ends wars. I don't start them. Well, I got a war to start, you know, and what's more, everybody else looks like pretty much like a paper tiger. So this event that seems to maybe be a hinge moment where the West kind of was slapped back into sanity or kind of bracedaced by reality by what what has happened

on the european continent um is a direct result of biden's own choices and biden's own behavior again i don't think it's america's behavior and then of course in terms of inflation what's interesting about the inflationary spiral in america is that it has a slightly different quality because the inflationary spiral in the united states in the 1970s was really triggered by the by the oil shocks the two oil shocks in 73 and in 79 i mean there was a lot of other stuff and a lot of other stuff happened and we screwed up our currency in various ways but the the inflation in the that is now gripping the united states seems so connected to the six trillion dollars in government printed money in 2020 and 2021 flooding the country after um you know after a decade of printing money

in order to protect us from the consequences of the financial meltdown 12, 13, 14 years ago, that we did this to ourselves. Right, way too much money chasing too few goods. And to your earlier point, until those in power wrestle with that reality right we just flooded the system with too much money it's almost like your your wage and price controls compare like it's like it's like you can come now they're talking about we're going to tax you know corporations need to reduce

their profits so they're making less money because that's a way to deal with inflation it's it that is like the wage and price controls, actually, a total distraction. And in comparison to Carter's Malay speech, which no one is foolish enough to ever repeat, I mean, that specific kind of experience is, the Biden White House saying things like, basically effectively saying, the American people don't know how good we gave it to them. Really. I mean, it's amazing. We created the child tax credit, gave the families all this money. They were lifted out of poverty. And where's our credit?

Our poll numbers at 40%. When they say things like, we need to tell our story better so that people will understand how they really should praise us instead of attacking us. That is the flip side of the idea that they don't know what they're talking about. They're the ones who are at fault because they don't recognize how wonderful we are. It's their crisis. Whereas for the first time in 40 years, people get a check two weeks after they get they have the same pay amount in their checking in you know in their pay stub right 350 dollars and three you know 787 dollars and 22 cents and uh that 787 dollars and 22 cents is worth just a little bit less than it was two weeks ago. And in a year, it's going to be worth 10% less.

Right? I mean, or month to month, the inflation rate, according to from February to March, inflation rose by 0.5%, by half a percent. So every single person, now half a percent is only you know okay so it's point it's half a penny right but then if you may if out of a thousand dollars half a penny is i don't know what that is 10 bucks like and it's not nothing i mean it's never nothing. And so their experience is, I'm making less money. Yeah. And my car costs more.

And, you know, the big ticket items. And my car is costing more. And I see I sort of want to buy another house, but I see now the mortgage interest rates are going up. No, no, it's this line that I've heard several Democrats critiquing the administration's approach, whether it was Paul Begala or the pollster Mark Melman separately have said

it's, the problem with the administration's approach is it's like going to a doctor when you're not feeling well. Like, you know, go to the doctor and say, like, my shoulder hurts, and I want to check it out. What can you, and the doctor says, no, your shoulder doesn't hurt. And you're like, no, no, no, my shoulder actually hurts. I'm here to get

you to, I'm here to get you to yeah i'm here to find out like and the doctor just keeps telling you no no your shoulder doesn't hurt your shoulder's doing great or you or you have the larry summers version of it which is you go to the doctor and you say my shoulder hurts i think what i need is surgery to fix my shoulder because i have a rotator cuff problem and if you fix it then i'll be better and the doctor says no i'm not going to do that here take some fentanyl and get addicted to it. Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to get you addicted to painkillers because then you won't feel it, but it's never going to get fixed.

But congratulations, now you're addicted to painkillers. So the country, 70% of the country thinks we're on the wrong track. The president's approval rating is 40% And they think They just have to tell their story better Carter's approval rating I think at it's worst in 79 Was 28%

And he finally marched back right To the high 30s low 40s I think as always his approval rating Matched his vote total On election day. Yeah. Right. Right.

But, you know, until the only debate between Carter and Reagan, which I think was nine days before the election, people didn't really know that Reagan was going to win. That was the odd part. It sort of all became clear, like, you know, when Reagan said, there you go again, or whatever it was, that something big was happening here but um if you you know as i recall and again i was i was 19 so i wasn't like involved in deep political analysis you know in washington i was out in chicago uh going going to college but um i it was not a it was not a, we didn't have the same kind of ridiculous amounts of polling then either.

There were like two polls. There was like Gallup and Harris, and that was it. Yeah, go ahead. But I'm just saying, people didn't know that Carter was going to lose that big. Right.

So I want to, how much people were tuned in to these crises, whether it was the foreign policy crises, whether it was the inflation crisis, the crime crisis? Like now, on the one hand, you're right. There's so much information. There's so much information.

And yet we have national, you know, attention deficit disorder. So we zero in on something. And then so it's usually about if the crisis is really bad and really galvanizing, it's three, four weeks if it's something especially captivating. So Ukraine, I thought, had that effect, right? Zelensky, and it captured everyone's attention. And then, I hate to say it, because it even happened on your podcast, Ukraine was quickly supplanted by Will Smith and Chris Rock. And

then we all became obsessed with Will Smith and Chris Rock. But was it? Because we're back. We're back to it. CBS poll says 75% of the country wants us to do more, right? I mean, that's what's interesting is, but this goes to, so that's Ukraine, but I mean, this goes to to inflation the national attention deficit disorder right that's a real thing and it's a real problem in terms of issues but where people don't have attention deficit disorder is over feelings feelings require no attention they're there they sit there in your soul so if what you're feeling is anxiety over inflation you're not going to get distracted from that. Every single time you go to the gas station

and gas costs more, that feeling floods back. Every time you go to the supermarket and you spend $6 more than you did last week on the same number of goods, or you start noticing that the box of cereal that you bought for the same price is 20% smaller smaller because that's

the other inflation game right is that people sell the same product sell less of the same less of the same product for the same amount of money um you feel it and there's no getting away from there's no narrative there's no distraction look-hey-squirrel game that can prevent you from feeling the insecurity and the anxiety that comes with a reduced income or increased prices or safety. Get back to the safety thing. There's nothing you can do. and say, you know what? In aggregate, New York, the number of subway crimes is actually down relative to where it was in April of 2016 when there were three events, blah, blah, blah. That doesn't mean anything to anybody.

Because if you're standing on a subway platform in New York and there's a homeless guy walking around screaming at the top of his lungs and he comes near you and you're not for a split second sure whether or not he's going to push you on the subway track because that's now happened 40 times in the last three months that's not going to go no no amount of rationalization information game playing with statistics is going to solve that problem what solves that problem is the feeling going away and the feeling goes away when solves that problem is the feeling going away, and the feeling

goes away when the macro problem is getting resolved, which is why inflation is the killer app of all policy killer apps. Okay. I want to just close on one. I know you have to run. You have a very important errand. I do. Relating to the family dog. Relating to the family dog, which trumps, as the scene in our home

is now the owner of two dogs. We got a second one, you know. Amazing. I totally get priorities. Okay, so I just want to close. You wrote a very provocative piece for Commentary Magazine that basically says this is,

not that you want it, not that you wish for it but this is vindication for neoconservatism this this in many respects the neoconservative policy movement was a response and political movement and moment was a response to the 70s and we are experiencing and you're sensing in the american public's mindset according to all the public polling, about Ukraine, that this is sort of the return of some kind of neocon moment, at least in global affairs. Can you spend a minute on that? Well, I would do both.

Both foreign affairs and crime, really. Maybe inflation less, though. So what I argue is that neoconservatism which has a reputation which has a bizarrely complex reputation was actually a relatively simple uh intellectual tendency both in foreign policy terms and in domestic policy terms foreign policy terms centering and circling in the 1970s around commentary magazine which was then edited by my father and the domestic concerns uh centering and and explored by the public interest which was edited by uh irving crystal and and nathan glazer and what they both had in

common was that they were explorations of where america was going wrong because in my view what brought these two tendencies together in wildly different ways was the failure of deterrence that in that that the exploration and foreign policy terms was that America had lost its deterrent power to deter without having to act to have strength and reach and force such that as I say the Soviets wouldn't have gone into Afghanistan because American power and the projection of American power and the projection of American power and the idea of American power was so potent that it would have retarded their ambitions and kept them from doing it in the first place. Similarly, in domestic affairs, you had moves in

criminal justice reform and moves in ideas about incarceration and policing that ended the idea that this was all being done to deter crime uh 9-11 policing a 911 policing which was the idea that you kept cops in cars until they had a crime to bust or to solve and then they went to it rather than prevented cops on the beat cops on street, who were there to interdict criminals before they committed crimes. To be present, to make it so that they wouldn't happen in the first place. And that brilliant thinking and brilliant liberal policy making and all kinds of progressive advances led people to believe that they could do without deterrence in pursuit of different aims

and different policy goals and that what the neoconservative vision was was a vision of a world in which deterrence was restored and when we think about where we are now with the Russians and in our foreign policy and in our domestic policy on crime, that is exactly what we need, is the return of the idea of deterrence, that we need to deter criminals from acting and we need to deter bad actors abroad from acting. authority, a belief in America's authority both at home and abroad. Public authority. This is why we gather in societies to protect ourselves from bad actors. That's why societies exist, to make sure that everybody can sort of go along to get along and get through their lives without untoward hindrance by people who want to steal from them or or take their land or take their property or something like that and that we have we there's been a weird disjunction between that central social responsibility both at home and abroad uh and and and the and the governing class of the united

states and that that's that's why this is a neoconservative moment because that i believe is what is the answer the solution to these problems is the restoration of deterrence in criminal justice policy and the restoration of deterrence abroad yeah almost like we need a broken windows policy at home and we also need it globally right i mean what are we going to have here i mean look in this sense ukraine is nominally it's not good news it's a horrible thing that's happening but the resistance and the fact that the soviets the russians excuse me couldn't roll over ukraine and do it you know and have been humiliated and all of that is a fantastic turn of events and should not be under you know should not be undersold or

or undervalued but you know i mean china is still sitting there china is way more powerful way stronger way more way more aff stronger, way more affluent, and way more determined than Russia in many ways. And they're still standing there looking over the sea at Taiwan. And the open question is, are we going to have the metal and show them that we as the only real preventative against them doing that, aside from the Taiwanese people and their resolute and stout resistance of the sort that I think they will have just as easily as the Ukrainians have it,

are we going to be there to make them think twice, three times, four times, five times, and say, you know what, it's not worth it. It's not worth it. All right, we will, five times, and say, you know what? It's not worth it. Right. It's not worth it. All right. We will leave it there, John. I know you've got to take care of business. I do.

Yes. Take care of dog business. All right. Thank you for doing this. We'll have you back, hopefully, to not talk about the depressing 70s and how they're echoing today. We'll find a happier topic. I think you wanted to talk about depressing topics.

Well, you know, that's me crushing morosity. That's the commentary brand. Here we are. Okay. All right. Take care. Thank you. Thanks, Dan.

That's our show for today. To follow Jon Podhortz's work, you can go to commentary.org or on Twitter at commentary. Of course, you can't find John himself on Twitter because he has taken himself off, but this is one of my public service announcements, one of many, to encourage John to get back on Twitter. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.