The Bulwark Podcast - Damon Linker: How Not to Fight Wokeness

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Even people who aren't racist and aren't anti-trans can get rubbed the wrong way by the heavy-handed puritanical approach of the woke movement. Plus, Nikki Haley's bromides from the Republican Party of 10 years ago. Damon Linker joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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charge. Take off the maskth, 2023. So happy Valentine's Day for those who observe. I have to admit, I've had this longstanding kind of cheesy tradition where I will go down to the local Walgreens. And I started off doing it as a gag, and then it became a thing where they used to sell these sort of stuffed bears that were singing bears. You press a button, and they sing. And the first couple of years, my wife was like, are you serious? And then after a while, I was like, where's the singing bear? Unfortunately, they no longer sell this.

So happy Valentine's Day. And the other piece of good news is that maybe this is the first day when I don't have to start talking about UFOs, because we're such a deeply serious country, aren't we, that we're having a debate about UFOs. Joining me on the podcast today, welcome back to Damon Linker, who writes Eyes on the Right on Substack, fantastic newsletter, author of the books The Theocons and The Religious Test, and also a regular on the Bulwark's Beg to Differ podcast with my colleague Mona Charon. So welcome back

on this podcast, Damon, although you're a familiar voice to Bulwark listeners. Well, thanks, Charlie. Great to be here. Yeah, we're not going to talk about UFOs. Do you mind that? No, no, that's fine. We can skip that. As I sort of joked on Twitter over the weekend, like, these aren't UFOs. These are just unidentified objects flying in the sky over the United States and Canada. And people kind of corrected me like, you idiot, that is a UFO. But of course, you know, everyone's joking these are extraterrestrials, when in fact, it's just merely, you know, technologically middling Chinese spyware

floating in the air above us. But I think it's another indication of how we are desperately in need of some sort of a distraction, right? I mean, you can just be distracted, you know, long enough by the Super Bowl and, hey, sorry about the Eagles and all of that. You know, we can have endless debates about Rihanna, whether she was lip-syncing, and then we've got to move on to UFOs as opposed to talking about anything that we've been talking about for the last six or seven years.

So we are a country deeply invested in finding something unserious to fight about. The strange thing about our media environment these days is that everything gets kind of flattened out into the same level. It doesn't matter what it is, if it's the latest mass shooting or the latest thing Trump or DeSantis says or the Chinese spy balloon or the Super Bowl or Rihanna, whatever it is, there's always one big thing that everybody is talking about, weighing in on, making jokes about, getting outraged about. And then the next day, it's usually just something else. And it just, whatever it is, it never sticks around that long. And nothing is kind of better or worse than everything else. Everything is like equally hilarious or terrible. It's a very odd thing. It can be numbing after a while. It is numbing, but that's one of our jobs, right? As professional nerds is to stand a

thwart all of this and every once in a while say, hey, by the way, everything is flat, but this actually is more important than that. This might actually have some long-term consequences. Exactly. Yeah. We use our judgment to try to say, actually, this is important, and that other thing really isn't important. It's trivia that really doesn't matter. And if we can't do that, then we're really failing at it, I think, because we need that guidance. You wrote a couple of very interesting pieces that I wanted to talk to you about, including a piece that anticipated something that I wanted to write, which is like, please do not call Donald Trump a dove. We can use a lot of different terms. Don't do that. Also, you write about Ron

DeSantis. And even though you are also a critic of wokeness, which we will try to define in a moment, you refuse to support DeSantis. This is something I want to get into as a deep dive. But since we are waking up this morning, I am reminded, Damon, that I am old enough to remember when Nikki Haley was the future of the Republican Party. Do you remember that? Do you remember those days? I do remember those days. And if Nikki Haley has her way, it is those days again. So let's play this. She put out an announcement video with a tweet saying, but be excited. We're all supposed to be excited now, I guess. Here's at least like a minute. It runs about three and a half minutes, but I figured we could just give the first minute

10 of her presidential announcement to Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador, former governor of South Carolina. The railroad tracks divided the town by race. I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Not black, not white. I was different. But my mom would always say, your job is not to focus on the differences, but the similarities.

And my parents reminded me and my siblings every day how blessed we were to live in America. Some look at our past as evidence that America's founding principles are bad. They say the promise of freedom is just made up. Some think our ideas are not just wrong but racist and evil. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have seen evil. In China they commit genocide. In Iran they murder their own people for challenging the government.

And when a woman tells you about watching soldiers throw her baby into a fire, it puts things in perspective. Even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America. I was born and raised in South Carolina. Yeah, okay, and then she goes on. We know it talks about her record there. Our colleague Sarah Longwell writes about this in The Bulwark today. On paper, Nikki Haley should be a top-tier contender in the 2024 Republican primary. She is a successful former governor from an important early primary state.

She has an impressive personal backstory, solid foreign policy chops, and great candidate skills too. This used to be an extremely attractive package for GOP primary voters, used to be, but not anymore. Instead, Haley's candidacy represents the best of the meh, middle tier of 2024 candidates, which for now includes the likely notional campaigns of Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Chris Christie. No one is really asking any of these guys to run, but they don't have anything better to do, so they'll eventually put exploratory committees together and take a joyride that may or may not make it to Iowa. In other words, Nikki's kind of the perfect candidate for 2015. So, Damon, what do you think about Nikki Haley and what this campaign represents?

I think Sarah, as usual, is quite right about that. And 2015 is pretty much the right year. I mean, the only other year I might want to put on the table for discussion is 2013, which is the year that the Republican National Committee had its notorious autopsy of the 2012 election loss. And as Bulwark listeners are probably well aware, Tim Miller's recent excellent book really talks about that autopsy quite a lot because he was involved in it. It, you know, rather famously suggested that the key for Republicans in the future is they have to be less racist. They have to be less beholden to the religious right. They have to appeal to non-white voters and be less scary to women. It was basically a recipe for what became the Jeb Bush campaign in 2016, even though he was a white man and obviously came from the Bush

family, so very much within the Republican establishment. That's why Sarah's quite right to point out that really you would think that Haley's perfect year to run would have been 2015 into 16, because that's when the party, at least at the establishment level, seemed eager for a candidate exactly like her. As her launch video explained, she came from the segregated South. You had whites on one side, blacks on the other, but she was neither. She was this multicultural South Asian child of immigrants and loves America for that reason. And she's going to kind of talk to us about how we can all get together and just love America for its ideals and fight tyranny abroad. This message is so incongruent with the Trumpian version of the party, which was the diametric opposite of what the autopsy said that the party

should do. I mean, you couldn't come up with a candidate in 2016 more opposed to what the autopsy advocated. He's like, Trump comes out and he's like, actually, we're going to talk about Mexican rapists. We're going to treat women like objects of desire that get discarded like garbage we're just going to promise to the religious right that we'll get more done for them than anyone else no matter how pious george w bush was we're going to do it better we're going to get those judges approved and overturn roe v wade which of course eventually happened and he ended up winning, but not by appealing to a kind of multicultural 21st century American electorate, but by activating the so-called hidden white vote in the upper Midwest. It was the diametric opposite. And here's Haley coming back. And

you didn't get to the part in the video that I actually think is by far the most amazing thing. She actually comes right out and points out that Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections. You realize not only does that completely discount and dismiss Trump's insistence that he, in fact, won in 2020, which, of course, is a complete fantasy. But it also portrays him as a loser for 2016 because he doesn't get a victory in that litany. Of course, it was George W. Bush in 2004 who actually won a majority of the popular vote and the only one in those eight elections. So there's nothing in that video about Trump. There's no image of him. There's no reference to any accomplishment of his administration or her role in it. We briefly see a little clip of her at the UN looking tough. And of course, she was the UN

ambassador under Trump. But there's nothing in that video to indicate that Trump was president, that she worked for him, that he was good, that we should continue what he did. It really is a throwback to like an alternative path that we never took in the country, which is what if in 2015, Haley ran and actually won with this more multicultural message? You know, I had to flashback to a picture from 2016 during the primary, and I think it was Nikki Haley standing next to Tim Scott, standing next to Marco Rubio, and you had this image of this alternative path of diversity. And of course, we know what happened. You know, it's interesting. Donald Trump has not taken any shots at her so far, seems to be completely okay with her candidacy. But to your point, that reference to the fact of losing the popular vote and then and she very specifically dumps on the 1619 Project. You have an image of that. You know, she has an image

of AOC and somebody from MSNBC and really leaning into that, bringing people together. I think your point that you had on Twitter is exactly right. This is a winning message for a general election, but it's a losing message for the Republican primaries. And not only does Tater whitewash Trump out of the picture, but it doesn't seem to acknowledge how fundamentally the Republican Party has changed and what Republican primary voters are looking for right now. And I think they'll like the general sort of patriotism, but it's certainly not the sort of nationalist red meat that they've become accustomed to over the last six, seven years, is it? No, not at all. I mean, the only thing that resonates at all with

Trump themes is she talks about securing the border in passing in a list of several things that need to be done. And other than that, the rest of it is just sort of, I don't know, again, like bromides from Republican campaigns roughly 10 years ago. And it's sort of like Mitt Romney style from that era. It's not even the 2012 primaries, which were famously back then called like the clown car primaries where you had Herman Cain and Michelle Bachman and others all kind of clamoring to win what we, yeah, Gingrich and Santorum, who actually did quite well and won many states, almost a dozen states. So, you know, that was kind of the pre-Trump vote, and we didn't know what it was yet, but that was exactly the kind of the electorate that Trump

eventually tapped into four years later, but there's none of that here. And so we have the standard problem that the party has faced ever since then, which is that, okay, we can come up with a Republican who we think can win in the general, but we have no path to actually getting that kind of a person nominated. And I just don't see it with Haley at all. I don't see it with her fellow South Carolinian, Tim Scott, either, although he's been kind of on a fundraising juggernaut of late. So clearly there are some people giving him money. Maybe he would do a little better. I'm not sure. I just don't think he's as much of a household name as even Haley, who isn't really, but at least she's been, you know, around for quite a while and pretty high profile jobs.

So you raise an interesting, you know, contrast because at least this video, and again, it's only the launch video, it doesn't necessarily represent, you know, what our campaign is going to be like, although it's a good indication, is this is designed for a general electorate, not a primary electorate. Ron DeSantis is running a very different campaign. Everything that Ron DeSantis is doing appears to be aimed at Republican primary voters, more specifically aimed at MAGA Republican voters. I mean, so she is casting a very wide net from the beginning. So far, DeSantis seems absolutely obsessed with not being flanked on the right by Donald Trump. So every single thing he does seems designed for the primary, not a general election.

And of course, it's premature to get into the discussion now, but I do wonder whether or not he will have boxed himself so far, you know, into the MAGA right that he'll find it difficult to pivot to a general election appeal. I mean, this is a guy who's not running to win back, you know, female voters from the Philadelphia suburbs or Detroit or Milwaukee, is he? I mean, he's pursuing the opposite strategy. Well, I do think that that is how it might end up playing out. I guess I disagree slightly in that I think he's doing a much better job than Trump could ever do of trying to kind of play both sides of that fence. I do think he does not, to my eyes, come off as quite as repulsive as Trump, and that makes a difference. Now, when he tries to outflank Trump on the right by going full

anti-vax, I think it's ridiculous. And there I think he's making a really big mistake. But for most of it, I think he's trying to, yes, there are lots of red meat to the right wing Republican base to assure that he's the Trump alternative in the primaries. But he also likes to do lots of photo shoots with him standing at a podium in his suit and tie and sounding kind of like boring but competent. And those are the seeds that I think he's laying down for what would be a pivot in the general election as, yeah, you know, I am in favor of these, you know, harder right positions, sort of like Trump, but I'm not as scary. I'm a politician. I know how to speak to the general electorate. And you can know that because I

went from winning the governor of my state in 2018 by 0.4% to up to almost 20% of the vote four years later. The people liked me. I'm not scary. I make life better for ordinary Americans. And that, I think, will be the core of his message, assuming he makes it to the general. Our elections are so close that it's not like DeSantis has to win like 10 extra points in the Philly suburbs in order to end up prevailing. He just needs to win a couple of percentage points back, just a little bit, a little bit less scary and repulsive than Donald Trump. And then he thinks he's golden, but we'll see. Okay, well, let's get into this because, and this is a little bit of heavy lifting,

because you did a very, very thoughtful piece about why you're not going to be voting for DeSantis, even though you consider yourself anti-woke. You're a critic of wokeness. You refuse to support DeSantis. In this post, you define the woke trend as an effort by left-wing activists to seize control of existing institutions, schools, private companies, government agencies, using workplace rules, the threat of public shaming to enforce these new moral norms. Before we get into the whole question of wokeness, anti-wokeness, and DeSantis, take a shot. I think there's a lot of confusion about this sometimes. So in your definition, what does it mean to be woke? I mean, you sort of, you know, paraphrased or quoted the way I tried to define it in a long, typically long convoluted sentence in my post. But, I mean, we've seen this for a long time.

In some ways, it goes back to the counterculture of the 1960s and the more kind of systematic critique of our system that came from the far left back then. It then reemerged in the late 80s and early 90s and what was called political correctness. And we saw that mainly on college campuses of the time. And then it went kind of dormant again by the late 90s and on past 9-11 through the Bush years, and then came surging back toward the end of the Obama administration in what is now called the woke movement, which I think has been traced pretty convincingly to something between like 2011, 2013, 14 is when you started to see it come back now, not just on campuses, but as if a new generation of students reared on social media, very kind of savvy about using technology to network online. And people who

came through universities and graduated around that time into that wired social media world started to try to apply those lessons that they picked up in college classrooms to their workplaces. So it's not like this began, I think, with upper management and then became imposed from the top. It's more that a whole new generation of entry-level people started doing things like organizing anti-racist workplace groups that then spread throughout workplaces. And when it started to gain the attention of the management level, those people sort of wanted to go along with it. Oh, what's to be opposed? Of course, I'm anti-racist. Yeah, it would be good for our brand if we come out as being anti-racist. And so they end up

endorsing the move. And then, of course, we had Trump and then it explodes because suddenly then like, oh, my God, the world's going crazy. It's more racist than we even dreamed. And then it, you know, then it's an overdrive. And that's where we are today, I think. Well, I mean, as you know, we're going to have listeners who are going, well, wait, I mean, I thought woke is the opposite of being asleep and that people suddenly became aware of injustice. They became aware of the reality of racism. They were shocked by incidents of police violence and began to think through what can we do to become a more just society? What's wrong with that? So when we say that there are anti-racist

movements and that they are embraced, I think there'll be a lot of people who will go like, hold on, I don't see what the problem is. I mean, shouldn't we be awake to injustice? What's the problem, Damon? The issue is that what we call wokeness is not really, and this goes to the point I'm sure we'll get to in a few minutes about DeSantis and why I can't support his attempt to take this stuff on. Wokeness is not really a political thing. It is a movement within civil society to use techniques that are extra political like shaming, like ostracism, like casting people out of social groups for holding the wrong views. And so in that way, it's very much a kind of outgrowth

of a kind of Puritan approach to things that like, you know, we, the right thinking moral people are going to take control of these institutions in civil society and police them in a more draconian way so that if you don't agree with us, we're going to make your life miserable. We're going to force you to sign declarations that just because you have a certain skin color, you're inevitably racist. and these kinds of things that, again, are not directly political. It's not like these are, again, edicts coming from Washington. They are an attempt to use social shaming to change people's moral attitudes. And even if someone like myself, who totally agrees that we should be nice and not racist and not anti-gay and not anti-trans and not be cruel, and we should provide protections

for all of these groups and all Americans, there is a way in which the attempt to enforce it through these social norms can feel oppressive and like a kind of heavy-handed puritanism that I think really rubs people the wrong way. Do you see it as part of illiberalism? I remember at one point I tweeted something out, you know, at its extremes, critical race theory can be illiberal. And Andrew Sullivan, who is not a fan at all anymore, not that he ever was, you know, fired back saying, no, critical race theory and all of these things are fundamentally illiberal. Do you agree with that? Well, I agree that the attempt to say not only that I personally think

it's wrong if you hold, say, the views of a lot of Trump voters about immigration and race. I think that's wrong, and I would argue against those kinds of people and try to explain to them why I think they're wrong. That's one thing. in my workplace who agree with me and try to set it up so that if you disagree with me, you either are going to quit because we're going to make your life so miserable for you, or you're going to have to kind of publicly repudiate your own convictions and affirm publicly that you're one of us. That's this kind of creepy thing that leads some people, I think, a little inaccurately to liken this to the cultural revolution in China, this notion of self-critique and going over the top and apologizing for my own

sins in public. That is creepy and illiberal. I think Andrew, who's a good friend of mine, I will only say I don't agree that all of this is somehow a kind of cultural Marxism and is inevitably incompatible with our form of government. I think it's more subtle than that. So I want to pivot to the Christopher Ruffo slash DeSantis critique in a moment. But where does DEI fit into this diversity equity, and inclusion? Because this has become also a flashpoint where you have a lot of corporations who have, you know, brought in these consultants and these experts and, you know, create new departments for diversity, equity, and inclusion. How does that fit into the new wokeness that people are reacting to?

Well, DEI programs are the kind of human resource arm of this movement, and they have insinuated themselves into a lot of private companies, certainly government jobs. It's a big part of them, universities. And I totally get why people, again, feel like this rubs them the wrong way. You know, I'm at my job, and then I'm summoned to come into a meeting that's run by a new employee who's kind of basically a human resources bureaucrat who's going to lecture to me about the importance of not being a racist, how I inevitably must be a racist because of my skin color and upbringing, and again, require a kind of public pronouncement on my part that I will work actively to make everything in the company and myself less racist. Now, again, in content, you would think, well, what's the objection to that? But this whole emphasis on, again, public affirming of certain views and always implied and actually enacted that you really have no choice but to go along with it because you will either be mocked and humiliated

and made to feel immoral, or you might even be fired and pushed out for refusing to go along. But then, of course, there's also the thing that also rankles people who are not progressives. They don't have to be like far right, but simply not progressives when they feel like what their workplace is telling them is that you sort of have to be affirmatively a progressive. And so diversity, as in diversity, equity, and inclusion, is defined in those narrow political terms. It doesn't mean diversity like, yeah, let's have conservatives in here. Let's have socialists in here. It means everyone must be a certain kind of progressive. And that, again, you know, makes people feel like as if the campus left wing ethic has kind of escaped the campus and,

you know, permeated the culture in such a way that it meets you everywhere, including even where you go to work and hope to make a living. So people, you know, get upset about it. And I understand why. So this has generated a huge backlash, which has been seized upon by politicians like Ron DeSantis and by ideological entrepreneurs and charlat newspaper or hears something about race that makes them feel uncomfortable, they should immediately think critical race theory. So as part of this pushback, it is the intention of making people feel uncomfortable about any discussion of race. So talk to me, this is where I think it becomes so complicated that you have very heavy handed, very sort of illiberal, you know, you must confess your sins type reeducation on the one hand. But on the other hand, you have demagogues who are saying that the backlash against CRT and diversity, equity, inclusion means that we should not have almost any kind of conversation that makes us uncomfortable about race. How do we navigate that particular moment?

In my view, and this goes to the heart of this issue about why I will not vote for Ron DeSantis for this issue. I mean, I won't vote for him anyway, but I have increasingly heard people who are critical of woke trends as I am saying, basically, we got to vote for DeSantis. He's the only hope to push back against this stuff. And I don't agree. I think we are dealing here largely with a cultural issue. And first of all, it might burn itself out kind of on its own, which often happens, as I explained, of an early version of this happened in the 60s. By the mid-70s, it had burned itself out. And then we had Reagan and a whole other era of our politics and culture. Then it came up with political correctness a decade or so after that, and then it sort of went underground and disappeared. Now it's back, and it's very

significant in its influence, but it is a cultural thing. And if we're going to fight back against it, I don't think this is the role of a governor of a state, let alone a president, to try to fix. What we need is courage by genuine liberals, and by that, I mean in distinction from progressives, and in the sense that you've meant when you've asked about illiberalism. Basically, if this kind of thing starts to happen within your workplace, and there's a kind of grassroots staff-based revolt against something like, don't publish this book, don't run that Dave Chappelle documentary or comedy routine because it's insulting, and fire this person, fire that person. What we need is the management to not just say, oh yes, of course, you are our enlightened juniors, you young people. You have more

finely honed moral sense than we do. We will do what you say. You actually say, no, actually, this company stands for a wide diversity of opinion. This country has a wide diversity of opinion in it, and we should reflect that here. And if you don't like it, you can always quit. If you aren't going to quit, you have to be willing to go along with this more open-minded, genuinely liberal outlook on these things. And that actually is exactly what Netflix did the last time there was a big upsurge of criticism about the latest Chappelle comedy special. there was another, as there had been in the past, a kind of outcry among staff members and some of it online. And Netflix, in effect, said, no, we're going to do this. And if you refuse to go along, then you can always leave and go

find another job. That is how you fight wokeness. And that was refreshing. Yeah. I mean, that's how it has to happen. We liberals, genuine liberals in institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR need to stand up and say, no, actually, we're not going to be browbeaten into doing this just because you think that that's the right path forward. We're the bosses. We decide what our company is going to do, and we're not going to be shamed into doing otherwise. So that's how you fight it. You don't vote for Ron DeSantis. You recently found yourself having to explain to people who were chewed up by this whole woke ideology why, as an anti-woke liberal, you would still vote for Joe

Biden. And you point out that there's a lot more at stake in the 2024 elections than woke issues. Does that mean, though, that you agree with DeSantis on the woke issue? Well, I agree with him that it's a problem. I don't agree with him that the way he goes about fighting it is going to be productive. I think it's just as likely, as I may have indicated earlier, there's a reason why wokeness reached a kind of frenzied peak during the Trump administration. If this was already percolating up around 2013, 14, 15, it exploded after Trump was elected because his kind of politics exists by being divisive, by throwing gasoline on these fires, and then trying to take political advantage

of the controversy that arises. Yeah, backlash to backlash to backlash. Exactly. That's the way this works. And that, by the way, is another way in which Haley's launch video is very much not a kind of Trump politics artifact, because she's talking about unity, bringing the country together. We're all Americans, which again, I like that message. That's the right message in my view. It tends to be the Democratic message these days, much more than the Republicans. But that's why I think DeSantis just kind of pushing on this issue constantly, curtailing civil liberties, saying teachers are forbidden to say certain things in

their classroom, banning books from those classrooms, and so forth. These acts are only going to give more fuel to the folks on the woke side, who will be like, look, we're going to become a fascist dictatorship if we don't fight back against this. And the next thing you know, you know, round and round we go through another cycle of mutual recrimination. It's just bad. And it will intensify. You know, I share this frustration as somebody that's written about political correctness for decades now to see Ron DeSantis and Christopher Ruffo parachute in. And their answer is to use the blunt force trauma of government bans to deal with all of this.

And it's like stepping back and going, okay, no, the critique against some of this was that they were violations of academic freedom, that they were fundamentally illiberal. And now you're coming in with fundamentally authoritarian attacks on academic freedom that are at root illiberal in order to fight them. This is just going to make everything so much worse. So as you point out, even if DeSantis would end up combating woke trends in a responsible way, which is far from clear, you don't trust him on all the other issues with much higher stakes for the country and the world. So let's talk about that because you're saying

that, okay, let's set aside wokeness. There is this issue, but there are so many more important salient issues in 2024. So let's break it down. What is at stake in 2024 and why you would not vote for DeSantis over Joe Biden? On one level, there's the fact that tens of millions of Americans rely on Social Security for their retirement. They rely on Medicare to pay their medical bills when they're elderly. Poor people rely on Medicaid in order to pay for their medical bills. It's our kind of tenuous social safety net that we have in this country. It's not what a lot of other countries have for health insurance, but it's what we make work for now. And we don't know where DeSantis comes down on all of this. Back when he was in the House, he was either with

Paul Ryan's efforts to privatize a lot of this and to cut back on benefits. But he also signed bills that were designed to go even further than Paul Ryan. So there's a real open question. Well, does DeSantis still agree with this? Is that really where he's coming from? Or is it instead that maybe he's changed his mind, but he's afraid that the Republican donors will stop giving him money if he admits that he's actually more in favor of being a Trump-style defend Social Security kind of guy? Because that's one way in which Trump was sort of more moderate than a lot of Republicans when he burst on the scene because he wanted to protect Social Security. So that's one thing that is a real issue that I worry about. I worry about DeSantis running for president on a platform on cultural issues, woke issues, and so forth, and then getting in. And the first thing he does is cite a bill with a Republican Congress designed to cut back on these fundamental benefits.

But then there's also foreign policy. You know, I was very much a critic of the war on terror. I definitely wasn't with the weekly standard, for instance, on a lot of the things that happened under Bush and even under Obama on those issues. But I think, you know, I'm an old cold warrior and our current environment is a lot more like that. And I think Biden has done a really splendid job in defending Ukraine against Russia's invasion, both in and of itself, but also in terms of its importance for signaling to China about our willingness to stand up and defend a country that's been invaded by a hostile neighbor. So I think Biden, you know, I have small criticisms here and there, but in general, I think he's done a very good and very responsible

job on foreign policy. And I don't have any idea what the Republican Party stands for in foreign policy at this point. You have, you know, the Trump transactionalists who kind of hop all over the place from country to country, depending on their individual calculation of not only whether they think a relationship with a given country will benefit the U.S., but even personally enrich Donald Trump seemed to be the main consideration for him. And then you have others who are more aggressive and hawkish about China, like Tom Cotton. And then you have DeSantis who believes what? I have no idea. We don't know. At some point, DeSantis is going to have to speak out about some of these issues. You know, I guess one of my main concerns about DeSantis is whether or not he actually will lead

or whether he's going to constantly be following the base, whether he's constantly going to be walking around saying, those are my people, I need to follow them. And I wonder whether or not as president, he would weaponize the federal government against his critics, not just in the media, but his critics in private industry or in academia by using government power against them. I mean, the story of what he's doing with Walt Disney, I mean, ought to send chills up the spines of every single free market conservative. The fact they're willing to go along with it is amazing that he's firing prosecutors who won't go along with him. You can imagine a President DeSantis weaponizing the federal

government in a way that Donald Trump might talk about, but probably doesn't have the competence or the skill to actually do. Yeah, that's certainly true. And that worries me as well. Although I would say that, you know, if there is, God forbid, a second Trump administration, I do not doubt that it will be more competent than the last time. There are a lot of people in the Trump world who are very aware that Trump accomplished far less than they hoped, and they have plans to run the show in a different way, a much more aggressive way, firing career civil servants up and down the federal bureaucracy and putting their own kind of hacks in positions all over the place so that edicts can come down from Trump's staff

to do things that they would never have done during the first Trump administration. And so while I certainly agree that the argument that DeSantis might be worse because he's more competent than Trump, you know, is a cogent claim. I worry that the second Trump administration itself would be less incompetent than the first one. I agree with you. I just want to pick up on something you said there because I think it is important to drive a stake through the heart of referring to Donald Trump as a dove or being dovish in any way whatsoever. As you point out, you know, implying that he's some kind of a peacenik in comparison with the hawkish warmongers on the other side is both misleading and dishonest. There is nothing dovish about Donald Trump.

And we really should make this clear before we get into the campaign. That word should never, ever, ever be applied to Donald Trump. Right, exactly. Now, the thing that Trump probably would not do is he's not going to send troops to a foreign country and station them there in order to try to husband the creation of a democracy there for years and years, because he doesn't believe in nation building. He doesn't believe in democracy promotion at all. So if that's what your main concern is, then maybe you like Donald Trump, but would he bomb Iran if someone whispered in his ear and persuaded him to do it for half an hour? Yeah, I don't see why he wouldn't do that. Could he invade Venezuela to oppose the

regime there? Sure, he could do that. Would he go to war with China over Taiwan? Probably not, but would he go to war with China over something else? Maybe, who knows? Would he use nukes? Would he use nukes? Yeah, fire and fury heading to Pyongyang. He says that, and then two days later, his best friend is Kim Jong-un. He's completely unpredictable. Everything is a result of a kind of impulsive reaction to anything going on around him, and at core is a kind of amoral transactionalism. He simply wants to do whatever will get him the best deal, the most money for his family, for Jared Kushner. If it's the Saudis, he'll help Israel if that will be helpful, but he'll attack Prime Minister Netanyahu if Netanyahu says something he doesn't like. There's no

coherence to it. There's no general moral conviction behind anything that he wants to do in the world. It's just sort of the Trump show with him kind of looking at the world and sizing everything up from scratch every morning. And it's unnerving and very dangerous to have the most powerful nation on the planet governed by someone with that kind of temperament. And he would empower Vladimir Putin. I mean, he would make sure that Putin had more time to crush Ukraine after cutting off USAID. So I mean, this is where I have the cognitive dissonance, thinking of somebody who is an apologist for the leading practitioner of aggression and genocide in the world today, to think of that as a dove. By the way, I just want to read something you wrote, because I think you put it very succinctly here. Donald Trump is not a dove, but he does believe in a vastly smaller America, one that is pulled back from serving as the ultimate guarantor of economic and geopolitical stability and security across much of the globe, including in Europe and East Asia. We need to be debating that between now and election day. I mean, the woke stuff is interesting, but we can survive that. I'm not sure we can survive

the shrinkage of the United States, you know, under the tutelage of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. You can have academic debates about the alliance system, whether it benefits the U.S. or not, and in what way, and in what parts of the world, and where should it be expanded, or maybe slowly pulled back in various regions. And, you know, Obama, you know, clearly wanted to pull out of the Middle East, which is one reason why he pushed, I think, ill-advisedly for the Iran deal. And we can talk about that. But Trump, his whole approach is that he would like us to, if not completely pull out of NATO, to be very much less involved in it. He wants us to not really risk any kind of altercation with China over Taiwan. And the fact is that an America that telegraphs to the world that Putin can take

his neighbor in one bite easily, that who praises and brags for himself about how if he were president, the war would be over in Ukraine in 24 hours. He doesn't mean that he's going to broker a fair peace. He means he's going to let Russia win as quickly as possible. A world in which America allows that to happen is a world in which America is vastly weaker than we are today. And that needs to be talked about. Donald Trump wants a weaker America. Take that line and stick it around his neck and see how he does in the election. Which also makes the world a much more dangerous place. Damon Linker writes Eyes on the Right on Substack, a must-read newsletter. You should subscribe if you don't. Eyes on the Right. He's the author of the books The Theocons and The Religious Test,

and of course, also a regular on The Bulwarks' Beg to Differ podcast with Mona Charon-Damon. It is so great to have you back on the podcast. We'll have to do this again soon. It was great to be here. Have me on anytime. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained.

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