The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: The Kraken Is Never Coming

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

The first impeachment hearing was panned on both sides, while House Republicans keep promising a new unicorn. Plus, the GOP is not going to follow Trump's abortion pivot, Biden gets an assist from Cindy McCain, and charting the future of conservatism. David Frum joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod. show notes: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/jack-beatty/the-rascal-king/9780306810022/

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with the Michelin X-Ice Snow Tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadexperts dealer near you at TreadExperts.ca slash locations. 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. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is September 29th, 2023, and it feels as if all the stars are aligned, at least for the Republican Party. I mean, they've been going through some things. So they are fresh off that chaotic, pointless debate the other night. They appear

poised to renominate the defeated, twice impeached former president who faces 91 felony charges. We are barreling toward a government shutdown. And Republicans decided this week would be a good time to take some time off to roll out their first hearing on the impeachment of Joe Biden. And it didn't go well. MSNBC put together a little bit of a montage of the Democrats reacting. And before you go, well, of course, Democrats are going to say that. Just keep in mind that the reviews across the board were pretty bad. I think there was kind of a universal assumption that this was a real shit show, that this was a dumpster fire inside a clown car wrapped inside of a fiasco. But you

get a little flavor of the way that Democrats were reacting to James Comer's, I would say, underwhelming rollout hearings. So let's play that. All right, so let's get it straight. We're 62 hours away from shutting down the government of the United States of America, and Republicans are launching an impeachment drive based on a long debunked and discredited lie. What a day we are having here, isn't it? Right? I mean, listen, as a former director of emergency management, I know a disaster when I see one. I want to say thank you to Mr. Donald Trump for calling this hearing today. We see the long arm, but little hands, of Mr. Donald Trump,

whose fingerprints are all over this hearing and this sham impeachment. Donald Trump, impeachments. Oh, how many impeachments? We got two there. How many indictments? We got four. How many for Biden?

Zero, zero. Donald Trump is right. He's sick of winning. He's just winning, running away with it. And that's why we're here. They can't save Donald Trump. They can't take away the two impeachments and the four indictments, but they can try to put some numbers on the board for Joe Biden. But the problem is when you sling mud, you got to have mud. And they just don't have anything, Mr. Chairman. Honestly, if they would continue to say if or Hunter and we were playing a drinking game, I would be drunk by now. If the Republicans had a smoking gun or even a dripping water pistol, they would be presenting it today,

but they've got nothing on Joe Biden. Come on. If you all think there's so much evidence, we're here. Call the vote on impeachment. Impeach him right now. I dare you. Yeah, that's not likely. So to sort all of this out, our good friend David Frum, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy. So, David, what is your hot take on what Republicans were up to? I mean, my reaction there was the Republicans were not bringing their best. This was not their best. This is their best. No, I think that's the mistake. When you listen to the second day reaction among Republicans and the rage of people like

Kash Patel and Steve Bannon against this hearing, they're denouncing it as vociferously as the Democrats are. You see a pattern that is very similar to what happened when Donald Trump began alleging election fraud in 2020 and 2021, which is the non-insane people, the people who remain on earth, are too weak to say no. But they are not insane enough to indulge all the fantasies. So they start something procedural, they begin looking for holes, and then the more radical element get angry. And they say, we want you to unleash the Kraken. Remember that? That's what Sidney Powell said, unleash the Kraken. And the others are saying, there is no Kraken. It's imaginary. And the people believe in the Kraken

are crazy. No, no, we want the Kraken. We want the Kraken. And so it creates this kind of tension inside the Republican coalition where Comer would, I mean, okay, he's obviously no genius, but he's not a crackpot. But he understands the Kraken is an imaginary, but he has to understand he has to do a buildup. Any minute now, Kraken coming, you know, countdown to the arrival of the Kraken, get ready, big Kraken. But he knows there's no Kraken, and he knows the people who think there is are crazy people. Okay. But does it actually matter? Here's my cynical question. And because in terms of actually lining up evidence, it was embarrassing. They brought in Jonathan Turley, they brought in this forensic accountant, and they both testified that, no, there's not enough evidence. These were their star witnesses, that there was not enough evidence to go ahead with the impeachment. But isn't a lot of this just simply counter-programming,

David? I mean, isn't this basically, look, let's flood the zone. Let's at least have the news cycle talk as much about the alleged Biden crime family as they do about the 91 actual felony charges against Donald Trump. And to a certain extent, if you throw up enough smoke, if you get enough people with their nose pressed against the window waiting for the Kraken to arrive, haven't you achieved at least something, at least in terms of the politics of distraction? And what about it? Well, if your goal is to appeal to the hardest core people in America, then yes, this is a good way to raise money. It's a good way to make TV careers. Do I think it's powerful politics? No. If you were actually trying to compete to run the government

of the United States, and look, that's not the business that Matt Gaetz and Lauren Bobard are in, but if you imagine you were, here are some things you'd want to bring against the Biden administration. I'm writing a story right now on an important new report on the extraordinary educational deficits that were caused by the COVID lockdowns. Disastrous. Disastrous. And something that a Republican party could indeed pin on the Democrats, because Democratic states kept their schools closed longer than Republican states did. The deficits are bigger among the children in Democratic states. And of course, Democrats, because of their obligations to teachers unions, don't even acknowledge, they won't use the phrase learning loss. They talk about unfinished learning, not accepting that it's really gone and in danger of being gone forever.

And the things you'd have to do to overcome the learning deficits, cancel summer vacation, and focus schools on intense drill in reading and math to recover the basics. Those are things that democratic teachers unions don't want to do. So there's something you can talk about. Why was the Biden administration taken so by surprise in Afghanistan? There's something you could talk about. The border, that's a real thing. That's not imaginary. You could talk about that. And those would all be things that would frame a debate that would be useful for the country. And maybe you'd lose on those issues. But those would be real issues where voters need to make fundamental decisions and the two parties should be competing. So is this a win for the Republicans? No, because in the end, the Kraken is never going to arrive.

And there's 18 months till the day. And that's a lot of time for people to realize, as they did with the voter fraud, that there's no Kraken. There's just nothing. And you've wasted everybody's time. You've wasted your own time. And you haven't dealt with issues that are important to the voters. Okay. But they've made the calculation, haven't they, though, that at least their primary voters don't care about policy. They don't care about any of these issues. They want the Kraken. They're completely okay with the felonious, seditious former president who is threatening to give the death penalty to one of the nation's top, most decorated generals, that this is what they do. So, I mean, I'm trying to like connect all the dots this week. I mean, that debate was so substance free. It's sort of an indication of this is the non-Trumpian

wing of the party, and they're just throwing spaghetti up against the wall. The Republicans in Congress are just fighting with one another. Nobody knows what their end game is or what it's really about, but they're going to shut down the government because it's all performative. And, of course, you have Donald Trump extending his lead. So in terms of actually talking about government and public policy, they seem incredibly disconnected, don't they? Well, when you say they've made a calculation, if you zap a steer with a cattle prod, it will move in the opposite direction from the cattle prod. But it's not calculated. It's just reacting. And even if the steer had a plan, which the steer probably doesn't, the steer is not executing the plan. It's just getting away from the prod.

And I think that is the way to understand what Republicans are doing. There is no central committee. There is no one who's making decisions. And when they have failures, they reinforce failure. So the people who are writing big checks in the Republican Party say, what we want is a candidate who is an alternative to Donald Trump who will never criticize Donald Trump. And we have two or three of those now, and they're not working. So let's add a fourth in the form of Glenn Youngkin, maybe a fourth candidate who is different from Donald Trump, but won't criticize him. Maybe that will be the charm.

That's not a plan. The plan is always you have to consolidate, and then you have to attack. That may not work, but at least it might work. Whereas what you're doing now is guaranteed not to work. It's driven by fear. It's just the steer stepping away from the prod. So let's talk about this Youngkin buzz, which broke out this week and appears to be wish casting that there are members of the donor class who are waiting for the unicorn to come

over the hill and save them from Donald Trump. How seriously should we take this Youngkin talk? First of all, I mean, do you think that Glenn Youngkin actually is interested in this? I mean, would he actually do this? Would he throw himself into the volcano in order to save the Republican Party at this point? If you could give a standardized aptitude test for presidential qualities, Youngkin would probably outscore any of the people in the... It's not implausible. Yeah. He was a capable business executive. He's been a reasonably responsible governor of Virginia. He doesn't project a completely unattractive and offensive personality in the way that Ron DeSantis does. And he doesn't have a long record of cringing and cowering before Trump the way Nikki Haley does. So yeah, if somebody said,

you, David Frum, have the only ballot in America, choose a Republican nominee, you know what, I think, yeah, yeah. I like the look of this guy. And I think he'd make a fine president probably. But will he run? Will he actually pull the trigger knowing what happens to him?

He's a very wealthy man, so he doesn't need to act fast. And he's got a stable life and a lot of good options. So from his point of view, the smart play is write a book, Youngkin's Vision for America, and then after the likely Republican defeat, then start working the New Hampshire circuit and run in 2028. He's got time and just hope that Trump will go away. Like, why put yourself into this mess? And in a way, DeSantis can't say no to his donors, because that's not just his political future. It's also his backup retirement plan. He owes them everything. They will decide whether he goes on corporate boards. They will

decide whether he has an economic future. He has no marketable skills, whereas Young Kim can say no to his donors. He's got money in the bank. Before we move on to other things, your thoughts about that debate? Because I think the reviews were pretty uniform that this was one of the worst debates. The moderators were rolled over. There was a lot of yelling. It was a lot of screaming. It did feel like the kids' table debate.

It felt like a debate between the candidates who were vying for second place. Doesn't seem that it has changed anything in this race. I mean, I know it's lazy punditry to say that Donald Trump comes out the winner, but here's a guy who is 30 points ahead. He doesn't show up at the debates and they don't really lay a glove on him. So what was your take about, and also, what does it tell you about the state of the non-Trumpian Republican Party? I mean, for the people who are looking for, okay, that stage is filled with people who are the alternatives, who will pull us out and bring us past the era of Trump.

Yeah. Well, one of the questions, if I were advising somebody who's thinking about running for president, I would ask them, since you're probably going to lose, because only one person wins, and the odds are statistically, even if you get to be like one of the top 10 most likely people to be the Republican nominee, is that still, you know, one in 10 chance, you're probably going to lose. If it comes to that, how would you like to lose? You hope to win, you need a strategy to win, but you also need to think about the more likely option. So these people are going to be remembered as cringing weaklings, broken in advance, unworthy of the office. And that's what they convince you. And I get it, there was a survey released yesterday, I think by, I'm going to forget which Republican group did it, that there's

nothing you can say that doesn't make Republican voters like Trump more. Because like women in an abusive relationship who have not yet made the decision to leave, he's been beating you for 20 years. So you have to defend that or else you look like, well, why did you put up with it for 20 years? So you have to create the structure of rationalization. That said, I think there's one thing to do in a debate like this. This is the debate after the indictments. You stand up there and your first line should be, a lot of people are asking, why me and not Donald Trump? And the answer is because we have to face the very high likelihood that Donald Trump will be in prison on voting day.

Yeah. And I give you my word, I will not be in prison on voting day. And if you're not willing to confront the party with that reality, then why bother? Why bother? There are beautiful beaches, there are wonderful hiking trails, people have families, they have pets, interesting books to read, there's Netflix. I mean, there's just a lot of other things you can do if you're not going to do what it takes. And what it takes is to make a case. Yeah, I always wonder about this. And you don't want to say too much to a Republican audience that may be hopeless, but he really is in danger of going to prison and more than danger of going to prison republican voters like him even more that may make them like him even more but you paul ryan at an event of

your friend he was recently where he said that he won't convert suburban women that's a an argument to try in 2020 right but in 2023 off the face he's going to prison he's an argument to try in 2020. But in 2023, you have to face, he's going to prison. He's going to have to commute between the different prisons where he's wanted. He's going to be wanted in a federal prison in one state, in a federal prison in another state, and he's going to be wanted in a state prison, in another state prison. And by the way, his company is going to be dissolved. And that's probably going to trigger along the way more fraud charges in the state of New York. So they're going to have to have a fleet of buses to move around the different prisons he's going to be occupying. Will they have Wi-Fi at these prisons? Will he be able to deliver his

acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee via Zoom? Yes, yes, with an ankle bracelet on. With the ankle bracelet on, which you know that my theory is, is that he steps from behind the podium, pulls up his pants leg and says, you know, this is my ankle bracelet. I wear this as a badge of honor. I wear this for you. And the crowd goes nuts, just completely nuts. It may be that the Republican party has become a party so alienated from the institutions of American life. And so deaf to ordinary ethics and morality that being a proven criminal is a plus. But the Republican Party is a minority of America. And that part of the Republican Party is probably half of the Republican Party. And you're not going to win an election that way. And there's a book that's

worth, I'm going to recommend to people, which is a biography of Mayor Curley of Boston called The Rascal King. And Curley was a criminal upon criminal. He's active from, I think, the end of the 19th century through the 1930s. And he's the point of the spear where Massachusetts decisively swings. In the late 19th century, it's a Yankee-dominated state, and then there's a period of swing, and then it ends up being an Irish Catholic-dominated state. He's the point of the spear for that takeover. And so what he's always able to say to the Irish Catholics is, the Yankees want to put you in prison, as they did. They want to stop you from voting, as they

did. And so I represent you, and you have to overlook my stealing. And so it's a good model of how this can work. And you saw this in the period from the 1890s to the 1930s in the white South, where again, people who felt beaten down by a hostile state would often put their trust in people who were blatant criminals. And so Donald Trump is doing that. But if we're at a point where we have that many people who are alienated in American society, Donald Trump is only an expression of the problem. I don't believe that Americans are that alienated. And every day, we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebullwork.com and take a look around? Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days?

To claim this offer, go to thebullwork.com slash charlie. That's thebullwork.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together. I promise. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid

MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TradXpress.ca 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. If it isn't, and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. Okay, so this is what I wanted to talk to you about today because, you know, amidst a great deal of Democratic bedwetting and angst, you have written a piece that argues that not only is

Donald Trump not going to win next year, but that there's going to be a Biden landslide. Now, of course, since you wrote that, there's been a series of polls, some outliers, but generally, I would say consistently showing this to be a very, very close race that Donald Trump is very competitive. So make the anti-bed wedding case that, assuming that you still believe that Joe Biden is going to roll next year? Okay, so I just want to be clear that I don't mean that he's going to win in a landslide and that he's going to get 56% of the vote. I think he's going to get 51, 52. What I meant by a blow was I think it's going to be a down the ballot win. That is, it's not just, so Biden's

going to win 51, 47, something like that. But I think Democrats are going to do unexpectedly well in down ballot races and especially in state races. Okay, tell me more like that. But I think Democrats are going to do unexpectedly well in down ballot races and especially in state races. Okay. Tell me more about that. Well, first we have some real world experience, which is Biden has had bad poll numbers almost beginning at about month nine of his presidency. But despite those bad poll numbers, Democrats have consistently done well in elections in 21 and 22 and 23. And the election result that I pay the most attention to is their pickup of four state houses in the election of 22, which, as I understand it, the party of the president has not done anything like that since the 1930s.

What that tells me, I had thought when the abortion decision came down, overturning Roe versus Wade, I thought abortion would be an important issue in 24, but it would be too abstract to motivate people in 22. And I was completely wrong about that. As consumed as you and I and people that vote were carved by the threat to American democracy, lots of people pay a little less attention to the structure of American politics. What is happening is the Republicans want to police, surveil, and harass me and the women in my life. And if you're a woman, me personally. And I don't like that. I'm an American. I don't want to be policed and surveilled and bossed around and told I can't travel across state

lines if I'm pregnant. So the reaction to that, I think, is just enormous. And I think Republicans can't stay away from that, nor can they develop an answer. They keep saying, we need an answer to this question. And they can't do it because that, nor can they develop an answer. They keep saying we need an answer to this question, and they can't do it because they're too committed. And yet Donald Trump is pivoting on this issue. And you have Ron DeSantis and other Republicans who've gone along with a six-week ban with a lot of punitive legislation. Donald Trump is, isn't he, trying to pivot. And I wonder whether that's going to have an effect because Democrats have been assuming they're going to run on Dobbs and they're going to run against Republicans who are extreme. And I wonder whether that's going to have an effect because Democrats have been assuming they're going to run on Dobbs and they're going to run against

Republicans who are extreme. And here's Donald Trump going, okay, I am not one of these people. I am separating my, it was terrible. They did the six week ban. I'm now talking about a 15 week ban, which polls completely differently. So does that change the dynamics? Because clearly Donald Trump looked at the midterms and he said it was abortion that killed us and he's not going to make that mistake. So this is like a weird moment to say Donald Trump is now more centrist than many other Republicans on this particular issue. Does that make a difference? Well, this is why I emphasize the down, when I say blow it, I mean down the ticket. I don't mean huge win at the top of the ticket. I mean decisive results down the ticket. Trump will try to do that pivot and it may have some success for him, but he has so many other problems, including

prison. But Republicans running for state office are not going to be able to pivot. They won't want to pivot and they won't be able to, and they're deeply branded. One of the things that we see is the parties have deep brand identities that are very, very hard to change. You can't say magic words and convince people that, like on the inflation issue, people believe the Republicans are the less inflationary party, even when they have been doing things since 2017 that are more inflationary than what the Democrats are. Yeah, because people have just, they remember that Republicans are always more comfortable with contractionary policies than Democrats are. And that goes back half a century, longer, goes back to the gold standard. So it's hard for you to say, I'm going to spend the next

six months trying to change a century established brand identity. And you have just so much tape of so many Republicans saying, yes, I want to put women in prison if they buy abortion pills for their daughters. And indeed, right now, there are women in prison in Republican states for buying abortion pills for their daughters. So it's going to be hard to say that didn't happen because there's the woman in Nebraska who's in prison for buying an abortion pill for her daughter. The point you're making about brand, I think is really, really important. You know, so, so for example, you can have the Republican party, you know, supporting the January 6th rioters who attacked police and still claim to be the pro-police party. And people actually think they are. They think that they can block all the military promotions and still be able to pose as the pro-military party. These are very, very difficult

things to do. What did you make of Joe Biden's speech in Arizona yesterday? He went down and opened a library for John McCain and delivered one of his strongest denunciations of how dangerous and extreme Donald Trump is. And once again, laid out the threats to democracy. Now, I agree with you that I think that this is the most serious threat, the existential threat. I'm not sure that's the way most voters are thinking about it. Your reaction to Joe Biden's speech, which I actually thought was kind of a laying out the gauntlet, laying out the fact that, okay, I'm going to take this fight to Donald Trump and I'm going to hit him hard. Yeah. President Biden has given a version of that speech before. He gave it in Philadelphia just before the 22 election. That was the one where he had the red lighting that looked very

dramatic. That speech had the effect of poking Donald Trump into intervening in the 22 election. That speech was very powerful to the good Democratic results because the Republican strategy in 22 is, don't talk about Donald Trump. This is not a referendum on Donald Trump. This is a referendum on post-COVID price increase and the price of gasoline. And if it had been such,

Republicans would have done well or better. Instead, Biden said, let this be a referendum on Trump and Trump, who was supposed to keep silent, then it's damn right let this be a referendum on Trump. And Trump, who was supposed to keep silent, then it's damn right, it's a referendum on me. And if you vote Republican, you get me and more me. And that's one of my tells about what's going to happen in 24, when you remind people that this is not an opportunity to protest gas prices. This is a vote for Donald Trump. And when Donald Trump cooperates, and I think one of the things that Biden did in that Arizona speech, and that's a different point in the cycle, so it doesn't

have the same impact. But those pictures of Joe Biden with Cindy McCain, I mean, if your problem as a Republican is to convince people that Joe Biden is a dangerous radical, which is a pretty difficult project, but if that's your project, Joe Biden, Al Sharpton, same. That's your project. Joe Biden's images with the wife of John McCain and being applauded by the McCain family. And we're going to be in a situation in 24 where it's going to be like the last scene

of Richard III with all the different warring factions. I'll say, okay, you know, York, Lincoln, we all hate each other, but we're telling you this guy, he's the worst. So you're going to have the Robins and Bushes and the McCains symbolically saying, we don't mind Joe Biden. I mean, we don't love him. He's everybody's second choice, but he's running against everybody's last choice. No, this is a really interesting point. Virtually every Republican, every non-crazy Republican in

America wants 2024 to be a referendum on Joe Biden, right? Except Donald Trump wants to make it a referendum on him, which changes the dynamic. I have a confession to make. When Joe Biden is telling the story about how he was responsible for John McCain meeting Cindy McCain and getting married, you know, I'm thinking, oh man, this is Joe Biden. This is another corn pop story. And then Cindy McCain's asked about it and said, yeah, this is Joe Biden. This is another corn pop story. And then Cindy McCain's asked about it and said, yeah, that's absolutely true. Joe Biden introduced McCain, which is like, there's kind of a flashback to when politics was completely different, when these guys would have these personal relationships, when they were human. I mean, I'm old enough to even remember

when Lindsey Graham was asked about Joe Biden, and he says, he's the best person, he's the best human being ever. And of course, that was from the before times. It is a counter image, isn't it? I mean, it is a reminder of how long Joe Biden has been around. And that is, a lot of people find that unnerving. You know, you're talking about how I introduced somebody to his widow, someone who did not die tragically young, lived a long and full life, and he's gone and I'm still here. And I was a little bit older at the time, even than he was then.

I'm still older. There is that. But yes, it gets the humanness, but mostly it gets to the point, if you're trying to sell that this guy is some kind of Bolshevik radical, it's always been an implausible project. And the more he looks like this kind of rambly, grandfatherly figure, the harder it becomes to sell the idea that Joe Biden is going to be the man who achieves, you know, Afro-socialism in America. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's the cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, they are arguing that he's so senile that he's sitting drooling in the corner and he doesn't know what day it is and he can't put his own socks on. On the other hand, that he is this architect of the deep state that is going to destroy America and destroy the church as we know it. But you know, it is interesting. Now I'm going off on a digression how the conservative media

incorporated obviously thrives on outrage and anger and it needs a villain. It needs a cause all the time. And you've written about this very, very extensively. Do you have any thoughts about the last week? And I can't believe everything seems to have been happening in the last week. We have so many of the MAGA influencers who've decided, okay, who can we vilify? Who can we attack this week? And they've decided to go to war with Taylor Swift. I think it's another reminder that these guys are not real men of political genius, that they've decided that she's woke. And so go to war with one of the most popular figures in American culture. And at the

same time, go after her boyfriend, who is one of the most talented NFL stars. It's like there's another reminder that there's not like a brain trust that sits around with a whiteboard thinking, what is the smartest move that we can do this week? No, it tells you something else. And we're talking here not about Republicans. We're talking not exactly, but even MAGA. We're talking about this hyper online radical right world. And how much of that is driven by thwarted male sexual desire? All of it. That's their politics. And so of course, they hate Taylor Swift. She's never going to date Roger Kimball. It's just never going to happen.

I'm sort of surveying my demographic, which is one of the most vulnerable. Male over a certain age, over a certain income, and we are just completely vulnerable. And yet I see a certain number who don't succumb. And you think, what is the most powerful inoculating factor for people in my demographic? And the answer is personal happiness. You're happy in your life. You just don't resonate to this message. And the Taylor Swift thing makes it, you know, you can't get so angry about this if you have a girlfriend of your own. But if you don't, because Taylor Swift is this huge, because she's not just, she's a very talented musician, obviously, but she's also

joins that to being an object of sexual desire for so many people. And they can't have her, and they don't have anything, and they never will. And they're in a rage about it. Certainly describes many of the creators of this content, and it absolutely describes just about all of the consumers of this content. Well, it is an interesting paradox that you have this movement that is so invested in masculinity. You have Tucker Carlson talking about irradiating testicles and everything, and yet you also have at the same time all this manliness

with that sort of incel culture, right? That I really hate these women because, I don you know, all this manliness with that sort of incel culture, right? That I really hate these women because I don't know, they don't like manly men like me. And of course, most of them are not that manly men anyway. Most of them would not want to walk into a locker room and say to Travis Kelsey, the things that they're saying online, right? I mean, these keyboard warriors would not really want to be in a room with Travis Kelsey. One of my suggestions back in 2016 for the Hillary Clinton debate prep was that she should arrive on the stage with a vacuum sealed jar of pickles, hand it to Donald Trump and say, I bet you $100 you can't open this. I like that a lot.

Yeah, I propose that to some friends. They said that's a little... No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't think that one has expired yet either. Okay, so you were at the Atlantic Festival this week talking about the future of conservatism. Our good friend Tom Nichols was ill. I have not been able to read anything about it. So, you know, I'm asked this question all the time, and I find it very, very puzzling, because you have to define what you mean by conservatism. You have to define what the timeline is. What did you say? What was your takeaway from this conversation about the future of conservatism,

especially given this week when we're seeing what conservative candidates for president do, what the conservative voters or quote unquote conservative voters, what a conservative Congress is doing? Where are we going? I've been working on a book for the summer about this. It may take a bit of a while. And it's a very different book from anything I've

ever done before, because it tries to be a little more poetic and visionary rather than highly specific. But one of the things that when I'm with people who are my new readers, is I always have a caution, you know, there's going to come a time Donald Trump is gone. And I'm going to disappoint you, because you're going to find out what I think about all the issues that are not Donald Trump. And that the future of conservatism is we're still, you know, you know, we've been in this fight. And so, you know, the rain's coming from a certain direction. And that's the direction which your umbrella is pointed. Do I believe the government is efficient at allocating resources? I do not. Do I believe that the government should be driving the direction of

industrial policy? I do not. Do I sympathize with the criticisms of American history, even acknowledging many of their truths? I do not. I think they are focusing on things that matter less and ignoring things that matter more. Do I think that anyone who works hard at it can make a sufficient success of their life in the United States. I do. Do I think the constitutional scheme basically is sound and should be protected rather than radically changed? I do. I mean, not that there are no reforms, I would imagine, but you go through these things, you know, and even if I'm wrong about any of those particular things, the system needs me. They need me and people like me to be saying those things. I mean, it can't always be true that anytime anyone has some, you know, brainwave, that we used to have are debates that need to come back.

And Donald Trump has been, because he believes in nothing except protecting himself from the consequences of his own criminality, he has stopped discussions that we need to have. I mean, there is inflation. What's the right way to deal with that? I mean, I do believe if you want to stop inflation, the Republicans of old were right. You need contractionary policy. You don't, as Biden thinks you do, have government investment to create new production to catch up to the money supply. You control the money supply. And these are

conversations and debates and arguments and battles and votes that we all need to have. And I hope I'll live long enough to see them return. But in the meantime, we have this threat to all that we hold dear. And you have to you have to see that off before you can go back to politics as it should be. Right. Jonathan Rauch has explained this as the difference between a heart attack and cancer, that the attacks on liberalism from the left are serious and they're long term. But we're dealing with the heart attack right now. And, you know, there are people who push back against that, that analogy. And I think that that's going to be a fight that we're going to have as well. I mean, when Donald Trump leaves, obviously we

don't snap back, but the arguments that you're describing are, are debates that we've had for hundreds of years in Western society, actually globally, you know, between how much creative destruction do you want? How much change? What is the pace of change? What is worth conserving? What is not worth conserving? There are a lot of things that are not worth conserving, as we've learned. On the other hand, there are institutions and there are habits and prejudices that should not be lightly thrown away, that if you destroy these things because somebody, you know, in a seminar room has a quote-unquote better idea, well, maybe we ought to be skeptical about it. As you point out, maybe we

ought to try it in one of the laboratories of democracy, say in San Francisco or Burlington, Vermont, before we foisted on the rest of the country. And that is a back and forth, you know, yin and yang, that yes, you want to increase opportunity. On the other hand, do you want to destroy the expectations? I mean, you know, people live their lives with a certain expectation, a certain idea of fairness, a certain idea of what society is going to be. You can make it better, as liberals have been pointing out. On the other hand, you have to be careful what you burn down, because there are things that exist for a reason. And I do think that conservative instinct is important. And also, I think there is that tension between individual

freedom and the common good that is always going to be somewhat complex. And we need to have those debates. Somebody wants to walk down the street singing a song. Should that be legal? Yeah. Somebody wants to walk down the street shouting at the top of his lungs. Should that be okay? And you think, you know, okay, well, somewhere between the guy singing a song as he walks down the street, which, you know, maybe you don't like the tune, but you have live and let live. It's a complex society versus maniacs wandering around the street shouting. So somewhere along that line, you need to do something about the maniac shouting and not do something about the person singing a song. But we have to get from here to there. And we may need, and this is a thing that I specifically have to accept, and that's one of

the things I talk about in the book, is sometimes generations go off the scene and say, you know what, your generational task is done. You know, as we today, as you and I record, the country is marking the death of Dianne Feinstein. I'll say this with respect, but because it is the day of her death, it is true. Also a warning that there are times you have to accept that your time is up. And it's not literally on the day of your death that your time is up. Your time is up for that. And you have to move on and allow new people, new generations, because many of the things I've been talking about, some of them will be intelligible to people in their 20s and some not. And the more of the future belongs to them than belongs to me.

And you may say, you know, we have to have these new debates in new ways for the people who will have 50 more years on this earth, as opposed to those of us who have, you know, 10, 20, 30. I had a conversation with Will Salatin, I think, on the podcast earlier this week. And he was making this similar point that maybe at a certain point, you know, some of us get a little bit jaded, we get a little bit worn down, we become a little bit more pessimistic. And so when you see, you know, young people, you know, coming on board who have a more hopeful view, who are not willing to just give up, it is a reminder that these things do go in cycles. And another thing that I think that conservatism has understood in the past has been that, you know, there may be moments in which we run off the rails. There may be moments where you embrace fads or innovations or horrors, but they're not necessarily forever because human nature is what it is. And so I go back and forth between being a little bit horrified by the fragility of the world that we live in. On the other hand, you're looking at dead histories behind you. And I'm thinking of all the periods where you had decades of just

darkness that somehow we overcame, that somehow the power of these ideas were able to bring us out. This is a book written by Anne Moreau Lindbergh, and she published it just after the fall of France in 1940. When things were dark, yeah. She was an authentic fascist, but she wrote as someone who was sad. And she said, you know, democracy was good. No one loved it more than I did, but we just have to accept that it's over and that the wave of the future belongs to these new regimes, Nazism, fascism, even communism, even Soviet communism. That's the future and Americans have to adjust to it. And it's called The Wave of the Future, A Confession of Faith, and it's published in the summer or fall of 1940 and sold a lot of

copies. And the Americans of 1940 said, screw off. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. No. Everything in there is wrong. We're going to leave that wave of the future 18 inches high. And I keep it nearby, just remind, this is the way I ended my talk at the festival. When you get to a certain point in your own life, the future holds decline leading to extinction. And it's very natural to project that, your personal fate, onto the society around you. And that's why old people are so pessimistic or tend to be so pessimistic. Because who wants to face the possibility that after you quit the scene, that's when things get really good. Really cool. The sun's going to rise as soon as you

leave. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you have a problem. You're like a prophet Jonah. We throw you overboard and the storm ends. So I keep this at hand. In 1940, liberal democracy was the wave of the future, not fascism, and so it is now. You know, maybe we ought to have an anthology of these prophecies of doom. I think it would probably make for some interesting reading. I was recently rereading Whitaker Chambers' Witness, and he was deeply pessimistic. For people who are not familiar. He was a former Time magazine editor who had actually been a communist and then broke

with a communist, and he was the one who exposed Alger Hiss. But he constantly, you could tell the deep pessimism that he had, that he was going from the winning side to the losing side, because he, like Anne and Maura Limber, really did think that, you know, Soviet communism was on the march and was probably going to be the future. And so when he left them, he had this very dark view that the West would not be able to survive. And clearly he was also wrong, at least in the short term. I reread the other day again for this thing I'm working on. In the late 1950s, Hugh Trevor Roper, who was a liberal conservative, best known because he was the first scholar. He was a British intelligence officer during the war, and he was one of the very first scholars into the Hitler bunker in 1945.

And he wrote a book called Hitler, The Last Ten Days that was this, for a long time, the definitive study of the 10 days before Hitler's suicide. But he was a capital C conservative in British politics and was appointed to the House of Lords. The last years of his career, he had a bit of an academic scandal politics and was appointed to the House of Lords. The last years of his career, he had a bit of an academic scandal, so there's a blight on it. But he wrote this devastating review of Arnold Toynbee, who was a great pessimist of the 30s, 40s, 50s, and the jig was up. And he has a line in the essay. He said, when radicals of left or right say that the future belongs to them, it is only a very feeble conservative who says they are right and calls for the last sacraments. The conservative of character pops them on the nose and says, you're absolutely wrong. It does not belong to you.

And I think we need some of that attitude. And that's why I keep Anne Morrow Lindbergh at hand. That is great. And what a great note to end on. David Fromm, thank you so much for joining me on the Weekend Podcast. It is always great to talk with you. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. And thank you all for listening to this Weekend's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.