The Dispatch Podcast - Liberal Elegy | Roundtable

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Reason Magazine editor-at-large Nick Gillespie joins Sarah, Steve, and Jonah to discuss whether conservatives (and libertarians) would be better off with a Trump or Kamala win in November. The Agenda: —If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose — Big —No small government parties —Trump and Harris’ “harmonic convergence” —To fight wokeness, vote Harris —The way forward for third parties —The need for a new consensus —Future of the two-party system Show Notes: —Yuval Levin on Advisory Opinions The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgir, and I've got Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. Sure. But we've got Nick Gillespie, the host of The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie and an editor at large at Reason. Nick. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Thank you. It's an honor and a privilege to be here. So last week, we talked about the intra-never-Trump fight going on. And basically the question was, if you believe that Donald Trump is unfit to hold the presidency,

what responsibility do you have from there? Do you have a responsibility to endorse Kamala Harris, to help her win, to do things? you know, affirmatively to ensure that Donald Trump doesn't win the presidency. I want to turn to the other question for this week, which is, if you're a conservative, what responsibilities do you have, or what are your best options as a conservative, given your two choices between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris? On the one hand, Jonathan Martin over at Politico wrote a piece that is certainly making the rounds

called, if Republicans want to win, they need Trump to lose. Big. I'll just read a few sections of this. The best possible outcome in November for the future of the Republican Party is for former President Donald Trump to lose and lose soundly. GOP leaders won't tell you that on the record. I just did. Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss, yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college, the less political oxygen he'll have to reprise his 2020 antics. Importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party. He goes on to describe how Harris is less a doctrinaire progressive than she is up for grabs on policy,

that it's almost surely going to be gridlock in Congress. And yet, argument on the other side is, first of all, I think, actually, that Jonathan Martin misstates his case. I think there's an argument that the best thing for conservatives is, for Donald Trump to lose for the reasons he's stating. But it's an odd argument to say it's the best thing for Republicans if they win the Senate and win the presidency that somehow this shows that they're not a nationally viable party? That's just an odd political argument to make if they win. However, for conservatives, the pushback would be, look, I take your point perhaps that

through losing you could usher in some new conservative revival and that the lessons that people will take is, oh, if only we'd had more conservative candidates, then we could have won the presidency. But it's just as likely the lesson that people will take is the election was stolen. We should double down on Trumpism since he won in 2016, and he's the last Republican president to win, Republican nominee to win. And in the meantime, Harris certainly won't be as conservative on any number of issues as Trump will be. You can complain about Trump's position on abortion, for instance, but it's still more conservative than Harris's. You can complain about maybe Trump won't appoint all of the Federalist Society judges that you want, but his judges will

certainly still be more conservative than a president Harris's. And in fact, we'll have Jonathan Martin on the podcast being interviewed by our own Jamie Weinstein coming up on Monday. But Nick, let me turn the question to you. Are conservatives better off in the short term because Trump will be more conservative than Harris? Or are they better off playing the long game and hoping that if Harris wins by some impressive margin, that it will bring back a conservative revival? Well, I can tell you it's going to be very interesting watching this from Canada. I've already booked my travel lodge there for an extended stay. The extended stay Americas are called extended say Canada up north, but no, I actually think that Jonathan Martin, I don't know what his

game is and pushing this kind of argument, but it strikes me as fundamentally stupid. Or, you know, maybe there's an AA thing working there. It's like, you know, the Republican Party just really has to bottom out before it can, you know, start to, you know, acknowledge it has a problem. And it's like we are, you know, you've already, you know, you've already had Trump win and run the presidency, you know, and you've had him lose, like nothing is going to change. You know, there isn't going to be a light bulb that goes on. There was the autopsy after Mitt Romney's disaster, right, where he, you know, almost not quite as bad as Hillary Clinton, but like really missed a layup from, you know, being held up by somebody held up right next to the basket.

So I think if the Republican Party and if the conservatives within the Republican Party, and I would love to reawaken those sleeping dormant geniuses, the libertarians in the Republican Party, like the time to change is now. It's not to wait for something bad to happen and then say, okay, now this time, you know, we've really bottomed out. I just don't think it makes any sense whatsoever. The larger question for the Republican Party, and I think broadly speaking, the conservative movement, particularly, particularly the post-Trump or the non-Trump conservative movement, whether it's anti-Trump or really anti-Trump, has to be what are the core things that they stand for and how do you express that through federal policy? And, you know, the confusion here is bigger than Donald Trump. You have people, you have grown adults. You know, Lindsey Graham has been in office. I mean, I think you're the only person to refer to Lindsay Graham as a grown adult, but okay. Yes, that's right. Or as a person. You know, he's achieved legal personhood.

But, you know, he, I mean, like, what does he stand for? The Republican Party, at least from the Barry Goldwater moment, where they got completely shellacked. They were handed absolutely the worst drubbing in, you know, presidential history pretty much up until that point. And they weren't like, okay, now what we really need to do is completely change course. They recognized that as the beginning of a shift that elected Ronald Reagan in, you know, only a few a dozen years later, the Republican Party and the conservative movement within the

Republican Party, and I think they could actually generate some interest from libertarians if they go back to something like, we are a party of individualism, we are a party of limited government, we are a party of rules, not of men. We believe in, you know, quaint things like free trade, immigration, individual lifestyle tolerance to the greatest, every possible, you know, that, that is what the Republican Party and conservatives need to do. It's ridiculous to we, like, as long as we hold the Senate and the House, but not the White House, blah, blah, blah, that's, you know, that's therapy speak for somebody who can't quite deal with the fact that they are not, you know, they're in the middle of a car crash that is happening.

And you've got to figure out what, you know, how do you get to the hospital? Is this sort of how libertarians have been for the last forever, right? that, like, maybe you have slightly more to gain with one party, but you're not really home at any party. Like, are conservatives and libertarians in the same boat now in a way that conservatives sort of thought they were part and parcel of the Republican Party? And now maybe they're more out in the wilderness. If conservatives, because I don't know what is left, if conservatives leave the Republican Party, what are the Trumpists, you know, exactly? I don't know. I would say, you know, libertarians sociologically and certainly in the post-war, and really even in the

kind of post, you know, early 70s when the libertarian movement has been around forever, of course, as the purest, most beautiful thing in all of God's creation, even if we don't really believe in God, and it has been corrupted by people like liberals and conservatives. But the libertarian, you know, post-war libertarians always rolled most. not exclusively, but mostly with the Republican Party, and you see that in people like Milton Friedman most fully, you could, you know, that can still happen. But they're over, certainly over the past dozen years or 10 years, you know, basically since Trump, not only have conservatives become less understandable and less focus, but the Republican Party more broadly. And as a result, I, you know, I would, love to know what the Republican Party really stands for. I would love to know what the Democratic Party stands for. I'm a small L. Libertarian. I almost always vote for the Libertarian Party candidate. I plan to this year. But, you know, if either of those parties actually said, you know,

here are, you know, here are our five top policy priorities and principles, and I'm good with three of them. I'm voting for either of those. And there was a time when that could have been the Republican Party, but not now. Jonah, attack Nick. Sure. So, it's funny. Like, I was going to make this point about how conservatives are becoming more like libertarians of your insofar as, and I'm jealous of the libertarians of your, because they've gone accustomed to not having nice things. Like, they just simply understand that neither party is going to be their friend. They're not necessarily going to be their enemy, but they're really, when push comes to shove, if someone isn't going to be included in the party bus to Vegas, it's going to be the Libertarians. And they've made peace with it.

So they take their victories where they can. They make their arguments where they can. What's the, was it, who was the Marine Chesty Fuller, whatever, who said? Puller. When he was surrounded, that's how he likes it, because that way he can shoot in every direction. that's sort of where a lot of libertarians have been, at least the branch of libertarianism that I am closest to, right? The sort of the reasoning crowd, the Cato crowd, not necessarily the libertarian party crowd

because, you know, I don't have that much need to buy gold ingots or thumb drives of Bitcoin or... But you want to be able to draw your own food, though, right? That's right. That'll last for years. Gems. Anyway, so, and so I, and then all of a sudden, Nick's sounding sort of like high in the sky, the political system will, can be responsive to libertarians.

If we only just, if we all do our best and try our hardest, we can make this the best yearbook ever. And I want, uh, I want Nick to go back to the crumudgeon, uh, sort of quietism of which is that you can't have nice things and probably conservatives can't for a while either and the concern for me is no one thinks that what the republic like i'll put it this way there is a ongoing debate nick knows about it better than i do in libertarian world about whether or not the libertarian party gives libertarianism a bad name is that a debate there was a debate for sure there is a debate he doesn't like to talk about it in public this is one of these things

They keep quiet behind their Irish lace curtains and talk about the family. But it's true. And I have these black eyes because I fell down the stairs. Don't make the fall down the stairs joke. I literally fell down the stairs two nights ago and have the bruises and broken toe to prove it. Yeah, we're supposed to believe that. All right. So what I worry about, though, is like the stakes of libertarianism being poorly

understood aren't that profound politically. When you say, what will the GOP be if real conservatives leave it, it'll be the conservative party. And what defines conservatism in this country for a normal American will be whatever the Republican Party does, not what National Review says, not what, you know, the American Enterprise Institute says, it will be defined by the actions of Donald Trump and the Republican Party for the near future. And I mean, to this day, every 20 minutes, someone asks me, when am I going to be a conservative again? And the only way that question makes any sense is if you interpret it as, when are you going to support Donald Trump and the GOP? Because they can't point to any position where I've really changed profoundly or certainly

not heretically on conservative philosophy or conservative policy stuff. It is the working definition for talk radio, for online people, for Twitter, for social media. for most of the institutions is whatever the GOP stands for today because the GOP is supposed to be synonymous with conservatism and the Democratic Party is supposed to be synonymous with progressivism. And I think that is a profound danger for the country if reasonable conservatism is seen as sort of extinct and the working definition of it is a sort of stateist populist nationalism. Okay. So Steve, I know where, at least I think I know, where you fall on this debate in terms of what conservative should do in this election

that supporting Donald Trump, even though he's more conservative than Harris, or will do things that are more conservative than a president Harris, doesn't justify, like, that won't save the conservative movement or anything like that. But the premise is still true. Donald Trump will do more conservative things than Harris. So, Defend yourself. Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, I suppose that's true. A lot of it depends on how we're defining conservative these days.

But, you know, I've been making an argument for a long, long time that there are, there's no small government party in major party in the United States anymore. Effectively, what you have is two parties that are basically making, you know, different versions of sort of pro-statist cases. It was the case for a while that Republicans were much more, sort of as an institution, dedicated to reducing the size and scope of government, or at least rhetorically, talked about reducing the size and scope of government. And I think that lasted through the end of the Tea Party. And then Donald Trump came around. And, you know, he didn't really make, you know, he talked about being conservative.

I mean, he, I think, pretended in certain ways to be conservative because he thought that would get him the Republican nomination. But remember, it was all the way back in the 2016 context that Rush Limba, who for, you know, a long time had been regarded as sort of the most influential conservative or one of the most influential conservatives in the country began talking about how he really was a nationalist more than he was a conservative. And, you know, he was a pragmatist. And he had that one long rant, sort of redefining what he was all about. out. I mean, National Review had put Rush Limbaugh on the cover saying he was the, you know, the father of modern conservatism. I mean, Jonah, I won't get that exactly right, but something to that. I think it was the voice of the opposition or something like that. We're so far from that over the past decade. Our Nick had a really terrific piece newsletter last week. Let me see what the title

was. He called it harmonic convergence. And he talked about the ever-blurring policy differences between Republicans and Democrats broadly and between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump specifically. And it was brilliant. I mean, the opening was, I thought, was brilliant. You know, he talked about Donald Trump now being the abortion warrior, Kamala Harris being the border hawk. I was in Wisconsin for the past couple weeks.

And you can't turn on a television without seeing this Kamala Harris ad in which she really does pretend that she is tough on the border. I mean, she's now in favor of the border wall. what she once said was, you know, against American, all-American values. But to the point, Steve, which candidate will be more into border security, Trump or Harris? You got to say Trump probably will. And which candidate is going to be more in favor of more restrictive abortion policy? It's got to be Trump.

Like, so, yes, the two seem to be running to the center rhetorically on every major issue. but if you're a conservative and actually want to see the more conservative candidate win, that's still got to be Donald Trump, right? Yeah, I mean, I guess, and this goes to take us full circle back to John O'Norton's piece. I mean, this is sort of the difference in how we're looking at this. On the one hand, those are short-term calculations, right? I mean, okay, do you support Donald Trump because he might be marginally more conservative on the following five issues than Kamala Harris says, sure, maybe.

I mean, I think that's how a lot of people are going to go into the, the election make decisions. And, you know, there are other people, and I've said this before, who are going to look at what Kamala Harris wants to do, for instance, with the regulatory state, and look at it in the context of their own small business and say, I can't be for that. Like, period, I can't be for that. It would ruin my business if I vote for that, so I'm going to vote for Donald Trump. But I think Jonathan's piece, which I thought was actually a very good piece, taking this longer

view, he was channeling Republicans that he's talking about. And Lord knows we've talked about this same group a lot on this podcast. These are the Republicans who will tell you privately, man, Trump has to lose, Trump has to go, this is terrible for the Republican Party, it's bad for the country, and then they'll go out and support him and give speeches on his behalf. He's talking to those people. And I think what he's doing is saying, in effect, they believe these people were out, you know, in some cases touting Donald Trump on the campaign trail, believe that the long-term health of

the Republican Party. And by here, I think you're right. We can substitute in sort of old school traditional conservatism. It's better that he lose so that you can recreate these distinctions or some bigger distinctions between the two parties on these issues of size and scope of government. But I don't think there is any real difference. And this is maybe where a libertarian perspective is helpful, you know, those long-term issues. I mean, that is stuff like entitlement spending. And the Republican Party under conservative leadership as well as whatever Trump is or whatever you want to call him, they're like, we are not touching entitlement spending. We are protecting that no matter what. I mean, that wasn't

the case though. Like through from 2011 through 2015, Republicans included in their budget year over year pretty significant entitlement reform driven by Paul Ryan. I give them credit. I, we, We can relitigate that. Anything that Paul Ryan wanted to do about all of that stuff would happen, you know, post-2050 and things like that. There was never a philosophical discussion front and center to say, you know what, entitlement spending is unsustainable and unsustainable and actually unethical and we need to change how we help people in their old age or people below the poverty line to get health care and basic living and things like that. I think that was a, you know, just kind of. time-bying move. In any case, I agree with you, broadly speaking, that the Republican Party rhetorically was different before and after Trump. But I think a big part of the problem, and this is what needs to really be faced, is that the Republican Party under George W. Bush, who left office as the least popular president, you know, up until that point in history with

modern polling, he absolutely, I wrote, you know, when he left office, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, Bush destroyed belief in, you know, that the Republicans believed in limited government and faith in government. That's the problem. This is not just a rhetorical issue. You've had in the 21st century Republican conservative presidents who grew the size scope and spending of government while they were saying they weren't. And they hollowed out all kinds of trust and confidence in the government's ability to do anything, which in a short-sighted vision, I kind of, I like that because I, for many, many years, this is the biggest shift in my ideological kind of makeup is I thought if we could show people that government wasn't very good at doing things, that would be the precursor to really change in the way we fund government, the way we conceive of it. It doesn't do that. It just creates a low trust society where people try to use the government as an ATM to get exactly what they want.

And I think it's that reboot within the conservative movement, which would make it more libertarian. in broad framework, not in specific issues, to say, you know what, we recognize that we need a fundamentally different approach to politics that emanates from the idea that the government should be limited and it should be doing fewer things, but it should be doing those competently. I don't think waiting until Donald Trump is safely buried and Barron Bond is, you know, getting a graduate degree and, you know, at Oberlin or something like that, waiting for that is it's not going to change anything. The problem with the conservative movement in the Republican Party,

is right now. And if people are saying to Jonathan, like, oh, God, I really hope Trump loses and then going out on something, you got to get rid of those people. They're not going to be good in four years when they think they can win. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, Lisa 2026 X-E-90 plug-in hybrid from $599 bi-weekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com.

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Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Okay. So I want to give another version of this argument. This comes from Jeff Maurer who writes the I Might Be Wrong newsletter.

He's a former writer on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. I think he's hilarious and I love his stuff. He wrote, to fight wokeness, vote Harris. The left's worst ideas flourish under Trump. And I'll just read a little bit of this. I'm voting for Harris, but I definitely understand why people are annoyed by wokeness. Even a liberal like me finds wokeness grading.

I feel that the only sane reaction to moments of peak wokeness, like the time gushers solemnly condemned racism or the time Elmo's dad expounded on the importance of protest is to think, what the hell is this crap? Wokeness might actually be worse for normie liberals because we tend to hang out in highly progressive spaces. In practical terms, a rancher deep in maga country is about as affected by wokeness as he is by Komodo dragon attacks.

But liberals often work in jobs where we have to wonder about how many letters we need to add after LGBT in order to avoid an afternoon in the HR gulag. And he goes on to talk about that in some ways, Trump forced liberals to accept the worst excesses of their own side because otherwise you weren't fighting Trump, right? Trump is a worse threat than what's ever happening in our own team. So we must face outward to that threat rather than focus inward on our own failings or excesses. and he gives many, many examples from his own personal experiences of writing on last week tonight during the Me Too movement.

These are the types of decisions that allowed wokeness to surge. Liberals bit our tongues, and that's on us, but we did it in response to the climate Trump created. Trump boosted wokeness by nurturing the far-left narrative about America's awfulness and by sapping the liberal will to criticize far-left ideas. The result was not unlike the koala bear's unlikely conquest of Australia. Ample nourishment and few predators allowed them to thrive despite being one of the most objectively ridiculous species on the planet.

Okay, again, I find his rating quite charming. I get that that might just be a thing for me. But look, his overall point is liberalism has done much better with Trump as a unifying enemy and force and narrative. And Joan, I think I've heard you make this point plenty of times. So if you vote for Harris, it will undermine progressivism from the inside, like winning will actually be losing for them? How much of this do you buy? A lot. A lot.

Look, I'm sitting for a long time. I think one of the problems in our politics today is we view the presidency in the same way that like sort of 1600s English people viewed the throne. Like, to have a Protestant, for Catholics, to have a Protestant on the throne was just petting the cat backwards on all things metaphysical and psychological. You just couldn't handle the idea of not having a co-religionist on the throne. And vice versa. If you were Protestant, having a, you know, a disciple of popery on the throne just was a record scratch unacceptable kind of thing. And people seem to believe that if we have someone from our team in the White House, then we win things out in the universe. And it doesn't actually work that way.

Parties that are stuck with the actual responsibility of governing often come out the worst for wear because they have to actually follow through on things. And look, I mean, the Jimmy Carter's presidency wasn't great. for the Democrats. Joe Biden's presidency wasn't necessarily great for the Democrat. Barack Obama's presidency, you could argue, was really destructive of the Democratic Party. It hollowed out all of those moderate elected officials in the South, like a thousand elected officials lost their positions under Obama's presidency and the intensification of sort of the blue big city party was driven in large part by Barack Obama. Having power is often not the best thing for a party.

And the point about the thing that drives me crazy and I've talked to, right, we've seen to talk to our friend David French about this when I was arguing with him about endorsing Harris. It is absolutely the case that all of the wokeness that people were most outraged by and most galvanized by to support Trump happened on Trump's watch. Right? The Black Lives Matter stuff, the riots, the DEI statements, all of that stuff was part of the popular front response to Donald Trump. Universities change their admission policies. D.E.I departments are being closed down. Everyone is saying, wait a second, I never said defund the police, all under Joe Biden's presidency. More and more companies are cutting their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Technology companies, including alphabet, also meta platforms, have made big cuts to those DEI programs. Your changes could be coming to 17 UNC system schools. The full board meets next month to vote on eliminating the offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The assembly speaker tells us he wants to do a wholesale audit of diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in state government. And because when you have power, your coalition all of a sudden, when you have, when you control the government, the government is to choose and you have to make distinctions and you start pissing off different members of your coalition. I firmly believe that if Trump is reelected, you're going to see another popular front of

broad left coalition where people are, people on the center left aren't going to criticize members of their own coalition because they have to be united in one thing and stopping Donald Trump. If Pamala Harris is elected, you're going to see a lot of Republicans go back to the only arguments they have any muscle memory for, which is a more traditional form of conservatism. And so I'm very sympathetic to the argument. Nick, why is you wrong? Attack, attack. Yeah. Uh, you know, your motherly instincts of pitting your children against each other. Very undispatchy and I have to say this attack, you know, we try to have longer and less. Yeah, what, you know, I guess then what we should be hoping for is that Cornell West or Jill Stein wins because then, you know, liberals will actually, you know, start to move back to the center where they might have been in like 1955 or something like that.

These are delusional arguments, okay? You know, and I love Jeff Moore. I think he's very funny. I think he's very insightful. But it's like, no, you know what? What happened in the, on the liberal and progressive part of the spectrum is a bunch of things. became intolerant, and then October 7 forced people who were liberal Democrats, but not insane progressives to say, you know what, like if being part of your team means that I'm objectively going to support Hamas slaughtering a bunch of ecstasy rolling ravers. I'm out. I'm going to, I'm going to move a little bit back more towards the center and say, you know what, maybe identity isn't the most important thing. Free speech is a good thing, you know, that the public health establishment, whether it's run by a Republican or a Democrat, is not, you know, the end all and be all of all things. I'm going to become skeptical the way that Ralph Nader was,

the way that even people like Ted Kennedy were in the early 70s. It had nothing to do with who was in power, I think. So, you know, what I think we're seeing here is, sadly, there is a new consensus forming. I'm a big fan of Morris Fiorena, the Stanford political scientist who's written a series of books over the past 25 years about how Americans actually agree with super majorities on a wide variety of things like, you know, free trade is pretty good, free speech is good, immigration is generally good, marijuana should be treated more like beer, wine, and alcohol than, you know, heroin, things like this. But they can't find expression for these supermajority positions in contemporary politics because the parties are run by radicals.

and that that will only change when a new consensus forms. And he points back to the period leading into the progressive era where there was what was called the era of no decision where the White House and Congress kept flipping back and forth and among all the different parties until a kind of broad progressive ideal came into being that the government should do more. And then, you know, things kind of settled down.

I think we're witnessing potentially the beginning of a new consensus, which is something that I think Jonah and Steve, certainly this morning, you've talked about, which is this kind of statist, you know, kind of consensus politics of like, okay, well, the government's just going to be doing a lot of everything. It'll dole out some things to people I prefer and some things to people I don't prefer. What we need now, and I think this is something where libertarians, conservatives of your sort, as well as liberals who are not progressive, all agree, is that we need to push back against this, you know, large blob consensus, that the government

is going to do more, spend more, be in more places, et cetera, like, we need to push back before this hardens. And what that means is that libertarians have to push back against the libertary nationalists and the kind of weird conspiracy theorists who have taken over many aspects of the libertary movement. Conservatives have to push back against the Trumpists and the Tucker of Carlson aspects of their world and things like that. And liberals have to push back against the far left progressives, which, you know, they have been doing to some degree, I think mostly because of external events. But this is the fight. Like, do we want to live in an America that, and I say this in the broadest terms possible, is libertarian? You know, you have a government that does a few

things, does them well, spends less and does less than it's been doing. But it's effective in what it does. Or do you want to have a more authoritarian government where whoever is in charge has more control over every aspect of our daily lives in all sorts of seen and unseen ways? But we're not going to get there. I'm sorry to go on so long, but we're not going to get there by liberals saying, you know, what would be really good is if my person wins, because then we'll fight those other people or conservatives saying, you know, what would be great is Trump loses, but we somehow maintain control of the Congress, et cetera. No, like, if, It's the principles that matter.

And that's what we need to be focused. I feel like libertarians just are consistently Cassandra at the gates. They are truth-telling and nobody listens to them. And it's so fun in a way because I think it frees you. No, it's not fun. It's not fun to be this. And I'm also, I'm very optimistic. Cassandra didn't like being Cassandra either.

But you know what? She lives through history and echoes. She had terrible, terrible, you know, taste in men as well. if I remember correctly. Bad sleeper could have used Ambien. No, but, you know, just this morning, I'm like super optimistic about the future because I think in very broad terms,

things are going well. The modern world is good and it's getting better, but we need to, you know, so I'm not at Cassandra, and I just tweeted something this morning about how the only real inflation over the past 20 years that matters is threat inflation.

You know, if it's not microplastics, you know, that it's, you know, it's AI or it's whatever the hell, right? What we need to be pushing back everywhere, if we believe in America as like a good country where you come here or you're born here and you get to live your life, kind of how you want and you innovate and create a great new future, we need to shrink the size scope and spending of government. That's libertarian, but it can be Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, whatever. Can I just ask a very quick question on what it means to be a libertarian? What percentage of being a libertarian do you think is

the vibe of hating, like, a team sports in junior high or, like, reading Ayn Rand when you hate the popular kids. And I, like, I know that sounds funny, but, like, I kind of mean it. Because libertarian, practical libertarianism, as you say, is adjacent to conservatism. And yet, it can feel very, very different. And so, I don't know, we've talked about this before, how much of politics was never about policy and vibe-based. How much of libertarian is vibe-based? I think exceptionally little, I want to point out that my high school, which a Catholic high school in Middletown, New Jersey, which actually went out of business because it was such

a crappy school. And it also graduated Brian Williams, the great fabulous of NBC. And I was the captain of my high school soccer team. So, you know, this idea that, you know, all libertarians are on an Adam Wanzas scale, where we're always on the outset looking at it is just a lie and it's bullshit. It's actually more something that Jonah is the one who's constantly talking about Albert J. Knock and the remnant and I want to be the hermit who nobody listens to. I'm Cassandra, but not a trans Cassandra because that would be bad and I don't like shopping at Target

for all my clothes, you know, whatever. No, it's like libertarianism is American and it's common sense, right? That's all. And it's positive and optimistic. That's, that was, it's attraction to me. It is truth-telling. So libertarianism got super popular and everyone wanted to be a libertarian and you controlled one of the major parties.

Do you think you'd still be a libertarian? Absolutely. Okay. I don't walk away from what, like all I want to do is like be able to travel freely, hire the people I want to hire, you know, speak my mind, do more drugs than are common, you know, that are legally acceptable at this moment, not to the point of distraction. You know, I make sure that poor kids. No, people who don't have parents that are well-situated have the opportunity and the option to fully engage in society.

This is not radical. It's common sense. And I think it appeals to all sorts of people. This is the fight. Do you believe in that America or do you believe in America where it's either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or, you know, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden? But everything you're saying is amazing. So why isn't it popular? What?

Why isn't libertarianism popular then? I think it is when it's presented in these terms and the policies that we talk about. But the world is vastly more libertarian than it was when I joined Reason in 1993. And yet, the two parties are becoming more statist, not less statist. Yeah, but this is also because it's not a zero-sum game in the sense of, you know, the government can grow and that's a bad thing and we need to fight that. But it doesn't necessarily mean that my individual ability to live how I choose is shrinks. It's not all of zero.

So just because these are very old arguments, as Nick knows, and we've had them many times. Let's stop the clock in 2015 before the Trump stuff happens, right? You know, conservatives always wanting to stop the clock. I know. I knew that you're going to jump on that. But I'm just trying to make a point about the larger sociological reality, which is that there are in fact, there were in fact, and I think they still are. But let's just say in 2015, tens of millions of libertarians in this country. They don't call themselves libertarians.

They mostly call themselves conservatives. Some of them call themselves liberals. And, you know, in the conservative intellectual movement, conservative politics for most of our lives, when you talked about a conservative economist, you meant a libertarian economist, right? Tom Sol, Milton Friedman, you go down a list, right? Friedrich Hayek, obvious. When voters voted as if they were, when libertarians would go through. voting behavior and voter attitudes and stuff and say, look how libertarian these people are, they'd be largely right because the libertarianism that Nick, when he's the frontman for

libertarian is talking about, is really just classical American liberalism consistent with the founders, with some improvements and inclusion for outgroups that is all to the good and all that kind of thing. where I think Nick's wrong on all of this is where he fully rejects Sarah's premise. Insofar as while there are millions and millions and millions of people who have libertarian attitudes about all sorts of things because America is a liberty-loving people. We are a liberal culture. Sorry, Patrick Deneen. Sorry, post-liberals.

You can come up with any theory you want by why John Locke was wrong and that therefore the world is going to transform into an ultramontane Catholic, you know, confessional state, it's not going to convince normal Americans, right? Because normal Americans are just Americans. And we have a very, we are a very liberal society in the classical liberal sense. The people who define themselves as libertarians are self-selected as a different group. They're the ones who are like millions of people love Star Trek in this country. The ones who call themselves Trekkies or know the difference between a trekker and a trekkee have self-identified themselves as a fringe ideological movement.

The stuff that, and this is why I said before about how libertarians have all sorts of fights behind the curtains, they do. There is this myth that they propagate in this country when they're speaking to outsiders. Like, you know, they're members of a Hindu sect. And they say, oh, no, no, Hinduism is really just monotheism. You don't know what you're talking about. And then behind the scenes, they argue about whether all these gods add up to one big god or whatever.

But they don't have those arguments in public. They don't air their dirty laundry outside. Libertarianism. No, we wear it. We wear it. Yeah, all on your heads at the chess club meeting. And so my only point is there are huge disagreements within libertarianism about what libertarianism means, what it stands for.

There's a reason why the reason crowd basically said, yeah, we don't want anything to with the Libertarian Party years ago because the Libertarian Party was not representative of mainstream American, you know, classical liberalism. It kind of went off the rails. And so I just think that there is this, it's like Arafat speaking English to Western audiences and saying one thing and then in Arabic saying all sorts, you know, destroy Israel stuff. A lot of time when libertarians are trying to sell the country and libertarian, oh, it's just the simple philosophy of mind your own business and be a good person. person and have the freedom to define your path and all that kind of stuff. And then behind the

scenes among egghead libertarians, it can get pretty esoteric pretty quickly. And just because Nick was a cool guy in high school does not mean he is representative of that entire sociology. Steve, you were cool in high school. What do you think? I mean, I had so many points to make at the beginning of this in response to your original question. And I'm now so lost between the Trekkie head-wearing soccer player people. I don't even know where to go with this. Let me make one sort of broad observation and I'll kick a back to Nick and Jonah

to settle things. I mean, I do, I take Nick's point that you know, Republicans weren't as small government as we might have, as I might have preferred to believe. But I do think that until the sort of at the sunsetting of the Tea Party era, a good number of elected Republicans

seemed to mean what they said, and rhetorically, they embraced limited government. That has mostly gone out the window with Donald Trump, and I do think that's why, you know, whatever the libertarians have been making the argument, the sort of uniparty argument for decades, literally. And I was always pretty skeptical of the argument, I thought, boy, you're really sanding over a lot of important differences between Democrats

and Republicans. I still believe that until 2014. And I think now, you know, the differences between the parties are increasingly blurred, whether you're talking about trade, whether you're talking, I mean, you can go down the list. I don't need to revisit the list. The great irony, I think, is that the charge of both the progressive. left and this sort of new right about more traditional conservatives, I would say, you know, limited government conservatives who talked about it and meant it, is that we became so unbelievably

powerful that we ruined everything. And you get this from, you know, Tucker Carlson, who, you know, Tucker Carlson, former adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute, who two years later began telling everybody that libertarians were at fault for everything. Really the problem was we all became too atomistic and too individualistic and, you know, the government wasn't looking out for people. And now you have this new right. And this is, of course, what concerns me most that isn't even from making the limited government, the rhetorical limited government arguments that I found useful even if they weren't living up to them.

It's important for people to be speaking about limited government if you believe it limited government is a good end. And now, instead, you have the new right. And I would say many people who used to be in that limited government right, Marco, industrial policy, Rubio, chief among them, making affirmative cases for greater state involvement. And that's deeply dispiriting at this point when I agree with Nick's general take. I mean, Sarah, we had Todd Rose on to talk about this sort of broader consensus. and he doesn't quite frame it in the ideological terms that Nick did, but I think he gets in many ways to a similar place,

which is there's a lot more consensus than our parties would have us believe. And that, I think, is the great irony of this moment. There is this kind of underlying consensus on a lot of issues, including some of the most contentious issues that we're debating every day. But this, the, and it's not necessarily where the statists would have us believe that it is. But in the meantime, you've seen sort of libertarians or limited government conservatives or whomever to put out on this island and blamed for the current state of America, even as the size and scope of government has grown exponentially by orders of magnitude just over the

past 20, 30 years that we're talking about. If I may, just to pick up on that and to agree with Jonah about, you know, something changed around 2015, 2016, and that is when I think, you know, this, what Steve would say is, okay, like I'm starting to buy into the Uniparty theme. That's when that switch really became fully visible. Libertarians, you know, in our fever dreams, we're seeing it, you know, going back to, you know, when the anti-federalists, you know, got written out of history or something like that. Like, what's the difference between Hamilton and Burr? You know, they're the same guy, right? But, you know, that there was a moment in, I think it was 2014 or 2015,

the New York Times Magazine had a cover story that, like, followed me and Rand Paul and a bunch other people, and the title was, has the libertarian moment finally arrived, question mark? And it's like, the answer is no, not in the way that any of us who were involved in that. And Matt Welch and I created that term what we wanted. But there was a momentum where that was being talked about. And that is gone now in favor of two types of major parties where the only thing that matters is power and how much you exercise it over people. The idea of principle has really vanished.

And for that, I do think libertarians somewhat are partly culpable because we did push the message that Ronald Reagan wrote to power, which is saying, you know, that government isn't the answer to your problems. Government is the problem. we won that argument thinking that would usher in a more, you know, a better, more realistic, limited view of positive government. And it did not, what it unleashed in many ways, I think. And particularly among younger people who don't think about history, perhaps as much as people

who lived through the Cold War did and World War II and things like that, it's like, no, there is only power. And that's what politics is about. It's not about getting out of people's lives. It's rather dictating how people live through the increased use of power and force. And this is why, if I can just say, Nick, I'm with you on your sort of, I did not know that we were going to get Sonny Nick today, but I love Sunny Nick. This is great. I'm with you on the broader sort of optimism on sort of the massive steps in human progress that we've seen over the past 20, 30, 40 years.

I mean, I would say largely due to the kinds of innovation that you see when you have free markets. Having said that, I'm deeply concerned about our politics for precisely the reason that you mentioned. You have an entire generation of people who have grown up, I mean, young people, and think that what we've seen over the past decade is normal. So they look at the Republican Party and they think that it's really just about seizing power to be able to do the things that Republicans say that they want to do, or in Donald Trump's case, punish his enemies, right? I mean, that's, and they think that's fine and normal, and it's not at all fine. It's not at all normal. And most especially, what they've missed is any real case

from any leading politician for limiting the size and scope of government. I mean, you just don't see that any more from the two major parties. And it's, it worries me that that's what this younger generation And here I sound like, you know, the old man wagging his finger. Keep yelling at the clouds. Kids these days, kids these days. But I mean it, I mean, this is what they think politics is. And they're largely unfamiliar with, I mean, that's too sweeping a generalization. I worry that they don't appreciate the case for limited government that I think traces back to the founders and the philosophers who shape their thinking because they're just watching.

it all be this just dramatic power play. Okay. I want to spend our last few minutes on a little bit of not worth your time, question mark, about what could have been. I'd like to visit the multiverse. This week, or at least in the last couple weeks, we've seen RFK Jr. drop his third-party bid and endorse Donald Trump, enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump. We've also seen Liz Cheney, who was rumored to be thinking about a third party bid at one point

back in the day, say that she's going to vote for Vice President Harris. Let's take our time machines back about 18 months when no labels was a thing that we talked about as a potential vehicle for a third party candidacy

because we all assumed and were correct that the Libertarian party would poop the bed on that one. And no labels, of course, in the end, just didn't field a candidate after doing all of this heavy lifting on ballot access, which I said would be their biggest obstacle. It turned out I was wrong. They did far better on ballot access. They did on candidate access. I also said that a viable third-party candidate, I didn't necessarily mean viable like they'd win, but viable they would be a factor in the election

would need to be someone with incredibly high name ID already and self-funding. I threw out Matthew McConaughey, but like Dwayne the Rock Johnson. And so the question I want to ask you is, and I'll start with you, Nick, if no labels had just from day one said

we're working on ballot access and Mark Cuban is our candidate, would the race look substantially different than the equilibrium between the two parties that we're seeing right now, which looks you know, you can argue about how it's slightly different than 2016 or 2020 or even 2012, for that matter. But it's not really.

This is a very similar-looking race to the ones we've seen in modern political history where the two parties are basically at equilibrium and then fight it out for, you know, who actually gets their nose across the finish line first. Would a Mark Cuban no-label's candidacy have mattered? Yes or no, Nick? No. And I think you're, you know, this is the. the dream. This is like couples porn after deep throat. You know,

the idea that there would be movies. Couples would go to at regular movie theaters was always a beautiful dream of porn producers and movie studios. It just doesn't happen. Why didn't I say shit the bet if we were going to talk about couples porn? You know, like if we were already not going to have children listen to this. You know,

but, you know, we have two major parties, who they are and what they stand for, changes from time to time. But that's where the action is going to be. We are at equilibrium because both parties are played out and they're offering up versions of the same dish, which a majority of people don't want. The question is, how do we close the door on this and move out of the 20th century and the fading political coalitions that are still wheezing on? And which somebody,

I think like RFK Jr. actually helped show that this was, even his insurgency, it was about mid-20th century politics. It wasn't about anything new or different. This was a candidate who, when he was endorsing Donald Trump, spent as much time talking about how seed oils were turning boys gay as anything about the politics of the moment. There was nothing that was going to be offered via a third-party candidate. What you need is a group of people to take a over one or both of the parties and start showing a message that is radically different than the slop that we've been served up. You know, going back at least, you know, just to give it in the 21st century, Al Gore and George Bush, if you go back and you look at their actual

platforms, almost indistinguishable from one another. And, you know, that's just continued on in more vituperative ways, but you can't, you know, this is what Fiorena calls unstable majority. It's like these, they're, they're selling stuff that might have made sense 70 years ago, 50 years ago. It doesn't anymore. Steve, Mark Cuban is the no labels candidate starting 18 months ago. Does it matter? I don't think so. I mean, he's a, he's a bit weird. And I don't think he has the kind of name idea that you're talking about when you're talking about somebody like The Rock. So I don't think so. But I'm not sure. You just have Moana age children, Steve. Yeah, that's true, actually.

You know, by the way, the Rock sells a great line of body wash products at Target now. Are you being paid for this? Are you being paid to be on this podcast? I'm not, but I, you know, it's a little bit more than the house brand, but it's worth it. I did not, I did not know that. I mean, things you learn. You got to get out more. You know, this is, I don't think that, I don't think Mark, you know,

would have made a big difference. But I do think that what we've seen since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden suggests that a non-Biden, non-Trump third-party candidate could have made a difference so long as that person was running against Biden and Trump. I mean, there was a USA Today's Suffolk poll that was released, I think, this past weekend that asked Democrats what they think about Joe Biden stepping down or dropping out of the race. And I think, think only 2% of Democrats said that they wished that Joe Biden were still in the race. So while it was a Trump Biden contest, I think there was a lot of room for a third party candidate to have done some damage to shape the debate, whatever, even if that person wasn't likely

to win. But I think Mark Cuban was probably not the guy. So first of all, I finally understand this phrase I always hear, which is what's the worst part about using seed oils, telling your parents you're gay? I had no idea what people were talking about until now. So thank you for that, Nick. I think probably not. You know, contrafactuals are always hard. But I agree with Nick's larger point.

I've been saying for a while that, you know, one of the nice things about, one of the good things about negative polarization these days, you know, people voting more against the other party than for their own party. And, you know, Jonathan Rauch has some great stuff about how people, the most committed primary voters don't actually like their own party. They just hate the other party more.

And the good thing about that situation is it's untenable. When both parties exist just to hate the other party, when one party dies, the other party loses its reason to live. And you could see very quickly, I don't, they may still be called Republican. and Democrat, but you can see very quickly the coalitions, we're seeing it before our eyes right now, right? We're watching the working class leave the Democratic Party very rapidly and join the Republican Party, and we're seeing the sort of bourgeois, college-educated, suburban vote move very quickly into the Democratic Party. What we're not seeing is the policies of those parties catch up to their constituencies in a responsible way.

But I think that could happen pretty quickly once one party gets its ass handed to it. I mean, you had Yuval of in on A.O. recently. If one party just realized that if they screwed the base of their party a little bit in order to become a 60% majority party, which is the norm in American politics going back 200 years, just not in the 21st century, you could see the other party. completely implode or revamp itself in all sorts of interesting and good ways. I think we are hectorically due for that kind of political earthquake. Whether things are better on the other side, I am a conservative. And so one should always assume things can get worse. But I'm a happy, I'm kind of a happy guy.

So cheer up for the worst is yet to come, which was, in fact, one of my yearbook quotes. but I agree with Nick that this is unsustainable and in my heart I kind of think it would be better if the party's imploded and reconstituted themselves as at least representative of more representative of the median voter and I think that might be coming okay can I can I jump in with something that's very much worth our time I want to point your attention Nick and Jonah to Twitter and Sarah's feed because as we are talking you would notice that Sarah tweeted random thought if no labels had picked Mark Cuban as its candidate 18 months ago it's hard to overstate how wildly

different this race would look right now so as we're talking she's not really interested in our answers she's soliciting answers from the Twitterverse and she puts out this tweet thread about this while we're talking do you have any idea what either

Nick or Jonah or I said in response to your questions. Absolutely. And I was about to tell you all you were wrong with Jonah coming closest to the right answer because Cuban jumping in the race 18 months ago when Trump and Biden were at their sort of lowest popularity could have gotten up into what I think would be like the 30s. The polling then would have been incredibly error prone and volatile. And so then you're in sort of no man's land per kind of Jonah's, uh, collapsing of the two parties when there's any real threat to them. I don't know what happens from there. I don't know how they try to prevent Cuban from getting on the ballot, for instance,

and sort of what joint efforts like that would be like, although they certainly tried already with just no labels or even RFK generally. The debate doesn't happen as such. Both parties might have considered replacing their nominee at that point, or neither. And, you know, and, And who knows how, you know, Cuban would have positioned himself, how much he even would have gotten pressed on policy, a la Harris right now, where he becomes sort of a vehicle for everyone's hopes and dreams of just simply not being Biden or Trump. So I think no labels made a huge mistake dilly dallying around trying to find someone more, you know, like a Larry Hogan or Joe Mansion, like just all wrong. did have a candidate first and then go. Yeah, but, you know, we had that with Ross Perrault in the 90s. And it's not, Rossboro obviously had an impact on the two elections that he was part of,

but he did not fundamentally change anything. I would argue that he would have, but for the meltdown. Like he was actually polling very well, then he had whatever that was. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of, you know, I'm a big Pete Rose fan, and I just watched a great HBO special about Pete Rose, the very things that made him such a wonderful baseball player are exactly the same reasons why he can't bring himself into the hall of it. Yeah. But I think that Ross Perra's a really interesting example because obviously self-funding but not high name ID, but he sort of proves that either, you know, the third party candidates

that have done well have had these sort of sort of fame, big personalities, or they've run on a very specific policy at a time where the two parties aren't, for some reason, capturing uh, some issue that people want to say that they care about. Ross Perrault obviously falls in that latter category. But then, then it, and again, because no labels is kind of a joke when you get down to it. They've never been successful for all of the reasons that you've mentioned, they dilly-dally, and they think everything is structural or no, maybe it's the individual or whatever. What Ross Perot did was he ended the possibility that being anti-Nafta was a viable position because it was between George H.W. Bush and that especially Bill Clinton and Al Gore

in a famous debate on Larry King's show drove the nail through the argument that Ross Perra was making that NAFTA and globalization and trade was the worst thing that could ever happen to America. The Republicans and Democrats, you know, absolutely as two separate units crush that. Neither of their candidates represented it. And by the end of the decade, we had entered a very good era of global trade. We can argue about, you know, what's happened since. So I don't, you know, the dream of the multiverse is always that somebody is going to levitate down and save us or rise up and save us. And it's not, we've got two major parties.

always been that way for a lot of, you know, reasons that aren't going to change. Those parties need to get better. And I like what Jonah is talking about to remind us that the 60-40 split is more common. And what you need is a party that is going to, you know, push to become that 60 percent, not by becoming mushy and compromised, but by actually representing what most people agree up. Nick Gillespie, host of The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. editor at large at Reason, thank you for attacking Jonah and Steve the way that we needed. Always willing to do your bidding, Sarah. My pleasure. You know,