The Dispatch Podcast - Members Only: America's Classless Society

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

A sneak peek from our regular members-only Dispatch Live discussion: Kevin, Chris, and Jonah discuss elites versus elitism and America's increasing decline from authenticity. The conversations was spurred by Chris' piece on America's classless society. If you want to join our live discussions, support the work we're doing, and help us do a lot more: become a Dispatch member. https://thedispatch.com/join -If you're a member, you can watch the full live discussion here: https://thedispatch.com/article/video-mccarthy-cant-keep-his-house-in-order/ -Sign up to "The Skiff" to get all Dispatch members-only content here: https://members.thedispatch.com/account/feeds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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champions out of air. Fly the seven time world's best leisure airline champions, Air Transat. Hello, this is Kevin Williamson from the dispatch. I've been hosting a series of conversations for dispatch members during which we analyze debate and sometimes even fight about

the big questions of the day. You can think of it's kind of an online cocktail party for our members and almost as much fun as the real-life get-togethers we host from time to time. This week, we're talking about the GOP debate and whether it matter and whether anything these primary candidates do matters. We talk about the state of the Biden campaign and the Biden investigations, the Nikki Haley bump, shut down politics, and the state of the anti-abortion movement. And if you're still interested in more than that, Jonah, Starwalt, and I go off on a long tangent

about Senator Federman and what it means to live in a truly classless society. Normally, these are for members only, but this is a sneak peek of some of what you get for the price of your dispatch membership. I hope that you will join us as full members of our community. We are really just getting started, and there's lots more cool stuff to come. To make sure that you don't miss out on any of our members-only podcast and other content, which includes Book Club, Ask Me Anything, Sarah and Steve's high-stakes wager, sign up for the Skiff, that's S-K-I-F-F, as in Pirate Skiff,

Our new members-only super feed that includes all the goodies and many more surprises to come. Check out the show notes to learn how. Stay tuned and enjoy. Thanks again. I think we will be parting ways with the young men for now. And the gray beards are going to stick around and talk about get off my lawn. By the way, I was just thinking, Jonah, you know, I know you've got Haley disclosures you have to do from time to time. I think you should just say, Google it.

And that'll, that should cover it all. For the record, my wife has not worked for Nikki Haley for over two years. And it's not like they are on the exact same page about everything. But, yes, my wife worked for Nikki Haley, worked on two of her books as a ghostwriter, was her speechwriter at the UN, and has a warm relationship with Nikki, if not necessarily, with the campaign. All right, Jonah, thanks for explicating on the thing I was trying to avoid. Chris, I enjoyed your piece, and it reminded me of a story that I know I've told too many times, but some people probably haven't heard it, so I'll tell it again. I was at a dinner party being hosted by Larry Cudlow and is at the 2012 Republican Convention. I love this already.

There was a guy there who was going on and on about what an anti-establishment he was, guy he was. Now it's the establishment hates me. I'm always at loggerheads with the establishment. And eventually I said, you're the chairman of your state Republican Party. If there's an establishment, it's a big state too, a big state. And if there's an establishment, it's you. I mean, that's what establishment means. But your piece was interesting in this sort of, you know, elitists against elitism thing,

or elites, rather, against elitism. This idea that people try to demonstrate their genuineness, which is a kind of virtue by emphasizing their lack of virtues. Their, you know, smallness, their pettiness, their bad man. There are low tastes, that sort of thing. So hit us with your thesis. Well, a lot of this is perloined gold burglary. The idea of, I don't know if you guys saw somebody did a video about Ted Cruz all the time.

Ted Cruz has said podcast. And it's just Ted Cruz. We call it a butted sot. Just Ted Cruz into Ted Cruz into Ted Cruz into Ted Cruz talking about his. podcast. We call it a what? A butted sot. Sound on tape, sot, butted, sot, budded, sot. Sounds like something terrible that happens to you in British boarding school, but go on. Well, it's not bad. It's just, you have to get used to it, Jonah. The, so all of this, this wall of Ted Cruz sound, and then at the end, they just pull a clip of crew saying, grifter's got a grift or grifter's going to grift.

Ted Cruz, your piece about Josh Hawley and his love of the drive-thru worker and fast food, the fast food employers in your line, I believe, was that he must have learned about that at the bank where his father was president. And so we have- Banks have drive-thrus. Banks do have drive-thru. They have the awesome pneumatic tube that I've always, you know, you want to put a hamster. in there and send it in for the people inside to scare somebody.

But I think for performative crassness, boorishness, loudishness, and Peggy Newton's great piece about the dress code in the Senate speaks to this as well, where, you know, this crisis of adulthood, this world in which, and let me just go ahead since we're, we're alone here, it's a baby boomer problem substantially. A lot of this was rooted in a generation of people who didn't want to grow up, didn't want to be the man, didn't want to do that stuff, didn't want to be square, right? What's the joke? I'm not a regular mom. I'm a cool mom. And a generation of people who didn't want to be like their parents and didn't want to do those things, if nobody does those things, then I think, Johnny, was it your piece, an epidemic of childishness?

Was that the, so this is stuff that we've, that you guys have plumbed at great length and with much keener insight than mine, but it definitely does feel like a moment, whether it's Lauren Bobert or whether it's just all of the, all of the trashy behavior. And what caught my eye was I was in Des Moines. I was doing a focus group out in Des Moines. And Des Moines, Iowa is a lovely town. I like Des Moines. It's a very pleasant place to be. I like red meat. I like clean streets and I like friendly people. And Des Moines got it all. And the, the vibe in Des Moines, Well, yes, or Des Moines, exceeding your already low expectations. And I thought, why are you being edgy, Des Moines?

The whole point of you is to not be edgy. It's that you're competent and pleasant, and it's a nice place. And just I was struck by the desire in so many facets of American life today that people want to be a victim and they want to demonstrate their victimhood by, as Dave Chappelle would say, keeping it real. So I have many thoughts. One is I was actually just in Des Moines as well for our very on Declan Garvey's wedding. Oh, nice.

It was arguably the sweetest wedding I've ever been to my life. It was adorable. It was lovely. It was charming. Utterly, as bespeaks the town of Des Moines, or befits the town of Des Moines, utterly without irony. Yes. It was a sincere event religiously, romantically in every other way.

And that's one of the reasons why your piece resonates with me. But I want to put it to you guys, and I'm kind of curious what Kevin thinks about this. So we all have been struggling with the era of horseshoe theory. It kind of pisses it off that we have to have. There has to be merit to horseshoe theory these days, this idea that the two sides are becoming like each other. And as someone whose first book, liberal fascism, was very much opposed to the concept of horseshoe theory in very specific theoretical ways. It's particularly painful for me.

But I think that this thing about this sort of being authentic, this obsession with being anti-elitist, even among elites, I mean, you left out that Ted Cruz's, you know, wife is a managing director of Goldman Sachs, and he went to Princeton, and it was a clerk for the Supreme Court. The idea that Ted Cruz isn't a member of an elite is just one of the dumbest friggin things, you know, you can possibly assert. It doesn't mean he's wrong about stuff, except when he starts talking about how he's an enemy of the elite. But I think one of the things that makes horseshoe theory difficult for a lot of people to grasp or to concede in our current moment

is that the accents and the vernacular of this stuff makes us miss the obviousness of it. And so, for example, if all of the Republicans who are doing this, I'm against the elites, I'm not a member of elite stuff, had thick Etonian British accents. and were speaking and the classic British language of proulier than thou, we would all immediately recognize what we're talking about here, right?

You know, where you have these guys who are like fifth generation Oxford or Cambridge guys talking about their, their sympatheticness with the common man and how they're opposed to the ruling classes and all these kinds of things. But because it comes with a drawl and a twang and because it changes, checks the boxes of all sorts of cultural shibboliffs. And because we don't have a history of class consciousness here, the way the Brits do, we let a lot of right-wing elites play the exact same game that snotty Jeremy Corbin types played in Britain. And it just goes over our heads and we don't notice it.

And I think that that's something that deserves more of a Kevin Williamson treatment than I can give it. Well, maybe I'll work on that. I was just thinking it reminds me of a story of our friend Charlie Cook, who had a very fancy Oxford accent long before he actually went to Oxford, apparently. And when he was a youngster, he was working at a drive-thru window at McDonald's. And this very, very fancy accent, and people would apparently just give him all sorts of grief for it. And so, you're a bit posh, aren't you? And was he supposed to say, no? So he said, well, yes, I am.

And I can't do the Charlie accent, but he can't really do an American accent either, although his American accent is better than my British accent. Yeah, the accents are funny that way because it's a particular weird thing with Texas politicians who feel the need to heighten the stereotypical texonness. So George W. Bush, who was a fine man, and I don't really know him, but I like him. And I think he was a pretty good president and a decent person. And I have no idea where that accent comes from. You know, it's supposed to be an accent from Midland, Texas,

which is, you know, not far from where I grew up. Nobody have ever heard talks that way. I don't know anyone who talks like Ted Cruz or Rick Perry. And in private, none of these guys talk like that, by the way. In private conversation, Rick Perry sounds like a normal human being. Ted Cruz sounds like a pretty normal human being. Sorry. And George W. Bush sounds like a pretty normal human being.

But you put them in front of a camera and they start doing this howdy-d-duty Texas. new sheriff thing. And it's all very kind of weird and disturbing. I was, I was upset with the Lauren Bobert story just because I wanted my getting kicked out of a theater story to be the, you know, which is, which is still a better story. Her story is awesome. But you know, Google it. You know, the New York Post endorsed me for mayor that year. And I was not actually a mayoral candidate. So here's the thing I wonder about this, though. And this is the more serious question. So the idea is to, I mean, it's self-serving, right? It's to build yourself up as a certain kind of character. That's how people play politics now, because politics has become partly a

role-playing game, partly a sort of weird, embarrassing form of public therapy. But if the idea is to play a character, it seems like there would be very quickly a point of diminishing returns for playing the same characters as everybody else. Like, you know, Lauren Bobart and Marjorie Taylor Green are like when they switched out Darren on Bewitched, you know, they're the same character. There's different actors in the in the in the same role. It seems like if you really wanted to set yourself apart, you would run the opposite way at this point and lean into some other sort of thing, whether it's, you know, some kind of personal virtue or you know, some sort of refinement or something like that just because the the pro lane is pretty crowded. And it's

getting really hard to distinguish yourself in that. I mean, you're not going to to be a bigger cretton than Matt Gates. It's just not going to happen for you. Paul Gossar has, yes, inchwormed his way to the Those are two very different brands of cretinenessness. That's a, that's not

Sprite and Seven Up. That's Mountain Dew and Sprite. Mountain Dew and Carbonated Urine. In subtle deception, but a real on in so far as you can tell those uh tell those things apart somewhere an eighth grader is watching this going you know i could carbonate it i know what happens we got a so mom does the soda stream still work um whole different kind of stream i uh oh i love you um i think there have always been politicians who have pretended to be common who are uh elite i think William jennings brian

William Jennings, Brian, or Huey Long, or any number of people. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, the story of Teddy Roosevelt is of the highest-born possible kind of American of his day, who was the rough riding cowboy and the man of the people. I think that is sort of endemic to the political class. What I'm very concerned about now is how many. Americans want to be that way in their real lives. You know, the John Fetterman moment of like, you know what, who actually really care? It's just the dumb Senate.

And we all, we spend all of our time talking about how dumb the Senate is. Congress is the only job I am aware of that you get by saying how much you hate it, right? Now, you all know, they don't hate it. They love it. They love their lapel pins. They love the guy waiting in the car for them out front. They love the two 24-year-olds walking with them, talking about how their tweet is blowing up right now and how great all of that is. And they love it.

But when they run for it, they have to say, this garbage, I hate it. If I didn't love America so much, I wouldn't want to go back to Congress and deal with these people, but I'm going to try to destroy it from within. That sort of, and I think Jonah hit it exactly on the head. we were worried after 9-11 about irony the member they sent the cast of Seinfeld to jail in the series finale of Seinfeld to punish them because in a post-September 11th world we needed more sincerity and I and I second that and second that today that sincerity counts and we need people who are sincere say what they mean mean what they say and all of that stuff.

But what we replaced all of that irony with, I think, is crassness, is false sincerity, right? Is keeping it real, Trump-like. One of the things that I didn't understand about Trump for a long time that makes sense, now he tells it like it is. How many people have you heard, have told you when they ask you about Trump or talk to you about Trump? Well, I know, I know, I know, but he tells it like it is. Literally the one thing he doesn't do.

Right. And I think, well, I don't know if I've ever met a person who lies more and more enthusiastically and with less regard for the truth than Donald Trump. But what they're really saying is he is an emotion, he is a river of emotion. He is a coursing river of his emotions. He does not hide any of his disgust or contempt or anger or satisfaction or delight. it's all just pouring right out of him and that's what they really mean because it's because we put this enormous price on authenticity and authenticity uh is uh often very bad news so i mean i don't want to get

too dark or philosophical here that's get dark uh but i was thinking about this so again not to traffic too deep in horseshoe theory stuff but we've seen movements, many movements in the past, that became obsessed with a certain theory of authenticity, you know, being true to your most basic human self that have ended in really debauched sex and violence. And because that's basically the only place it can ultimately go, right? And so sometimes people bounce back and you get, you know, St. Augustine, right? You know, went to the orgy, realized it wasn't for me, dedicate myself to hire things.

And then you get other people like Charles Manson who go to prison because they're obsessed with this cult of keeping it real and all the kind of thing. And this is the story of radical movements, maybe not all of them, but I'm hard. pressed to think which ones aren't that ultimately they ultimately get caught up in the cult of the deed right because the the the fundamental logic of populism in its rawest form is that all external constraints on you on my behavior are are illegitimate or inauthentic and i'm going to act act on my barbaric yop because my barbaric yop is the only yop that freaking matters and screw all you elites, screw all you norman protectors,

let's whip the normies. And as a personal credo, it usually ends more in the sort of sex and drugs phase than the violence phase. But per political movements, the last exit off of that train philosophically is violence. And I by no means think that 90,

really 99% of Trump's hardcore, even hardcore MAGA people, are heading to car bombs and blowing up buildings and stuff. But the number of them who are willing to make apologies for people who do is considerably smaller, right? And the percentages, you know, there are people who are willing to do that. And people like, oh, that's outrageous and that's a slanderous thing to say. Well, go back and read about the 1960s and how many mainstream establishment liberals

made apologies for the guns on crisis, you know, guns on campus crisis at Cornell, made apologies for the Black Panthers. I mean, Hillary Clinton interned at a law firm that defended the Black Panthers. The Weather Underground. Big swaths of the American liberal elite bought into this the fire next time kind of argument,

bought into this idea that the only truly authentic people who were living, who weren't living in what Sartre, would call bad faith were the ones willing to follow through on their radical pretensions and they worshipped groups like the weather other ground even if they didn't have the courage to follow through on it it does not seem to me far-fetched to think we're going to see some of that kind of stuff play out without the fancy pants intellectual rationalizations and permission structure you get from a four-year education at brown but the same basic logic can apply and

I think it would be naive for us to think that a movement so obsessed with authenticity and radical opposition to establish norms and authority wouldn't end up in violence at some point. And when we when we asked the survey question, would you use violence to protect the country to, in the case of an emergency, what, you know, would you engage in violence? Majorities say yes, because most people, we hope at some point would say, yes, I would I would take up arms to defend the United States of America if there was a foreign invasion or whatever.

And then once you get into the nitty gritty part, and this is the story of January 6th, what would you do? Oh, yeah? Well, you say you're worried about the election being stolen. Will you club a cop with the American flag? Will you poop and Nancy Pelosi's waistband? What will you do? Right.

We're here. What are you doing? And just like ma-mowing the flat catchers, which is, it's the same phenomenon. What would you do? I'm keeping it real over here. I mean it, I'm living this life. Thank you.