The Dispatch Podcast - The Inflation Game

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

The economic state of America, which technically may be improving according to the latest inflation numbers, is still not good. The gang (with deputy managing editor Michael Scott Reneau stepping in for Steve) discuss it and home in on why that’s bad news for Democrats. Plus, Tim Alberta of The Atlantic just wrote a profile of evangelical churches in America and it is so good Sarah, David, Jonah, and Michael had to talk about it and the state of evangelicalism on today’s episode. And finally, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer held a vote on abortion access in America which failed miserably. What the heck was he thinking? Finally, what is the legacy of John Brown?   Show Notes: -TMD on the latest inflation numbers and baby formula shortage -Tim Alberta on the evangelical church -Politico: Senate Democrats’ imaginary majority Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined by David French, Jonah Goldberg. And for his dispatch podcast debut, Michael Renaud, our deputy managing editor, although it turns out his real name is Michael Scott. So we will be referring to him as assistant to the managing editor for the rest of this pod. We've got plenty to talk about. We're going to start with inflation and Joe Biden's speech this week on potential price controls, move to the state of the evangelical church. church, how it has shaped the Republican Party and vice versa. Abortion, Chuck Schumer's latest vote for Democratic senators. And finally, a little discussion of the abolitionist John Brown. His birthday was May 9th. Let's dive right in. Michael, I want to start with you. Just tell us a little bit about where we are on inflation.

What has happened in the last month as we've been focused on some other topics? So if you're paying attention to the numbers that came out this week, the rise in Consumer Price Index was not as severe as it has been in previous months, but it's still not very good news. The Consumer Price Index was up 8.3% for the month of April. That's slightly down from the month of March. March when it was at 8.5%. So we're still seeing in things like price of gas, price of food, numbers continue to go up. The price of gas actually this week reached a record high at

$4.40 per gallon. So even though some of the numbers look like there's a little bit of a cooling off, the economy is still in pretty dire shape. Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, I actually told NPR last night also that the Fed's going to continue trying to cool things off, but it's not really looking good in terms of trying to avoid a recession altogether as they try to do this. There are huge events, he said, geopolitical events going on around the world. They're going to play a very important role in the economy the next year or so, he said. I think we have a good chance to have a soft or softish landing or outcome, but that's a markedly different tone than what Jerome Powell is saying,

even just a few weeks ago. And, David, we saw some pushback, I think, from vulnerable Democrats that this is a real problem, it's not a political problem. Katie Porter, a single mother who's in Congress, talking about the difficulty in having to put bacon back when she saw the price had risen that much. Yeah, I mean, I think it's settling in that this inflation problem is real. It's prolonged.

the steps they're going to be taken to try to rein it in are going to have a pretty dramatic effect on people's lives in many ways maybe as dramatic effect in some sectors as inflation itself. If you're talking about it, it's suddenly going to get a lot more difficult to buy a house. I start to wonder, we have housing inflation here where I live that is just absurd.

It's just absurd what's happening to housing prices here. But then you add on top of that an increase in interest rates. And, A, I wonder if that housing surge can continue. And B, you know, it's just, it's going to create a crunch. Now people are priced out of the housing market even more than they previously were. And so it's, it's a mess. I think it's a mess that is, A, so it's, it's pain, the pain is so, it's felt,

you know, it's such a widespread basis that at this point the Democrats just have a colossal problem on their hands. I mean, they really are in the mode of just sort of praying for a complete Republican meltdown at this point, that they have to be able to point to Republicans and say, yeah, I know you can't buy what you used to buy. I know you're losing ground in the real world, but these guys are just nuts. And that's all you've got left. And the other thing is, you know, this is introducing sort of a cultural shift in the U.S. because we spend a lot of time in this country, not thinking about inflation anymore, not thinking about rising prices anymore.

And really, those of us who were more connected to the fiscal discipline side of conservatism, many of us who lived through the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s, we were kind of looked at as old news. You can just spend money. You can spend and spend and spend and spend. And it's all going to be fine.

And this, we're in the middle of a recalibration right now. Jonah, the president gave a speech this week about it. Talking about price controls as an option to curb inflation. My impression is that inflation is a bit immune to your price controls. That's not really how it works. Curious if you had thoughts after the president's speech. Yeah. I mean, I kind of see the most.

market responding with poorly dubbed captions of your price control kung fu is good but mine is better um because there's just it's just it's such a ridiculous idea to you know to to bring back we see elizabeth warren proposing legislation um the f tc is getting its uh the the long prophesied fears of the f tc becoming an economically demonic force in american lives are finally coming to fruition. And the thing is, it's like, the problem, I just went on a rant about this on the,

on the remnant, but like the problem Biden has is that he is absolutely correct, that there are a lot of reasons why these problems are not of his making. Supply chain problems have been a real thing because of the pandemic for years now. It's not his fault that China has a zero COVID policy that caused them to close down the entire city of Shanghai, which is like one of the most important hubs of global commerce.

You know, the war in Ukraine is not his fault. You can go down a long list. And also, to be fair, Republicans under Donald Trump were all in for a lot of crazy spending for four years that certainly laid the foundation for, you know, it's sort of like the straw that breaks the camel's back. I mean, it was a bigger than a straw when Biden pushed through almost $2 trillion in COVID relief. But that spending on top of the spending we had already done, I think the badly designed unemployment insurance stuff, it made inflation almost inevitable. And that's not all of Biden's doing. The problem politically is that Biden cannot, for various reasons, speak honestly about it.

So he has to, you know, it's Putin's price hike. or, you know, he tried to make the case that build back better and the American Relief Plan stuff were actually anti-inflationary, only when he finally had to realize that inflation was in fact a problem. Until then, he was saying it's not a problem or it's transitory. He made fun of people who thought this might be inflationary. And so the problem, it's sort of like George W. Bush in the wake of Katrina, the second you sort of get out of the lane of being, an honest truth teller about what the problem is, all criticism of you kind of sticks because

when you're not being honest and straightforward about the nature of the problem, there's very little, you can't, you can't defend yourself. And you see this all over the, and then Biden compounds it in this top, he gives about inflation where he basically says, you know, we're going to, I feel it in my teeth, the problems with inflation, you know, which is like, okay, is that like receiving transmissions through your fillings? And but, and we're going to do everything we can. And then he says, we're going to do everything we can by asking Americans to pay their fair share and taxes and and to not price gouge. And first of all, there's almost no evidence of actual price gouging

going on. Elizabeth Warren keeps trying and failing to do that. But the way I think a normal American reads that is here's this guy who just wants to stick to his original talking points and his original agenda and bend reality to give him the permission structure to do that. It's sort of like saying build back better was going to be anti-inflationary, even though it was designed when they didn't think inflation was a problem. It's all pretextual. It's all BS. And I think that think that's the way it hits people. And then this lastly, I don't think it's his fault that there's a baby formula shortage. But my God, like, I don't want to traffic in stereotypes, but I think as a general rule, people with young new babies tend not to like focus on a lot of abstract

political theory or economic explanations when they can't feed their new babies. And the idea that Democrats are on the wrong side of that issue, you almost have to have sympathy for, because again, I don't think it's their fault. It's just all this confluence events. But when inflation is out of control and you don't seem like you're in charge and you don't have a grasp on things, you get all the blame. And that's the place there are the Biden's in. Jonah, you anticipated my next question to Michael, Michael Scott, which is the baby formula thing to me is fascinating. So obviously, I have talked about this. I've been tweeting about it a lot. this week, that I wanted to raise the profile of the issue because it felt like there were

a lot of parents out there screaming and that nobody in D.C. seemed to notice the problem. That is done now. Very much, the White House has been asked about it at the White House briefing now repeatedly. They've put out a plan. Democrats in Congress are holding hearings about this now. There's going to be a House oversight hearing into it. Great. I am satisfied from the raising the profile of the issue question. From the politics of it question, though, I completely agree with Jonah. Well, I mostly agree with Jonah that it is not the administration's fault. However, this is an executive branch problem.

It's not that Joe Biden told the FDA to shut down the Abbott plant in Michigan that makes so much of our baby formula. It's that the FDA has been operating in this world in which they shut down a plant had no plans, it appears, to reopen. had no plans for how the country was going to get baby formula and you have such a large bureaucracy operating within the executive branch. The very problem is that Joe Biden or any other president wouldn't have known about it either until all of a sudden six states were well over 50 percent and they're out of stock numbers. The rest of the country hovering around 40 percent out of stock. And it's it's caused a panic because unlike toilet paper, there's, there's no substitute if your baby needs specialty formula or just formula at all. And by the way,

this has really brought out the very worst in Twitter. Oh, yeah, do not. To the point that actually I've been enjoying it. I mean, I think that most of the people are trolls talking about how, like, finally women will learn to be self-sufficient you were made to make food for your baby. Like, thank you for that. Brilliant comment. I so enjoyed it. So, Michael, on the politics side, the men who are saying that do not have wives. Right. This is like, I don't care how traditional of guy you are, husbands know not to like finger wag at wives about feeding babies. It's just not a thing. Especially between the hours of 3 and 5 a.m. So Michael, my question is we see a lot of Democrats in the House saying, again, they want hearings. They want to know things immediately. You have the Biden administration from the political side, again, the White House.

saying this isn't new to them. They've been paying attention to it. At the same time, I think Jonah raises a good point, which is nobody cares if you say you feel their pain when their pain is that they don't know how they're going to feed their baby tomorrow. That that is such an existential crisis. This is the United States of America. It's 2022. It feels like a more tangible way that people are going to talk about inflation. And I've noticed on the RNC sort of, you know, email list, et cetera, they've been really, really pushing this issue. You have some Republicans tweeting about it a lot, you know, blaming Joe Biden, et cetera. I'm wondering if this will actually be the, will be the stand-in for inflation, you know, instead of talking about how things cost more at the grocery store.

Like, this is such a tangible way and really visceral, whether you currently need baby formula or have ever had a baby. and you know the formula was a day late in arriving at your house or you went to the grocery store and it wasn't there just that feeling of like oh my gosh how are we going to get formula for the baby any parent of any generation will remember that feeling is this going to be the political topic for the next few months or is next week going to be something else well i mean i think you're right sarah because as you say if you've had kids we have four all four of our kids had baby formula at some point if not for the longevity of when they were infants. But you look at other things involved in inflation right now, too. I mean, Elizabeth Warren keeps going back. I think she mentioned Kroger when she got on her high horse with this, you know, supposed to price gouging bill yesterday. People go to the grocery store.

We all see the empty shelves a result of the supply chain issues, but we're all paying more out-of-pocket for our groceries. We're all filling up our vehicles. This type of inflation hits everybody's pocketbooks in much more real ways. I think if you look at some of the aspects of the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, there were issues in the credit markets, which really didn't hit everybody at the bottom of the scale the same way that going to the grocery store and not being able to find, you know,

staples at a decent price, milk, eggs, butter, things like that. So I think it absolutely hits people that way that's going to raise the price. profile. And in fact, Pew had a poll out the day before yesterday or yesterday. And 93% of Americans, according to this particular poll, say that inflation is either a very big problem or moderately big problem. So you got 93% of Americans who say that inflation, yeah, it's a big problem. And that's far and away over what other responses in that poll were. So I think it's a matter of time before we see how badly this plays out for Democrats in particular. The other thing, and this kind of piggyes back on what Jonah was saying, too, I mean, the other thing about the

Biden administration with the remarks that he made about inflation this week, it's so easy to, I don't know who folks in the administration think that they're fooling by kind of obfuscating and avoiding the issue. Vox had a story out this week, pointing out the fact that the San Francisco Fed in late March. So we're talking six weeks ago, seven weeks ago. The San Francisco Fed had an analysis piece out basically showing in these huge jagged spikes core inflation in different parts of the world and then core inflation in the U.S. right after the American Rescue Plan was passed in early 2021. So right out of the gate, the evidence is there in black and white that some of the spending compounded upon other spending from the Trump administration plus all these other factors

just shot inflation up right out of the gate and they estimated could be as much as 3% that's something like the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan contributed. I don't know how you can avoid the consequences of this stuff politically, especially as we're coming up on midterms in a few months. Yeah, just a really short point on this. I think when you add together things like empty shelves where baby formula should be rising prices the supply chain problems that we had months ago that still linger

you're continually piling on thing after thing after thing that for a huge chunk of Americans just doesn't feel like America right you know for most most people who are alive in this country don't remember inflation they don't remember the gas lines

They don't remember these kinds of challenges that we had in the 1970s and moving into the early 1980s. And I think it just creates and contributes to this general feeling of malaise, to use the Carter-era term, that something's just fundamentally wrong. This isn't the country that I'm used to in some really basic ways. And that's just a huge problem politically for the Democrats is not all Biden's fault. there's probably a great argument. It's not mostly Biden's fault. This is something that's been going and building and building with two parties spinning like drunken sailors and the fruits of policy. Part of the baby formula problem is related to difficulties in importing baby formula that have preexisted the Biden administration for a long time. But when you're in charge and you're not hitting it head on in an honest way, and even if you are, if it's still there, I think that people just have this sense. that things are just not right at a kind of fundamental level. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how

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that will put into the show notes on the current state of the evangelical church and politics. as well as sort of the history and how the evangelical church and Republican politics got so intertwined. Curious, if you want to give us your thoughts on that piece and what broader takeaways you have as we think about some of these primaries that are going on and some of the candidates that we're seeing rise in the polls in Virginia and the third person running in third in Georgia. Well, you know, Tim's piece was magnificent. I mean, I really would urge that folks read it. and he has done his homework. And what he did is he did what reporters should do, which is he got his nose out of Twitter,

and he went and he visited churches, to see what churches are actually, how they're actually changing, how people are actually struggling with some of the tensions within the church. And to paint with a kind of a broad brush here, what he found, which is what you find all over America, and I get emails from pastors constantly. and I'm seeing this theme constantly is there's a set of pastors in evangelical churches who are really trying hard to keep their congregation together and united around something around the gospel and not

politics, that politics isn't sort of part of the package deal of church. Now, that doesn't mean that they don't address political issues at all. It's just not fundamental to the identity of the church. It's down the line on the list behind trying to having, vibrant ministries to your city or, you know, vibrant small groups, a, you know, outreach to addicts, you know, way down that list would be politics. And these are people who are really struggling to keep people together. And it's very, very, very difficult. Because if you address something, anything, you're going to enrage some people. And if you don't address things, you're going to enrage people. It's kind of in a microcosm, the reality that,

you know, woke capital faces right now where if they do address something, they enrage people. And if they don't address something, they enrage people. But the difference between sort of woke capital and churches is you've got a highly mobile congregation. And so what's happening, as Russell Moore explained in a podcast recently, is that there are pastors who are embracing crazy as a church growth strategy. So they are all in on politics and then cast standing in anyone who's not all in as being weak, as being ashamed of the gospel, as being unwilling to face the times. And a lot of this is happening in non-denominational Pentecostal churches that are just totally alien to the mainstream media. The mainstream media knows nothing about

Pentecostalism. They probably don't even know a Pentecostal, and maybe never met one in their lives. And so it's happening in this place. It's completely alien to them. that's operating under a theology that's alien to them. And what Tim Alberta did was he kind of pulled the curtain back. And he said, this is what it looks like in real life when a church from the right starts to dive in and wrap both arms around politics. A lot of it is about as awful as you might expect,

with people talking about ivermectin from the pulpit, right? with people spinning out vaccine conspiracies that you wouldn't believe from the pulpit and growing exponentially while they do it. He profiled the pastor whose church went from 100 to 1,500 who took that approach. That's an incredible growth rate. He talked about this guy Greg Locke, who's not too far down from me and down the road for me. And a lot of people get mad on Twitter when people go see Greg Locke.

And they say, well, there's lots of church. is not like Greg Locke, stop focusing on Greg Locke. Well, yeah, I get it, but he's had exponential growth being crazy. I mean, he went, one of these things he went viral for was threatening to beat up a Dunkin' Donuts employee over masks. And he just gone crazy. And his social media reach is immense. More than two million people on Facebook, they follow him on Facebook. That's huge. That's far more than almost every other celebrity pastor in the US. And so what Alberta showed is that the way in which the church is being divided is really being divided between those people. It's not liberal and conservative. That's not what it is. There's no liberals here or very few, very few. It's between

people who are trying to keep the gospel sort of the main thing and keep together a church across differences and people are leaning into the political moment in a very profound way. And that's where your divide is. And Jonah, this piece was about how politics has changed the church. But of course, evangelical voters have changed the Republican Party as well. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, one of the things I also just put on my intellectual history hat, there is this notion today that religion, particularly popular on the left,

that says religion has no place in politics. and yet you would not have gotten American progressivism without a very aggressive role of the social gospel movement. The founders of the American Economic Association were like, I think half of them were also pastors. Richard Ellie, who's like the most famous member of it, founder of the head of the Wisconsin School of Progressivism,

was also a devout Christian who thought it informed everything. And I think that the, the truth is though in the modern era that a lot of those that one of the great ironies is that a lot of those forces were essentially

quietest until Jimmy Carter and Jimmy Carter is the one who sort of politically activated a large number of evangelical Christians and then couldn't hold on to them and they all started moving to the Republicans and it The thing that disturbs me, the thing that deserves me about the original progressives, the things that disturbs me about, the stuff that Tim is writing about, the stuff that David

is writing about, is I really don't like sort of when you get the peanut butter of religion and the chocolate of public policy in the sense that it's fine to have your morals informed by religion and think, I think it's not only fine, it's appropriate and good to have your your views about society informed by your religious convictions, but where you get into trouble is to say, when you start saying, if you disagree with this policy, it means you're a bad Christian, or if you disagree with this policy, you are violating some church teaching or worse, a tribal connection to a group that claims to have a monopoly on the singular reading of scripture or religious meaning.

And the reason why that's a problem is that it becomes, that's just a very difficult thing to debate, right? It is a recipe for thinking that your political opponents need to be destroyed rather than reasoned with. And I think that's true both in terms of the minds of sort of secular types, who say, well, there's no reasoning with these people, and the mind of certain sort of religiously activated nationalist types who say these people are, you know, anything between they just don't get it and demonic.

And the public square, I think religion should have a place in it, but it needs to be driven by sort of liberal principles of persuasion and reason. And I think too much of our politics on both sides operate as sort of, it's sort of the wars of religion under different flags again. Michael? I think, I mean, I would agree with everything. that Jonah and David had said. I think one of the things that strikes me about Tim Alberta's piece, and he did a fantastic job reporting this. Not that long ago, I mean,

12, 15, 20 years ago, a lot of politically active evangelicals were talking about the danger of seeing politics as the way to make the great society, if you want to use a term from LBJ. I mean, I remember Chuck Colson before he died, I think, in 2012. Chuck Colson, Nixon's, you know, famously your infamous Hatchetman who became a Christian while in prison, he would talk a lot about the political illusion, which is the term he borrowed from Jacques de Lule, which is to say that progressives would try to use the state, would try to use politics to craft society as they want it to be. And I think the trap that, and I say this as a theologically conservative,

evangelical. The trap that I think a lot of our folks have fallen into that Alberta's peace underscores is that we're falling for the other side of the coin of that political illusion. So we see these things going on in the culture. We see, you know, evangelical see things that get them stirred up and riled up. And most of the time it's for good reason. That's fine. But they want to wield the political sword. They want to wield the power of the state to try to enact change. where half of a generation ago we were, you know, rightly criticizing folks on the other side of the aisle for doing that sort of thing. I think you look at things like Ron DeSantis and Florida and just the spirit with which

he operates on some of these issues, the whole Disney kerfuffle, just kind of illustrates that a lot of evangelicals just want to increasingly wield the power of the state to try to get us back to this, what we think of as a great society, which, to sound like you've all lived in for a minute, wasn't really ever quite that way. And, you know, one other thing about this, if you read the debate on Twitter, sort of the blue check debate between academic right-wing evangelicals and right-wing evangelicals in the media, it's totally divorced from reality. And it's totally divorced from reality in this sense that they act like as on here are two sides the classical liberals who never conserved anything sort of the

you know the against the dead consensus debate for populism over liberalism and the post liberalism over liberalism and there's that you've never conserved anything everything is slipping out of our fingers and now we have to turn to a more state-centered approach and it's all quite um it's you know, it's all quite academic. It's all quite theoretical. And then you see what's actually happening in churches. And it isn't, you know, Louis the 14th. It is, as I said earlier, it's Ivermectin. It's vaccine conspiracies. It's QAnon, which has disproportionate. I know multiple people in my in my circle of life who believe in all or part of QAnon. It's QAnon. It's selection conspiracies. And so it isn't just that there is some sort of philosophical argument here

and philosophical distinction. It is, yeah, okay, there are some philosophical arguments and some philosophical distinctions and approach, but an awful lot of it has just really devolved into this furiously angry, unhinged engagement that is, you know, it's the far right Christian world that tried to get Ruby Bridges Goes to School banned from the books, from the elementary school curriculum here. What's the high-minded academic theory behind that? It's just a lot of fury. It's a lot of anger. It is a lot of conspiracies. So, you know, I feel like the Twitter debate about this is just completely, is completely divorced from reality. And who actually, one of the people who actually has her finger on the pulse of where an awful lot of people are going,

I hate to say it, is Marjorie Taylor Green, who fundraises through references to Satan. And this is where a lot of people are. It's one of the reasons why she's one of the top grassroots fundraisers. And we just have to recognize that. And it frustrates me because I feel like the Twitter, Blue Check Twitter, Christian, right, is defending a movement that doesn't exist. And they're ignoring the movement that's actually there. with amex platinum access to exclusive amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside so being a fan

for life turns into the trip of a lifetime that's the powerful backing of amex pre-sail tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race terms and conditions apply learn more at mx.ca. slash y annex all right switching topics over to the politics of abortion we have protests continuing in front of justices homes david i think you and i may decide discuss some more legality of that on AO, the flagship podcast. But since we're not on the flagship podcast, I wanted to talk just specifically about the politics, Jonah. Chuck Schumer bringing to the Senate floor a bill called the Women's Health Protection Act did not get the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster. But he also didn't get the 50 votes needed

to say that they had a majority. Elizabeth Warren giving an interesting statement to Manu Raju of CNN after the vote, quote, I believe in democracy, and I don't believe that the minority should have the ability to block things that the majority want to do. That's not in the Constitution. What we're talking about right now are the individual rights and liberties of half the population of the United States. I think that's enough to say it's time to get rid of the filibuster.

Getting rid of the filibuster would have done nothing to put this bill through. And if anything, of course, her side was the minority side, making that entire statement sort of interesting. So, Jonah, this bill has been criticized by the likes of Joe Manchin, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, saying that it doesn't codify Roe. It would be a large expansion of abortion rights in the country well beyond Roe or Casey, potentially, depending on how you interpret it, meaning that you could get an elective abortion throughout a pregnancy, perhaps. So what Chuck Schumer has done here, in my view, is have all of the Democrats take a vote on abortion, on a pretty extreme abortion bill that then Republicans are going to be able to run on

their vote. In the meantime, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and I believe Joe Manchin now, maybe Bob Casey as well, Democrat from Pennsylvania, who had initially voted no on this bill when it came to the floor in February and changed his vote this time around, working on something that would just codify Roe, put the current state of abortion constitutional law and move it to be statutory law.

Jonah, the politics of this. Is Chuck Schumer a secret genius that I'm not seeing? Or was this a crazy, dumb, political move for his caucus? I think it was crazy dumb political move. I don't want to get to that in two seconds. But first, speaking of crazy dumb positions, the idea that Democrats are still trying to get rid of the filibuster when they're looking at a future where the Republicans may not have 60 votes, but will definitely, almost surely have control of the Senate

for a big chunk of the next decade. and their priority now, based on like, imagine weird, kind of like otherworldly facts, as Elizabeth Warren laid out, where she thinks they're in the majority, when in fact they're in the minority and she wants to give, you know, we saw this with the bill that better stuff, where, you know, Bernie Sanders says two people can't stop, shouldn't be able to stop the majority from doing what they want, when in fact it was 52 senators, there's two Democrats plus 50 Republicans who were the majority and the idea of getting rid of the filibuster strategically is just so mind-boggingly stupid for Democrats and yet that's sort of it's it's like the it's

sort of like my point about Biden and with inflation they can't get let go of the old talking points and that and the old talking points are not catered to the existing reality in ways that make any sense um which brings me to schumer look i i we talked about this a little bit on the dispatch live, which Sarah and I attended, because we actually care about this company. And the basic problem seems to me, and you guys know this stuff better than I do, is that Roe, broadly speaking, without the little sort of exceptions that have accumulated at the state and local level, and, you know, under federal law, if you sort of reboot Roe from scratch, Roe is actually an extreme position. Roe allows for abortions through the third trimester.

Roe is and the Democrats have been living off of this idea that Roe is the moderate position. They believe it. They think it. They think it pulls that way because most people don't want to get rid of Roe. But when you poll people about getting rid of Roe, what they're really saying is, I don't want to talk about abortion and I don't really know what Roe holds. If you explain what Roe holds, they're like, no, no, no, that's crazy. I'm fine with restrictions in the second and third trimester, depending on what they are. And so what Schumer, by trying to reimpose Roe is actually taking the unqualified, pure, uncut version of what Roe allows without any of the modifications, which is an extreme position, which is just an incredibly dumb thing to force your caucus to vote on when all of the polling right now says that whoever can claim the centrist, moderate, reasonable ground will come out on top of the abortion question. But Schumer is owned by his base on this in much the same way that McConnell's sort of fending off his base when he says, you know, he won't rule out a national ban on abortion. And at least McConnell gives the sense that he understands the political dynamics and is trying to navigate them. Schumer really just sounds like he's just all he cares about is not being primaried by AOC, which is not a great way to be a majority leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate.

Michael, do you have any reporting on the future of that compromise bill? I mean, David and I have talked about this a lot, that perhaps this will provide some wind in the sales of a gang of six-style move on the abortion topic in the House or Senate of sort of that middle that actually represents the vast majority of Americans who think abortion should be legal sometimes and illegal at other times. Collins and Murkowski, though, of course, have been working on this since February and no one seemed to care before. Do they care now? I am skeptical that that's actually the case, especially the closer that we get to the midterms.

Republicans are going through all these primaries, as are Democrats, but the spotlights on a lot of Republicans. I mean, there have been other things, too. Immigration is one of these things we keep on hearing whispers that we're going to move forward on and things don't seem to materialize the China competition bill. I mean, we finally have a conference committee that Haley Bird has done some good reporting on. We finally have a conference committee on that, but you would think that the China competition bill wouldn't have taken as long to get through. I think everybody pretty much agrees China is a problem, right? But this is the kind of stuff that requires adults kind of coming to the table.

And I think the incentives for that right now, unfortunately are low. The closer we get to the midterms, I just don't see any sign of that actually taking place other than whispers and, rumors of people coming together. The other thing about this, too, Politico had a story yesterday that I just kind of rolled my eyes at. And, I mean, the headline in the political array is Senate Democrats' imaginary majority. And you've got several Senate Democrats in here kind of bemoaning the fact that once again, Joe Manchin or others in their caucus are throwing a wrench in things. And I just have to wonder, like, I mean, so much of this is political posturing, obviously, in kind of the kabuki theater that happens, but who did not,

what political outlet did not write some kind of a feature or story about Joe Manchin 16 months ago being able to do all this. We saw this would build back better. We're seeing this to some degree now with this abortion bill. I mean, it should not be taking anybody by surprise and no, Chuck Schumer does not have an easy job trying to navigate anything through the Senate. But man, he sure is not making his job any easier by, again, doing kind of the flip side of what Republicans are doing and playing to the extremes and not getting his own nose out of Twitter, so it would seem. David, what are we missing here? Chuck Schumer is Mitch McConnell's, you know, Harry Reid.

He's the heir to Harry Reid, the evil genius. Chuck Schumer was put on this earth to make Mitch McConnell look like a genius. I mean, look, the malpractice here is really staggering, and it truly is a symbol of the psychological hold that the base has on democratic politicians. You know, this is something where, you know, it doesn't even feel like there was a serious consideration given to an ounce of compromise. This wasn't like an agonizing choice by Chuck Schumer here. This was, oh, of course, we're going to go beyond Roe KC. Of course, that's the legislation we're going to put forward. And all the activists who are now telling us, don't use words like choice, instead use decision,

and are so deep in their progressive bubble. And from a human standpoint, I get it. If you are living in giant cities where 100% of the people you're around, 100% of the time, are just as extreme as you, if not more, it has an effect on a person. This is just documented. But how many times do you do the same thing? How many times you run a playboat that says, cater to the base, and then Twitter, shame, Joe Manchin,

or surround his houseboat with kayaks, and this time it will work? That's absurd. This is, there's just so much incompetence. I mean, I wrote a piece a couple weeks ago on the French press, and it was, can't anyone be normal for five minutes? or can't anything be normal for five minutes? I mean, we're constantly facing abnormal crises

like the baby milk, the baby formula crisis. It's another one. Can't anyone be competent for five minutes? Can't somebody look and just say, hey, I know you feel passionately that abortion should be legal right up to the very moment of birth, but you know what?

That's a 10% position in the United States of America. And we try to win elections here. and I have a bipartisan bill that will in Chuck Schumer's perspective protect 99.5% of legal abortions and I've got bipartisan support on this and we're going to run with that

and that would be political competence from the left and no that's just not an option that's just not an option and I just shudder to think what's about to happen in some red state legislatures If Roe is overturned and that the elite opinion holds,

it's going to be landing into the states at a time of more dumb culture war legislation than I've ever seen in my entire adult life, where there's just a race, just a race towards culture war extremism in red state legislatures. And you're going to start to see in a lot of places the incompetence flip side of the incompetence we've seen from National Democrats. So here's my plea. Can't anyone be competent for just five minutes, please?

You know, Steve interviewed earlier this week for the other installment of the Dispatch podcast. He interviewed Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns of New York Times and the reporting they've done about January 6th. And they get into part of their conversation and talking about why did Joe Biden come out governing the way that he has governed right out of the gate? And I think this is certainly true, the Biden administration, but I think it's true of Democrats, where they are right now. Joe Biden wanted to be a president of consequence. People in his administration wanted to be, they wanted him to be a president of consequence.

I think so much of kind of the Chuck Schumer apparatus, right, he wants to be a leader of consequence. And to do that, he's got to play to his base. And I think, you know, to your point, David, when you're trying to be the leader, the party, the faction, whatever. of consequence. It's really hard just to get stuff done. All right. Here's our last topic. Speaking of getting stuff done. This week marked

the anniversary of the birthday of John Brown, the abolitionist who led the raid on Harper's Ferry. And I just noticed something a little unusual. It felt like there were a lot more people talking about John Brown in the

news, on Twitter, et cetera. I even saw a member of Congress tweet about John Brown's birthday, obviously in a positive way. I don't think that it's a coincidence that we're talking about John Brown in 2022. And while I think we look back on John Brown as being so obviously morally right, John Brown obviously used violence and advocated for violence to bring down slavery, these were actually the words he wanted to be remembered by that he gave to his jailer on the day that he was set to be executed. I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done. Preciant words,

as it turned out, that was in 1859. words he wanted on his epitaph. I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith. Jonah, in 2022. It's so great how the more hot button it is, the more certain I am, you're going to Jonah first. Oh, for sure. David, you're just far too likely to give a cool and tempered response to my prompt. I want heat. Um, Jonah. in 2022, we're talking about someone who was so convinced that they were on the right side of history, that their view of morality was correct. And history has vindicated them more than I think even John Brown could have possibly imagined in 1859. And he killed quite a few people

in the bloody Kansas fights, a massacre where he just took pro-slavery people out of their homes. and killed them. And then, of course, the raid on Harper's Ferry led to the deaths of several people on the other side and on his side, including his sons. Jonah, I guess my first question is just the philosophical one. Is there, is John Brown right? Has he been vindicated both in terms of what he believed, but also what he believed the correct tactics were? So, as we discussed in the planning meeting yesterday, I see this entirely, entirely as an attempt by Sarah Ezger to set me up in some way.

So I'm going to be very judicious about all of this. Obviously, on the question of slavery, qua slavery, John Brown was correct, right? I think we can all stipulate that. And he might have even been tactically or strategically right that bloodshed was the only way this thing was going to get solved. I am of the school that that does not give one permission structure to pull people out of their homes and murder them. And so we can get a little Marxist on this in terms of like the cold and personal forces of history made someone like John Brown inevitable. Right? This is his logic is very, very similar to the logic of the Bolsheviks who thought,

you know, hanging a few hundred coolocks to send the right message about the nature of the class struggle and the coming revolution was required. You can be a soaked-to-the-bone Marxist and Soviet apologist and still think that that was evil, which I do, and I'm not obviously a soaked-to-the-bone apologist for those of the union. What worries me is that, yes, you can make, you know, part of the problem is our brains work by analogy. And if you convince yourself that your opponent is Hitler, then you're giving yourself permission to do all sorts of things that would have been justified with Hitler. If you're giving yourself the, if you're telling yourself that people who disagree with you

about Roe v. Wade are like slaveholders. You're giving yourself permission to do all sorts of things that you think were morally justified with slaveholders. And I think this kind of, the John, around sort of, hey, you know, you got to make, you got to break a few eggs to make an omelette kind of stuff that we're seeing around there is actually pretty dangerous. Because as an academic historic matter about debating, you know, how we got rid of slavery and whether it was inevitable that we would have a civil war over it, it's a really interesting conversation. But when you

start throwing it into the climate that we've been describing for the last hour, it seems much more likely to give permission to somebody who wants to be like the congressional baseball name shooter. And I think that stuff is out there. I think it is, I think we're playing with fire with the protests around the Supreme Court justices. We know it's out there in terms of the guys who showed up on January 6th. And I'm legitimately concerned about it. So I'm, I'm issuing my normal inclination, which is to make cheap jokes about any of this stuff. I'll leave it there. David, you had some historical thoughts on sort of just, again, was John Brown right?

I mean, he was right in his prediction that slavery would only end in blood. And in some ways, he was almost perhaps too pessimistic. I mean, not pessimistic enough because it didn't just take slavery to end in blood. It took another almost 100 years, 99 years of. blood to end Jim Crow, a lesser scale blood, a lesser scale bloodshed on a lesser scale. But I think when you're talking about John Brown, I think Joan is hitting on something really important here. And that is there was the idea of John Brown and then there was the reality of John Brown. And the idea of John Brown was this sort of messianic warrior for

righteousness that kind of after his capture at harper's ferry that he sort of swept through this idea of john brown swept through northern abolitionist ranks where he was really revered by the end of his life and i would really urge people to read mcpherson's battle cry of freedom which is i think the best single volume history of the civil war out there it's just phenomenal and what he talks about is the way in which the reverence for John Brown kind of broke the brain of Southerners because what ended up happening is as the reverence for John Brown filtered back down

south of the Mason-Dixon line, they didn't draw any, many folks in the north. Drew actually drew a distinction between Brown's idea and his methods. So they, northern abolitionists, decried his errors of judgment, but then they endorsed the nobleness of his aims. Horace Greeley called the Harbors' Ferry Raid insane, the work of a madman. But Macpherson writes, this distinction between act and motive was lost on southern whites.

They were cast into, quote, unreasoning fury. Why? Because they were very familiar with John Brown, the man, in completely rejecting John Brown the idea. they rejected the idea of abolition obviously but circled the wagons about around the brutal reality of the man himself and they saw the reverence for john brown in the north as a reverence for his methods and they saw it as an entire region embracing the idea of murder murder to end slavery and and so this is something where you know look uh i think lincoln's second inaugural uh is one of the greatest pieces of speechmaking in the history of the United States, if not the world, about the awful, awful toll of slavery and the divine judgment placed upon the United States for its slaveholding. And I think John Brown was right as a matter of prediction.

But when we're looking at historical figures like this, we can't forget that he was a murderer. I mean, that's what he was. This wasn't a guy who was gathering up a, You know, a revolutionary army truly in the way of the American revolutionaries. This was a guy who just would flat out murder people. And we need to remember that. And I agree with Jonah that the more we revere flat out murderers, the more likely it is that you'll get more of them.

And there's a lot of people running around this country right now arguing that the stakes are just as high as they were in 1859 and 1860. and that makes me very nervous. Michael Frederick Douglass said, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was all his own. His zeal and the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine.

Mine was a taper light. His was the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time. His stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave.

John Brown could die for the slave. I mean, I don't want to be in the position of disagreeing with Frederick Douglass on anything. That's the headline in which Michael Scott. Michael Scott disagrees the Frederick Douglass. Michael Scott goes after Frederick Douglass. I think I'm going to go to a different direction and completely disagree with David and Jonah and say John Brown is absolutely 100% correct, which is not true. I mean, a couple of things. one, to your point, David, you had abolitionists in the Northeast,

like Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who were really pretty much papering over what happened in Kansas, which, I mean, if you look at what happened in Kansas in 1857, I think when John Brown went out there after the Kansas Nebraska. I mean, he used a sword, right, to rip people from their beds and butcher them. So, I mean, there's a grittiness and an ugliness to that that I think gets papered over. And it makes kind of the lofty statements, you know, not to harp on Frederick Douglass, but it makes loftier statements like that probably easier to make when you do that.

But both what happened in Kansas, what happened in Harper's Ferry. David, you mentioned in some of our conversations before this call Nat Turner. those things elicited, if you want to go Newtonian here, those things elicited opposite reactions from Southerners that really escalated things. Yes, we were probably headed towards massive bloodshed anyways, but it just ratchets those things up in addition to just being wrong to take life outside of, you know, outside the proper pathways to do that. It just is not prudent, I'll say that. The second thing is, like, if you look at Nat Turner and John Brown,

and there are lots of other examples, too, these things didn't quite have the intended effect that folks wanted them to have. And so it's a big gamble to take. in a moment that we, the moment that we're in right now, it's an awfully big gamble to say those people over there are evil. We have to take these extreme measures and act outside the confines of what we've agreed to do as living together in a country, living together in a state and just exact my own idea of justice, exact my own retribution, vigilanteism, whatever. It's an awfully big gamble that it's going to pay off the way you wanted to pay.

off because I don't think the effects, I don't think the results of Harper's Ferry or what happened in Kansas really matched what John Brown would have wanted it to match, at least in the short term. And we're going to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us this week, and we will look forward to talking to you next week. This is a part of the podcast. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your

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