The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - David Frum

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

Author and political commentator David Frum joins Lawrence to discuss Trump, US foreign policy, the challenges of a Carbon Tax, “wokeness”, behavior policing, and much more.  See the commercial-free, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. Today's podcast is different than all of our other podcasts because it was recorded remotely due to the pandemic. I was in our studio in Phoenix and my guest, David Frum, was across the country in Washington. And now here I am at home recording this introduction after the fact. Nevertheless, despite all those difficulties, the discussion itself was fascinating and particularly timely. Fromm has written a book recently, Trumpocalypse, describing his impression not just of the last three years of the Trump administration, but more importantly, his reflections on its relationship to democracy and his concern about the future of democracy in this country and how to get beyond the current administration. Now, what makes this particularly interesting is that Frum himself is a conservative commentator with well-known credentials.

He was a speechwriter after all for George W. Bush. and we talked very widely, not just about the history of conservatism and democracy in this country, but also about various aspects of the Bush administration and the 20 years between then and now. The discussion was extremely wide-ranging and incredibly interesting because of his experience and knowledge, both as someone trained, as historian and lawyer who later became a journalist, and also because of his background. We share a commonality that we talked about at the beginning. We both grew up in Toronto and moved to the United States as young adults with vastly different politics.

But our experiences there versus here color, I think, both of our views of political systems and the world, differing as they do. But the fact that we've come together at the current time and agree on so many things where earlier we certainly disagreed on many, many aspects of politics is a reflection of of the incredibly interesting, shall I say, time that we're in, and makes this discussion particularly worth listening to. I genuinely enjoyed the discussion. I pulled no punches, and David was able to respond in kind, and I hope you enjoy it. Well, David, it is a thrill to be with you, at least across the country from you and virtually with you after it's been a long time that I wanted to talk to you. Well, thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here. And I realize that I don't know people are watching this as opposed to hearing it, but this is

actually a conversation between three Canadians, because not only am I here and you here, but over your right shoulder, I think I see an image of William Shatner. Yes, that's right. Another Canadian. All famous Americans are Canadian, I used to say. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. It's going to, this is, it's going to go all over the place, because you have had a remarkable career. And you've written a new book. book, which we'll talk about, but this isn't just about that. This is about your ideas, which I think are worth discussing because they're so deep and really hit at the nuances of American life in a way that I haven't seen before. I want to bracket the interview with two quotes from you. One from

your book, The Right Man, where you said, with his access of evil speech, President Bush sent a message to the world. He felt no guilt and no self-revelling. out. At the time, you said, you considered that a compliment. We'll come back to that. Then in the new book in Trumpocalypse, which I might as well, since I might as well be a good host, there we go, which is a great, great read. You said, I came of age in the conservative movement of the 20th century. In the 21st century, that movement has delivered more harm than good, from the Iraq war to the financial crisis to the Trump presidency. So that transformation between what I, sort of a synchophantic praise of President Bush

to a criticism of the movement which which is largely, I will argue, and maybe we can disagree about this, his legacy. Having said that, I also, for full disclosure, I have to have to put myself in perspective. Two decades ago when I heard about you, I kind of visceral, I had a visceral response. I despised everything you said, okay? Make that clear. And that's changed to someone whose views, I think you probably brilliantly and bravely present the harsh light of reality on the United States more accurately than any commentator I've read or see either in this book or online. So we've come a long way. At least I've come a long way in my appreciation

of you. And I want to just say how we both agree. I think this following statement will both agree upon, so I want to get it out of the way. Just to say, Bush is a postule on the backside of the nation, democracy, and humanity, and also presents the greatest danger to democracy that we've had in U.S. history. Did I overstate that? Well, I think you said Bush when you meant Trump. I'm sorry, Trump. Yeah, I confused the two, as you'll see.

I met Trump. Look, I think it's true of anybody who's lived the life of the mind, like our late friend Christopher Hitchens, that the story of your life is one both of continuities and of discontinuities. And the story of your life is of continuities you see, continuities you don't see, discontinuities you see, and discontinuities you don't see. And we're not always the best analyst of our own life, which is unfortunate because oftentimes were the only analyst there is because who else cares. So when I look back, you mentioned the Bush years.

The right man, that was not the working title for the book. The book about the Bush presidency, I mean, Bush was in many ways a person not to my taste. We would never have been friends had we ever met on an equal footing. And I had not supported his nomination in 2000. I'd been a McCain advocate. And in that book, I have a lot of doubts, some of which at the time I suppressed, some of which I felt and expressed, some of which were sort of rattling around at the back of my head in nonverbal ways and it sort of manifest themselves in the book. But like you, I've had a critical engagement with the United States my whole life. That is the one great intellectual continuity, I think, is that I'm a child of even more than of the conservative world, I'm a child of the Cold War. I was born in 1960. So many of the important

memories of my life are associated with the decisive moments of the Cold War. My late father, who was a great art collector, he bought his first important piece of art during the Cuban Missile crisis. He couldn't afford it at all. He paid for it by check. And as he later explained the story, that what he thought was by the time the check cleared, he would either be dead or else he would be so happy to be alive that he would find some way to pay the check. And the painting he bought now hangs in my house in Canada. Oh, that's lovely. And so we grew up under that protection.

All the possibilities of our lives and my life were formed by that great fact of the American security and the American World Trading System. I came from a family that was a border family mingled by community. And so I've had this critical engagement with the United States my whole life and where sometimes I'm thinking, why can't Canada be more like the United States? And at other times, why can't the United States be more like Canada? And that has been a theme through all the books. I don't, when you talk about Donald Trump, the person, I mean, obviously, he's a worthless human being. There's nothing good you can say about him.

And that's unique among American presidents, even among the predecessors, even the worst. You know, the slaveholders, the racists. John Tyler was a traitor. He served in the Confederate Congress. But John Tyler, traitor though he was, was an extremely affectionate father. Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson, racist though they were, were men of great physical courage. Richard Nixon, you know, was in many ways a criminal, but a profound intellect and a serious writer. James Buchanan commonly thought it was the worst president of the American history,

the president on the eve of the Civil War who didn't fortify the arsenals of the United States against Confederate treason, Jason Buchanan was well-traveled, well-informed, well-read. And Warren Harding, fun at a party. There's just nothing you can say about this guy. I was wondering, have you tried to find something good to say? When he ran for president, I had one good thing to say about him, which is, it's no longer true. But when he ran for president, the one thing I could say was, he, never pretended to be a better person than he was.

But since he became present, and since he's begun hanging out with evangelicals, he's begun pretending to be pious and godly. And so he's given away even that one piece of credit, which is, you know, he take him at face value. All of that to say, though, my two books about Donald Trump, Promocracy and Trumpocalypse, both try to stay away from the question of his personality. Yeah. Because I'm not interested in further enumerating all the ways that he's a bad person.

Yeah, that's why I wanted to begin this by just accepting that he's a bad person. I want to say, why wasn't he screened out? The whole point of this insanely complex political system in the United States is to screen out people like this. Why didn't it work? Yeah, and that's a great question, and we'll get to that. Interestingly, you've sort of anticipated where I came from. This is the Origins podcast, and I want to first begin, actually, by discussing your origins, you gave a really great sort of brief introduction.

But again, I want to go back even further for you. And also for me, because I want to explain to some extent the context of some of the questions I'm going to ask and why I had that visceral interaction. Because I kind of always felt, even though we really didn't get to know each other until indirectly through our mutual friend Christopher Hitchens, late after he died, we had a connection. We both grew up in Toronto, in nice Jewish boys from Toronto. The, although slightly different side of the tracks, I would say.

But in any case, we both moved to the United States for school. I didn't go, I never even thought of the United States as an undergraduate. You went to, as an undergraduate to Yale. I went to do my Ph.D. at MIT, and that brought us to the United States. Interestingly enough, I've been reading, and I think this is true. And when you were age 14, you were campaigning for a new Democratic candidate. For the Americans, that's kind of a socialist candidate in Canada. That's right?

Yes. And interestingly enough, when I was age 14, I campaign for a conservative candidate in Canada at the time. So we're ready. Is it the 75 election? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Same election. And so we were on opposite ends of the political spectrum then, and then we reversed because you came and became what at the time I thought of as an apologist for the Republican Party, and we can discuss that. I became a kind of left-wing radical. At the same time, I grew up with the same time. I grew up with your mother.

So did you. But so did all Canadians in a way. When I was in college, I would come home from class every single day so I could listen to as it happens to hear your mother, St. Barbara, and who tragically died in 1982. And I guess the year Clinton was elected. And I kind of felt, I got the sense she certainly wasn't a political conservative and how she reacted to your growing conservatism. I have no sense of myself as a self-made person. I would not be what I am, who I am, where I am, without the advantages that, and some of the challenges that came from my upbringing.

My late mother used to quote, I didn't know it was a quote. Later I later I later it was a quote, the opening paragraph of the Great Gatsby that whenever you're tempted to criticize anybody in life, remember that not everybody's had all the advantages that you've had. And in the book, that's a sentence soaked in double and triple meanings, but in her speech, it just had one. My mother, who was born in 1937, was diagnosed with fatal cancer in 1974 at the age of 37, and she was told she had a year or two to live. Now, modern medical science kept improving, and so she got more time, but she never got a big, she lived for

18 more years after 1974, but she never got a sentence of, hey, you have 18 years to live. She got a sense of, you have two years to live nine times. And that sense of doom overhung my family. And so although we had, we were very prosperous, it became more so, we had many material advantages and my parents were both very cultured people and it was a very, very loving and close marriage. And I led, in many ways, a sheltered life. It was a sheltered life always overhung by doom. Do you think, I know someone else who, a good old friend of mine, Stephen Hawking, who felt he had one year to live for 50 years. Yeah. And his productivity and his and its contributions increased after he was diagnosed. Maybe because of the urgency of living, did, did that impact on on your mother's

sort of the incredible energy? So she was determined to squeeze every bit of juice out of that fruit. And so she was a, the American listener to one oh, but she was this gigantic presence in media, where she was simultaneously a Ted Cople figure, the country's leading, or Jim Ler, the country's leading interviewer, but she was also kind of Walter Cronkite figure because she epitomized news values in a country where because everything is just poorer in Canada than it is in the United States. There's less margin. And so people in media tend to make compromise is just to put food on their table.

And because of the advantages in her life, she never had to even consider that. She never did commercials. She never did endorsements. She never did any commercial activity. She wouldn't hang out with she never associated with politicians. She never, in her entire career, I don't think she ever had so much as a cup of tea at the House of the Prime Minister or the Premier of Ontario. Such a difference from journalists nowadays. Yeah.

And that was a real point to her that she did not know them. She did not know them socially. There's one story, an amazing story where your mother got in trouble as a journalist, which I read about in preparation for this. there was a shooting at University of Montreal, a young engineering student, I think, had killed, shot and stabbed 14 women. And he was decrying women in feminism. And she basically spoke out and said,

why do you limit, don't think of this as limited to a group. It's not an attack on feminism, it's attack on everyone. And people, as far as I know, she got in real trouble for that. I don't know if you want to come. I remember that very well. Because of her mortality, she was, tremendously aware of suffering and tragedy. She used to say, and this is a saying,

I have adopted in my life about life, there are those who know and those who don't know. And what you know is pain, and the nearness of pain. And she knew that, and she taught us to know it. But what she had then a tremendous aversion to, was anyone who tried to use pain for a purpose. And that was what I think, offended her about the reaction to the events in Montreal in 1989.

I think I brought it up not just because I'm fascinated by your mother as well, which I am, and it was clear she was a great conversation, let's say, so she's fascinating every night, but I'm fascinated by... She's just the most extraordinarily fascinating person. Yeah, but you're fascinating, which is what I want to get to, I think. And one of the reasons I brought up that story is because one of the issues that goes hand in hand with the Trump presidency, I don't think it's a consequence so much, although I think it's been exacerbated by it, as we'll talk about, and you elaborate

on this, is this polarization and the use of things to create us versus them views of the world. And that's one of the reasons actually why I wanted to also have this podcast. And it's poetic to me. Another connection we had, as we say, is Christopher Hitchens. And it was really Christopher who taught me something which is so important, which is you can have good discussions and have good friendships with people with whom you disagree about. a tremendous number of things. It's okay.

And I say that because when I announced on Twitter that you and I were going to do a podcast, I got a response. By the way, you're the only person that I've ever announced in advance that I was going to have a podcast with, just so you're aware. But in any case,

honored, I think. And it was interesting to see it. Maybe it would have happened for some of the other people, but I don't think so. You can imagine what I got from, because I probably followed by more of left-wing people, that I got immediately unfollowed.

I got all these people unfollowed. How could you give this person a voice and this notion that you're not allowed to have any conversation with people if they disagreed with you about anything ever? And I remember Christopher, you know, he was a friend of Justice Scalia, a person, you know, who indirectly have connections with my niece was a clerk for him at the Supreme Court. but who's someone whose views, I guess it's clear, I disagreed with in almost every way. And Christopher was going to film a thing with me, Scalia, and him, and it would have been a remarkable thing, but Christopher died. But that fact, and I thought, well, this is what we should be doing as a society. And it comes to what you're, we'll come back to this at the end of the interview because it's at the end of your book, this notion that we, if we can't come together at some level and have discussions, after the crisis that is the Trump president,

then the nation is in real trouble. Well, thank you. Let me express some sympathy for the people who are treating those angry messages at you. Obviously, it's bad to be Dr. Nair and Richard. It's also true, and I found this very much in the Trump years. I mean, I have lots of friends with whom I have lots of disagreements. But I found in the Trump years, I have rather fewer of them. Because sometimes there are disagreements that are about how you know,

how intellectual matters, how you see the world. And so there are people who just have other views. And then, you know, people have arguments over that. That there are large issues of principle. Like with Scalia, I mean, Justice Scalia was a devout Catholic. That was the basis of a lot of his vision of the world. He would deny it was the basis of his jurisprudence. But I think he said it.

No, he once said, he once said the law, you know, the authority of law comes from God. Right. And so Christopher, who didn't believe in God, couldn't believe that. But, you know, let's put it this way. I mean, that it's not an insane proposition that the authority of law comes from God. Most people who have thought about law over the centuries have believed that. So, you know, that's not crazy. You might think it was wrong.

But then there are things, and this has happened in the Trump years where people have views. You think, I think you have that view because you get excited by bullying. I think you have that view because you've always had cruelty inside you that you were afraid to express and you find it emancipating when somebody expresses it. Or I always thought you were, you know, the usual Washington type of, you know, not a hero exactly, but that, you know, there were things you wouldn't do for a dollar. And now I discover there's nothing you wouldn't do for a dollar. And so I don't think we have to say, you know, sit down with anybody. Why can't people just talk? And there's certain parts of the Twitter sphere.

There's certain people who are actually right-wing who present themselves as liberal who say, my view is, you know, Bashar Assad sits down on the chair opposite. I will debate him on his plans for genocide in Syria. I don't believe that. You know, so I don't believe that. I don't think you have a duty to have conversations across all differences. It's more, it's challenging to think what are the important differences at which you say, you know, I can't, I'm not going to, at some point we're going to have a vote and one of us will win

and one of us loses. One of us loses. And beyond that, the vote is symbolic of the possibility at some point we have to have a fight over this and one of us wins and wants loses. So I'm, so those people on Twitter say there are, there are divisions. And look, if someone says, and from their point of view, I'm on the other side of that line, I can't gain say that. That's how they see the world. If that is a conscientious point of view, my question to those people is, for me, the barrier is how much does cruelty form a point of view, fundamental view, and I would say to them that through a lot of observation, a lot of experience,

being on the so-called left does not insulate you from having cruelty as a foundational element of your personality and your politics. That is something that I've come to agree with. and I'm going to talk a lot about your transformation. And as I say, I want to go through the arc of your life. And this may take some time because it's fascinating. And I want to talk about some things to see if you still believe things that I think are completely wrong. But we'll get there. But I do want to go back still to another aspect of your origin.

I began one of my books with a quote from Louise Bogan that said, the initial mystery, the most important initial mystery of any joke, journey is how did the traveler reach a starting point in the first place? It's a wonderful quote to me. And I want to try and understand what I would say is your starting point, which for me, at least, is at least from the point of view, this conversation is when you join the Bush White House, okay? We'll take that. I mean, obviously you've had many starting points. I was 40 when I joined the Bush White House. We're nearly 40. So I was not a young person. And I was married. I had two children. So if I'm saying what is that is for me very much the middle part of a story,

people need to be, I was quite an old person by speechwriter standards when I went to work as a speech writer. That's an important thing to note. I think it's very important. Were you one of the older people around or I guess your Gerson, who your boss was older than you were? Yeah, we were, we were, look, the normal White House speech writing shop. If you were to see the Reagan shop or the Clinton shop, what you'd see is, um, One person who was near an age to the president and was something like a long-term associate of the president. And then a lot of 20-year-olds.

And doing the work and writing. And the speech writing shop tends to get, as administrations get older, the speech writing shop tends to get younger. The W. Bush speech writing shop was more middle-aged than usual. And most of us were late 30s. early 40s but that was that's quite unusual okay well let's go back to your teens the story I've read and it may or may not be true is that what what started your road to what the 20th century conservatism after we're having worked for the social

socialist candidate was the book by by Alexander Shuljanitson yeah so maybe you can can you talk about that a little bit yeah so I learned one thing One fantastic thing on that campaign, which is I was knocking on doors. My job was to collect information. How many voters were at this address? That was my only. We were double checking that the province kept a record, but we wanted to have our own independent record,

exactly how many voters. Was anyone visiting? Was there any extra voter that was maybe not registered who could add to the rolls to get them to vote? But I exceeded my remit and began asking people what they thought was the most important issue in the Ontario provincial election of 1975 or whatever year it was. And I was a keener.

And I brought this information back. And my supervisor, who's some grizzled veteran of 24, 25, just threw up my work and said, that's not how their minds will work. And he says, I've never gotten. To ask a voter, what is the most important issue? It's like asking him, what is his favorite prime number? It's just not the way.

his mind is organized. It's not the right thing to ask. You won't get useful information. But my politics are very much a project of the late 70s and early 80s. So I was a product of this Cold War consensus, which began to fall apart in the late 70s. And suddenly things were not working. And I have an analytic mind. I began to say, well, why not? I wrote a book about the 70s. Why do the prices keep going up? Why do the, why are all the, you know, why are all my friend's parents' marriage is splitting up. Why do the Soviets seem on the rampage? And the Soviets in particular became, and I would say in retrospect, one of the reasons the Gulag Archipelago as a book hit me so hard was we were a Holocaust survivor family

who never talked about it. And that the Soviet gulag became something that was similar, that you could talk about. And so we read, my family, we read endless, who read the, you know, Evgenia Ginsburg, we read, and we read Jews who had been in the Soviet gulag system because that was that one little bit of remove where it was tolerable.

You could hear it. And because otherwise it was just, it was just too much of a rip. And so I came at this and my, I remember having many arguments with, or discussions or sometimes arguments with my mother because I was absorbing this whole new or new to me literature of the late 70s about inflation, about reasserting American power, about winning the Cold War. And she was very much in the intellectual culture of a decade and a half earlier. And that was that was what made me.

a conservative was absorbing those answers to those pressing questions. And the thing that set me wandering later was, and the thing where I see both myself is continue, as I still think those answers were basically right. But I think one of the things I've learned from politics is political questions are always conditional and contingent. And answers to them are always imperfect. But if you find right answers to That means the problems stop being important, and politics can't be organized based on those problems anymore. And that the story, this became that a major thing with my writing about the conservative world after the Bush administration, was that you had a lot of people wanted to go back and solve inflation one more time. You had a bunch of people wanted to defeat the Soviet Union one more time, wanted to stop crime one more time.

Well, those things had been done. And while there are people historians who might be argued whether the conservatives have been right about them or not, that question was really only of historical value. You said something that made me wonder. It's interesting you say this question about prime numbers, and I'm a big fan of prime numbers. I'm not going to ask about prime numbers. No, no, no, no.

It's not going to be a quiz. Why is it, you know, I contribute to campaigns, and I'll make clear I contribute to a campaign of Biden for president. I get every day, I never respond, because I know it's just a ruse to get more money, and I'm just happy to give the money. But asking me what I think are the most important issues. Why do candidates do that, do you think, to the supporters?

It's an endless stream of, you probably get the same things. But if you contribute, asking you what you think are the most important issues, I'm sure they don't care, but why do they think I, I, is just to give the appearance that they may care about me? Is that the reason that they do that? Yes, and to get a sense of engagement and ownership and caring about the campaign. they also, if you're getting a lot of that question, it means you probably answered it at some point along the way in the past.

And so that some algorithm has registered, that that is the way to get your attention. The Trump campaign sends out a steady stream of two kinds of messages, abusive and nice. You know, why haven't you contributed? And please contribute. And they are doing that because they're constantly testing. Some people respond to one, some people respond to the other.

And once you respond to them, then you get more and more of that thing you've responded to. It's interesting because some have put me on a Trump list, so I'm beginning to get the Trump ones too. But it's interesting. And maybe it's just a characteristic of the left versus right or Democrats versus Republicans. It's interesting. Or maybe just Biden being kindler and gentler. I never get the angry ones from the from the, I always get sort of pleading or requests to say, oh, I know it's a hard time. We haven't heard from you, but I never get the hard ones.

Maybe they should try that too. Maybe it's an example of some of the techniques that the left could learn. One of the things that surprised me that I hadn't realized about you, which also made another connection, is that you, after Yale, you went to Harvard Law School. You got a law degree. What it's intriguing to me is that you became a journalist, to some of the writer, but a journalist. ultimately. And I mean, so I don't want to just classify you as that, but it's, it's, but, and your mother was, and you didn't become a lawyer. So I wonder what, did you always want to, did you, because of your mother, were you always intrigued by journalism or has it just happened? Did it just

happened? Oh, well, the loss is, it is actually a barber's story, the law school story. So I, there were two years in between college and law school. I was back in Toronto, and I was getting into a lot of mischief and wasting time, wasting money, just getting into trouble. I mean, I'm not a big trouble person, but as much trouble as it was possible for me to get into, that's the amount of trouble I was getting into. My parents were increasingly concerned about my aimlessness. And I was haunted, I think, in my own defense, I said, what made it so aimless was I'd come out, I graduated from college and I'd always had this idea that once I was at college, I would have the answers.

I would have read all the big books. I would know what there was to know. And I came out of it just crushed by the sense of, I don't know anything. I just feel stupider than I did when I went in, more ignorant than I did when I went in. And I wasted time when I was in college. So I then made up this list of things I wanted to learn and to read about. And so I spent those, a lot of the time in those aimless two years, also just, you know, staying up until three in the morning, reading things. I went through like the first year economics program and read the economics textbooks.

I sort of snored my way through bar mitzvah classes. I went back and became serious about Hebrew. And then I was doing other things, too, that are less creditable to talk about. So after about a year and a half of this, my mother said, you need. a plan. And if you don't have a plan, I'm going to make a plan. And then she said, my plan is that you should go to law school. I said, what? I don't want to go back to school. And law school, I don't want to be a lawyer. I know. We knew lots of lawyers. I didn't like the life. And she said, you'd be good at it. First, I don't even my mind. I think like an historian or now I'm interested

in economics. I want maybe something else. And she said, well, let's just try, just try writing the LSA team. So I bought one of those books and those test books. And there's this, this, There things were like 20, 21, 22 questions. So the first, I did the first one, and I got three at a 22 bite. And I showed it to tomorrow there. I said, look, my mind's just not organized this way. It's just not for me. Look, three out of 22.

She said, let me, let me try it. So he tore out one of the pages and she checked it. She got 22 out of 22. Bam. Did I mention we're a very competitive family? Okay. That was clear. Wait a minute, 22, 16, yes, I get it.

Then I would humble me, but it wouldn't be, you got 22? That's not, okay, it can't be as hard as it looks. So I then became really good at writing the LSAT. But of course, it was psychology. I was trapped. Having proven that I could do so well on the LSAD practice test, now what excuse did I have for not doing the real thing? And once I did the real thing, what excuse did I have not to go?

And it was a weird experience. I have very ambivalent feelings about it. I met some wonderful people there, including a professor had a huge influence on my life. Judaswar who taught at the government department. Also, Jewish refugee landed in Montreal and then ended up at Harvard. And I never practiced law, but it has formed a lot of my thinking about the way institutions work ever since. And was a great gift.

Did it affect your conservative outlook? I tried to wonder just for family reasons how my brother made that trajectory. And I noticed that as he did his law degree in Canada and then did a master's in law at Yale. But he progressively became more conservative during that time. So I'm just wondering, did it affect your... Well, it affected mine, maybe in a job. different way from his. The first at law school, the law schools in those days had a strong left-wing tilt. I mean, it was something that was superficial because people did then go out

to make a lot of money, but the language of the school. And so there became quite self-conscious little nodes of conservative students. I was president of the Federalist Society at Harvard, and we sort of probably radicalized each other. We created an alternative, ghettoized social and intellectual culture within a seemingly in hospitable environment. And over time, those things, they were very new when I was there, but they became very powerful and created promotion networks and all kinds of other networks. For me, the way the way law had an impact on my thinking was, there's a famous sentence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great judge and Supreme Court Justice, said the life of the law is not logic, it is experience. And that through,

my life, I was, that I'm always very interested in the question of how do we get to this point? And there are oftentimes solutions that are good solutions. One of the things, I will have this discussion with more liberal people, they say, the answer is to abolish the electoral college. They answer to everything. But you can't do that. It's not, it can't be done. And if you were to do it, and you would also unravel so many things in American life. So even if you could do it, you would have to think twice about it. But since you can't, you shouldn't even think about it, because it's not a doable thing.

And then there are these workarounds, these compacts. If you undo the electoral college, you're undoing the two-party system, which may be good, but you need to really think about what you're doing. And so I just came away from that with a deep sense of institutionalism. Lawyers are, that you are taught, that institutions have their own logic.

You can't just make things, you just can't issue decrees and make expect things to happen. And that is something that for me was a lifelong lesson of the law. I've always wanted to think things through for myself. And that was one of my reactions, by the way, after the Bush administration, which is, you know, to jump ahead to that story. Very effect, I mean, the 9-11 experience was just so shattering and personal. And we lost a dear friend in the attack, my wife and I. And it just, but it also then raised a lot of topic matters about which I knew very little. I'd never much paid attention to the Middle East.

I had not been much interested in, you know, I've been to Israel to see family. I never, I never wrote about it. I never much thought about it as anything other than like, you know, Middle Eastern Florida. So Zionism wasn't a big part of your, you know. No, it was more like, it was the unquestioned Jewish Zionism in the 70s and 80s, which is, you know, back in those days, what happened is, you know, Shimon Peres would come to Toronto for the UJA fundraiser and everybody would clap. And Monacham Began would come to the UJA fundraiser and everybody would clap.

And the idea that they were indifferent, that was not, it was so far away. It wasn't, you know, he was the Prime Minister of Israel. So you clap. And, you know, we had family there. We spent time there, but we didn't involve ourselves in the internal concerns. And that's as we're just not into internal, was really, pop my mother a little bit more. But so, yeah, we're a Zionist.

We were for everybody. And, you know, whoever they wanted to elect, we were for that. Are you still that way? Not so much so, but broadly, yes. I mean, I do, I, I, I do tell the prime minister to Israel politics that, um, every, every answer the Israeli face comes attended by enormous risks. Peace has risks, war has risks, concessions have risks, hardlines have risks. My children will not shoulder the rifle, uh, to pay the cost of a risk gone wrong.

So I'm not going to tell, um, I mean, people there. So long as what I increasingly are, so long as you remain within a, broadly democratic liberal culture. And there are things that are happening in Israel now that... Are very worries. Give me very worries. So that's a different thing. But like, you know, if Israelis democratically decide to give back the West Bank, that's fine

with me. And if they decide to keep some of it that democratically, that's also fine with me. And because I don't bear the risks that are caused with their menu of terrible options. But you take it as... It's funny. I plan to go in this direction, but you take it as granted that it should be up to them what happens to the West Bank? Well, as a matter of fact, it is.

Oh, as a matter of fact, it is. But it's an interesting question. I mean, so you say, you know, it's their decision and as if there's not a... Yeah, like, like, I should say it's not how they approach this problem is their decision. Yeah, okay. And yes, and obviously, when I think about it, I have identification with the Israelis and, you know, I wish everybody well, but I don't have an identification with non-Israeli. So, you know, these are my relatives.

And, but I don't, anyway, but to go back to the 9-11 thing. So I got swept up in this moment where the country was suddenly plunged into this whole, this is not stuff I'd come to the Bush. I'd come to the Bush administration to work on trade issues mostly. I was very excited. I mean, I have a free trader. And that was, I, my remit, the reason I was high. was to work on all the domestic economic issues, trade, ag, there was going to be a big

agriculture bill up and, and those things interest me a lot, which is a foible, but or a peculiarity, maybe it was an opportunity to bore people. But, but they, so that's what I was there to work on. And, and then we're, it was an administration about completely different stuff. And I was in many ways, not my area zone of familiarity. You know, I, I, And as of September 11, 2001, I don't think, I don't think I'd ever visited the Persian Gulf. I'd certainly never visited Iraq. I knew history from a book. I'd met a couple of exiles.

I'd read Kanan, Micaiah. I was interested, but I was an amateur. And then this thing happens. And all my friends from the Cold War, which is something I had been very invested in, spent a lot of time on. I had traveled in Central Europe, and I did know that world. And I had followed very closely the developments in the 1990s, pulling out the transition from communism to liberalism in Central Europe. All my friends who've been on the right side of that issue all had some answers about what to do in the Middle East. So I listened to them.

And one of the things I came out of the Bush administration doing, this goes back to the question of the law school, saying, you know what, from now, on, I'm not listening to anybody, but if I'm going to make any mistakes in the future, I'm going to make my own mistakes. Okay. Look, what I want to do first, before I take you back again to the Bush years, because I'm not going to let you go free there yet, in my mind, is I've tried to sort of think about your transition out of the person who wrote the books I know of before and during the Bush

years, to the person you are now. your views have changed in a number of ways, and it's amazing to read. I'm fortunate because I happen to read those two books side by side, so I can compare statements of the same man 20 years apart, more or less, or almost 20 years apart. So when I think of the source of your own change in view of the success or lack thereof of conservatism in the 90s and beyond, there's a few quotes of yours from the new book.

one says after 2008 the sorcerer's apprentices of the conservative world conjured up demons intending to control them but the demons proved too strong for them and knocked them aside hurling open the door to the sorcerer himself Donald Trump I think I'll read all three and then we can comment at all of them there's another point where you talk about having talked to a young Republican and you say he spoke in a tone that I probably had shared at his age of stark choices between left and right, of certain and eternal doom if the wrong side prevailed and even one single time, and have startled surprise that I could not share his perceptions.

I answered him only briefly then. I was there to listen and not talk, but here's a longer answer now. I found this a profound statement, by the way. That's me talking about you. The possibilities of the future are shaped always by the decisions of the past. and and and and and that's why I'm not going to let you go free for it with with with with with with with with with which I think I think Donald Trump is a direct legacy of of George Bush but let me read the last quote um which is that um which I think is one of the most honest statements of a change of mind that I've read in a book and and and it's a it's a it's a discussion about the gold war warriors pearl and all the and the people who you were talking about in the Bush administration I guess An error of observation led to an error of advice, that the most important constraint on the United States was not resistance by objective facts, but a lack of subjective willpower. The claim was all fantasy, and harmful fantasy too. I partook in it in some elements of this fantasy at the time, and I do not write these words to criticize others more than myself. All of these suggest to me that you look back at some level at the younger David Frum and are disappointed in some aspects of why you bought the conservative line.

And they present to me some period over 2008. I'd like to know during the period from the time you left the Bush administration to the time you began even before Trump writing about Trump, that changed. And how did it happen? and at least you're obviously we all have our own perspectives that may not be real about why we do things but but what's your perspective of why you do did it yeah well as i said at the very very beginning some of these processes are not visible yeah to ourselves sure of course um and some of them we may not be honest with ourselves about not to be because we're dishonest but because

yeah we don't we don't process them like but if i were to tell that story so It was evident by early 2004 that the ideas on which the Iraq war was based were not true, that there were no WMD in Iraq. I don't believe that George Bush ever lied about that. But I do think people deceived themselves. And they chose the evidence they were going to believe. Sure. and self-deception is a much realer thing in politics than deception of others.

Because it's very hard, actually, to keep two lines of thought going, this thing that I believe, this other thing that I say. You know, that's, I can't help to drop. I'm going to try not to drop it. I tend to interrupt too much anyway. But that's what amazes me about Trump, by the way. He can effectively, unlike Bush, who, I'm willing to agree he and some of his call. I don't think the same is true for all of his colleagues, but deceive themselves because they won't. wanted a result and they took whatever. We all do that. We all want to believe. We believe this and we'll find the evidence that takes us there.

That's one of the great things about science. Science teaches us how to question ourselves. But Trump is really amazing because he can, he, he knowingly lies and knows he's knowingly lying. It's really kind of an amazing. I haven't seen anything comparable in a politician. It is remarkable. So, things began to go wrong and I began to worry a lot about why they, they've been about why they've gone wrong.

And then I discovered that when we began to talk about this, it was a difficult thing. There's a joke that sort of circulated among some like-minded people at that time. Just how many Bush administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb? And the answer is, there is nothing wrong with that light bulb. Perfect. And that was the problem. You couldn't see it.

And then it was also evident to me. I mean, one of the reasons I had been for the Iraq war is I thought the Afghanistan project was doomed from the start. And the thing that Obama always said is that by going into Iraq, we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan. That always took to me as the single best argument for the Iraq war was do not commit yourself to Afghanistan, which you cannot fix. Oh, that's funny because you write as if you thought that George Bush going into Afghanistan

was a good thing. There's no choice about going in. Let me refine this. But what happened in September, October, and November and December of 2001? There's absolutely no choice. You had to do that. I think the great turning point in Afghanistan was the moment that Osama bin Laden escaped in December of 2001. And one of my might have been some histories, what if bin Laden had been caught in December 2001?

Do I believe, I think the United States would have gotten the heck out of Afghanistan right away, or some token commitment. But I would have said, you know what, business is over, let's get out of this. But having failed, governments often respond to failure by doubling and tripling and quadrupling their investment and then defining new objectives that are so impressive that no one will remember the failure of the previous much punier objective. We're not here just to catch some malo factor. Bring freedom and justice to the world.

And so it expanded. And I thought one of the things is, well, look, if you're going to try to renew a society, and this is where, you know, Christopher and I were so much in agreement and you probably were in disagreement, Iraq is in every way, a more promising place to try this than Afghanistan. People can read, for one thing. That's a big head start. They have bureaucracy. They have, and that turned out to be an illusion. They didn't really have a bureaucracy. It wasn't really a functioning state. In fact, one of the things we got wrong was we thought Saddam Hussein was a much more successful ruler and a much more modern ruler than he really, than he turned out to be. But it certainly looked like a more modern place. And the other thing that I was, another reason I welcomed the Iraq thing, is there's another debate, which is maybe the country to focus on as a source of terrorism was Iran. And one of the things I've always believed is that any U.S.-Iran conflict was a mistake,

that Iran is, this is a society, countries that, partly I'm here influenced by my many friendships in the Iranian diaspora, this is a country that is ready for a transition under its own power. And our job is to be patient and to stand back and wait for that transition to happen. And it's a very propitious place for a transition. And if we intervene, we probably will empower the worst elements in Iranian society. if we intervene in almost any way. We will empower the worst elements, not the best.

And the best elements there seem so strong, so exciting, that you want to make sure they always feel like they've got a friend around the corner when they're ready for it. Anyway, so as things began to go wrong, and I began to try to talk about it, and you discovered it was not something you could talk about. And then meanwhile, in the area where I really did feel comfortable, and I really knew the data, which was the American economy,

it was evident in 2005, 2006, that the Bush expansion was not working for most people. And although I will not claim that I foresaw the financial crisis, what I did see was there was something really ominous about an economy, and I wrote about this in 2005, where incomes are not rising, but spending is. And the spending is rising is people are taking on more debt against their rising asset values. And my late father, one of his rules about business is that income is a fact, wealth is a theory. Right?

I got a corner store. It throws off $100 a week in rent. That's a fact. What is that $100 a week worth? That's a theory in a different time. That's where the stock market goes up and down. People value that income stream at different prices. And so what was happening was Americans who are not seeing their incomes rise,

we're seeing the value of their houses rise, a theory, borrowing against it. Debt is not a theory. Dead is a fact. And so I got more and more worried about this. And I began to think, you know, we need to rethink. And so I published a book in 2007 that was like a halfway, a half-bate cookie of an intermediate phase. Or something is going wrong. And there are things we need to do.

And that's where I began actually writing about the global warming channel. And I became interested in it because the carbon tax. I actually became interested in the wrong way around. I started being attracted to the solution of a carbon tax as a way to raise revenue for the state. Yeah. Do things in a way that did no harm to anything important. Anyway, so that's where I was in 2016. You know, just that still comes true in the new book in a way that I disagree with you.

I mean, you talk about the carbon tax, and I want to spend a lot of time on, because you do spend a lot of time on climate change and carbon tax. And I'm very impressed because I think carbon tax is a very rational approach. But I don't think it's an approach to, you tend to approach it as an economic benefit, as a tariff effectively, that may be a pleasant tariff instead of an unpleasant tariff. In fact, I think you should do carbon tax and approach climate change, not because it's economically beneficial in the short term, but particularly because, it costs money because in the long term it's beneficial. And treating as a tax that doesn't hurt is not the point of a carbon tax it seems to me. But anyway, so having said that, well, why don't you respond? Because we never know.

I'll never know if we get there at the rate we're going anyway. Well, my carbon solution, as you know, is not just about, and you make this point very powerfully in your book, that even if we were to stop emitting today, we've signed up for a future that may not be consistent with human civilization. And so we need to do something about that. So in the book, I'm very interested in carbon sequestration and how you do it. It's something that's just glimmering as a possibility right now. It's expensive, but it may become less so, but it's not prohibitive.

And given that we have a defense budget that is, so crazy. A hundred billion dollars more a year is being spent by President Trump than President Obama. What's it buying? No one can say. And mostly we're preparing for a naval war with China, which we are never going to fight. So, you know, that extra $100 billion, just think of this as an insurance policy. That's not the wisest way to spend $100 billion extra dollars.

That's not the budget. That's the increase in the budget. If that could buy you a lot of carbon sequestration. Well, not that much, but yeah, it could buy you some. Your attitude, by the way, about the defense budget is also very refreshing. I remember when I was in Cambridge, I do my PhD. It was a book came out to A Price of Defense by Philip Morrison, a number of the standard people,

and arguing that, of course, defense spending costs, and you have to think rationally, rather than just arguing that we're a stronger nation by spending on it. But in fact, climate change as a threat is a, is a, and the military understands this and understood it more quickly than many of the civilian aspects of even those administrations that appear to ignore it. The military already had study groups looking at climate change because they realized that climate change is a threat specifically because of the sociopolitical implications of between 100, over this century,

between 100 and 600 million climate refugees, that that, you know, if you look at what happened in Syria and its impact on the world, that's small potatoes compared to the threat of climate refugees, which is one reason why we should think of, it's not inappropriate to take defense money, blow to defense money that is useless out of the defense budget. It's actually appropriate because climate change is a defensive issue. Yeah.

Do you agree? I do, and I think one of this pandemic should drive, home to everybody this truth, which is all, you know, for four years, President Trump spent an enormous amount of money preparing for a naval war with China. And we now have a threat from China that's had really shattering costs on people all over the world. And President Trump wants to have an argument about whether China is to blame. That's not an interesting question. The question is, okay, you spent all this money to defend the country against China. Why did you buy worships when that was not the threat. I think I had a colleague in mine, a Nobel Prize winning

business when I was at Harvard who I was talking about the government spending on different things. And he said, I think that they still are spending money on mules from the Civil War. There is this inertia in military spending that often is unrelated to actual threats. It's just like any government institution, and here you're much more. expert than I am, I'm sure. But anytime there's a lot of money to be spent, there's a lot of effort to spend that money, right? Yeah. Well, and claimants grow up around it. So, you know, you build tanks. That creates a tank factory. That creates shops and interest groups around the tank factory. That creates a member of Congress who is beholden to all the various interests that depend on the

tank factory. And now you tell that place that maybe, tanks are no longer useful. And they say, okay, fine. What are we going to build instead? So, well, actually, nothing, nothing. We're taking all this money away from you, and we're not going to build any kind of rolling, cannon firing piece of hardware. What we're going to do instead is sequester carbon. They're going to think that's worse than communist. Well, that's if you say it that way, and I have issue, we'll talk about sequestering carbon, but I think that the problem is if you say it that way, of course. But in fact, there's, again, this takes me years back when I was opposing missile defense and the waste of that missile defense is.

You can say it creates jobs to spend money on military technology, but in fact it creates fewer jobs, a certain set of high-tech jobs. But if you present sequestering carbon as a major potential technology development program that may in the end employ many, many more people, then I don't think people are going to object so much. If you say we... No, no, no, but now you're overlooking the thing. We're saying is, we're going to, member of Congress from the tank fact making district.

We're going to put everybody in your district out of work. But good news. We're going to create twice as many jobs in this district. No, of course. You have to stay away. He says, no, I'd rather have fewer jobs in my district than more jobs than somebody else's district. I've been through that. I was been through that with the superconducting super collider in the United States where I watched it die

because different districts were complaining about what they were or weren't getting, and you tried to make sure it was being built in 50 states so you could get appropriate number senators to support it. No, I think you have to say that in your district, I mean, it's like saying, well, it's what you probably have to say to people in Kulman districts, that what we'll try and do is repurpose those, it will create new technologies in your areas to try and retrain people to do a different kind of thing that may be better for, you. your productivity and economic competitiveness in the 21st century,

and at the same time, better for the world. Maybe that sounds naive, too? No, that's what we try to do. And then we have to reckon with something we talked about at the very beginning, which is the American congressional system of government makes it more difficult for the United States to do things like that than it is for comparably organized countries with different systems of government. And now we with coal mining because it is a private sector industry, in the end, the government

cannot save coal. Yeah, it's not going to, it's going to die no matter what. It's going to die no matter what. And we've already seen that. And coal mining as a profession or an occupation has died a lot longer before the coal mining industry did. Very few people employed, by the way. That's the other thing that's so ridiculous. You get rid of all the coal mines and it would be a lift in unemployment.

I think I use this number in Trumpaclops that if you total everyone in the coal industry, not just the miners, but the bookkeepers, marketing, you know, lawyers, everyone employed by every coal mining company, you get fewer people than teach yoga for a living. No, not teach yoga than our license to teach yoga for a living in the United States. Perfect. That's not from the book that I know of. Maybe it was Trumpocracy, but it's a great, it's a great comparison. And so that's what's interesting that that's become a big issue because, of course,

as you say, it doesn't make any... It just... The first day of social isolation, many more people went out of work than... Well, maybe the first hour of social isolation, many more people went out of work than if you closed all the coal mines. But, okay, we're jumping around, but I do want to hit, because we may not get to seek restoration,

because I was actually where I worked, at the university, I was involved in a program of trying to promote carbon capture, and I've now come around to think, thinking that at least direct capture from the atmosphere is sounds nice, but it isn't economically particularly viable. The numbers I think you're quoting, so if we put the best you can, a goal for carbon capture is something like $100 a ton. That's not achievable now, but a goal to spend $100 a ton of carbon. We put 10 gigatons of carbon globally into the atmosphere every year.

So that's just to just to counterbalance what we put in, that's a trillion dollars a year. that doesn't change it. That doesn't take carbon out of the atmosphere. That's a trillion dollars just to keep it the same. Ten trillion, if you want to reduce it, it's not hundreds of millions. And so it will be a challenge. I see it as a much bigger challenge than, I agree with you that it is a laudable goal and perhaps the most laudable goal, because it is the one thing we can do where the physical consequences are in some sense known. If you take carbon out of the atmosphere, you know what will happen, as opposed to geoengineering, which you allude to in the book as well. I'm really worried about that.

Yeah, but, you know, let me also pick a bone here with you about that, because I was a little surprised. It looked to me almost like the Trump line. You claim that it's China. It's actually not. There's trons of, in fact, as far as I know, China is looking at geoengineering, but I have many, many colleagues in the United States that are. And so, first of all, I don't think we can point a finger and say, China is going to do this and it's going to have problems. I think geoengineering has certain

problems. If you put aerosols in the atmosphere, we don't exactly know what's going to happen. But the one thing that a good climate scientist friend of mine informed me about, which I think it hopefully will make you feel better, is while there's a danger of geoengineering, because unlike fighting carbon production, or at least reducing the global carbon footprint of the world, one country can unilaterally decide to do this, any country. country could decide to do this without the consent of the rest of the world and the rest of the world is going to suffer or benefit from the consequences. So that is a concern. But the good part is that unlike carbon, which survives in the atmosphere for about a thousand years,

if you put aerosols in and bad things started to happen, there's a half-life of about a year or two. So it is a danger, I agree, but in a global sense, it's not something, and I've changed my mind on this because I actually did a radio program once about how opposed to engineering I was. But I think now that it's something that's worth considering and it's as a test in a way that won't be catastrophic or that may not be catastrophic. So I wanted to just throw that out to you. But you put your finger on the issue. And maybe this is just a reflects a different set of intellectual disciplines that we are interested in and comfortable with. Sure. So I'm way less comfortable with the science of it than you are.

But what I can see is once you say this is something that could be done unilaterally, that what I hear is, look, things about this from an international relations and a governmental point of view, I hear conflict. Because different countries are going to have different threat perceptions, different risk tolerance. And, of course, when the risk is analyzed, the risk will not fall randomly on the planet. And the example I give in Trumpocalypse is a study that the Indian government did that found that a plan that the Chinese were considered. would have serious risks for Indian rainfall. So this is something I see as treading us on a path to war. But one of the things that is a real background fact

to all my thinking on these kinds of issues and something that has really changed over the past 20 years was I mentioned at the very start. I was a child of the Cold War. And for all of its terrible risk, the Cold War is built on the foundation of American power. And then I achieved, I spent the center of my life in a time of when American power was more unquestioned than ever before,

that any power has ever been in the history of the world from 1990 to 2010. Maybe the 50s would be. Even in the 50s, a great power competitor. After the Second World War, the United States was probably the only country that wasn't decimated. But in this case, you were living in a time of peace and prosperity and stability. I mean, the world of 1940, America power was great in 1946, But it also felt in 1946, American power was not adequate to the needs of the world. I mean, America was half the output of the planet.

Yes, so that made you look very rich and strong. But it was a planet full of starving people. And could the United States ever feed them? Probably not. And then once you set people on their feet again, then that 50% rapidly fell, that 50% of world output. But there was this period from 1990, 2010, 2005, and the United States really was supreme. And we are now moving into a world which the United States and China will be peer nations. The United States will have certain, for a long time to come, certain advantages over China.

It's more innovative, its power is more deployable, it has better alliances, but they're not so different. And that's going to be a new thing for Americans to think about. And so I am haunted by the possibility of major power conflict and want to pay a very heavy price in all kinds of ways to avoid it. And the risk of geoengineering projects is the risk of great power conflict. And this is also represents a distinction between us. I'm older than you. I'm a child of the 60s, the mid to late 60s, but the 60s. And therefore my attitude is very different than a child of the Cold War particularly.

I was a child of the, you know, grew up in Vietnam, during Vietnam. And that certainly influenced my view of American power. and I won't deny that it's affected me ever since. But one more note about climate change, which is interesting to me that besides a carbon tax, which I think we both agree for maybe slightly different reasons is a rational policy. You also say we have to go to nuclear power. And that did interest me because I don't, let me just say, as a physicist, I'm not afraid of nuclear power.

I mean, nuclear power conjures up for people, you know, from Fukugita to, you know, you just, you know, Chernobyl, etc. And whereas, in fact, I'm less afraid. It's a lot easier to detect a small amount of radioactivity than it is the pollution due to coal. Most of the energy people that I know, and I've looked at this myself, would agree, there is a place for nuclear power. We shouldn't sort of pretend that nuclear power is all bad and we shouldn't, we shouldn't close existing functional nuclear power plants if they're not dangerous.

That's a ridiculous thing to do. But I don't think we can put all our eggs in that basket for a number of reasons, primarily economic. Namely, it takes 20 years to build a nuclear power plant, an incredible invest in money. And history seems to show us, as far as I can see, that it's just financially not a particularly useful way to go, specifically when there is another nuclear power factory that it works very well. It's called the Sun. and the sun does produce on the earth about 100,000 times more power incident on the earth than humanity uses every day. And so I just think nuclear power is worth having it as a piece, but it's not a panacea.

And certainly, I don't think it's even in the current world economically competitive with what's happening with solar power. Anyway, this notion of your being a child of the Cold War and American power throughout the book, when you're talking about going beyond Trump, not throughout the book, but particularly where you're going about going beyond the Trump, you talk about American leadership.

The question is, first of all, is it practical? Because as you point out, we're basically almost on par with China. And I would always say, some of the things you said were more innovative and we can transform things more quickly

and we have better alliances. Well, all of those things are changing rapidly and Trump is responsible for destroying a number of them. It's not clear to me. It's realistic to imagine us having the kind of hegemony we had, even if we could. But I don't see why that's a good thing. And again, maybe it's because I'm a child of the Vietnam War.

In particular, I had an experience, when I taught at Yale, a friend of mine was a science advisor to Mitterrand. And he invited me to the Elyze Palace to meet with Mitterrand and advisors, which was a big deal for me. And I bought my first suit, I remember. and I went there and we were talking about the challenges, the climate change was one, but at that time it was, I think it was genomics,

and there were a whole bunch of global science. They wanted to talk about global science programs that France could be involved in. And I remember at one point, it wasn't, but it was one of advisors said, why do you always talk about leading? Why can't you just be a part of it? Why can't you, why can't, instead of you talk about

inspiring the world, the United States inspiring the world. Why can't the United States be inspired? Why do we have to have a position of leadership? And why is it presumed that we must have that? So I want to throw that out to you. It's a collective action problem. So if you, your, your town wants to build a new town hall. And what everyone who's ever done a project like that is found is that when, when a corporation or a wealthy individual says, okay, I'm putting down 20% of the cost on condition that the rest of you come up with the other 80%.

Okay. You get a lot more action than when somebody says, okay, let's all put in the same $50. Because the 20%, that first down payment toward the town hall makes people believe, hey, you know, this is happening. It's not because the first contribution of $50 that we're still as far away as ever.

So the United States has always been able to goad other people into acting. And then to make it less fanciful that every time, I think without exception, since the end of the Cold War, when the United States has said, okay, you know, you're right, Mr. Mitterrand. And this is the story of the Balkans' wars. We'll step back. The hour of Europe has come. I think it was James Baker said that about the Balkan War. You guys run it. And they can't.

They can't agree. And that's not because Americans are good and Europeans are bad, it's because no country in Europe is that big. The way they overcome that problem is with the European Union, and the European Union is not a state. And it can't act like a state. It can't make central decisions. So, yes, theoretically, the European Union could be as powerful and rich as the United States.

It's a bigger population. But it can't act that way. They cannot deploy troops. They cannot have one person say, okay, I, president of the European Union, commit the European Union to the defense of Bosnia. It doesn't happen that way. And so nothing to happen. And as we've seen, and we've seen this in the pandemic, we're running a real world experiment because the United States has not led. Yeah.

It's been utterly absent. So there is nothing preventing the European Union and Japan and everybody else stepping up and saying in the absence of American leadership, we'll do it ourselves, except. What you get is every country for itself, selfish, narrow nationalism. And it's going to have a long-term effect because not only is, maybe it's good that you have lots of different people hunting for a vaccine separately rather than one big research project because you get the advantage of competition and because vaccine research is not so, so expensive. Yeah, it's probably from a scientific perspective, when you don't know what the right route is, it's better to try a lot of different ones and then see what works.

So maybe that's good. But what is not going to be good is what is following, where each country's, says we need to have our own face mask industry. Each country says we need to have our own antibiotics industry. And the United States can maybe do it, but that's going, maybe, and the European Union can maybe do it. It'll be less efficient than if we had true trade. What happens to Japan?

What happens to post-EU Britain? What happens to a country like Canada? What happens to Mexico in this world in which everyone is building national champions? We tried that. The way, you just need one leader to overcome the collective action problem, and not to give everybody orders, not to be a hegemon, because the United States will not be that again. But to act like the impetus behind what has to be a coalition from now on, if we might have any hope.

Well, it certainly has to be a coalition. And I guess the question is that is, is the United, can the United States be the impetus of a coalition in which it doesn't leave? I see no evidence in history of that being the case. I guess, and, you know, the one, I was looking in my notes here, but the only thing I've ever agreed with Trump on are quotes you use disparagingly about him saying the United States is, you know, and he used it for a different reason, but him saying the United States is not really that different than other countries.

We're not exceptional. We haven't been better actors. This notion that the United States has acted to inspire the world for the benefit of the world in a way that's different than other countries and hasn't acted in its own self-interest is not something I see from history. And so I wanted whether you might comment on that, because I know it's probably something we disagree about. Yeah. Look, I think we have when thinking about America's role in the world, you need to cycle from the child view. which is the United States is uniquely good and uniquely generous. Through the smart aleck adolescent view, which is what I think the Noam Chomsky view basically is,

which is the illusions are stripped away and the clever adolescent sees the truth, which is, you know, the United States, it's no different than Sumeria or, you know, Sparta or any of the other empires of history. They've all been out for themselves. They've all been raping and pillaging for what they can get. Let's not have any illusions here, mom. And then that wisdom comes from knowing what the smart adolescent knows and realizing that with many asterisks, many hypocrisies, many imperfections, many flaws,

that the childish version of it is not true, but closer to the truth. And that the world that was built, especially since 1945, is the best governance project. in the history of the human race. And it spread. And people say, what about all the countries that didn't benefit from it? It spread. So between 1945 and 1975,

that project was a project of the United States plus certain selected Northern European democracies. And then in 1975, it spread to a whole range of countries that Portugal and Spain and Greece joined the Democratic Club. And then it spread again at the end of the 1980s.

80s, to the Pacific Rim, South Korea and Taiwan, Chile returns to the Democratic Club, then South Africa, and then in the 1990s through Central and Eastern Europe. And more and more and more people participate, each in their own way, but in the world that is based on collective security underwritten by disproportionate American commitment, based on free trade, based on the ever accelerating reduction in armed conflict, which has been such a striking feature of the post-1945 world. And now we're in recession. We're going the wrong way.

And maybe we're doomed to continue to go the wrong way. But it is the wrong way. And we were on from 1945 to 2005, we were on the right way. Well, okay. Look, I think we were on the way to where we're at right now. And I think you can see a lot of the signs of it as early, I think, think as certainly at least as early as the Bush administration, if not earlier. The build up, well, during Reagan, which was a time when I was particularly concerned about the

buildup of military spending, as you say, there's less armed conflict, but huge, but much bigger military spending. And I remember during Reagan's period with Star Wars and missile defense, and particularly during, well, to jump back, to jump back for a second. The military spending is in many ways what reduced the armed conflict. Because what the, look, the way we got this new structure of peace. The reason the 1945 war ends in a more peaceful settlement than the 1918 war is because at the end of the First World War, countries like Germany and France and others could say, well, yes, the Americans are stronger, but it's not impossible that we could be a great power to. So let's focus on building up our own military power.

after 1945, whenever it's impossible. Every dollar that Germany spends on armed forces is wasted because it cannot do it. Well, but actually, this was something I did get from Chomsky's class, which was an American foreign policy, focused on the post-second World War world, argued by looking at statements from the Council of Foreign Relations and memos that have come out, he would have argued that it was actually planned.

The United States looked at what the post, you know, as it was clear how the war was going to end, looked at the post-second world world and said, how can we engineer it so that other, basically, other countries are impoverished and we can do what we want. Well, other countries are not,

we're not impoverished, and they got rich. What? They all got rich. They were all richer in 1960. No, but that's okay because they got rich because, well, they got rich because they could, look, the point is that, if Germany gets rich by helping empower the American economy, that's a good thing, right?

I mean, multinational corporations and can grow around the world. The point is, the United States, after a Second World War, you're absolutely right, was the only world power. And the question is, it said to, it's said to the after World War I, Germany and France said, we're going to try to stay in the great power business. And after 1945, the message, and this is one of the things I think Donald Trump, you know, he's always complaining. They don't spend anything on, you know, Germany doesn't have an army anymore. Japan doesn't have a Navy anymore. Yeah.

That's a feature, not a bug. The problem that Germany had has had through its history as a country is it can't feed itself. So since 1870, the Germans have wrestled with two answers to this question. And one answer was, why don't we build a giant army, conquer a slave, empire in Eastern Europe and have them grow food for us. And the second answer was, why don't we build cars as expensive as a village and sell them around the world and use them to buy pineapples and papayas? And people said, the first idea, maybe it's unethical, but it's practical.

The second idea, that sounds crazy. And after 1945, the United States said, okay, option one, off the table forever. You will never be able to do that. Why don't you try option to sell cars as expensive as a village and see whether you can buy enough food to feed yourself? You walk around Munich, walk around Berlin. This really worked. And it's not a failing. The fact that Germany was told you'll never be a military power again.

In France, too, you know, you do your thing. We are doing security for everybody. And we're going to pay more than our fair share because we're going to get more than our fair share of the benefit. But that's, yeah, what Chomsky's complaining about. This is the greatest achievement in the history of human government. Oh, okay, okay, but actually, but Chomsky would agree with you exactly. And he would have said, in fact, what he said, it wasn't a petulant teenager, but a child. If you ask a child, do you think the United States behaves as a country as other great countries have behaved around the world?

The child would say, yeah. The point is that foreign policy is done generally not out of altruism, but out of self-interest. and maybe a more peaceful world is out of self-interest, but or a world in which, so there's nothing wrong with saying that we benefit from an economically healthy Germany, but to argue that we're doing it for Germany, is I think.

Okay, but here's one more thing. I know you've taken a lot of time, but this is maybe... It's okay, no, no, I'm fascinated. I'm so glad to be able to say right-wing things on this program. Yeah, good. So how is the United States different from previous empires?

And the answer is when you are 25% of the world economy and you pursue your self-interest, predation is not going to work. You're too big. The world's too small. You know, it's just that the opportunity, and this is one of the things that we're seeing in the Trump era, that yeah, the United States still has the power to twist the rules and to screw over smaller countries. But what we're discovering is when you're 25% of the world economy or 22 and a half

or whatever we are now on our way down, your benefit from rules where Denmark can sometimes win is so great that, and the benefits from, and because your economy is so big, the benefits from predation are so small that your self-interest puts you out of the predation business. And that America, it's just because the unique thing is it's not that Americans, as I said, are better than other people, is they occupy the special position. where because of their geography, they've had this giant, through history, this giant security surplus, which they can then export. Because of the size and diversity of the American economy, and because of the liberal nature of American institutions, too,

the United States, it can't really benefit from predation, as Donald Trump is proving. It does benefit from rules. And because it is liberal institutions, it's got a bias in favor of those rules anyway where they are more domestically acceptable than a policy of predation would be, which is not to say the United States has never done predatory things. It's done a lot of them. Why Chile? Why, why, why, why, why, why do, why, why do you? But Chile's a, Chile's a good confirmation of my theory because the United States did do something

predatory in Chile in 1970 or 71, and it was a terrible mistake. I said 73, I guess, was the kid. Yeah, 73. Sorry, it was a terrible mistake. And the benefits were tiny. the costs to American reputation and prestige and ability to get things done were enormous. And so in the end, the United States played a decisive role in toppling the Pinnett dictatorship in 1989.

And I think I would argue, and I think a lot of people argue, that was a terrible, to the extent that the United States, it wasn't the only, it didn't do it, but to the extent that it green lit, the people who did do it, they did a very foolish thing. Okay, so let's jump to today. because it interests me what you said about, I agree with you about Iran. So we're, in one way or another, doing that to Iran now.

We're effectively working very hard to destroy the infrastructure of that society instead of encouraging that society to grow from within. We're hurting the people of Iran. We've canceled treaties that looked like, in my opinion, they were in everyone's best interest,

especially the nuclear treaty. And so we're doing that now. Yeah, it's not smart. Okay, but interesting me, but you just, but this is why I don't want, I didn't mean to, well, it may sound like I'm catching you in something. I don't mean to do it this way, but you point out that Iran, you have viewed as Iran as a country with potential to, to fix its own problems. So in that case, and therefore condemning it is not helping. Okay. So hold on, you know where I'm heading.

So let's talk about the axis of evil. Yeah. Is that a good thing? You know, Iran is an axis of evil? Is that a good thing, a good way to initiate the process by which you say is we should be aiming for? Okay. Let me answer first to the question, but what to do now and then go back to the axis of evil speech. So first, we rightly impose sufficient sanctions on Iran to inhibit their ability to do mischief,

because whatever the potential of the civil society, the Iranian state, is a malignant actor. And seeking nuclear weapons, seeking to export terrorism, it's responsible for this, the terrible, more Trump responsible than any other single country, even Russia, for the terrible atrocities in Syria. So we need to put enough sanctions on them to curb that behavior. The Trump administration then tore up the Iran nuclear treaty. I didn't love that treaty, but my objection to the treaty was the problem was that Iran got all its benefits up front and paid out the benefits over a long period of years.

So the problem is when you say, okay, we got this deal, and the thing that's wrong with this deal is they get all the benefits. I can't help interrupting. Do you not think the benefit of having a non-nuclear Iran is a benefit that we get up front? Because that's, I mean, Arnie Moeus was a colleague friend of mine. Because the benefit was they got a big chunk of money right away. And immediate admission, readmission to the world trading system. What we got was a promise of a decade and a half of supervision of their nuclear program. So what we got was 15 one-year benefits.

And they got one big 15-year benefit right up front. The problem with that, so that's a, so you can see what's wrong with that. The problem with canceling it is they got their benefit up front. The thing that was wrong with the treaty is the reason why you don't cancel it. And we lost by canceling it. We got our benefit, which was parceled out in increments over 15 years. I understand that, but it's sort of, I'm not sure it's 100% fair to say that. So they got the benefit.

And the only thing we don't get, you know, we lose out on the fact that now there's every every incentive for them to build nuclear weapons when they weren't. What I said is, what I said is we are told that over the period of 15 years from the signing of the treaty, that Iran will comply with certain procedures that make it more difficult for them to acquire a nuclear weapon. So that is a benefit that is distributed over a 15-year period. Yeah, whereas they get it, I understand, they get it right away. But it's more than, I'm thinking of...

So once you're in that deal, it's very foolish to cancel it because you can't get back. But what the Trump people did, the Trump people then did. I want to get back this because I don't think it's a negative that they benefit it. Many of the sanctions on Iran, like the sanctions we've done in numerous countries, what they do is really hurt the people in those countries. It really hurts the infrastructure. The people that bear the brunt of those incredible economic sanctions are the people you're hoping who are going to, in the end,

pull that country out of its current trajectory. And I have a real problem with that. The sanctions are also felt by the military establishment. Of course they are, but... And it's the only tool we have. But you want to be careful about them. And what has happened in the Trump years is when they, after they canceled the treaty, their solution to the problem of Iran got its economic benefits all up front,

was then to put in place sanctions that are more draconian than ever. They go beyond what is necessary to cramp Iran's military capacity and nuclear capacity where they're trying to drive the country to revolution. And revolution's very seldom. and well, maybe never. Well, in Iraq, it didn't end well. We tried to create our own revolution. Well, that was that was, Iraq was at least an invasion,

where there's the possibility of imposing an orderly state. In Iran, what's going to happen, the Trump policies drive them to a revolution, and power will be in the streets, and we see who gets it. And there won't be any American soldiers there. To back, go back to the acts of evil. That speech was delivered early in 2002. And it's a very different world and one where a lot of things you think that we all know,

in 2002, the activity of AQ Khan, who was like the Johnny Appleseed of the Pakistani nuclear program, that was a highly classified secret. He was unknown to most people. In 2002, it was considered a clever thing to say that it was impossible that Iran could be aiding Hamas because Hamas was Sunni and Iran was Shiite. Everyone, smart people just said that could not be true. And 2002 was considered a smart thing to say that Iran and North Korea could not be swapping missile technology for nuclear technology because Iran was Shia and North Korea was Stalinist.

And it was considered a smart thing to say. There are a bunch of things that were smart things to say. Except they were all untrue and they were known to be untrue. So what President Bush was trying to do was to say there is this nexus of states that don't have a lot in common with each other, but that are engaged in sharing. information, sharing technology, supporting each their own terrorist groups. The terrorist groups also have important autonomy, that Hamas got help from Iran, but it wasn't an instrument of Iran in the way that Hezbollah was an instrument of Iran. And that as he's taking terrorism to the top

of the list of American priorities, we need to think about how terrorism works. And he faced another problem. And this is where a lot of the rhetoric of the Bush administration came from, which is the word terrorist is a challenging word to translate into Arabic. Because one of the things you're always worried about is that someone is going to translate terrorist into Mujahideen, which is a word that at least in those days, I think it may be different now, may be corrupted, but those days had quite positive connotations. So I don't speak Arabic, but there was a word that the administration wanted people to use, which meant effectively lawless fighter.

And Arabic is a much more flowery poetic language than English. So a lot of things that sound normal in Arabic, sound excessive in English, and a lot of things that sound natural in English, sound very blunt and dry in Arabic. And so President Bush was looking for language that would convey moral condemnation to prevent the translation of terrorists into mujahide. And so the language of evil and evildoer, which people always thought was driven by his evangelical constituents in the United States. No, they hated terrorists. They didn't need to be told the terrorists were evil. They already hated them. What he needed to do was to shape the debate in the Arab-speaking world, Arabic-speaking world,

so that people did not use Mujahideen to describe the terrorists. And what he was trying to describe was how do you talk about these interconnections and interpenetrations of terror groups and terror sponsoring states in a way that captures people's attention? Now, the big criticism of the Axis of Evil phrase, and I think this is a probably a fair, is not that it was untruthful or inaccurate. And not there's this stupid argument that it's made by, that somehow that Iran was nice and became not nice because of the access. No, I think there's another argument, but the real problem was it,

it may, it cut off the administration's own retreat. And that the question, it was too attention grab it. And that it goes to this question of maybe after 9-11, we needed to find a way to deal with terrorism and then refocus. and having used this language, that became hard. We are now stuck with eight years of war on terror when maybe we should have compressed it into a shorter period of time and had smaller goals.

Well, yeah, but what about the, I mean, the thing that's just the elephant in the room that seems to me is that it was also, I'm not so worried about the, I mean, the Iran and North Korea ended up not being, but it was including Iraq in there. It seemed to me what it was was an invitation to create a reality in which an eventual invasion that people wanted to do

and wanted to create a rationale for was automatically there by including Iraq and the axis of evil, then it wasn't a big step to eventually arrayed Iraq, because it clearly, once you create the reality where Iraq is on par with Iran or North Korea, then of course, if it's a country, one can invade, why not evade it? So one of the big problems with that was it created the groundwork for, what certainly was in a global sense, in my opinion, immoral and illegal invasion. In this, in, and I think I'm now going to forget,

whether it was February, March of 2002. In February, March of 2002, I don't believe that George Bush had made the decision to invade Iraq, which, of course, happened a year later. I think he was on the path to it, but the decision had not been made. By that. The acts of evil speech actually pointed him in the opposite direction.

And there was a choice to be made, which is if you want to, if what you want to do is invade Iraq, then you want to make your problem as small in focus as possible. You don't want to waste time on Somalia. They don't want to waste time in dealing with the Muslim armies in the Philippines. So the axis of evil speech pointed Bush toward a truly global war on terror, which had its own problems and may also have been a mistake. But it reflected a moment when the United States was going to be working in many different places with a lower level of commitment in each place. And so if what you want to do is invade Iraq, it's crazy to talk about an axis of evil. What you should do is give a speech about Iraq and the unique.

Well, you have to insert it if it's not part of already the global dialogue. But the thing about it is, if the axis of evil is true, if it's a useful construct, then the obvious question that somebody proposes, and I'm not saying this like on one side of the other, about my own role, but I was not a principal. But if I'd been sitting around the table in the fall of 2002, as we hurdle toward, or I would say,

Mr. President, you yourself in front of the Congress spoke of a global axis of people. You yourself talked about the interconnected dangers in Somalia and North Korea and Iran. You are committing us. now overwhelmingly to one tiny little project that may turn out to be so expensive that it prevents you from dealing with the axis of evil. And if you want to deal with the axis of evil, you have to retain your freedom of maneuver and bogging down in Iraq. And indeed, that is what happened.

By bogging down in Iraq, we were less able to focus on Pakistan and other places. And we never, I mean, well, I guess coming back to my, this interesting political discussion I've had been planned to have, but coming back to my original argument against Afghanistan, originally was I had no problem with going into the people who actually committed the acts of terror, but deciding you're going to use that as an excuse to topple of government, is it two different things? It's like, you've got to ask the question, okay, so let's say some American bad actors do something in another country. Does that motivate? And maybe they're, you know, maybe they're right, maybe they're harbored in some way by some aspect of some point.

I know, I know it was much more ingrained in Afghanistan. But the point is, with the war on terror, what we end up doing was not, I mean, if you believe that there was a grander war on terror, it would be nice if the first thing you did was get the terrorists. And then maybe you could say, okay, well, and, yeah, and that. But the Taliban and al-Qaeda can't be usefully. I mean, they were so interpenetated. And, well, I think, I think, but for the reason that you said that Iran, in some sense, that Afghanistan wasn't savable in the sense that

I guess you would argue that Iraq was... We ever committed to it. Yeah. We ever committed to it. Well, I think what would have been well this was, you know, what I suggested to time, I mean, if you want to have an effect, the effect rather than a military effect, would be

to, you know, bomb the madrasas with books and educators and send teachers in, because that's, I mean, you've got a culture and you talk, there's a beautiful quote in your book about about conservatives versus liberals on culture versus politics, which changes which. And at some level, if you want to change hearts and minds,

I'm an educator, so I guess I kind of feel education is a key factor. Well, the changing hearts and minds may be too big a project and not worth it and too expensive. But the United States had to, it was not possible, credible, tenable in any way, and not right, not to try to kill bin Laden. And if you're going to kill bin Laden, and you have to kill the people who are protecting. Yeah, I guess before I, what I want to end this with,

and I hope you don't mind if we go maybe another half hour. Is that okay with you? Is anyone going to listen to two and a half hours of us talking? They will be mesmerized, I guarantee you. I don't know. I feel like we're now down the most of the digits. I don't know whether people want to listen, but I want to listen, and I'm doing it.

So one of the central thesis that I think is important to at least address, there's several times in actually in the right man book, not in the Trump-Oclos book, where you basically say if it hadn't been for the act, you know, if the votes had gone, if the Supreme Court hadn't done what they did, and if it had been for the accident of that election, then this. And at the time, the argument I got from you was, well, it would have been worse. But it seems to me, if the votes had actually been allowed to be counted, and if there's no doubt that Al Gore won in Florida, statistically, I wrote a piece in The York Times at that time.

Forget the counting ballots just by looking at correlations between votes in the one district with a butterfly ballots, Buchanan versus other issues. You could show that maybe 5,000 of those people voted wrong. But forget that. If Gore had won, what we wouldn't have, And we wouldn't have, in my opinion, the legacy that has led us to Trump. We wouldn't have had the Iraq war, which churned a huge amount of the world against us at a time when we were at least had a great opportunity for goodwill among the rest of the world.

We wouldn't have had the incredible budget deficits, ultimately, which at the time you praised, I mean, there's no doubt Clinton had a budget surplus. And at the time, you say it was great that we gave it back to the people. but it led to an era of ever-increasing budget deficits, which are now dwarfed by what we have now. So I don't think we would have, the Iraq War, the trillion dollars in the Iraq War, wouldn't have put that kind of budget deficit impetus on the country. And we would have not had the beginnings of an administration that procedurally, regularly deceived and censored science and reason, including the claim that there were,

weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when in fact everyone at the time that I knew who was technical and when involved in assessing Iraq didn't think they were. They might have been wrong, but there was no, but anyway, so that was the first aspect of deception, and we'll go into some more. And then the final aspect was the fact that we would have had a climate tax because Gore would would have probably put one in. Those are the four things that I think in the modern world would have made the modern world so different. We hadn't had the Iraq war, those huge deficits, created the beginnings of a government which regularly censored information

in a way to make its own goals seem better for the public and failed to address climate change. So the world would be immeasurably better off if George Bush hadn't been elected. So I want to throw that up. Well, I think it's probably, it's certainly true that Al Gore would have fried. Yeah, I'm not saying what if... Yeah, absolutely. And it's not clear...

And one of the might have beens, and I talk about this in Trumpocalypse, I don't think I talked about it in the right man because the people, I don't remember now, the people were still serving in the administration and I would have embarrassed them. But there was this little nodule of climate people inside the Bush administration. and they had during the campaign, which I had not been a part of, they had gotten Bush to commit to regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. And there was a big push in the early months,

and I was a part of this, that they quickly recruited me as a fellow traveler inside the speech writing department. Yeah, in the central apocalypse. We tried to get President Bush to recommit. Now, we were crushed. I mean, it was us against Cheney, so we were crushed. So that's not a real might have been.

But here are the things that would not have been different. So we might have had some climate action in 2002. Probably we would not have had the Iraq war. Not 100% certain about that, because there are people around Al Gore who felt about Iraq the way the people around Bush felt about Iraq, but probably not. But we would have had the global financial crisis

because nobody would have gotten in the way of the subprime market And the important legislative actions that sort of were the last moment happened in the late 1990s under Bill Clinton. Sure. And everything that made the fun, it was just part of the American consensus. I mean, there was that every respectable person was in favor of the securitization of mortgages, Democrat and Republican. And they were all wrong together.

But that was just, it was such a consensus view. And stepping into the mortgage market is to spoil the party. It would have been something that very few administrations would have wanted to do, especially an administration which would have been in its sixth year. Al Gore would be a huge Republican majority in Congress in 2006. So we would have had a global financial crisis. And then you have to say, okay, if you have the global financial crisis but no Iraq, how different is the politics of the world really?

And what you also don't stop in this situation is you don't stop the advent of the Euro currency, which is an event as consequential for the 21st century as the Iraq war, because it is the euro currency that impoverishes southern Europe. What the euro currency did, in effect, was to subsidize Germany to export and subsidize or incentivize Germany to export and incentivize Spain, Italy, and the other less productive countries in Southern Europe to borrow. And then when that project collapsed, you got the economic preconditions that supported the radicalization of European politics after 2010. So I think you would have had less pressure towards xenophobic populism. One other thing that would have been that would have been the same is had Gore somehow won,

you might have had an even more permissive immigration regime into the United States in the 2000s, than you had under George Bush. And immigration is also huge. So you wouldn't have had the Iraq war pressing us towards xenophobic authoritarian populism, but you would still have had the global financial crisis. You still would have had mass migration. You still would have had the Euro crisis

and the effect in Europe. So maybe it would have been different, maybe not. But I don't think you're stepping into the looking glass into a different world from the, you know, the man. It's not a man of the high castle. In their world, everything is different. Yeah, yeah.

In their world much is the same. And many other things we cannot even begin to imagine would have been different. Who knows? It would have been the third term, third term of a democratic president. So there might have been scandals that, you know, were doing. I mean, there could have been this. I mean, look, when I say, I had Al Gorebin president. I mean, you know, in some ways it's like saying, what if Barack Obama had become president?

Well, when I was actually on his advisor, it's one of his science advisory committees in 2008 before he became president. And I could have said, well, all these things will happen. And they didn't happen because he had to deal with the Congress that didn't allow these things to happen. And it was politics. So there's no doubt if Gore was elected, then one can't presume what would have happened, except that climate would have been obviously a big issue. And you're right, the global financial crisis of the 90s, I suspect would have happened. But the initiation of a trillion-dollar war, which was the beginning of a regular series of endemic budget.

deficits which have continued in this country wouldn't have happened the world might not have if we hadn't had the Iraq war I think I happen you know it's again it's all imaginary maybe we would just have had a bigger war in Afghanistan and that and with the same with almost as many people dead and almost as much money spent because remember that the one of the things that happened and this was an objection but by going to Iraq Bush reduced the war in Afghanistan so maybe Al Gore would have just spent that money on a different war. You're right. And you're right. And I thought we probably would have could as and should have. So let's move to something. But there's one thing that really was initiated during the Bush administration that concerns me most.

Because one of the things, of course, that concerns me a tremendous amount about the Trump administration is this 1984 mentality of denying reality and denying reality over and over and over again enough so that until people believe that that reality is different. And that comes to my own purview in some sense in terms of science. It began, and I was part of a group that complained about this during the Bush administration. Let me read you some quotes. This is from Bush's father. Science, like any field of endeavor, relies on freedom of inquiry, and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity. Now more than ever on issues ranging from climate change to AIDS research, to genetic engineering, to food additives, government, on the impartial perspective of science for guidance,

which is one of the most beautiful statements about the relationship between science and policy that I've ever heard. This is a statement from George Bush's administration, Scott McClellan, who said, this administration looks at the facts and reviews the best available science based on what's right for the American people.

Okay? You sense the difference? We decide what's right, and we pick the science that we think is right for the people. Now, that's one aspect of the minute you start to pick and choose in science or in Iraq or anywhere else to go for a goal that you want to get to, that's where science comes in because it tells you that you should try and prove yourself wrong as much as you prove right. Let me read one more quote and then we can have a little of this guy. The other quote,

of course, is the famous quote that came from, I think it was given to a Washington Post reporter, but this is that one where he says, the AIDS said that the guys like me were in, quote, what we call the reality-based community. You know this famous quote, which he defined as people who, quote, believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore, he continued. We're an empire now. And when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality, judiciously, as you will, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too. And that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left just to study what we do.

Now, does that sound familiar? In the current world? I certainly know that, know that. that quote, I have often wondered about whether it was spoken as powerfully as it was written. There is a kind of, because it wasn't in the Washington Post. I'm now going to forget where it appeared, but it was in a book. It was, I just, I've always wondered about that quote. I'm sure it is connected to something that somebody said, I don't know. But it's also got a kind of mephistophelian grandeur about it, that it's just too good. It's just too good.

People don't speak that way. Yeah, no, it's a great quote. So let's talk about this. So what the words of George H.W. Bush are very formal. They're given in a speech. Scott McClellan is speaking off the cuff and in an improvised situation. And so he's being less specific. But here's what I was, this is, I think, one of the things about science generally.

And I think you would agree. Well, I don't know if you'd agree with it. Maybe you wouldn't. In the end, scientists can only provide advice. They cannot provide answers. Yeah. And we're living through this now. Coronavirus is a good example of this.

We are not going to wait until it is completely safe before people return to factory, schools, offices. We are going to do that sometime before it is completely safe. What is the appropriate moment to do that? The scientists can tell you the tradeoffs and the costs, but in the end, nobody elected them. In the end, there's no answer. There's no correct answer. There is just, it's a value judgment. And that's what politicians are for. And one of the things I have learned over my career is tremendous respect for the work of politicians. Because they are

experts. You're a friend of Norman, Nomchanski's like his phrase, which he means is criticism, I think is praise, manufacturing consent. That's what politicians do, because consent does not exist in nature. Democratic consent doesn't because people, you can't really aggregate opinions in a meaningful way. So they create consent to make action possible. And so at some point on those two curves, they're going to find a point. What you ask for the politicians is that they'd be respectful of truth. Yes. And they'd be non-malignant, non-pathological actors who are trying to do the best up to the limit of their ability to do the best. And this is where Trump is different. I mean, the story about the Bush administration, you say, well, why didn't they, you know, they're looking,

They should have listened to more expertise on Iraq. They dismissed people. They were hasty. They were biased. They were they started with the answer. But they were not malevolent people. And they were not people who, that's even in creating their own reality. If it was said, whoever said it didn't mean we will say that it's the best economy ever

when 40 million people had a right of work. What they meant was that we can do things that will actually change the facts. We're going to move so fast. We're going to be so successful that your assessments of our actions will already be out of date by the time you write them down because we will have done other even more amazing things than we previously did. And that's the kind of statement that Silicon Valley executives make all the time. Well, but I guess I agree with you completely that both quantitatively and qualitatively, I'm not trying to paint Bush and Trump with the same brush.

What I'm concerned about is the seeds of what we're dealing with. Now, what you said before in some sense in that quote I gave earlier in the podcast where basically we reap what we sow. And it's those seeds that I'm worried about. I will say that you... Okay, I need to stop because. I want to say, this is something that is important. important to me, and this may be a good place to begin to wrap up.

Sure. I think there are two, when studying the Trump presidency, there are two things that you need to keep in mind. And people, especially on the left, want to keep in mind only one. Trump, you have to study Trump both in the flow of history, where he came from in the American past. And I don't want to say that that's important. And you'll have to have some in the flow of geography.

Because similar things are happening all over the democratic world. Yes. in places where George Bush was never president, in places where there was no George Wallace, in places where there was no slavery. So those things that are distinctive to America cannot explain Trump when you have Trumps in Hungary and Poland and Mexico and Brazil. So you have to explain them both historically, both across time and across space. And one of the things I've tried to do in my two books now on the Trump presidency is say he's not a unique, He's not, he is a distinctively American event, but he is not a uniquely American event.

And if we're going to study him, we have to study his counterparts in other developed countries. And my bias, I think, is to say that I am more impressed by the causes that explain why this is happening everywhere, than I am impressed by the causes that explain why this is happening here. Okay, okay. But you hit the role, I mean, one of the reasons worthwhile talking about this is I'm a scientist and, and you have been both an advisor and a government and a journalist. No, no, but I think I know. There's no nice way to say it.

Let's just say it. Okay. No, no, but you're an ex-but you've been part of the political process in a way that I never have. And so it's important to respect that. And you hit on something that my wife was worked for the government of Australia. And she was basically working interfacing between scientists and government. And she made quite clear to me that, yeah, you know, first of all, all, one thing that was always clear to me is that scientists shouldn't make the decisions. They're not

elected to make the decisions. They should provide advice. But at the same time, you've got two different communities that it's worthwhile realizing that what's of interest to the politicians may be very, something very different than if it seems important to the scientists. That doesn't make it wrong that the different thing is of interest to the politicians. It doesn't make it wrong that the politicians may be more concerned about the economy than how many people are dying. It's just a different, you just have to recognize that they're coming from different places, and they have to answer to different constituencies. And the best thing you can try and do, if you're teaching a scientist to have an impact, is to try and appreciate what's important to the politicians, and similarly,

have the politicians realize what's important to the scientists. So there's nothing wrong with them having different priorities, and ultimately it's the politicians who have to make the decisions, and in a democracy, they're elected to make the decisions, and they should be making decisions. But your point is exactly right. What scientists should provide is advice and what the government should do is take that advice. And the seeds of, and I don't want to harp on this too much, but the seeds of not taking that advice and censoring were prevalent in a way that maybe, it certainly probably happened after you left the administration. But during the Bush Times, where, you know, I was part of a group of, at that time, initially 62 scientists, there were 20 Nobel laureates,

19 National Medal of Science Winners, four former science advisors, that were concerned about the Bush administration's manipulation of science. And it is a precursor of what I'm seeing in spades now with the Trump administration, the clear removal of scientists from advisory boards, replacing them with lobbyists, the denial, the simply denial of statements that scientists are making or in the denial of reality, which is somewhat the same. I remember writing about the fact when George, when W. Bush talked about missile defense and said we'll have a missile defense, you know, in place this year. And we never had had, we'd hadn't had a single test of a missile defense system

that ever worked against any, any missile with a realistic countermeasure. We didn't have a missile defense system. I used to say, we should just pretend we do because it's just as effective as saying we do, and it's a lot less expensive. but this is what that group wrote. Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy. Although scientific input to government is rarely the only factor in public policy decisions,

this input should also be weighed from an objective and a partial perspective to avoid perilous consequences. Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementation. policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle. When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions. This has been done by placing people who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and on scientific advisory committees,

by disbanding existing advisory committees, by censoring and suppressing reports by the government's own scientists and by simply not seeking independent scientific advice. Now, we could go into that and if we'd had more time, I'd go into case studies. But of course, that is precisely what we're seeing now. And in my mind, as a scientist, a huge part of the problem of the Trump administration, because I think of science more broadly as an empirical investigation of reality supplemented by rationality. That's what I think of science and testing.

You said something earlier on, and I think this may be, you said, it's the job of scientists to provide advice, and the politician should take advice. Well, not take the advice, but they should. And, you know, one of the thing about advice is, it's not compulsory. No, but what's really important is you don't do, I agree with you. You can ignore the advice, but that's all right. But what you don't do. And you know what, I will tell you, I am unshacked. Supposing the politician has a problem where we have to decide.

I'd build the dam here or build the dam there. And there are costs and benefits. And the costs and benefits that are available to the scientists and of interest of the sciences point to one answer. And the cost and benefits that have interest to the politician point to the other answer. I am unshawked not only that the politician would choose the answer that makes more sense of the politician than the scientist.

I am unshooked. They would say, and that report we have our scientists that points out that gives aid and comfort to our political opponents and will embarrass us at the convention, the election, we're just going to put that in the shredder. I'm unshooked by that. And I don't think that's censorship. I think the point is that you're the client, you paid for a work product. The work product will be embarrassing.

You made a decision for so long as you've made them for non-pathological reasons. But what was done, what was what I'm more. worried about now, and I'm sure you're equally worried about it, is removing experts from panels and replacing them by no experts. Well, that's not, but that's what exactly, that's what exactly happened over and over again in issues related from stem cell research to climate change. In fact, drafts were removed from government reports. Connections were, that showed there was no, you know, even ethical and religious connections,

like there's no connection between abortion and breast cancer, removed. And I have a whole list here of important people, Nobel Prize winners and others who were removed from policy committees. And that's what we were objecting to at the time. And I just want to point it out that it is qualitatively and quantitatively different than what's happening now. But I worry that it was part of a continuum that developed to now. And let's talk about now. I mean, I don't want to have the argument. I mean, because we'll, you know, we can have that one time over beer.

But let's talk about we're in this situation now. And I want to respect your time and try and end. You've listed, I think I listed eight proposals of realistic things, not getting rid of the electrical college. But let's just go through them in maybe a minute apiece, okay? Campaign finance. Yes. I don't think that's one that I pay less attention to than other people

because I think the problem there is money's hydraulic. when you have extremely unequal concentrations of wealth, the money is going to flow into the political system. So I think that's a little bit the wrong place for people to put energy. Getting rid of the filibuster. That's an easy win. Filibuster is a rule of the Senate.

It's not a law. It's been modified off in the past. Most recently, we eliminated the filibuster for judges. This is the legislative filibuster. I say the first thing, order of business because otherwise the American majority will never be a Senate majority. Exactly. I think I planned a whole 20 minutes talking about the, you make a very strong case that

it's in the interest of the Republican Party right now to try and ensure that elections aren't fair, at least, or representative, because if they are, they're going to lose. And I would say as a republic that right now Republicans have bad incentives and they need to, for their own sake, build themselves better incentives. That it will be a stronger party in the long term. Once it understands its job is to compete for votes, not to surprise. Yes, well, actually, well, we'll get to it. Statehood for D.C., you say, is true, any achievable thing? For the residential areas of D.C.

In the Constitution, it says there must be a federal district in D.C. It can be no more than 10 miles square, but it doesn't say, it doesn't set a minimum. So you could put it around where all the federal office buildings are in the mall, and Congress would have exclusive jurisdiction there, but the residential areas you can make a state out of it. The state would have more people than Vermont and Wyoming. Very soon it will have more. have more people than Alaska and North Dakota. It's certainly richer than any of those places

and contributes more to the federal treasury. And it would go far toward balancing the Senate, making sure that tiny little rural populations do not have two-thirds of the seats in the U.S. Senate. One thing people ask about, what about Puerto Rico? And I said, well, I don't have a principled objection to Puerto Rico. My sense of the votes there is in, it shows that about 55% are in favor of state.

And with the Quebec and Catalonia precedents in mind, I think that's not enough. That if on the day Puerto Rico votes 80% to be a state, that's a different conversation. But 55, it just stores trouble. Okay. Now, you mentioned it, but voting rights, restoring voting rights. Do you want to add to anything you said before? George Obie Bush signed the reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court took out parts of it in 2013. The court's decision was not crazy.

The court decision against those sections of the Civil Rights Act said, this act creates special scrutiny of places that had bad voting practices before 1965. How is that rational in the world of 2013? And indeed, the court was right, because one of the places that got special scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act was Hawaii, which is a good actor. And one of the places that did not get special scrutiny was Wisconsin, which is the worst actor north of the Mason-Dixon line. So the Supreme Court said the Congress go and rewrite this law and base it on some more rational basis than voting behavior before 1965.

And I think at this point, Congress should accept that invitation and say, right. Maybe you should have one voting rights act that applies everywhere. Speaking of voting rights, in the current situation, which you wrote this before it became a more urgent issue, mail and ballots. Voting by mail, I'm still amazed at the – that this can be actually made an issue in those parts of the country where people have always voted by mail. I've always voted by mail in the states I've lived in. There's a valid concern about voting by mail, which is, or the concern that seems to be me valid, which is it shortens the election.

And the people vote by mail, something will happen in the last week, the last two weeks, the last three weeks, the last month, and they are voting without that in. information. And so one of the arguments is, and parties often plan to have closing arguments. And the voting by mail person is denied the closing argument. That said, I think the people who vote by mail are people who are the most committed to their vote. And you're probably not going to change their minds. I think you're the only person I've ever heard who thinks that the election process is too short in the United States. What I mean is that things happen in the last week.

I know, I understand. I don't have the benefit of those. So I think that's a concern. That's an important issue. But speaking of short and long, I wanted to make the contrast. You and I both grew up in a country that had a parliamentary electricity. And again, it was something I would spend 15 or 20 minutes. In terms of representative government, a parliamentary system versus the republic system with an executive in a Congress.

Choice of evils. Yeah, I know. Well, I wanted to, so, but there are, there are certain representative advantages to a parliamentary system. You would agree? This is a huge topic. Obviously. And it's also, it's also, I think, not worth a lot of mental energy because the decision was made more than 200 years ago. Okay, but let me, but let me. The thing that, the United States could learn and should learn, in my opinion, from parliamentary systems is it needs to have a more of a professional. civil service. And the pandemic has brought the cost home of having so many political appointees in places where political appointees don't belong. Yeah, that was one of the further things you point about is making a more professional. You start with the judicial system, making it depoliticizing the judicial system, but you talk about, you know, in all areas of the bureaucracy, we should

have civil servants. And you're right. That is one area where I don't know whether we're unique, but as far, I don't know if it's a property of parliamentary systems, but in parliamentary system, everyone essentially below the minister is a career civil servant. It could be the case here. This is a historical inheritance of the American government that basically, basically through much of the 19th century, literally everybody in federal and state government was a political employee, including the messengers, including the people in the telegraph offices.

People are often amazed at how high voting turnout was in the 1880s. Well, one reason was everyone knew that Uncle Jack would lose his job as a messenger if the other guys want. So that the family got interested. And then since the 1880s, the federal government in the states have steadily shrunk the proportion of the government that is, actually the theory of American government is the rule is that people are pointed politically. The exceptions are that they are appointed as civil service. but the exceptions have been growing and growing and growing. They stopped growing in about the 1970s. And I think we need a new period where the president now points about 10,000 people.

I think this would be a better and happier country if the president appointed 1,500 people. Okay, no, it's something I completely agree with. In that regard, in terms of voting rights and to some extent, well, jumping back a second, my wife worked for the government of Australian and is Australian as well as American. there you're fined if you don't vote.

You have to vote by mail in general, and you're fined if you don't vote. So voting is 100%. Was that? Not a meaning. It's a symbolic fine. It's $10, right? No, it's about $60, but it's still, I mean, it's not trivial.

But what do you think about that? It seems to me that if paying taxes is a civic obligation in a society in which you have a social contract, that not voting is irresponsible. In fact, then, could be fined. I have never given that enough. thought to have an opinion about it. I think it's a really, when I heard about it, I thought, wow, what's wrong?

What's the downside of that? And of course, people would say people should have a right in the United States, which is based on rights, people should have a right not to vote. I'm going to, but people don't have a right not to pay taxes if they make money. But anyway, gerrymandering, you said. Yeah, that's gotten much worse since 2010 and it is an artifact of the incredible Republican wins in the year 2010, which also was a census year and enabled redistricting in 2011. Parties used, there used to be some restraint on gerrymandering both by the Voting Rights Act in 1965

and also by the deterrence between the parties. The Republicans had such an advantage after 2010 that they just, they were undeterred. So I, in an ideal world, politicians would not draw their own boundaries. That is a bigger reform than I can imagine happening soon in the United States and certainly won't happen in 2021. So I recommend restoring deterrence by Democrats. in the Democratic states drawing two maps for their state, a competitive map and an uncompetent, saying, if you in Georgia will draw a fair map, we here in North Carolina will draw a fair map.

If you don't, we won't. And then try to create a sense that, while subject to protecting racial minorities under a new Voting Rights Act, that you're trying to make as many competitive districts as possible, not as few competitive districts as possible. Okay, now there's, There are two other things which are big issues, and so we want to try and talk about them as briefly as possible, but you bring them up and they're vital, and it would be a shame not to least mention them.

One large part of the book, and sometimes we talk about how you can lose to Trump, involves wokeness, involves the, the, the, there's a great quote which I would search through for my papers if I had them at this point, where you basically say that, okay, requesting things becomes demands, and demands becomes implementation, and that the electorate that you're trying to reach, in a large part of the people who didn't vote in this country or who might have their votes changeable, are not receptive to this idea that we have to legislate in every way personal conduct. And we refuse to, and we cancel, and we, you have a great statement about how the legislators in the 50s or 60s were people that may have been alcoholics and may have been this or that,

but they managed to get a lot done. And by legislating personal ethics and condemning anyone who disagrees, platform wasn't. This is not exactly about political extremism. This is a bit of different thing. I had a friend who worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 and was struck by focus groups

where working class people, white and black talked about political correctness as a problem. And what are they talking about? I mean, you know, and in the book, I quote lots of surveys and data about how people complain about this. And what my friend explained and I tried to explain in the book is these were people, often women, who were afraid that if their husband who had a year or two of four-year education

made a joke that middle-class people didn't like, that he would lose his job and the family would be ruined. And that they experienced what they called political correctness and what I call wokeness as a form of policing of the behavior of parts of the population by other parts of the population who were always changing the rules. And that they could never compete and that terrible consequences hovered over them.

And so, you know, we saw this in the 2020 Democratic campaigns, that the issues that were supposed to sink Biden never did. You know, the question that Biden was more touchy with women than modern, educated women like. And some of us political, and by the way, more touchy than I would like and more touchy than I would be. But, of course, I'm a product of the people. educated bourgeoisie, those are not our manners. But other people said, I can see he's got a good heart.

And even if he touched someone in a way they didn't like it that minute, I think he didn't mean any harm by it. I think he's got a good heart. And I don't want you pulling the walls on his head because you've got some set of new rules or invented at Oberlin. And this guy who went to college shortly after the Civil War, whatever it was. He hasn't, he's too old and I'm too, you know, I'm not wealthy enough to know your rules. Leave us along. Yeah, and you point that out. I found one of the quotes, which was interesting from the 2018 election, Gallup asked Democrats and Republicans to choose their top voting concerns. And Democrats, 87% selected healthcare, which we'll get to next, it's a big issue, but we'll spend five minutes on. And was tied

equally with, quote, the way women are treated in American society. Those were the two big issues in 2018 in a world with a lot of problems. Whereas the Republicans, 84% selected immigration and second only the economy at 85%. And you were pointing out the dichotomy there. If you focus on the issues which aren't relevant to the people who might vote to you, and those are woke issues in this case the way women are treated by the economy, but in society, you may have a problem. Now, but one thing that I don't think you said, but I assume you presume this, it seems to me, at least, and most people I know, is that this wokeness is in some sense a response out of frustration that we're seeing so prevalent now in every area of society

where Jimmy Fallon has to apologize for impersonating Chris Rock, who's black, and how do you, you know, by blackface. So hold on, let me finish, that it's a response to Trump. It's a of frustration to people saying, Trump epitomizes all of the bad behavior, and he never got punished, and we want to punish someone. So I don't know whether that's... Well, I talk about this in the book. The extent you can measure whokeness, which is a minimal extent, but the extent you can, the decisive year seems to be 2014. And I agree that some of the things we would call our responses, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, or the revival of Black Lives matter. There was a round one in 2014 after Ferguson. These are responses to cruelties and injustices,

and in some senses, they're welcome. But I think there's another thing which is going on, which is that the advent of social media has created new kinds of communities, and it's created, in effect, new kinds of religious observance. So wokeness is also a revival of the American Puritan tradition, which was always, which Puritanism was about upper class people, policing, lower class people. And an obscure point, you know, but it's so telling. Donald Trump says we're saying Merry Christmas again. I don't know how it was in your part of Toronto. I grew up in a world in which people said, happy Christmas. And in the British Isles, people say happy Christmas. Why?

What's the difference in Happy Christmas and Merry Christmas? Well, Merry Christmas is a much older phrase that included a connotation of drinking and having sex. And the Christmas holiday, as it was known in England in the six, one of the reasons in the 1600s had a lot of, because it was the quietest time of the year, the nights were longest, a lot of getting drunk and having sex. And that's one of the reasons the Puritans hated it so much. So the Puritans ultimately lose and the war on Christmas is given up and the upper classes accept that there will be Christmas. But beginning of the 19th century, the middle classes say, it has to be a little bit less drinking and less sex, please.

And so they converted the word merry with connotations of those things, which is something you would say in, you know, God rest, you merry gentlemen. The merry gentlemen are drunken gentlemen. They began about 1820, 1830, it became more polite, more refined, to say happy Christmas with none of those connotations. And indeed, Christmas became a different kind of, of holiday. Something like that is going on now. We're, you know, we're trying to, educated people are trying to clean up the behavior of others. And they're often right. You know, do not comment,

certain comments you shouldn't make. Good. But it's also true that some of us are quicker to figure these things out than others and the people are slower to figure them out feel it's not a fair game. Well, I mean, and it reaches, I mean, all these things have a pendulum. But I, one example, I think, I think it was the Philadelphia Inquirer, the editor had to remove because they were talking about the effects of the protests on urban landscapes. And there was an article that happened to say buildings matter too. And that, as you know, that editor had to be removed because of that statement. And it seems to me that's a kind of extreme extremism, which is, and in fact, the wary area, I've tried to thought of how I've come closer to you, as I know you've come closer to me. And it seems to me right now, the right, or at least the conservatives, are on the right side of free speech.

The left is not. I think free speech is not the way I conceptualize it, because free speech refers to your ability to say things without punishment by the law. What we people are experiencing are social consequences for activities and for speeches, for speech and things that are not. speech-like. I think what I'm hopeful, and this is the end of the book, and maybe a good place to wrap up, is that what Trump could do for us that is good is he's made many forms of cruelty visible and has prompted a reaction. And the challenge for all of us, and since the killing of George Floyd on May 25th, emotions are very running very strong, as the emotions return into more normal currents to channel those impulses into constructive courses that lead to less cruelty,

not to more petty tyranny. Well, how can you disagree with that? The last thing, which we won't have time before we get to the end, which is a proposal you make, which is incredibly important and occupies a lot of time in this book, importantly, is one actually we agree about half of. You point out that the next president, if they're going to achieve anything, you point out you have to do what's achievable

if you want to make government workable and get beyond all the problems that we're going to have after Trump as president the next president are going to have a huge number of problems if you don't achieve anything then you're going to be blamed for it in some sense and the two things that you point out

you suggest a trade-off you agree as I do that health care in this country is in a miserable state and you spend a tremendous amount of time and I'm not doing justice now I'm happy to if you want to spend another half hour. But at the same time, you say the trade-off is that we, so liberals, if you want to call it that, get health care, but they have to give in on immigration. The conservatives have to

give in on health care if they want to get immigration. Do you want to spend three minutes parsing that? I think one of my big master ideas in the two Trump books is the thing that makes authoritarian nationalism possible is people don't feel their country's looking out for them the way it should. Yes. And the country is all there is. There's really nothing else. And it's maybe not the ideal way to organize human affairs.

It's what we've got. So my master idea is we need to make nationhood mean something more. And that means both tighter connections within nations and then clear distinctions between nations in ways that do not cause conflict, that do not invite great power, competition and that don't invite xenophobia, that don't invite protectionism. And so, you know, denser connections, higher boundaries, especially the movement of people. And so I see those two things as related. The stronger health care system binds citizens together more closely. And stricter immigration means that the distinction in citizen and non-citism is clear and more

meaningful. Obviously, I think you're absolutely right. You make a big point that in other countries, the health care system binds people. And several brilliant points that I can't help but mention, even if it takes longer, just of yours that I thought were very interesting. One is that it automatically makes an us versus them mentality because people don't want to be in a position of having to have the crummy health care that other people have. And they want to be in a privileged position, and it automatically makes an us versus them thing.

But it also suppresses the innovation that is supposed to be the hallmark of capitalism, that America has fewer, creates fewer, self-employed individuals because you don't want to become self-employed because you lose your health care. That's a fascinating point, I think, that is really important. We've all seen that, I'm sure, many of the people we know. People have an idea, they've got a good job, they've got an idea, they want to take it on the road, but they worry, my kid's disabled. What happens to me?

At the same time, the reason that resonated with me is there also, however, lots of studies that show that immigrants are much more entrepreneurial, if you look at the history of it, are much more entrepreneurial than those who haven't, you know, those who have immigrated end up being much more entrepreneurial. So that there's a reason to encourage immigration. If you're here illegally and you can't be in a job with health insurance anyway, then you take, and you have an idea, then why not? Because it's not like you're going to get the health insurance.

If you don't have the option. But, I mean, it's a reason to welcome immigrants, I guess is what I'm saying, is that ultimately you point out that the society can't afford to, rightly so perhaps, provide health care of everyone, including aliens, and you point out that Canada doesn't, which is the paradigm of sort of goodness in my mind. But at the same time, these people are also doing the jobs

that no one else wants to do. The reason they can't afford the health care is they're doing the crappy jobs that other people don't want to do. And does society as a social contract in the Rosone insent owe something in return to those people, I guess, is the question that I would have.

It's a question of numbers. And that's our talk about the book. Immigration is not a binary thing where it's good or bad. There's a question of optimality. One statement you make about, you say you do not beat Trump. This is on the last two pages of the book before they say, you do not be Trump until you've restored in America that has room for all its people. And then there's, I'll skip a little bit of it.

And you say, and I found this so. poignant that I tweeted it after the George Floyd incident you said after the protest there you say build a world that does not have room for millions of your fellow citizens and they will burn it down rather than let you enjoy it without them

maybe you cannot bring everyone along with you but we still try for your own sake as well as theirs I mean that is what we're seeing in some sense is the reaction the what's the right it's just and it was prescient you wrote it before it happened but but what happened

George Floyd is an exact example because people perceive they're living in a world that doesn't have room for them for whatever reason and they don't want to burn it down. And we can't pardon acts of violence and crime, but we can understand it at least. And I thought that was a very – And in fact, if we want to stop it, we really have to understand it. Exactly. If we want to stop it, we have to understand it. And I think that's a really important lesson from your book. And then the last one is the quote from Lincoln, which is that – Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with men of this, we shall have weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and good. Let us therefore study the incidence of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them is wrongs to be revenged.

And I think that is the most important moral lesson of the book. And to me, the conversation we have had is a demonstration of that. The reaction to the people who didn't want me to have you on is the reaction of revenge instead of understanding. Is the reaction of let's have an intelligent conversation and try and learn and discuss so we can both with the same goals of producing a better world. And I thank you profoundly for taking your time to do that as well as for continuing to write. Thank you for reading that quote. I just, I've always, it's not one of his most famous quotes. It's one that I found always one of the most moving.

You know, it's funny. Twitter is such a negative thing. I tweeted that because I liked it so much. And all these people wrote, it's not one of his best quotes. It's not one of his best teachers. And I thought, damn, you know, that's the world we live in. Anyway, thank you, David.

It's been wonderful. I hope you enjoyed it. It has been great. You are such a mental athlete. I'm struggling to keep up with you. Oh, well, it goes both ways. But thank you. Thank you very much.

The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krause, Nancy Dahl, John and Don Edwards, Gus and Luke Holwurda, and Rob Zeps. Audio by Thomas Amison, web design by Redmond Media Lab, animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects, and music by Rickalus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.