The Ricochet Podcast - Be Afraid

Episode Date: March 10, 2016

This week’s podcast is a large as the plains that our guest, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) hails from. We go from Trump, to party loyalties, to Rubio vs. Cruz, to remembering Nancy Reagan, Camille Paglia, and more. With the Senator, we delve into his very public argument against Donald Trump as the party standard bearer, why he’s a conservative, and the upcoming battle over the next Supreme Court... Source

Hello, everyone! Rita! I'm not gonna get... I don't know what's gonna happen here. I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's gonna prove to be disastrous. And what it means is that the people don't want socialism. They want more conservatism.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs and our guest is Senator Ben Sasse. So let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 295, everyone. I'm James Lilex. Rob Long is on the other side of the country.

We finally got Peter. Remember those days, folks, when you'd try to make a phone call and your phone would say, sorry, you have to update your telephone firmware and start again? No, of course not, because those days were wonderful and easy. But now everything's updated. Everything's restarted. Everybody's connected, because those days were wonderful and easy. But now everything's updated, everything's restarted, everybody's connected, and we're here ready to roll. But first, I've got to tell you this, we are brought to you by a triptych of fine sponsors.

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And it's pretty easy to make the smart switch to Harry's. Just use the coupon code. As for all of those other fine sponsors, Ricochet. And speaking of which, we're brought to you by Ricochet.com. And this is the place where we all stand back and let one of the founders tell you why you should open up your wallet so that a little cartoon fly comes out and that you give your money to Ricochet. Why, Rob? Why? That would be me.

Here's why. Because the Republic is in trouble. Because it's getting ugly out there. And it's not ugly at Ricochet. And Ricochet's where you can go and have a civil conversation. You can have a civil conversation. You can even have a civil conversation

if you're a Cruz supporter with a Rubio supporter or a Trump supporter with a Rubio or a Cruz supporter. Kasich, not so much. No, you can have one Kasich too. At some point, we're going to have a nominee who's going to be roughly on our side, I think. Although that's not certain. And at some point, we're going to have to choose the next president.

And we don't have the best choices there are. We don't have – I mean, I expect to have better choices. We have pretty lousy ones, it looks like to me. So it's going to be up to us. And the way it's up to us is if we sort of recreate a civil conversation on Ricochet.com. If you're listening to this podcast and you're a member, thank you. We are pleased and we are honored to have you as members with us on our little experiment. If you were listening to this podcast

and you were not a member, look, you can listen to it for free if you want. You're doing it. But we really do need your help. We really do need you to step up and join. Come to Ricochet.com. You can join. 30 free days. There's absolutely zero risk. 30 free days. There's absolutely zero risk. 30 free days. And stick around. See if you like it. And we know you will. So Ricochet.com. Make it a to-do list. I know a lot of people listen to this podcast and say, I keep meaning to do it. I keep meaning to do it. Do it today. It's important. as your silent protest, no matter who you support, against the stupefication and dumbing down of this race

that everyone has a little bit of a hand in, but some people, as I think anyway, I'm looking at you, media, have more to blame than others. Anyway, end rant. Well, there is a code of conduct in Ricochet, and let me subvert it in word, thought, spirit, and deed with the following weasel words. Some say, I won't ascribe these insults to myself, but just say some say that the Republicans are about to nominate a narcissistic blowhard whose knowledge of things is as deep as the reflective coating on the back of a mirror. But others note that the guy who's got all of the energy on the Democratic side is, how do I put this nicely? He's a red. He's a commie rat.

And I know these days you can't say that. He honeymooned in the Soviet Union. He honeymooned in Russia. Well, it was a sister city, to be fair. You're only allowed to say a commie if you're making fun of the people who were at any point in human history worried about communism. You can't just say it genuinely. I'm saying it genuinely. He's a commie rat.

He's a rat. He's a dirty rat. He's a rat. So let's ask – bring Peter into this. who, not as just an avowed socialist, but one of that special breed of people who really thought the Nicaraguans were the wave of the future and praised them for everything they did. There's not a slit throat or a closed press that Bernie Sanders didn't seem to get little jollies from.

Boys, I know the opening chit-chat in these podcasts is supposed to be lighthearted and sprightly, but you touch, you almost bring me to despair. This is, I've been, Bernie Sanders is in all kinds of, I find him impressive in some ways because of the sheer consistency. He hasn't revised his views in the evidence of history for five decades. There's a certain admirable doggedness and consistency about it. I find it admirable in the same, in any way, shape, or form. I've got a pick sitting at my desk. Amusingly admirable. North Dakota that is incapable of changing, too, and I don't admire it.

I'm sorry. Go ahead, Peter. Well, no, I mean, not to belabor that one point, but for somebody like Bernie Sanders, communism is almost a religion. And there's something, I do find it almost perversely admirable how doggedly he's kept the faith. I mean, he's certainly more of a believer than Rob is an Episcopal. Well, yeah, that's a very good assessment, though, because as a man of faith, you're looking at another man of faith and saying, eh, I get it, I get it. I happened to be in Berlin, this would be 15 years ago, 18, something like that, after the wall had fallen. I happened to be in Berlin and visiting monuments, and I saw a group of old people off in the corner of a public park. They were all

wearing red scarves or red bandanas and I got closer to them and I heard they were singing the international, the international, the communist anthem. And I found somebody who spoke enough English and it was the anniversary, it wasn't May Day, but it was the anniversary of the day the Soviet, the Red Army, first entered German territory. And these old communists, in spite of everything, for them clearly it had become a kind of religion. And they were singing as if they were singing a hymn. And I found it weirdly touching. But, and I put Bernie Sanders in that group. He's a nutcase, in effect, wearing a red bandana and singing the Internationale. What moves me to something close

to despair is that history is so difficult to convey, even recent history, even history that all three of us who are not that old, after all through and saw you can't tell an 18 or 19 year old american we can talk until we're blue in the face about how incomes have stagnated so still the last 25 or 30 years have been a pretty good prosperous peaceful time to grow up in the united states of america and you can't tell you cannot convey to a 19 or 20-year-old what it was like, how bad things can be, what it meant to be an Eastern European to have your life locked up for four decades. How do you get them to understand this't communists or socialists or whatever it is they think they are with him how great things are now in the world, all over the world comparatively, because – only sifting through the ruins of the Soviet Union and the sort of the ash heap of history, to make your point, it's almost like you want to say to these young people, or not even young people, people in general who seem to be forgotten, how much better everyone is, how much wealthier the rest of the world is because of capitalism. That's almost where I think we lose. The sort of anti-communism is – yeah, you're right.

It's correct. It's horrible. But it's really pro-capitalism. We need to be saying all these things came about, the iPhone that you use, the medical devices that are now available, almost all the technology and the food and the distribution that you have. That's all thanks to capitalism. No, on the contrary. Capitalism has stood in place of those things. Capitalism has been thwarting the development of all those things, which would have naturally come out of a big hole in the earth all by themselves somehow by the magical elves who work somewhere.

But that's what I mean is that there's an exhaustion on the behalf of free marketeers and capitalists to talk about the benefits of capitalism sometimes. I know. It's like people talking about the advantages of not having your house on fire every day when you wake up. I mean, there are certain things that are manifestly obvious, and one of them is how this world came to be. But you have people who've grown up in a palace, an absolute glittering palace.

The only thing that they can become worked up about is the fact that there's a lot of dust on the windowsill. So they form committees. Yeah, but that means we have to be a little more vigilant, right? I mean, that's all that means. I guess what I would say is this. In the coming crack-up of what I think

will be the two parties, which I don't think is a bad thing, ultimately, one of the most interesting things is going to happen. I think there's advantage to the party that cracks up the first. Because I watched that debate last night. It was at the gym, and I watched it. And there's something so old and ossified and, like, weirdly retro about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

It's something so yesterday about it. And I don't mean that like they're both old people, but everything they're talking about is old. Nothing's new. Nothing feels like they've come up with a new idea or a new way to approaching old problems. Look, we could probably, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Peter Robinson,

James Lilacs, and Rob Long probably agree on 45 or 50% of the problems that we face as a nation. I mean we probably agree on the problem, but their solution seems so – it's almost like we could do it ourselves. It's so old and boring, and I think that when the Republican Party falls apart and has to re-figure out itself, that we're going to be – that's going to be useful creative destruction. Good for us. We should end it now and figure out what the 21st century political party looks like, what the iPhone party looks like. Then the first – well, then we'll have two parties because you'll have one party that is economically nativist, and you'll have another party that's in favor of free trade, which some believe means nothing but open borders.

They won't crack up because they got good message discipline and they have the advantage of utopianism on their side as well. I mean, after eight years of Barack Obama, the idea that the nation is starved for a doubling down and reapplication of these ideas in their purest and more antiseptic form is madness. But yet that's the way it goes. But Bernie isn't going to get it because he doesn't have the super delegates. The system is rigged so that Hillary will. And she's not going to preside over a crackup at all. They will stifle the 30 to 40 percent of the people who want pure, undiluted socialism.

And those people will fall in line because at least they'll get some of the race-based, class-based, envy-based, destruction-based, regulatory-based world that they want and cherish. So they'll get some of that under right now the republicans won't do it because they don't do it now james and the envy based and you know it's happening in the republican party that's what the republican party which stands for now envy and race and class-based uh anchor the fort the front runner of the republican party right now is that's how he's running. Right. That's what I was going to say, is that element is there, but they're not going to vote for a GOP because they won't get it as pure as they like. So the party splits, the party

destructs. That's what I was going to say. Will you be the Republican Party? Oh, well, okay. Okay. Because the Democrats will... Go ahead. Go ahead. No, go on. Well, I was confused at which party you were talking about. I wasn't sure which one you were embodying. Democrats can just split up just as these Republicans can. If I had said this a year ago, the Republican Party is going to crack up. It would have been insane. It would have been an insane thing to suggest.

Parties will crack up. It doesn't matter what Hillary Clinton wants. It doesn't matter what the establishment wants. They're going to do it. If they're going to do it, they're going to do it. In American politics, one crack up usually is an earthquake that sets the other one apart. Once you have free radicals running around, big groups of people running around looking for a political leader, whether they're Klansmen or working class whites or nativists or people who just want border security. Everything's up for grabs.

That's not a bad thing necessarily. And I think that the GOP will crack up first before the Democrats because they have better message discipline. And if you're relying on your youth to show up, the youth maybe will, but the unions will, the rank and file will. And the people who find as i said they don't get it pure but they'll get some of it and they'll they're content to get some of it some incremental grasping towards that utopian future peter yeah no i i i guess i'm with you on this james i mean i understand rob's point and I'm thinking back to the last party we, the last time we genuinely had a party crack up was 1856, I think, John C. Vermont. The Republican Party is founded when?

1856, 57, in that range. And then Lincoln becomes president. It was a four-way presidential race in 1860 that produced Abraham Lincoln. But by 1864, we were back to two parties. These things happened quickly. There's a kind of natural sort of equilibrium in this country with two parties. And you could argue, I think it's a pretty good argument that the Whig policy positions got cast aside, but the people who ended up embracing the new Republican position were demographically pretty similar to the old

Whig. So you could argue there was a kind of underlying party that cast off one set of policy positions or one outlook and then quickly embrace the new, fairly quickly embrace the new Republican party. Something like that may happen. Still, what's going on, it just seems to me the Republican party right now, who knows what's going to happen? The Democratic party now, who knows what's going to happen? The Democratic Party, we do know what's going to happen.

We've got this weird thing where an old Hillary Clinton is being led backward through time in some bizarre way by Bernie Sanders because her campaign is moving to the left to protect itself against Sanders. And to move to the left is to move backward in time. She's old in the first place. She's going back to older positions, positions that were experimented with and discredited in this country in the 70s. And yet, for all the reasons James names, we really already know, don't we, that Hillary is going to be the nominee. So she's this fairly quite, this really quite old lady is going to take the oldest political party in America and take it back to policy positions that are 30. I mean it's just – it's like running the Dr. Peabody's – Mr. Peabody's time machine. It's amazing how old and tired this is going to be.

But it's happening. It is happening. They have the discipline to make it happen. But my point is that you would have said the same thing and you would have been correct about the Republican Party four years ago. Old, tired, always the next guy. They always end up marching in lockstep. They have message unity, whatever it is. It's always the next guy. It's Bob Dole. It's Mitt Romney. It's never – the Republican Party will never crack up because republican primary voters are too disciplined and that is historically absolutely inarguable they are except when they're not and they're really not now and i think it's i think it's um i think it's naive to suggest that that the democratic party isn't going to go through the same thing not this cycle it's not going to be perfectly symmetrical and perfectly timed but they're going to go through it too, because these are big generational shifts and these are big economic shifts. And there's a whole bunch of people right now who don't feel that they have a party. I mean,

if you're a self-described evangelical voting for Donald Trump, you do not resemble an evangelical voter that we would have drawn an accurate picture of 18 months ago. If you are a self-described conservative who believes in conservative principles 18 months ago, we would have had, the three of us would have had a pretty solid idea of the psychographic of that voter. And that psychographic is now utterly irrelevant and inaccurate. So 18 months is no time at all, but it's enough time for a big party to crack up.

And I think to suggest that the Democratic Party is not gonna is just crazy. Of course they're gonna. They're not gonna do it now, but they're gonna do it. You can't escape the earthquake. I think the difference is what the two parties reform into. I mean, the party,

there's so much more ideological spectrum bandwidth on the right, I think, that you can pick and choose almost anything from nationalism to internationalism. You can all fit them into that prism. But there's a certain set of ideas on the left, which the people who are coming along are not going to reject them in favor of different ideas that go against what they believed before. They just want to double down and get more pure. That's it.

They will be going after somebody who is more pure. and there's a much more narrow, what's the word, lane. No, I'm sorry. I hate that word. There's a much more narrow artery when it comes to the ideological spectrum of the left. It gets purer and purer and purer. So that's, I mean, all of this supposes whether or not, you know, do we have a constitutional right to two parties? If you have to ask yourself that question and think about it, then obviously you're not all that up on the Constitution. Our listeners are, but some people aren't. Well, I wish there was some way I could be up on the Constitution, James. Isn't there some system by which I could educate myself?

Well, there is. That's where Hillsdale College comes in. They've got a Constitution 101 course, and it's available to everyone, anyone, for free. Because everyone, the listeners, knows that you've got to learn

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No, real, actual people reviewing the thing. You can sign up for Constitution 101 for free at hillsdale.edu slash ricochet. That's hillsdale.edu slash ricochet. Hillsdale.edu slash everybody slash ricochet that's hillsdale dot edu slash ricochet hillsdale dot edu slash everybody now ricochet all right uh so we got florida coming up here is it time to strategically vote for rubio to keep trump from getting it or is cruise trying to knock him out so trump gets it and cruise rides to the rescue later what sort of calculations going on here? Oh, gee, you know, I have money. You take this, Peter. Thanks a lot. Easy one. Well, what is there to say? Cruz is making a strong bid in

Florida. Clearly, I think his campaign is calculating that if they can take out Rubio, they make it a two man race and and Cruz still has a chance of stopping Trump before he gets to the convention. There's a lot of commentary on the web, just Google around on our website and others, and you get a lot of people who are saying that this is somehow dirty pool, it's unfair, it's beneath Ted Cruz. And yet, of course, this is the way politics works. Marco Rubio has run against Ted Cruz in virtually every primary, and there have been a couple in which Rubio denied Cruz first place. I don't find that necessarily the mark of overweening ambition. That's just the way politics works.

Four years ago, you'll remember, Florida was a very dirty spectacle. Newt Gingrich had come out of South Carolina having defeated Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich was on a roll, and the Romney campaign backed up a dump truck and dropped about two pounds of dirt on Newt Gingrich going to the airwaves and with ads many of which not all of which but many of which impugned Gingrich's character rehashing the ethics committee investigation to Gingrich in which he was cleared of all charges

but that so even when mitt romney who everyone agrees is an honor is as honorable a man as politicians ever are uh florida got got dirty what will happen i just i just you know it's i still find it hard to believe but this this may be just, this may be me singing the Internationale with a red bandana around my neck, my throat. I still find it hard to believe Donald Trump is going to be the nominee, but like anybody else who still finds that hard to believe, I'm now forced to say, well, it'll happen at the convention. Nobody will have enough delegates to win the convention. It's going to be a broker convention. After the first ballot, all the delegates will come to their senses. And I realize that this is, in any historical, from any historical point of

view, that's a fantasy. Broker conventions haven't happened in the Republican Party in decades. There's no broker. There's no broker. That's right. There are no brokers anymore. Yeah, there's no brokers, no Mark no broker. That's right. There are no brokers anymore. Yeah, there's no brokers. No Mark Hanna. Right. Right. There's no guy from a Thomas Nast cartoon with a top hat and a big belly.

Don't you miss him now? Right. Hey, boys, could I try something on you? Why, of course. Camille Paglia. Am I pronouncing that correctly? The GL is Paglia. Okay so it's sort of the original Italian. Camille Paglia. Okay has up everything she writes is at least half crazy in my opinion but just

beautifully written thought, she thinks. And she's got something up on Salon, which is a kind of mea culpa. She admits that she's been wrong about Trump. And what it comes down to, I'd like to read a couple of sentences when we get our guest online, but here's what it comes down to.

Primary voters nationwide are clearly responding to Trump's brand of classic can-do American moxie. This guy, that's Camille Pellett, this guy conveys a sense of energy and a fundamentally positive outlook about the United States of America and everything else's details. Robert, James? Yeah, I think so. I think that's the nicest possible gloss on Donald Trump. So I don't disagree with it, but I think it tunes out other things and tunes out

other things that he's arguing. I mean, you know, Trump is not a figure of optimism the way it can do gee whiz like a Ronald Reagan was a figure of optimism. He's a figure primarily of anger and of revenge, right? We're going to get we're going to get them back. And they did this to us and we're going to get them back. That's kind of what his his thing is. I saying it's not effective it's really effective it's going to be i don't think it's going to be effective in general because i think he will be the nominee and i don't think he's going to be very successful but um i i think that's there is a strain in american

the american people who believe that they've been rooked rightly or wrong wrongly, and he's the only one saying, I'm going to get the bastards back for you. We're going to go in there, we're going to take their oil, we're going to build a wall, they're going to pay for it, we're going to teach the Chinese a lesson, despite all this evidence that China's on the verge of a recession, their trade deficit with China's gone down 30%. Japan doesn't even – he mentioned Japan.

Japan is at a relevant data point at this point. Even illegal immigration has gone down. So it's revenge. It's much better. At some point, you want a little bit more than that. You want details. She says they don't matter, but they do. And the thing about Trump that makes you worried sometimes is that you believe that he would make a speech in which he said that America has been stabbed in the back

and that he wouldn't know the reference. And that if somebody pointed it out that would be ridiculous. That there were just words that he put together and he knows all the great words and he can't say that. But the thing of it is, is that we're talking about him and we're not talking about Rubio because everybody agrees that Rubio has given up the ghost. And when you think of a ghost, you think of the friendly one named Casper. And that's why I'm here to tell you that when Rubio does retire, I recommend a Casper mattress with its special kind of foam, a little memory foam in there, a little late. It's just the right sink and the right bounce. And every disappointment in life can be a swash with a good night's sleep, and that's what we recommend for anybody that matter of this year, this difficult year.

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Before I just veered off there into the commercial, I was bringing up the end of the career of Marco Rubio. Or is he now just going to have so much goodwill that he's going to take over the GOP wing, the establishment, the Chamber of Commerce wing? You really hate that, don't you, James? There are a few people I can name, a few people I know personally for whom that is really, really, the GOP

stuff really bugs them. You, John Podoritz, and well, besides me, I mean, and Jonah. Well, establishment tools, all of them. Sitting there in New York as Jews, what do you expect? That's precisely the sort of neocon thing that's gotten us into this mess.

Wow. But you channel it pretty well, I've got to say. In the New world order, you might find yourself a chief propagandist. If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve. You go on. So the future of- Straight forward question. How comfortable do you, are you both now firm Ted Cruz supporters? We've just spent the last 20 minutes slanging Donald Trump. Is the corollary, have we reached the point at which the corollary of that is to support, if you are, if you can't

stomach Donald Trump, you must support Ted Cruz. Fair statement of where we are? Well, Peter, let me tell you something about that. The other day, I listened to a speech by Ted Cruz and I was remarking, I was remarking at the cadences that he said that I knew were going to follow in a way as almost as if they had been said before in the tone of a preacher. And that is why when I eventually decide that I'm going to support Ted Cruz, it's not going to be a question of me supporting Ted Cruz. It's going to be because Ted Cruz supports the people who support him. And we're going to take back this country in June. To answer your question, when I can get past the absolute theatricality of nearly every single thing that I hear from him and concentrate on the substance, then yeah, I'll probably be a happy Cruz supporter.

We bring them to the Ricochet podcast. Ben Sasse. He's the Republican senator from the great state of Nebraska who's made quite a name for himself on many different platforms. From December 2010 to December 14, Sass served as the president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska. Before that, joined the University of Texas LBJ School, a public affairs center for politics and governance. As a fellow, we might add. Prior to that, from January 2004 to January 2005, he served as the chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Policy in D.C., a job previously held by O.O. Antonin Scalia. Senator and Ms. Sass are the parents of three children and live in Fremont, Nebraska.

We welcome him to the Ricochet podcast. Here's Rob Long with a question. Hey, Senator, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. I know you just came off the floor. Glad to. One of the things people talk about is the establishment this, the establishment that, the GOP establishment's done this

and that. And my question is, if there is an establishment, why can't you guys get your act together and settle this thing? I mean, is there a room where you can sit in? It's kind of a facetious question, but it's a serious question too.

It's like what's it like right now in the Senate? You've got two senators running. These are people you know. Is one of you guys going to say, listen, let's just all make a call to this person or that person and get this done? Does that ever come up? Well, I think there were 73 implicit questions, and we agreed to talk for 15 minutes, but let's just go to sundown now. Let me not answer one thing first. Let's park three or four or five things. First of all, the idea that I'm establishment

is sort of like the idea that I have a rhythm. I mean implausible anyone who knows the actual situation i'm ninety nine ten seniority and one of two people in the senate is never run for anything before my life before they elected to the senate and uh... my party uh... basically ran attack and begins to be my primary because i didn't know the lobbyist community so the idea that i'm establishment means that words have no meaning uh... so that the start with that. Second of

all, if there is any smoke-filled room where these meetings happen, not only have I never been invited, I don't know that it exists, but I think there was a time until, you know, I don't know, four months ago, maybe, that the word establishment had some kind of meaning. And I am zealously anti-establishment if we actually define the term. Now I think it's become almost entirely meaningless because it's an anti, anti, anti, anti thing that whatever somebody's against, the opponents of that make strange bedfellows with somebody who once knew that person was mad at him for cutting him off in traffic. So I am very, very worried that we don't have a clue what Mr. Trump believes on absolutely anything.

And so I'm against Mr. Trump because I'm pro-constitutionalist and because I'm a conservative. There are other people who are probably against Mr. Trump for different reasons, but that doesn't make some sort of net coalition. But I think the really important fundamental thing we have to acknowledge about this moment is that so much of what's coming apart in the Republican Party isn't just because Mr. Trump is an effective catalyst of this moment, that so much of what's coming apart in the Republican party isn't just because Mr. Trump is an effective catalyst of this moment, though he is. He's a smart, able guy. I think national media regularly misunderstand who he is. He's the smartest marketer that's ever run for president of the United States, and he's arguably the guy that has the highest

name ID and Q rating of anybody who's run for president of the United States since James Madison. But Mr. Trump is an effective spokesman for a number of things that are wrong. But what he stands for, I don't have any idea. But you couldn't do this, which is I think he's waging a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He's waging war against essentially 17 of the 20 planks of what the party, the party of Lincoln has historically stood for, you couldn't do all that if the party wasn't already hollow. So the party had no clarity about its core principles. So let's just start by acknowledging that as frustrated as many of us may be with Mr. Trump, he's waging war against something that deserves to have a lot of shots fired at it. So let's begin there. So let me ask you just to follow up, because I should have started by saying I agree with everything you said.

But a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, whatever happens, let's fast forward past November. Fast forward past the inauguration of Senator Hillary Clinton. Will we look back on it and say, well, you know, Trump was a disaster for us in a lot of ways but he made us stronger? Did this little bit of poison was what we needed? We needed to crack up and put ourselves back together again? I think there are many times in life when things are broken and you do need

a disruptor and so surely he's going to play the role of the disruptor no matter what happens next. Whether he wins the nomination, doesn't win the nomination if he then loses a 62-38 race and the worst outcome any major party candidate has ever had in U.S. history or somehow overperforms and surprises people and comes close in any of those scenarios, he's going to have been a disruptor. But I think you have to say disrupting toward what end? Because I want to make America great again. And if what you want to do, if you want to make America great again,

you have to talk about how you would do that. And what is glorious about America is that it's an anti-statist tradition. The American system of government, the constitutional system of government, is a big affirmation of limited government because it's a bigger affirmation of human dignity and limitless human potential, and why civil society and mediating institutions and churches and schools and small businesses are the center of American life. An Alexis de Tocquevillian understanding of what America was 200 years ago is what America

needs to be again if we're going to make America great. And what's happened over the last many years, and some of it is because of underlying economic disruptions, that's not the whole story, but the nature of work is radically changing. People are scared and insecure, and we should be frightened about how radically the economy is changing from anything our parents or grandparents ever knew. And they're looking for leadership. They're looking for a Washington that does a smaller number of big things. But in that situation, what we want to recover is a sense that politics can't possibly be the source of meaning in our life. Politics can't possibly solve everything that's broken.

We need 320 million Americans with dignity to be building solutions in their local community. And Washington has a very precise set of enumerated powers and limited responsibilities. And a guy saying that I could solve all your problems if only I had more power in the model of Obama. And let's be clear, Trump has said many, many things like that. He has said, I think on executive orders and executive unilateralism, Barack Obama has paved a new way. Well, I think that's the opposite of what any of us who believe in limited government want. We need a constitutional recovery where Washington is put back in a box of building a framework for ordered liberty but not trying to centrally plan everything and I think on that if you said is Donald Trump's core message that he could solve everything if he had more power or is his core message let's have

limited government again and set loose the huge potential of the American people he sets the former not the latter so I don't see how his disruption is going to help fix us unless he becomes a sort of antidote that everybody says, oh, crap, I was against Obama. And Trump tried to say there was a sort of right wing identity politics by which he could do the same thing. I'm against that, too. Maybe we should reembrace the American founding. I guess that would be a useful outcome of this real hard poison. Senator Peter Robinson here. Good to have you with us. Listen, Camille Pellia has an article. If we have time, I'd like to try two things on you here.

We've got Camille Pellia has a piece up in Salon. Camille Pellia, who's a left winger, but always interesting, always insightful. And she publishes essentially a man of cold blood. She said, I was wrong about Donald Trump. Let me try a couple of her sentences on you here. Trump's fearless candor and brash energy feel like a great gust of fresh air sweeping the tedious cliches and constant guilt tripping of political correctness out to sea. Primary voters nationwide are clearly responding to Trump's brand of classic can-do American moxie. Close quote. Presidential elections are low resolution events.

You've got one guy who's standing for making America great again. And he conveys the sense that he has the energy and the determination to do it. Everything else in this contest right now is details. We ought to embrace the guy and the energy and the can-do spirit for which he stands and then begin working with him and his staff as quickly as possible to start filling in the details and make sure that they are constitutionally filled in. How about that position? Well, let's start with your opening point that she's a heck of a writer. So I don't agree with her a lot of the time, but I still am always impressed by her writing. But I think this is one of the times where, you know, that's a

pretty sad commentary because I don't hear Mr. Trump saying things that are about lifting back up the dignity of ordinary people. You know, I think it's funny as I've been critical of Mr. Trump and I get hit by national pundits, you know, that he's the voice of the working man. I mean, for heaven's sakes, I'm a kid who grew up working on a farm and I'm the child of a football and

wrestling coach. And he's a $300 million trust fund, maybe who buys golf courses and wives at modeling agencies, but he's the voice of the common man. I mean, it's just, it's silly. Um,

but when you really listen to common man. I mean, it's just, it's silly. But when you really listen to what Mr. Trump says, he doesn't really talk about what the constructive vision is for whole local communities, for vigorous entrepreneurs, for family formation, for a restoration of civic virtue and engagement and textured local networks where life is actually lived and meaning is found. What you instead find is mostly a vessel for anger to insult other people. And when I hear people in the social media space talk about Mr. Trump, they really scare me quite a lot because they sound like they think

if he had all the power, he could solve everything. The good news is most Trump supporters are not goofy like that. Most Trump supporters are well-meaning folks. I live in Nebraska, as you mentioned in your opening. We have three little kids and I commute basically every week and I bring some portion of my family with me. So my community is regular Nebraskans. It's not DC lobbyist community. And so I know, unlike a lot of media who said they've never met a Trump supporter, I know tons of people who are supporting Donald Trump. And when you talk to them, the vast majority of them admit that the reason they're supporting him is because they think we're really

broken and they need somebody to scream no at Washington louder. And then you say, okay, but do you think he's the solution to our problems? Most Trump supporters say, well, no, of course not. They sort of talk about it like it's the first ballot. Like it's just, it's a way to register your protest and your dissent. And then later they'll figure out what to do next. And when you, when you sort of push them, they say, well, I don't know that I really want him to win, but man, do I want Washington to know we're back

and so it did but camille's point there uh... that you you you you have a low resolution of that just registering that protest right right the problem with that nation is if he's in office hope to do you ever have that this guy believes that executive restraint where where did the ever talked in a way that says one of the glories of America is understanding that the potential of these 300 plus million

people, that the definition of the American nation is so much more than the compulsory powers of the federal government? Where does he ever draw that distinction and talk about the limits that we want for our government? Because that's what we need to do. We need a Washington that doesn't think it can do everything, but the things that it should do, it ought to really be laser focused on doing, and you ought to have precise plans for those things. And I think what we hear from him is more general platitude about how he'll get all the awesomest right people, and he'll be able to do everything, just trust him. Well, the American system is actually based on distrust of government, and that's a glorious thing. So is it not too late to stop this guy?

Oh, I don't think it's too late. I mean, I think that... Please don't. No, I think there are lots of opportunities for the American people to still wake up. I mean, I'm opposed to mr trump uh... chiefly because i believe in the constitution and i want anybody running for office to talk constantly about that american creed because of the negative

political document it's not the limits on government i never hear that from himself i'm i'm opposed to him for constitutional reasons and for but conservative policy commitment i understand a lot of people following him are not doing it because of all through doing it because of style and i i understand the moment that we're at i'm not opposing him on because i'd pick any great insight into where the politics go from here

but the pressure question let's just acknowledge a couple of big facts the national media acting like you've already won this time i think he has a thirty nine percent of the delegates in the votes cast today and about thirty four and a half percent of the votes i the votes cast today and about 34.5% of the votes. I think Ted Cruz has about 29.5%. If the person who were in second place and at 29.5% instead of 34.5% were a media darling instead of Ted Cruz, the media would be talking about this like it was a near-dead heat. So the coronation of Donald Trump is partly because the media just loves this.

It's like crack to these people, right? And a lot of them are liberals who can't wait for the day that he wins the nomination. And then they can start doing investigative journalism and not treat it as a sideshow, but that they're going to try to take him apart. But so first of all, he's nowhere near being on a pathway to 1,237 delegates.

And so I think that, you know, once people are paying a little, again, this is not the core of my objection to the guy because he may well win the nomination, but I think it's important to recognize he has the highest negatives of any major party candidate who's ever run for president since we've had polling. We've had polling since the mid-1930s, and there's never been a guy that has more opposition than this guy. And the second level of analysis that's pretty important as well is the intensity of the opposition is extraordinary. So when you look at what independent women think about this guy, yes, it is true.

I'm interrupting the thought, but it is true that there are some old Reagan Democrats, sort of union folks who are pro-Second Amendment, who may turn out and vote for Trump and haven't in the past or may go from Democrat to Republican to vote for Trump. I think that number is likely much, much smaller than the number of independent women that he's going to create as anti-Trump voters. When you're in my community in Nebraska, the number of people who are relatively apolitical

who want to talk about Trump, the leading reason why, besides just sort of intrigue, and he's, you know, a good rhetorician, and he'd be good to have a beer with, and he's fun TV, and get all that. But the number one voice that I hear from is people who are essentially women who aren't that politically engaged who say, you better be darn sure I'll turn out to vote against that guy.

I don't want my kids growing up in a world where that's our leader. Senator Sasse, James Lallick's up here in Minnesota, the Plains, where, of course, real Americans are made, as you know. Good question. When we look at one side of the party, they seem to be, 30% of them seems to be endorsing a post-constitutional authority figure. And on the other side of the political aisle, you've got 80% of them endorsing socialism. Could it possibly be that an appeal to the constitution, to the limited government, to the old Tocqueville notions, that actually that's going to be a hard sell because people don't want that anymore. It interferes with their desire to get things or to get things done. Or is it too late? That is the reason I ran,

because I want my kids to grow up in an American constitutional republic, and I want your listeners' kids to grow up in that republic, and we have not done the important cultural catechesis that we need to do. We could talk lots of technical things about the Constitution, but fundamentally the starting point for how to think about a question like this, I think, is well before he was President Reaganagan even before the governor reagan uh... union democrat spoke gd spokesman ronald reagan uh... with a guy who understood that in a republic you're always only one

generation away from the extension of freedom and the only way that a republic where we believe the people rule via law not that there's some great man strong man who could solve every problem for us the only way a republic goes forward is if we believe in civic virtue and if we believe in the restraint of public officials because we believe in this constitutional system and the hard sad truth of this moment isn't anything precisely about economic disruption in twenty fifteen or sixteen it is about that

you know sort of degradation of public discourse about candidates in twenty sixteen the sad moment where i think that were fifty years into a nineteen sixties hangover where we have stopped teaching the next generation what america means and we have a guy is president right now who when he was asked in twenty twelve do you believe in american exceptionalism it's like you can you could watch Barack Obama's head spinning through the polling. He's like, well, of course I don't believe in American exceptionalism, but I also can't say that.

I'm up for reelection. I'm a sort of global European elite, and I know that I don't believe in American exceptionalism, so why don't I just say that the term is meaningless? Yeah, President Obama said, I believe in American exceptionalism the way Brits probably believe in British exceptionalism and Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. Well, that sort of neuters the entire point. It isn't that we think we're superior to other people because of ethnicity or something we receive in the bloodstream. It's that America is historically exceptional because we don't believe that Mike makes right. We don't believe the king is free

first and the people are dependent subjects. We don't believe the passive assumption is prohibition on what you want to do. We believe the passive assumption is permission because people have natural rights, and it's the government that's limited, not the people. And you're obviously right. The sort of horrific premise of your question is, do most Americans know that? Obviously not. And so if we're actually going to make america great again as opposed to make america europe um we're going to need to have a constitutional recovery and that's what i would hope democrats would join us with this shouldn't be a republican partisan issue constitutionalism is the oath of office that everybody in american public life takes to

preserve protect and defend the constitution but the the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, needs a reform project that's about becoming constitutional again first, not yearning for a Republican Barack Obama, which is largely the logic of a Trump candidacy. Senator Sasse, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Keep hammering these ideas until we hear opportunistic talk show hosts start to sound like conservatives again. Won't that be fun? Good luck at the Senate, and we'll see you down the road.

Thank you, Senator. Hey, thanks, guys. Hope I wasn't too shrill. Absolutely not. You know, Rob's gone, right? Rob had to get, Rob had to go to a meeting. He had to go to a meeting at the GOP.

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You have any reminiscence of Nancy Reagan who left us this week? Oh, yeah. Well, of course, I put up a post about that, but I was just, I'm down here in Southern California today to attend her funeral tomorrow. So it's very much on my mind. What's on my mind, I suppose, right now, I've talked about

her and my memories of her. I was chatting the other, just yesterday evening, I remembered something that I'd forgotten for years that showed in the White House, she was very formidable, always on behalf of her husband, but still formidable as witness, something that came to mind. I'd suppressed the memory. I got dragooned into writing speeches for her for about two months or so before I could figure a way to talk my way out of it. Nothing against Mrs. Reagan or speech writing for her, but I joined the White House to have to write for the president, wanted to do policy and so forth. In any event, I still have this in my files, although I haven't looked at it in years. I wrote one speech for her, I think it was four or five pages, and it came back from Mrs. Reagan. And she had in the felt

tip, blue felt tip pen that she always used, she had drawn a line through every line I had written on page one, page two, page three, and page four. She had not written in the margins, this stinks, but she might as well have done. And I had to sort of sort that through what happened here. And it turned out Mrs. Reagan didn't want to say a word that had anything to do with policy. She just wanted to be gracious, to say things that were frankly platitudes, but to say them in an elegant way. And that was one more way in which she was doing her best by her husband. She didn't want to run any risk that she might make news or become a controversial figure in her own right. She was there to support her husband.

Speeches for her were a question of tone. She wanted to be warm. She wanted to be gracious and she wanted to say nothing that actually made news or suggested that she was some kind of force in the White House with regard to policy, which, by the way, she never was. But she was very strong and staff properly feared her a little bit. That's one Nancy Reagan. The other Nancy Reagan is suffering takes different people different ways. She became such a sweet, after nursing the president and even while he was still alive, she became so sweet and so appreciative of staff. And I guess I'm recalling right now,

this would be the last time or the second to last time I saw her. This would be a couple of years ago. There was an event at the Reagan Library. She was so sweet to everyone, chatted away, gave me some background on the 1964 speech. Barry Goldwater's staff tried to stop it. Barry Goldwater himself had to intervene. All fascinating. And on the way out, I got this one little glimpse. Mrs. Reagan had me take her arm and walk her from the dining room to her car. And the dining room in the you if you'd used a wheelchair to get from the car from the dining room back to the car this evening. And she just stopped for a moment and she looked at me and she said, no way. And it was just this marvelous, when I'm going to perform, I'm going to perform. She still had a sense of her role. She didn't want to let people down. She wanted to look strong and elegant. And here she was in her early 90s. She was quite, quite a woman. Strong, intelligent,

and forceful before it was cool. Well, you have to go to the proper websites, Peter, to get the other side of the equation, because don't you know that Nancy Reagan can be summed up as somebody who bought China while people were dying of AIDS. That's essentially what the left just got on her. And that is the tap dancing that they were doing. It's curious how AIDS was Ronald Reagan's fault. I'm still trying to exactly figure out why that was and how a public pronounce earlier stuff.

Just for the sake of the record, you can't mention something to an old Reagan guy like me without my wanting to correct it. Be it noted that the China that she bought. And when the Reagans moved into the White House, there were all kinds of things that were pretty. The curtains needed to be replaced. Been a long time since money had been spent maintaining that institution. The China, the new curtains, all of that was purchased with privately donated money through the White House Historical Association, which had been set up during the Truman administration for just that purpose, to buy furniture and to maintain the White House using

private funds. Not a penny of public money, taxpayers' money, went to that China. Item one. Item two, people forget the timing of AIDS, but it was only becoming a major issue in the second half of the president's administration. If you look at the actual record, the amount of money that the Reagan administration spent in the National Institutes of Health budget devoted to researching AIDS increased by something like 1,000%. The administration did respond to AIDS. It was not a major political issue until he left office. But as a medical matter, the administration responded to it quite promptly and with lots of research dollars. You're done, James. It's just the kind of Koch brothers, quote, fact, end quote, that makes people think that, you know,

it's of a piece with George Bush supposedly spending money on AIDS in Africa. I mean, come on, really. It's just, you know, they hate these people and they want them to die. No, actually, I love everybody. I want them to live as long and fruitful a life as possible. And in the words of that, who was that? A father who was an Orthodox priest in Fiddler on the Roof. Do you remember that in the opening scene, Tradition?

When Tevye asks the father for a prayer for the czar. He asks the rabbi for a prayer for the czar. If such a thing is possible. It always sums up my attitude toward government. Rabbi, could you give us a prayer for the czar? And he the prayer for the Tsar, if such a thing is possible. I always summed up my attitude toward government. The Rebbe, could you give us a prayer for the Tsar? And he said, for the Tsar? May the Lord bless and keep the Tsar far away from us. Which is pretty much an American attitude as well about government,

whether or not it comes back or is buried under a tsunami of socialism. The day comes. Here's something for everybody to think about. Trump's the presidential nominee for the GOP. Hillary has Bernie Sanders on her ticket. Hillary is elected. Hillary is indicted. Bernie is president.

Won't that be fun? We'll leave you with that. But listen, before that happens and you still have some money in your pocket, spend it on things that will make your life better. I know, consumption is one of those things that drives climate change and inequality. Yeah, right. Well, you need to sleep, right? And Casper's the best

possible mattress. You need to learn. Hillsdale College will give you a free college on the Constitution 101, and hillsdale.edu is where you go for that. And you need the shave unless you want to be some hairy anarchist, okay? And that's harrys.com. In all cases, the coupon cases the coupon code is ricochet and it'll get you some money off this is the ricochet store as well where you can get bags and cups and mugs and hats and t-shirts and all the rest of this stuff and show the world that you go to ricochet the husk what

is that you'll get them to sign up we'll get money we'll prosper we'll thrive and we'll be here for the next election cycle that'd be great See you in the comments, everybody. Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Peter, to our guests and everyone listening. And we'll see you down the road on Ricochet 2.0. Next week, James. Jim is in America. We'll take side the wheel.

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