The Ricochet Podcast - Cheer Up, Chaps

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

James and Steve put Charles in the guest chair to elaborate on his National Review cover story exhorting against generalized downerdom and political pessimism. Further, the trio speculates on the nature of negotiations with the people supposedly running Iran, as well as next week's birthright citizenship case before SCOTUS.Sound from this week's open: Marco Rubio speaks on Iran war objectives.

I'm guessing, though, you're going to get a flood of gift packages containing Walmart Timex watches from people who say you don't know what time it is or something like that. Of course. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination. Because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. It's the Rikishay podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward on James Lillix. Today we're going to be talking about misery. We will have none of that here.

Thank you. Let's have ourselves a podcast. The objectives I've outlined to you, again, I repeat them, because I see these reports, like, if the users is not clear on what objectives are. We've been as clear as you can possibly be from the very first night of what the objectives of this mission are. We're going to destroy their factories and make missiles and rockets and drones.

We're going to destroy their Navy. We're going to destroy their Air Force, and we are going to significantly destroy their missile launchers so they can never hide behind these things to get a nuclear weapon. Well, welcome, everybody. It's the R ricochet podcast, episode number 782. Why don't you just mosey on over at Rickashay.com and be a member? You can be part of the most stimulating conversations in community on the web.

That place you've been looking for, that's Rikosha. I'm James Lillings in the place that I was looking for and found in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And it's a beautiful, cold, crisp day out there. It should be a little bit more spring-like. But, you know, we had 75 degrees two days ago, and today it's spring all the flowers in because it's below freezing. And then Stephen Hayward in California, I presume, in his bookline study, with his skylight above him, if you're watching the video, it's kind of funny. It just looks like there's this sort of angelic beam of heaven coming down into it, illuminate your noggin and explain your insights and the rest of it. Charles Cedle your cook will be along in just a second.

We'll have to upgrade him for his tardiness and make him. We'll be like the class, you know, when the bad kid comes in late and the teacher gives him the look and the rest of it. to put a piece of paper down explaining his absence. But before he gets here, let's settle the Iran war. So, Stephen, the president says, going to unleash hell, end quote, on Iranian energy infrastructure. Not maybe a good idea if we want the state to thrive post-liberation. But he said five-day halt on strikes to open negotiations

about the straight and the rest of it. Everyone's saying contradictory messages. Everybody's saying backing off. Everybody's saying failure. I just think that we ought not to believe anything that we hear because it's entirely possible if people are saying things in public that actually don't comport with what's going on in private. There's smoke and misdirection and the rest of it. That would seem to be the canny thing to do in war, no?

I mean, there's several scenarios you can play out that are quite plausible. And yeah, I don't know anything either. I'll just say I have a general rule right now, which is, well, I'll put it this way. How can we tell that we are winning this war very strongly, as someone might say? because the media says it's a quagmire, right? I mean, really, I think you can't go too far wrong saying whatever the media says, the opposite is probably closer to the truth. Now, I do think that this sort of day-to-day bouncing ball, maybe it's Trump trying to calm the markets,

maybe he's playing for time until the 82nd Airborne gets in position so they can do a serious landing to take Carg Island. I think Carg Island is, again, I don't know anything about this really. I don't have deep expertise, but never stopped. any of us before. Of course not. That's right. So I mean, look, I think it's game over for the Iranian economy and their leverage if we take their main oil terminal. And we can force the straight to open. But if we want, they're the risks, of course. And then I think maybe he's thinking, well, maybe we kill enough Iranians to destroy enough places. They're finally going to come to their senses and make a sensible deal, which right now they seem to be resisting. So I don't know what's happening either.

But, you know, the track record so far is you never know. Trump, right? We now know before the war started that he was playing for time while they got everything in order and really forming a serious battle plan that they said would be four to six weeks of taking out the, and so I don't know, maybe Iran surprised us by attacking so many of its neighbors as hard as they have. I'm not sure if we expected that or not. Again, I don't know, but I'm still reasonably confident. I know Charlie thinks the clock is running, and I'm starting to warm up to his point of view that the domestic politics are going to get increasing. difficult for Trump just because. But right now, I'm just going to sit back and, as someone

likes to say, we'll just have to see what happens. Indeed. When you say they're going to strike a deal with the Iranians, who exactly? I think that's the question. Who's left? Are we going to be negotiating with Mullahs? We are not. Are we going to have to probably hold our nose and talk to some people that we wouldn't like to because they may have had something to do? But they're, you know, the whole argument about whether debathification was the necessary thing to do in Iraq and whether not they should have left a structure in place and then just plugged, you know, our strong man in as opposed to doing what they did. That's something for history to decide. Well, you know, something I've not heard anybody talk about that surprises me a little bit is recognizing a new

government. In other words, like we did in World War II by recognizing the Gaul as the legitimate government of France or, you know, the Polish government in exile. so forth. I don't know why we aren't saying something like or thinking about saying, gosh, there's no more government in Iran. All their leaders are gone. It's chaos. We don't even know who to negotiate with. And there is a plan with the former Shah's son that I've seen. And supposedly he is ready to step up and organize a government, a transitional government. Why aren't we thinking about saying we now recognize this is the legitimate government of Iran? And of course, it's a bold political move and how does it actually work anymore? I don't.

don't know, but it's something that I think could be interesting to try. Maybe the fear is it just starts a civil war in Iran, but that may happen anyway. Well, now joining us with two cold buckets of water to tell us why the clock is ticking. It is Charles C.W. Charlie, how you doing? Good. How are you? So you're saying the clock is ticking, that time is of the essence. People are calling it a quagmire as if the definition for modern quagmire isn't up in in Ukraine, which would seem to be quagmmerish. It's not a quagmire at all. It's just been, and it's been going on curiously offstage, it feels like, for quite

some time now. But you think that domestic political calculations are going to answer into it? Tell us why. Well, partly because the war was never discussed or debated or explained. And partly because Trump does have a history of starting things. capriciously and ending things capriciously. I don't mean by that this term you see thrown around Taco, Trump always chickens out. But he is bothered by the state of the bond markets, the stock market, oil prices, and so on. And when you haven't laid out a clear plan and you don't have

the public on your side, which he doesn't, then those things loom large. I have gone. There should be more bully pulpiting going on, don't you think? There should be more explainers. There should be a speech from the Oval Office with flags behind. That's kind of what I want more of. Well, I do in theory, and in practice I think he should have done it irrespective, but his ability to stick to a topic is, let's say, limited. so I slightly wonder whether it would have been as useful as, say,

if President Reagan had done it. But yeah, I do think he should have done that. And I must say, for those who think that I'm couching some hidden opposition to the war in these criticisms, I've become more hawkish as this has gone on, not less. I was just saying as much on the editors' podcast, I think that there is absolutely no doubt that, the case against Iran is solid. If the big problem with Iraq was that many of the claims that were made weren't true, either at the time they were made or turned out to be untrue, that's not

true of Iran. The Iranian regime is exactly as described. The Iranians were producing weapons that they were not allowed to have. The Iranians did for years kill Americans. And I've had the last one really emphasized to me in the last few weeks when I've spoken to veterans about this. I live in an area full of veterans. Jacksonville's a naval base. Also, veterans have come to some of the events that I've put on in the last two or three weeks. And yeah, they're self-selecting conservatives by definition at those events, less so here. But all of them, all of them, are pumped because they all say the same thing, especially those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those guys killed my friends. This isn't debilts. This isn't debilts.

The question is whether we should go in, sure, and how we should do it. But I've become more hawkish because I don't think that there is a strong case against hitting Iran on the basis that Iran is bad. It is. Right. I agree. But the thing about James' point about an oval office speech with the flags behind you, I think that way too, because I remember, you know, Reagan or Nixon earlier presidents,

Trump's not very good at those. He's sort of stiff. The few times he's tried it, I also think it does not get the audience that used to get, right? It used to be when there were only three networks they did the so-called roadblock, right? So wherever you turn on your TV,

you're going to get the president for half an hour or an hour. And that's not true anymore. So I don't know what works anymore. The crowded, meaty landscape and are sort of customized entertainment who even watches TV. Everybody's on TikTok or Instagram or whatever.

So I don't know. I think it's a harder communications environment. That's not to excuse Trump, the administration, Charlie, for what you say of having a coherent message. I do worry that at the back of that is Trump's improvisational characteristics that what he wants above all else is for Trump to win or be able to claim a win. And if that means leaving the current regime in place with what looked like acceptable terms, he would do that, even after saying, you know, in January, we are coming to help the Iranian people throw off this evil regime. Well, you know, which is it? We need to either see it through or something. I don't know.

It is perplexing and troubling. Yeah. To leave the regime in place at the end of all of this would be, not a stab at the back. I hate that phrase. It would be a gross abrogation of duty now that you start this thing. I mean, it's one of those you break it. You own it things, as Colin Paul used to say.

Of course, nobody quotes him that much anymore. Yeah. Supreme Court. Scotus is going to hear arguments on birthright citizenship. I love the name of this in this case. It's Trump v. Barbara, which just somehow sums up our age more than

anything else. Which one of you constitutional scholars would like to take a crack at this and tell and think reading your tea leaves, which way you think it's going to go? I think you should start, Steve. All right. Well, I'll give it a try. I haven't been keeping up with the briefs on this case. Yeah, it's going to be

argued, I think, Thursday this week. I haven't been keeping up with the briefs. One thing that struck me, though, is I should probably explain for listeners. The clause of the 14th Amendment, what they call the Citizenship Clause, says all persons born are naturalized in the United States, comma, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,

comma, shall be, for whatever the rest of it says. That clause, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, has become very controversial in recent years. It's long been thought that that meant an exclusion, say, of diplomats, right? If you're a diplomat, you're subject to the jurisdiction of your home country. So if you have kids born while you're posted in Washington or New York or something, they're not, they don't have birthright citizenship. But there's active debate about whether that meant, for example, should include the modern phenomenon of birth tourism, right?

There's a thriving industry out here in California of rich Chinese mothers come over here to have their babies born in Orange County or Beverly Hills. Never mind, you know, poor Mexicans crossing the border. And then they fly back home to China. And now they have a child with entitlement to an American passport and all that would come with that, including ways of getting assets out of the country later on and so forth. Well, are these people who come here for a week to have a child born? Are they really subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in a meaningful sense? Now, saying that they're not and that the expansive understanding of birthright citizenship that we had for a long time is challengeable,

had been a fringe view of a very few, some of them friends of mine, like John Eastman's been arguing this for 30 years. But the view has been spreading amongst a lot of other serious constitutional scholars. Ilyn Wormann, a young guy up there near you in Minnesota, James, has written very strongly about this. Richard Epstein, I believe, has come around to this point of view. I think he has, Charlie. You can't keep up with the copious flood of Richard's verbiage. Richard wrote 47,000 words about that. Yeah, right, right.

And so, and the point is, is that the view that, well, wait a minute, maybe we should. And really, there's only one case about it from the 1890s that everyone says settled the matter. But I think if you look closer, it's not a complete slam dunk. The Wong Kim R case, I think was called, been a while since I've read all these. So the last thing I'll say, and then Charlie can correct and fill in and add to it is a lot of people are saying they might not reach the constitutional question of that clause in the 14th Amendment because there might be some. statutory grounds where they might reject the challenge and thus leave the deeper challenge for another day, which I think would be unfortunate. But we are asking the court to do an awful lot right now under President Trump. I think there are a couple of things here that interest me. The

first is I hear it said quite often that one of the big problems with the Trump administration is that it asks questions constitutionally that have been settled. I think that's wrong in the sense that there is a paradox within our constitutional order, and that is that we are, and the lower courts are, and the governments are obliged to follow the Constitution and to follow Supreme Court precedent. But if you think that that Supreme Court precedent is grievously wrong, the only way that you can get it heard is to do something that violates it, as we, of course, learned in the most famous case of all,

Brown v. Board of Education. And so if, for example, like the state of Florida, and I agree with them on this, even though I'm not fond of the policy, you think that basically every single Supreme Court pronouncement in the last 70 years on the death penalty is complete nonsense, then the only way that you can get it heard again is to pass a law that contradicts it. Well, Trump thinks or hopes that our birthright citizenship precedents are wrong.

And the only way you can really get around to determining whether or not he's right at the court, hasn't been heard for a long time, is to do something. And in his case, he passed an executive order, which is not a law, but which has the effect of bringing up the matter. So I'm not angry with Trump for having done this in the way that some are. That said, I do think that he's probably wrong. Certainly, I think he is wrong to think he can do it via executive order. So the maximalist case against Trump is that the 14th Amendment mandates birthright

citizenship and subject to the jurisdiction thereof just means diplomats and so forth. And therefore there's nothing anyone can do about it unless we amend the Constitution. We have birthright citizenship. Maybe it's a terrible policy. I actually think it is. But that's the Constitution. Deal with it. And then there's this third way argument that I've become a little more sympathetic to having

read the amicus briefs, which is that, no, the 14th Amendment does not mandate birthright citizenship, but changes to the meaning of something. subject to the jurisdiction thereof have to be made by Congress. And Congress can decide who is eligible for birthright citizenship and who is not. And that argument has been made with increasing frequency, and I think with increasing quality. And I think there's some truth to that. If that's the case, the Supreme Court will have to say that, though, because Trump didn't get a law pass and won't get a law passed unless the Republicans were to say abhorrence a filibuster

and then get every single person on site to change this, which isn't going to happen, not with 53 vote. So he's not going to get his own way, but I don't really resent him for trying because Steve's right. The last time this was heard in earnest was won Kim Mark, which was in the late 19th century.

So it's totally reasonable to put together a brief and say, I think this is wrong, as long as you then respect the law when it's been adjudicated. I'd like there to be an executive order that banishes the income tax. You'd go back.

Right. James, you and I grew up with that great cliche in the 60s. began every New York Times editorial. Any country that can land a man on the moon can solve X problem. And my favorite version was, any country that can land a man on the moon can abolish the income tax. We never heard that one for some reason.

Unfortunately, no, because the thing that always bothered me is, oh, we can put a man on the moon, why can't we do this? Well, because putting a man on the moon is a very specific objective with a very specific set of technical requirements. And it's something you sit down to do with slide. rules and the rest of it. And so, yes, but I mean, it's a good thing. Well, and guess what we can't do right now? What's that? Yeah, well, I'm on the move. Well, you know, man, my fingers are crossed about this next one. They really are. They really, really, but it will get to that in a point.

If I may change the subject for a second, you, gentlemen, I would like to discuss the fact that it's Friday, and that means that I'm going to have pizza. And no, my friends, I am not going into an ad. The local grocery store is having a bogo for pizza. And there are two things about that. One, I hate the term bogo, because it's wrong. By one. get one. Well, that's the nature of every commercial transaction. What you mean is buy one, get one free, which would be Bogoff. But you never hear Bogoff. You just hear Bogot.

But I was standing there yesterday, and I was beholding the range of frozen pizzas that we have. It's extraordinary how many there are, and how good so many there are. I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, where Pinky's Pizza was the standard and it was one of those saltine crusted pizzas with little cups of

grease. You could grease the tread of a Sherman tank with one of those pizzas. But it was good. But now I look at what we have, and it's extraordinary how blessed we are in the frozen pizza department. And I can look at all around life and find that manifestation of that abundance absolutely everywhere that I look. And it makes me happy. And that brings us to our guest.

Our guest is an English-American conservative journalist. He's a luminary at National Review, don't you know? He's a graduate of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford, and is the author of the conservatarian manifesto. In addition to the National Review, of course, he's written to the New York Times and Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other places as well. It's been described by the Atlantic as perhaps the most confident defender of conservatism younger than George Will. We welcome to the podcast, Charles C.W. Cook. Hello, Charles.

Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. And you note how this went to my head because I was late for this episode. So the moment you have me as a guest, then I start behaving like a diva. We're having Charlie on because, first of all, why not? And he's lots of fun to talk to. And he's written a spanking article for a cracking article for National Review. about, well, before we had Trump v. Misery, this is Cook v.

or we had Trump v. Barber, this is Cook v. Misery. Enough with the long faces is the subhead of his piece of National Review. America is not, in fact, a hellscape. And to some people, they'll bristle when you say this. Because, no, this is, this is, this is, there's no reason for cheer. Look around. Everything's horrible. That's the scent of fascist booted in the face of America. But oddly enough, as you point out, 81% of Americans are either very or somewhat satisfied with their lives,

while just 20% are either very or somewhat satisfied with the way things are going for the U.S. in general. Now, this disconnect is not unusual, but it seems to be really extreme now. So you make the case that, well, you make the case against misery. Tell us what prompted you to do this and what your insights were, are, will be. Well, I just think that it's a little bit absurd that we live in this extraordinary place. And really we shouldn't underestimate that it is an extraordinary place right now as it exists. This country, this people, this economy, this culture is extraordinary. I know it could be better.

I know that there are people in government on left and right who make bad mistakes. I know that if people listen to me and you James and you Steve, and they just adopted all of our ideas, it would be far better than it is now, of course. But I just find it somewhat absurd that everyone is so down. And the tone of our politics is what you would expect from a country that was in terminal, decline that had nothing going for it. If you listen to both parties, they are sour. Their argument is in effect, well, yes, if we won all the time and the people who don't agree with us were vanquished, it would be a good place. But until then, and I just don't agree,

and this is not the same thing as saying that politics doesn't matter, or that I don't have strong opinions or that, you know, we shouldn't fight to make the world a better place. But I think you have to remember your baseline. And just for once, I wanted to write a piece that said, guys, I know every month I say, here's what's wrong or here's how this could be fixed. But could we just recall this. And when I found that Gallup data that said 81% of Americans, as you say, were happy with their circumstances, but, you know, 20% were happy with the country, that made me realize that most likely what's happening here is that people think that other people are unhappy or that they might be all right but that the problems that we face are so great as to render that irrelevant but that

doesn't make too much sense because we live in America so if America has produced 81% of people who are happy with their situation then surely it's going okay yeah so this is a cover story Let's add that for listeners. This is what the young people today, I guess, would call a banger of an article. That's the phrase I hear a lot from them, right? And I like it because it tracks very closely with my disposition about things. It reminded me of actually a comedy sketch from back during the Great Recession, around 2008, 2009, by Louis C.K., who was later disgraced in Me Too for some really boring behavior.

But he had a little sketch he did called Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy. And it was very funny stuff about the people complain about progress, right? You know, if our phones have a, you know, a five-second delay getting connected. And he says, well, you just wait a minute. It's got to go to a satellite first. And it doesn't cost you anything. Whereas, you know, James and I will remember if you wanted to call somebody three minutes long distance, you had to wait until 11.01 p.m. when rates went down, right?

So we're spoiled. And there's a certain decadence about all this that maybe is a theme that we should explore a bit. There is a couple of parts of the article that I don't disagree with, but I think need to be probed a little harder. So you point to the Gallup data saying, my life's going great, but the country's in terrible shape. I have for a long time, and I presented to students and asked them sometimes the first day of class to explain why, what their theories are, for the following data, which is if you go back to about 1958, when Gallup and Harris and others started asking Americans, do you have a, have high confidence or trust in the federal government to do the right thing most of the time or all the time. When I started that time series, I've been asking that question or close to it ever since, then Pew took it up. Okay. Back in 1958, the number of people who said yes to that

question, high trust, high confidence was almost 80%. Today, it rarely gets above 15%. And it's been all downhill ever since. A slight retreat during Reagan years, but nowhere close to what it was under Eisenhower in the first few years of Kennedy. Well, why did that happen? And I mean, there's a bunch of explanations, but what I'm actually coming around to, Charlie, is you're a fragment of one sentence where you say, certainly life is more than mere politics. Strongly agree. Politics is consuming more and more of life and our political class is so evidently incompetent. So, you know, James Q. Wilson once said 30 years ago, says in 1958, when people looked out of their government, what they see? They'd see a federal government that had one World War II, very quickly,

relatively speaking, built the interstate highway system pretty fast, expanded schools and suburbia for making homes affordable for people. The education system, the GI Bill, sent hundreds of thousands of returning GIs. You saw a record of competence and achievement by our federal government. And what have we had since then? It's just increasing incompetence. and so I think there are reasons why people sour on the results we're getting from our government. And then the other problem is we politicize more and more of life. So when you say certainly life is more than mere politics, I'm remembering the 60s when the new left started saying the personal is political.

And these days, more and more things are politicized that weren't when James and I were growing up. Yeah, that second point of your, Steve's, I was just about to make it. Go ahead. That's why I'm stepping all over you. I'm going to let our guest do it, but we are a simpatico wavelength on that one, buddy. But the first thing that you were talking about, I just wanted to say this before Charlie takes over,

is that all the things that you mentioned are now in disfavor with the fringes of the people. The fact that we won World War II, well, we were siding with the wrong guy, that Churchill mania. The fact that we built the interstate system allowed to empty out the cities so that, you know, the fact that people could go to the suburbs,

meant that the core cities were destroyed and that endless suburbia sprawled gave rise to a rise to a car culture that's horrible, and we should all be taking the trolley. Everything that you mentioned, either the left hates because it is given us the suburban America that we have today, or the right hates because,

I don't know, whatever, they're horseshoeing their way to being as idiotic as the left. So, yeah, I mean, we did accomplish those things, but then we're all held up as being, well, yeah, okay, so what have you done for me lately? Or these are really bad, and we should all be trotting along in horses

and cobblestones and buildings that are, you know, the big cities no longer no taller than six stories. Anyway, Charles, that's, I've derailed things. Say something about... Well, yes. I agree. I'm a conservative. I think that that is a huge problem, Steve.

And James. I think that's a huge problem. But can I just counter it in that... I think, obviously, the government's too big and it's incompetent. It spends too much. and we have people like Gavin Newsom and power, and Trump doesn't help. And all of those criticisms are right, and that's why I engage in politics. If I thought that everything was perfect and the best of all worlds, I wouldn't do this.

I would do something else. But at the same time, later in the piece, I cite some statistics about the place the United States currently occupies in the world that maybe are at best despite the government, or could be in some cases, the result of policy. I mean, for example, yeah, we don't have much trust in government because government does a lot of stupid stuff. But we're also in a way that we were not in 2000, for example, energy independent. We're a net exporter of energy.

That is the product of a combination of public policy successes, and you can thank conservatives for those, and mostly the private sector. We have an economy that is now one and a half times the size of the EU's, where in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected, they were the same size. I guess it's a lot of private enterprise. did that. Ultimately, that's the only way of creating wealth and GDP. But it's also, thanks to tax cuts and regulatory policies and us having a different set of rules in place than the rest of the

world does. And it ought to be said, a different set of rules in place than we had in 1970, when we had wage and price controls and a ridiculous tax system. We have got much better federal tax policy and federal regulatory policy in many ways now than we have ever had, or at least that we've had since prior to the New Deal. So I agree with pretty much all of your criticisms. Of course I do. You and I agree on politics mostly. But the notion that everything's sliding backwards, you know, this is slightly outside of the remit of the piece, and I may write something else on this, but this phrase I see all the time at the moment, this is what they took from you. Yeah, some of that's true. But you could have done that in any decade. In the 1990s,

this is what they took from you would have been peaceful streets. The crime was unbelievable. People who were born in the year 2005 cannot imagine what crime was like in the 80s and 90s. In the 1980s, the abortion rate was downright disgusting, and people thought they were going to die in a nuclear war. In the 1960s, we had race riots, we had the Vietnam War. So this is what they took from you instinct. It's a good one in some senses, and it's one I share as a conservative. You do want to watch trends that are negative, and there are a lot to them. But also, it can't exist in a vacuum.

We can't just say, this is what they took from you. and then imagine that whatever it is that you're looking at was surrounded by sunlit uplands and rabbits running around happily and frolicing in the evening, because that's just usually not true. No, it's not. And when I see those things, they're inevitably attached to some picture of suburbs

from the late 1980s or early 90s. Everything is basked in this nostalgic golden glow. It's an old pizza hut that had the red glasses and the check of plastic table closet. And all that is true. Nobody took it from us. In most of these cases, if it's gone,

it's because we didn't want it, and it went away. But they didn't take it from us. There are alternatives and analogs to be found today. But you're right. The crime was horrible. When you walked outside of that pizza hut, there was a chance you're going to get shanked.

When you, if you didn't, and you were living in the suburbs and you were going in your banana seat bike somewhere with the little streamers coming, you were worried about nuclear war in the back of your head. You're absolutely correct. And when they say, this is what they took from you and they show you a grand Baroque cathedral,

with this incredible roca co, you know, fizzy decorations going into the heavens. You have to forget there's probably a steaming pile of heap, or durer right outside of the steps because there wasn't any sanitation. And cholera. And cholera. Right. And plagued from time to time.

So, yes, all things being equal. But I think one of the reasons that people do feel enmeserated today is twofold. One, as Stephen said before, the personal is the political. We have not been given any safe space in which we can just simply exist. Everything has to be tied up into this bolus of intersectionality. And everybody has to worry, well, I don't. But people have to worry that they have the correct opinions about absolutely everything. Somebody put it on Twitter the other day, I thought it was just great, is that the problem today,

probably if it's been always the problem, with modern progressives, is that they have an idea. And they keep themselves from considering second and third orders because it would require observations and solutions that would put them out of favor with their in group. I think that's absolutely it. So there's this constant performative nature to make sure that your politics are correct. I was having a conversation of coffee with a coworker with a former coworker the other day, and I really had to watch what I said because unless I had said certain words, condemnatory words about certain topics, I was going to be cast into the like of fire.

And the second thing I think that it doesn't help is social media. When people have a fire hose of people who are ratcheting up everything to make you angry and it's blasting in your head and you're scrolling in an infinite way there's no there's literally no bottom there and i think that's a big part of it and people who bed rot and just sit and look at that and see how everything's awful when they could be out there you know i don't know looks look maxing in singapore or something it's not helpful and i don't see a way necessarily around that so how charles in your piece for the public here do you deal with the pernicious effects of hold on, I got a notification on Twitter.

I'll read that later. How do you deal with the pernicious effects of social media when it comes to combating misery? Well, you write cover stories in National Review and it solves the problem. I mean, it's all I can do, right? I agree. It's a huge issue.

And one of the issues, of course, is that it's impossible for anyone who did not live through those eras to know what's true and what's not. And the only things that survive are the good things. It's like cars. There's so many beautiful cars from the 50s and 60s. But when you go to a car show, you end up thinking, wow, all the cars from the 50s and 60s were beautiful. But actually, almost all of them were terrible.

And there was a handful of them that were stunning. And the ones that were stunning are the ones that we look at now at the car show. And I'm not saying that... I'll argue with that, but we can do that in the comments. but do go on. Well, choose whatever it is that you want. If you disagree on cars, let's say. I mean, pop music is a good example.

I love a lot of music from the 1960s, but 90% if it was garbage and the stuff that we hear now was awesome. So you can apply that quite fairly, I think, not to society, because I actually am off the view that America has always been great. I hate this view that, well, yeah, I mean, fine. but in 1910 women didn't have the vote like yeah okay and I agree that's not good for women but that

doesn't mean America was a hellscape but I think that if you go back and you actually talk to people who were there you get a much better conception of what life was like and what was good about it and they become nostalgic because they grow older sure but they also remember things and you find out things about them and you see pictures of them and you think well you were quite poor and had a really small house and your car looks as it was about to fall apart. But on social media, you can present, especially with AI, this paradise conception. And it's so hard to fight against. Although I'm rambling a bit, what I will say is this. One of the things that I personally find a little bit weird about some of those, look what they took from you on social media,

is that they actually look a lot like my town. I mean, some of them are like a kid riding a bike. Right. Or there's a whole bunch of people out in a park and there are American flags and they're having a picnic. Or, you know, it's like a family around a Thanksgiving table having dinner. That's what they took from you? Don't you do that every November? So there's probably something else going on here that actually is bad. But I don't know how you fight it other than to tell people that it's wrong. And also maybe remember that most people aren't on social media and those that are on social media. social media usually aren't engaged in politics.

Well, so, I just wanted to go ahead, Steve, and then I'll ask this with both of you. Readers should know, or listeners should know that you really at the end call for, we need a disposition of the happy warrior. We need more about it. I mean, one sentence jumps out of me. You say, there is more to being a statesman than perpetually provoking a citizenry into disgruntlement. I like disgruntlement, and I keep thinking we need PG Woodhouse to tell us how to gruntle

ourselves as he had one of his great passages. And I agree with all that. The substance is important, and I'll just add a little caveat to James. I healy agree with everything he said about progressives, but, you know, Republicans have been complicit in the growing incompetence of government, too. Not as bad as Democrats, but still, they share some part of the blame. I do wonder, and I said this once before, and now I'll give you, you know, one example of why I think it.

The question of what decadence is and how you measure it is a serious one, and, you know, I'm kind of a social scientist, so I resist. these broad generalizations. On the other hand, up here in this, what used to be a backwater wine region of California is now a fancy wine region of California. Where it used to be all the wine was never more than $5 a bottle for some pretty good stuff and you walked in as a little family operation. Now it's a wineries that cost, you know, $40 for a tasting. And starting about 20 years ago, I would see people showing up with my hairline, which, you know, I have no hairline, except the guys would have their beards, their hipster beards, and a ponytail,

and they would drive in in their Lexus that had a Bernie Sanders sticker on it. And I thought something's gone really screwy here. That doesn't make sense. And that's just sort of a, you know, sort of a microcosm of a broader decadence that I think afflicts the Europe worse than us. And by the way, your point is that, boy, if we feel bad, the Europeans really ought to be down in the dumps, right? So anyway, I mean, I'm briefing all that, but I guess what I want to see from you, Charles, maybe, is a whole book.

Because this is a profound problem you put your finger on and a worthy remedy that we need to flush out. Here's the chapter for it, and I'll give it to both of you. You say in the piece, twas ever thus, American statement there, fire up the random date selector and consider a decade you are tempted to romanticize. All right, Charles, what would that decade be for you? Well, of course it would be the 1990s because I was a kid slash early teenager. And I do think, objectively speaking, there was an awful lot to be said for the 1990s. So I'm not pretending that we just always favor the time in which we were young. I have not, although I don't know too many people of that age, I've not met too many people who say,

you know, the 1930s, that was where it was at. I think the 90s were objectively good. But also, there were lots of bad things about the 90s that I forgot, and that didn't matter to me because I was nine. So that would be mine, although there's a lot of crime. Like I say, I mean, when I was a kid, even in England, but you'd hear about this in America all the time. And unlike now, where the British and the Europeans are obsessed with all these evils of America,

most of which are not true. It was true in the 1990s. Stephen, what decade for you? Oh, it would be the 80s, right? I mean, so, yeah, I started coming of age around 1968. I was only 11, 10 or 11, but I was paying attention to things, and my parents were involved in the world in serious ways. And I thought the world was coming to an end, right?

The assassinations, the riots, the war that wouldn't end. I mean, really, and then the 70s were just awful with inflation and, you know, things going wrong. And then Reagan comes along and, look, really turns things around. The country, that decade went really well. I do agree the 90s were a very fortunate decade for the reasons Charles says, but I'd take either one of those. And I would not want to go back to 1968. No.

I'm tempted to romanticize the 50s because I love the style, the vibe, the rest of it. But two things. One, I know that it's probably a lot more annoying and banal than I tend to think it was. And two, I really fear that I would be one of those Morts-Sall types who was just sneering at the Iks and the suits and the rest of it. A little one I know. But then I go to the 20s. I really like the 20s. The 20s are fascinating to me because it's 100 years ago,

100 years ago, but it's so recognizable to us today. They had papers, they had radio, they had magazines, they had newspapers, they had automobiles, they had skyscrapers. The whole modern vocabulary of our lives is there. And I'm tempted to romanticize it a little bit, except the whole thing about trying to get some liquor and it's really tough. And also sort of the, I mean, but if you read the news, newspapers, you will find that there's a lot of blue stockings. There are a lot of cotton mather types.

There was a lot of wiggery and prigory and the rest of it that I wouldn't have liked. But frankly, I mean, just looking from the newspapers, it's a smart, interesting, crackling era that I would love to look at. But I know it better than to romanticize it. Well, but remember James, Will Rogers' great observation, and at least prohibition is better than no liquor at all. Yes. Do you know, a few years ago, I went to Atlanta with my dad as part of a civil war trip that we took. And we went to this beautiful, big mansion house somewhere outside Atlanta. I don't know where.

And the tour guide said to us that when prohibition was passed, while the Volstead Act was being debated, the owners of this house bought two days. decades worth of alcohol. Wine, beer, spirits, and so forth. And so for them, prohibition never happened. Now, this is, of course, the cardinal sin of nostalgia and the one I'm arguing against, because everyone thinks if they'd lived in the Roman era, that had been Julius Caesar, rather than a guy who got tetanus at the age of 19. But if you could have lived James in the 20s like that, then I think it would have been pretty swell. But at the same time, there's an element to American life that perhaps runs through all of these decades that we talk about

and seems particularly poignant given the art of your piece. It is a reconstruction or reevaluation or a re-updating of the famous Nighthawks by Hopper, which has always been a haunting painting for several reasons. One, the fact that there's no door. Usually in those places, there's a door in the corner, but there isn't. There's just that piece of curved glass, which is inviting some yag or hooligan to put a rock through it. And then two, there's across the street, there's a sort of empty, uninhabited, blankness that may or may not have people slumbering in small, little dark apartments. And those people who are sitting there are not having a wonderful, convivial conversation.

There is an apartmentous. There is a loneliness. There's a 3 a.m. in the morning of the American soul there. And that runs through from then to now, except now, of course, as we say, it's people who are being alone together as they sit in bed and scroll. One last thing before we go, and it's another piece that Charles did. it had to do with the beach idiots. In defense of beach idiots, I haven't read the piece.

I assume you mean the people who, when they put a microphone at them and ask what country are we currently at war at? They say Iowa. And not the people who are rampaging on beaches and causing riots and shootings and the rest of it. But just the sort of genial bubble-headed person who goes down there to have a tan and drink and hook up. And you're defending them. You're defending these people, Charles, to defend yourself here. How long have you got? This is in a sense of a piece with the piece.

But I had a few observations about this that I know made some people deeply unhappy. And I got an email from a guy who said that I was out of touch because when he was a young man, he spent his late teens protesting Richard Nixon. And then he said, I should be watching you going forward. And I thought, well, QED, buddy, because you were exactly. exactly who I was writing about. He spent his teens protesting Richard Nixon. I have that an image in my life or in my head of The Simpsons where the comic book guys walking down the street

and a missile is headed directly towards him and he says, oh, I've wasted my life. Well, look, the reason that I defended these guys is fourfold. The first reason is that I really am genuinely not persuaded that the sort of person who is 18, 19, 20 years old and doesn't know anything about foreign policy or economics is materially different than the sort of person who is 18, 19, 20 years old and doesn't know anything about foreign policy or economics, but talks about them all the time. I see nothing in our young indignant

activist class that tells me that they are well read. They're prolific. They're annoyed. They're annoying, but I don't think they're particularly well read. Second, I looked at the video that Fox put out. I do think it's funny that the lack of intellectualism was being argued by Jesse Waters, but I looked at this video that Fox put out and everyone in it seemed happy. And I think that's really important, especially when you're 19. There's lots of time and don't take this to mean that adulthood is unhappy, it's not. But there's lots of time to do the things that make you take an interest in politics. Things like have children, get a mortgage, have a job, move. These are things that make you wonder about that elections thing. But these kids are 19. They seemed really happy, and that's

good. The third thing is that politics, and this is, this is, I think similar to a theme that both of you touched on earlier in our conversation. Politics is not an end unto itself. When you politicize everything, you forget what politics is for. Politics exists and is important for this reason, so that we can create the right conditions within which civil society can flourish. You get the politics right, that means that people can have families. and churches and businesses and sports leagues and associations and restaurants.

And that's the point in it. And if you look at that beach, that's one of the reasons we have civil society is to create the circumstances in which 19-year-old girls can say the main thing I worry about every morning is which bikini to wear. And the last point that I made is that if you look at a 19-year-old girls, year old who says the main question in my life is which bikini to wear. And you see that as a failure. Then you've actually forgotten what most of human history was like, including relatively recent

human history. I mean, my grandfathers were minding their own business in 1939 in England. My grandfather on my mom's side worked at an orchard in Devon. And my grandfather on my dad's side was an apprentice carpenter. And then the world blew up. And they went and, signed up. They weren't conscripted. But I don't think that either of them had thought on the Apple Orchard or in the Apprentice Carpenter Program, you know what I wish I were doing right now? I wish I were fighting in North Africa, or I think I were, in the case of my dad's dad, in North Atlantic convoys that were being sunk every day. They thought about other things. I mean, they presumably didn't wear bikinis, but they were thinking about other things that

were probably quite fatuous and that was good. And, you know, I would imagine that much of the time they spent killing people and having all their friends killed, I imagine a lot of that time was spent thinking about how it would be nice to go back to having days where you didn't have to think about too many important things. And I just don't want us to lose sight of that because we do sometimes. We get so obsessed with politics and injected into things that it doesn't belong that we forget why it is that we have it in the first place. I get your point. And I think that we all should be grateful and look at that 19-year-old girl.

Well, you look, male gaze thing. But consider her and the problems that she has about which bikini she's going to choose and just say, I hope she gets one V2 dropped on the motel, just to put things in perspective. Charles has been fun. Stephen, it's been fun. Everybody, it's been fun.

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