The Ricochet Podcast - Debate The Debate

Episode Date: September 13, 2019

This week, Bolton bolts, we debate the debate with The Washington Post’s Henry Olsen, kick around the culture with The Atlantic’s Andrew Ferguson, we’ve got a new Long Poll question for you (but you have to be a Ricochet member to vote), Lileks awards the coveted Member Post of The Week, and some thoughts on the 18th anniversary of 9/11. Music from this week’s show: My City of Ruins by Bruce... Source

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylek.

Today we talk to The Washington Post's Henry Olson about the election, the campaign, and The Atlantic's Andy Ferguson. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 464. I'm James Lilacs here in the middle of the country talking to Rob Long and Peter Robinson, who are arrayed at disparate points of the compass. Rob, you're in New York, I believe. Peter, you're still in California. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you indeed. And the whole world this week was abuzz with what, let's see, what can we call it? An unexpected White House shakeup. Not unexpected at all. Bolton out, surprised to those who thought that Bolton was in in the first place. And he went

from being the crazed hawk who was going to lead this madman president into another war with Iran to being the last moderating, stable, serious man left. And so there's never any good news in the Trump administration. But I'll ask you guys, what do you think happened? I mean, I think we know what happened, but how would you characterize it? I'm sitting 2,800 miles away, so I'm not sure, but I'll give you my best guess from reading what I've read and knowing a few of the people at considerable distance, knowing some of the people involved. Trump likes personal diplomacy. He believes that if you can get the other guy in the room, then he, Donald Trump, is going to be able to persuade him to do a deal. All of Donald Trump's pre-political career has suggested to him and to many other people that he's actually pretty good at that. He wrote a book called The Art of the Deal. In the early

phase of his career, he did get buildings built in Manhattan. And you don't get buildings put up in Manhattan unless you can deal with union bosses and difficult architects and the people who put up the money and so forth. Okay. And John Bolton believes in strategy. He believes in thinking things through and identifying your interests and their interests. And before you put the other guy in the room, you come up with some pretty detailed plan about what exactly it is that you're hoping to achieve and what incentives you have that you're hoping to achieve and what incentives you have that you can put before the other guy. And he is suspicious, as many

professional diplomats tend to be, of personal diplomacy. That's what happened, I think. Donald Trump has, although we've gotten, as best I can tell, zero from North Korea in the form of substantive concessions. I believe Donald Trump has enjoyed the atmospherics of his meetings with Jim Ong. I can't pronounce it. The other guy for the the the rocket. Thank you, Kim Jong-un. Exactly. Trump enjoyed those atmospherics. He wanted to do the same thing with the Taliban. Who else may he want to do the same thing with, particularly as he's heading into an election year? And John Bolton kept saying, no, Mr. President, we need to think that, Mr. President, it would be a bad idea to give them an international stage. No, Mr. President, don't invite the Taliban to Camp David.

And Trump listened to this and thought it made a certain amount of sense, but it irked him. And finally, he just had had enough of it and said goodbye to Don Bolton. That's what I think happened. And I'm not too happy about it. There's a place for both, but probably the greater place, the greater weight has to be given to serious matters of diplomacy, serious consideration of diplomacy and strategy. Over to Rob. Yeah, Rob, do you remember the outcry when President Clinton brought Osama bin Laden to Camp David to discuss the future of the Middle East? Yeah.

I think Peter, I mean, I sort of agree with Peter in that sense. I think there's sort of two things going on here. One is that you have a president whose natural impulse is America first. And that's the crude and I think primordial way to describe a philosophy of government, a philosophy of foreign affairs, which is American interests first. What is in the American interest? And I think there have been a lot of presidents who've been very successful and I think actually very effective in the world by reminding their staff and their direct reports that the most important thing is to present a policy

in terms of why it is good for America's interests. And when presidents get into trouble, it's when they sort of start thinking about, well, you know, America's interests are sort of second or third on the list. Most important thing is world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think that is a problem because I think that Bolton is a creature of 9-11. I don't mean that in a bad way.

And I think he will never, and he and his sort of that wing of foreign policy philosophy will, and strategy will never forget and will never bend from the idea that it is in America's interests always to be, you know, the word isn't belligerent, but aggressive in hotspots that have traditionally supported and in many ways instigated acts of terrorism. I guess the problem with Trump is it's all the piece of kind of a, he has the impulse to do, I think,

to have the right attitude, which is America's interest first, but not the philosophical or even just even the, I mean, he's just lazy to to underpin that with knowledge and with the acts of consistent philosophy so yes he's right and his north korea policy is a perfect example of that he has his initial impulse and we know this from his meeting with the chinese premier before i think before he took office uh in palm beach was hey north korea that's your problem that's your client state. We're going to hold your feet to the fire. I'm not going to expend any energy trying to solve this problem. You solve it, and we're going to hold you responsible, which was probably the smartest,

most effective, and nerve-wracking to the Chinese policy of any American president since North Korea became trouble. It was brilliant and it was smart. And he it took somebody who didn't have the sort of this incredible background in State Department gobbledygook to see clearly the problem, which is that North Korea only exists because China lets it exist. And if China basically is like, put your dog on a leash. Right. He then instantly almost fell back from that because it wasn't really a thought out policy that had any underpinning. And now he's meeting with Kim Jong Un. And in fact, not only has he not gotten anything out of Kim Jong Un, he has made himself very vulnerable because North Korea is still China's dog. It still requires Chinese cash infusions. So now the political future in many

ways, or political standing in many ways of Donald Trump in American politics is his quote-unquote success with Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-un is actually testing missiles slightly well within the range of what's acceptable but what he's really saying is if kim jong-un decides to test tomorrow a long-range missile again who's the fool not kim jong-un not the chinese mayor but the president donald trump who idiotically decided that he would rather gamble with his prestige with uh somebody's client i mean, look, if I'm a Chinese, I mean, I'm not going too far, so you can stop me when you want. But if I'm the Chinese premier, I will go to Trump and say, yeah, this trade war is killing us. By the way, we're going to give Kim Jong-un a billion dollars. And we're going to tell him he should launch a missile probably around August of 2020, maybe September of 2020.

Right in the middle of your general election. Maybe August and September. Yeah. Or maybe October 20th. He'll test a nuclear weapon, October 20th. How's that? Now tell me how you love these tariffs. What do you think Trump's going to do? That depends. No idea. I don't. A lot of people, I mean, a lot of people have just factored off North Korea as this crazy sideshow that produces weird, strange Stalinist pageantry and has no results and goes on and on and on and on and on without finish. Afghanistan, I think most Americans have just factored out any possible resolution to that and said, you know, we went there, we blew it up, we took it over, we set up a government, the girls got to go back to school, they didn't have to wear

bags over their heads, we gave them a shot at having a civil society, they don't want it, so screw it. It is, I think, the general idea out there. Tempered with that, the idea also that Kabul should probably remain safe, that is a haven of civil, of nascent civil, not nascent, but, you know, a haven of civilization that of nascent civilization, not nascent, but, you know, a haven of civilization that deserves protecting because that's where the smart and cultured people go. And that the rest of the country can pound sand because it's not really a country at all. It's just medieval fiefdoms at war with each other. And who cares what they do to each other? Who cares? We're not going to go out there and keep shoving our guys and girls into the meat grinder for the, you know, for the plains of

Afghanistan. And that's not a bad position, by the way. I mean, it isn't. It's strategic in that if you keep troops there, you are able to strike back when you know that something is cooking. Here's what I worry about. All presidents conflate personal interest with national interest to a varying degree. Either it's a canny political calculation or it's sociopathy or narcissism. I have no idea. I mean, Ronald Reagan knew that advancing the country's interest also advanced his electoral interest and made it possible for him to do things that he wanted to do for the country. Ronald Reagan's instincts on these things, I generally trust it. Bill Clinton, who knows? Barack Obama, again, there's a case of a guy who it seems would make a deal that did the American interest bad, but reflected well on him in as much as in his college

professor mindset, the United States deserved to lose this particular round to account for its Western colonialism, et cetera. I think the problem with saying we want to deal with Iran is you're dealing with a bad actor who's not going to respond and respect whatever we sign and is inimicable to American interests. And the Taliban is the same thing. Why negotiate with it? What's to negotiate exactly with the Taliban? What? Exactly.

Is that your question? Yeah. No, it is. Yeah. And the answer is there's nothing gained by bringing these sons of go to conduct to America. I agree with you. If you were Donald Trump, here's the way you might be thinking. For a number of years now, the United States, between the cost of running our military in Afghanistan and our very substantial aid that we're providing in a number of ways to Afghanistan, we've been putting 50 billion, 50 billion with a B dollars into that country year after year for a number of years.

Donald Trump says, wait a minute, I think I could buy these guys off for 2 billion. And it's not, right? Okay. That's great. Then, then, then, then after they kill a whole bunch more of us, then we give them four billion. How about if we not give them two billion? That's the problem. That is the problem. But the argument, the deeper Trumpian argument, which he isn't really making, but I think is compelling, is precisely what is in America's interests. Is it a free and democratic and pluralistic Afghanistan? Which isn't going to happen. Maybe, but it's not going to happen, right?

What's in America's interest is a crackpot foreign government on a very tight leash where we own them, right? That's what's in our interests. If we own them and they're the Taliban and they want to talk trash about us, that's fine. If we own them and they're the Saudis, they want to talk trash about us. That's fine. But in America, the only important thing for for I think in the Trump philosophy is will there be another 9-11? And and and his calculation, which I don't think is crazy, is I don't know. You buy the guys. You you keep them on a tight leash.

You you're close enough to them there that you keep your enemies close so that you can keep an eye on what they're doing. They're never isolated. And then you they're not in caves in the hills, but they're in, you know, in in the cities where you can watch them. And if they get out of line line, you bomb them again. That's really the argument after 9-11 was, what is in our interest? Is it in our interest to build democracy? Or is it in our interest simply to punish with extreme vindictiveness this incredibly unforgivable crime? And, uh, we decided as a country and as a, you know, foreign policy that we was the former. And so we ended up spending a whole lot of money doing a whole lot of things because we didn't want to make a mess. But in

fact, maybe sometimes making a mess is the right thing to do. I mean, I think that we all have to, I mean, I think, I think the problem here is it's so deep, and it's so deep in our national psychology, especially now. And we even have a president who in many ways embodies this conflict, which is, I think it's fair to say at this point that the best intentions, the best goals of our military experience in Afghanistan and Iraq that have been unmet, that we have, in fact, failed. The interim goal, which we decided wasn't the real goal, but should have been, is did we make Americans safer? And that is demonstrably, yes, we did. So we didn't create a democracy really in Iraq. We certainly

didn't create a working democracy of any meaning in Afghanistan. But we certainly did send a message to people that if you try it again, we will punish you. Yeah. And after you've been punished, just wait. Just wait. Wait. Because after 19 years, we'll give you $2 billion and say, tut-tut, don't do that again. Yeah, but we did that with the Nazis, too. I mean, we did it with the Japanese. No, we occupied and leveled their cities and destroyed their government. Hold on. I know we've got to go to a spot and then we've got guests, but I'm not following Rob

when he says we did it with the Nazis and the Japanese. We didn't try to buy them off. What do you mean, Rob? I'm just not following. We created a Marshall Plan. We rebuilt their cities. Oh, I see. Okay, got it. Right, but that's a little bit of a different situation. You can't compare rebuilding Afghanistan to rebuilding Germany. Germany was completely devastated down to the molecular level. Afghanistan was not. There was nothing to rebuild in Afghanistan. There was a structure and a civilization and a culture that could be reshaped and rebrought back in Germany and Japan. Right. And so therefore we got, I was going to say, we got our money's worth from them. And that was, by the way, a lot more than two billion dollars was enormous expenditure it was today right but paying two two billion dollars to guys in who are in afghanistan saying don't do this again when

they are left intact to plot and plan as they wish if they're not left intact i mean afghanistan is a total smoking ruin afghanistan in 2019 doesn't resemble afghanistan in I mean, in Iraq, neither does Iraq. I'm just trying to be realistic. Like, realistically, the war made sense, but the dreams of creating and being the architects of a new birth of freedom in the region was an unnecessary pipe dream to smoke. That's what I mean to say.

I agree with you, but what I mean by intact is that there are places where they can go undisturbed and use sat phones and plot and have everybody buy for tea and the rest of it and do what they have to do. Listen, I've got to move along because we have to do a commercial and we have to talk to our guest. Hey, good luck segueing to that. This is the best brief but compelling illustration of how hard these issues are. Okay, James. Exactly right.

Well, they are difficult. Yes, they are. They add taste in your mouth. See? That's pretty good, right? Come on. Right. It'd be great if I was going to quip, but I'm going to bowl and branch. Hey, let me give you the three most important words for getting a good night's sleep, and those would be one, comfortable, two, comfortable, and three, comfortable. If you

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bellwether and tell everything about Donald Trump's future. Now, maybe not. Or what? Tell us exactly what happened down there. Yeah, well, the Republican won the special election by two points. And that is something that Democrats are spinning as a problem. But I think it really shows that even when Donald Trump is going through a rating slump, Republicans can still win Republican seats when they're outspent three to one, as the Republican candidate was by the Democratic candidate. It shows that there's still strong support for the president and the Republican Party. And it indicates that if Trump could get his job approval up only two or three more points, he would be in a good shape for reelection.

Henry, how can that be? Peter here, Peter Robinson, thanks again for joining us. How can it be, unless you're looking at, well, you look at all the polls, so you know 20 times more than I do about this, but Trump's approval ratings, as I saw them just the other day, were down to close to 40. One or two polls had them in the high 30s. How can it be that you only need to get to, say, 42 or 43 or 44 to be in good shape for re-election? Well, if that were true, I wouldn't have made that statement. There are polls that show him that low, but the RealClearPolitics average as of this morning had him at 43.4. And if he is at 45 to 46, then you know, based on the dispersion of his constituency, that he is close to or at 50% in enough states to win 270 electoral college votes.

I'm not saying he's going to win the popular vote. That would take a massive, massive miracle. But he didn't win the popular vote last time. Opposition to him tends to be most vocal in already safe states. In other words, it doesn't matter how many moderate Republicans in Atherton, California switch to the other side, the Democrats are still going to win. And his constituent, and the thing about North Carolina 9 is this is a constituency that combines suburban Charlotte with rural areas. The Republican candidate did well in counties that were Obama-Trump counties in the rural area within that district, which is a good sign for similar counties in the Midwest. And there's reason to think that if Trump does better, then the deficit in the suburbs will be cut as people view him more favorably. Now, Henry, devil's advocate just a little bit one more time. In North Carolina, too, the Republican may have been outspent by his

Democratic opponent three to one. But didn't Trump carry that district by a margin that lay in the teens in 2016? And this fellow just pulled it off by only two points? Yes. Trump won by 12, and the margin here was two points. I focus more on the absolute vote than the margin, because last time one of the regions the margin was large was because of third-party voting. But the fact is, if Donald Trump gets 50% of the vote, Donald Trump's going to win. Last time, he did about four points better in this district than he did statewide. So that projects that, you know, based on what we saw, is that he'd be at about 47% in North Carolina right now. Get himself up a couple of points. He's at 49 to 50, and that's

before the Democrats picked their nominee. And we all know that their last time were people who didn't like Trump, but they disliked the Democrat more. So if Trump's at 48 or 49, who'll vote with him no matter what, there's got to be a couple of points that could come his way if the Democrats swing left as they seem likely to do. Henry, one more question for me, and I'm going to be setting up my brother-in-arms, Rob Long, because I know he wants to get in here. So here is the question. On the one hand, we have Karl Rove writing in the Wall Street Journal the other day, look, there's a lot that's already, the election may be a long time from now, but there's a lot that's already happened. It's already down to Biden, Sanders or Warren. The rest are just playing games.

It's really going to be one of those three. And then by contrast with Karl Rove, we have my brother in arms, Rob Long, who keeps saying, guys, guys, guys, calm down. It's way early. Very few people have tuned in even now. One of these lower-tier candidates could have a breakout, or Joe Biden could have a breakdown. It's just really early. And Henry says? This argument, in one of my favorite lines from J.R.R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Rings is, go not to the elves for advice, for they will tell you both yes and no. There's arguments for both sides. So here's the argument for Karl Rove, which is that I do not think that a candidate has come

from below 10% this late in a campaign in decades, which is to say we have candidates who break out like a Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum or a John McCain or a Howard Dean or a John Edwards, but they don't win the nomination. They become the candidate whose foil to the ultimate nominee helps define the race. However, you have a situation where Biden is the leading factor of a constituency that is roughly half of the Democratic Party. He is somebody who is clearly shaky. It only takes one or two meltdowns on national television, kind of the Rick Perry oops moments that help crystallize uncertainty. And then half of that electorate that he dominates right now is up for grabs.

And neither Sanders nor Warren are campaigning too much for that constituency. That's where Rob could be right, is if Biden goes through a meltdown of the type that Jeb Bush went through or the type that Rick Perry went through himself, then that opens up a huge constituency that if it is captured by one candidate could propel somebody from the bottom of the pack. So basically, I'm right. Before you get to that, I'm saying you could be right. I'm saying you're basically right. Look, I'll take this Arlen Specter way out. You know, he voted not proven on impeachment. I'll say not wrong. I'm not sure it'll be a meltdown for Biden, though.

Some people after the performance last night may have gone to Polifact. I went to Polident to see exactly how much adhesive strength they have in their chemicals these days. It'll be something that reveals an infirmity or a strangeness to him that. Well, anyway, Rob had a question, Ron. So thank you for saying that I'm right. I heard you say I'm right. Two minutes. What is it that Julian Castro said two minutes ago?

We actually run a poll here at Ricochet of our members, and it's sort of, we try to ask us sort of an interesting question from the perspective of the center right and we ask them which democrat do you hope runs against trump so i guess in a way we're asking them which one do you think depending on how they feel about trump which one do you think has the worst chances right so which democrat do you hope runs against Trump right now is Biden. The second strongest is Sanders and the weakest is Warren. In fact, as I've written last week in the Washington Post, at this point, Warren is either tied or behind in early polls against Trump in every swing state that she needs to win except for Pennsylvania. And that ain't

going to get better unless she swings to the center. So are ricochet voters here, ricochet poll respondents wrong when they say they hope Biden runs against Trump because they think Biden has the best chance to lose? I think they are wrong. I think they're banking that Biden will be seen as more liberal than he is. I think their banking that Biden will be somebody who melts down, although my suspicion is, is if he doesn't melt down during the by the by the primary, he's not going to melt down in the general election and that there is enough discontent that the person who is discontented with Trump will convince themselves that Biden is good enough. And I suspect that most of the ricochet voters are people who are contented with Trump. So how would you explain that? I mean,

I'm giving just one last one because I find this fascinating that you have to go to the candidate. If you're if you work for Trump, you're in the Trump campaign, you have to say to him here's here's the problem everybody hates you but i think the other side is going to nominate somebody they hate even more in the the race for trump isn't to be liked it's just to be disliked the least that feels to me like a new part new kind of american politics but maybe i'm just wrong maybe this is where american politics really has been all along this kind of idea like like, ah, they're all bums, but this guy's the at least tolerable. Is that, are we, is this a new kind of politics or is this just politics as usual, just a little bit more colorfully rendered? I don't think it's politics as usual,

but there are examples of that. In the 1988 campaign, George Herbert Walker Bush was basically 50-50 in the polls starting in 1987. He never really changed all that much. Mike Dukakis, his eventual opponent, started out unknown, won the primaries, was incredibly well-liked, or so the polls said, at the Democratic Convention, and then Bush launched two and a half months of continual carpet bombing. And by the end of the campaign, more people disliked Dukakis than liked him. Bush had a higher favorable rating, even though it wasn't very high, and he won. And I think that's the old, within our lifetimes, example of the sort of campaign that Trump high command would expect to be running.

That's so interesting. Henry Peter here. So in a word, if you had to sum it up in a word, you'd say that right now the Democratic nomination is Joe Biden's to lose. Is that right? Yes. Okay. And then how this is an open-ended question. Maybe it's a dirty question because it requires a book, not an answer on a podcast. But I think back to the

first election of which I have memories. I hasten to add that they are very dim toddlers memories, but I had an older brother who in 1960 campaigned for Richard Nixon. And what I remember, and my brother and I have talked about this many times over the years, this is hard for people to grasp because of what became of Richard Nixon. But in 1960, a lot of the country admired him and felt affection for him. And his opponent was John Kennedy, whom of course, much of the country just adored. Was that the, this is really, I'm sort of following up and hoping to elaborate a little bit on Rob's question. Was that the anomaly when we had two candidates who really

were very well liked? Was that the anomaly in American history when it now looks as though we're trying to figure out which two, the country of 330 million, we're trying to find out the two most unpopular people we can run. How do we get past this? What's weird and what's normal? Yeah. I think we are in a period where anyone who wins either party's nomination, because the parties are so polarized, is going to be viewed incredibly negatively by the other side. In 1960, the Gallup company would be asking polls about how you feel if the other party won, and basically people weren't too upset. Of course, this is also the period when both the new left and the new right were campaigning against this symmetry between the parties and saying they're too homogenous, there needs to be more division. And we now live in the era when the left-wing challenge to the democratic establishment has largely succeeded, that even the new establishment

is well to the left of where it was in 1960. And the conservative, now conservative populist challenge to the old Eisenhower-Nixon establishment has been successful for decades. So I think it's almost impossible to have somebody in the modern political age where both candidates are well-liked by a cross-section of America, the parties are too divided to allow that to happen. Henry, last question. As a member of the media and an observer of it, Biden says that he wants to eliminate fossil fuels. Okay. Do you expect that any major news organization is undertake a large project to describe exactly what effect that would have on the rest of us, or is just one of those things? Do we just think that he said it

because he said it and no one thinks he means it? And it's I mean, the Washington Post editorial board would endorse Joe Biden. And I don't expect that they would then subsequently say, here is how we are going to completely eliminate our news operation on print because, you know, Joe's the future and that's what we got to do. Yeah. You know, worldwide enthusiasm for climate change is much greater in theory than in practice. When the Australian Liberal Party, which is the conservative party down there, won the election this spring after having not led in a single poll for the prior two and a half years. The one defeated candidate that they had was giving a concession speech, and he said that we do, we meaning the right, do poorly on climate change when it is a moral issue, but well when it is an economic issue. So ask yourself whether it is a

coincidence whether or not fans of climate change do not get into the details but focus on the fear. They know that the morality plays better than the facts, and I do not expect any sort of serious, deep, investigative work on what decarbonizing the economy would actually mean in concrete terms. Newsflash, a lot of disruption, a lot of job loss, and a lot of higher prices for you and me. Henry, it's been a pleasure. You should come and do a podcast for Ricochet all the time. I think I will think about that and reach out to you guys. Please think about it. And if you do, we will say something about it on this show later. Hint, hint. All right, talk to you later, Henry. Thanks. Yeah, decarbonizing. That'll be fun to watch. Won't that just be? It'll be

like flossing your teeth with a burlap rope. Well, the problem is that Rob, before talking about minty mouthful freshness, actually alerted everybody to the fact that a quip thing was coming. True. So really. No point in my interrupting it now because it was pre-interrupted in a sense. It was pre-interrupted for my convenience and my pleasure. But the fact of the matter is, as they say, who says that?

The fact of the matter. Somebody always says that. Well, it's not me. Was it Mark Stein? I don't know. Mark Stein have good pearly whites? Hard to say. Who says that? The fact of the matter. Somebody always says that. Well, it's not me. Was it Mark Stein? I don't know. Mark Stein have good pearly whites? Hard to say. Point is, quip. Now, we're already into September, right? Have you started a routine yet? I mean, because September is about getting back to routine school and getting rid of the old summer lassitude and the rest of it. Well, one of the

things you can do, it's an easy thing to do in starting a routine, is to get your teeth on a daily healthful basis that only really Quip can provide, really. You can simplify your mornings and your evenings with the simpler electric toothbrush from Quip. And you're thinking, oh, wait a minute, why is it electric?

Can't I just go and buy one that buzzes? No, no, no, no, no. Here's the thing. Timed sonic vibrations. Repeat after me. Timed sonic vibrations that covers the basic of every part of your mouth. And it takes just two minutes, twice a day. So after 30 seconds in one quadrant, three times, and it tells you move to another part of your mouth. That way you get your entire mouth clean in a way that you don't if you're just standing there staring at the you know at the mirror and just shoving it around your mouth like that ever since i started using the quip i feel better when i brush because i know i actually did it i actually brushed my teeth the

way i should when i go on a trip too i've got this little micro mount thing that mounts to the uh the mirror i can pop it off put it right in my travel bag and off i go lightweight compact design so you can bring it anywhere you want to go. So enjoy, you know, sleeping in. Perhaps summer technically is still with us, but, you know, you can get back to the routine of fall with a smile. Quip, I should note, has a built-in two-minute timer. Did I notice that? I did. Did I mention the little thing that attaches? I did. Did I mention the brush heads that are automatically delivered? No. No, I didn't. This is cool, too, because the dentists recommend you have a new brush every three months. Quip delivers that to you automatically for just five bucks. A friendly

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slash ricochet and our thanks to quip for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast and now we welcome to the podcast andy ferguson staff writer at the atlantic why because the atlantic said someday we're going to put up a paywall. We need somebody that people would actually shell out some shekels for. And Andy is the guy you want to pay to read. The author of Fool's Names, Fool's Faces, Land of Lincoln, and Crazy You, One Dad's Crash Course into Getting His Kid into College. And now that I got my kid into college, I want to read that so I can recall the horror stories. By the way, if you want to see Andy on Twitter, he's not on Twitter. Welcome to the show.

Hey, we had the debate last night, and some old folk there. I shouldn't use the word old, because you can be 70, you can be 80. My dad was spry and vital into his 90s. But they are of a certain generation. And for a party that prides itself on youth, why are the leading candidates getting up there, shall we say? Well, that's a really good question. I have to admit, I didn't watch the debate last night.

I know that violates all the pundit codes and everything, but I had to watch my hair, and there was other stuff going on. Only way that violates the pundit codes, Andy, is because you admitted it. You could hold for it for 10 or 15 minutes. It's like saying, I don't know.

Which is also illegal. You wrote a piece in The Atlantic, The Tyranny of the Seventy-Somethings. Let me read a relevant graph. Quote, Sanders and Biden have made themselves the equivalent of the old dude cruising the pool

at Club Med in his sagging Speedo, cap teeth gleaming, knobby shoulders and fallen pecs bronzed and shining with tanning oil, gold chains twinkling through the chest hair. I'm not saying one of them won't succeed in his quest, though I have my doubts about both, but in a saner world, it would be obvious that the quest itself is unseemly. It's beautiful and typical Andy.

All right. So true. Indeed it is. But having given everybody the image of Bernie Sanders in his Speedo, all we now are left with is the image of him later in the locker room blow-drying his nether regions with a power blower. So maybe we can move on. That's gross. That's gross. Yeah, I've gone too far. Well, let's go away from those guys then and go to something else you wrote about, Heidi Schreck.

Heidi Schreck, I got no idea who she was. I had no Then go to something else you wrote about, Heidi Schreck. Heidi Schreck, I've got no idea who she was. I had no idea who she was until you wrote about her. Who is she, and why exactly should we care about her at all? Well, I think that she's coming to your city of either Minneapolis or St. Paul soon. She had a one-woman show on Broadway for most of the year. It was a huge hit. She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The people who actually put up the money for her one-woman show at the Helen Hayes Theater actually got their money back, which is unheard of on Broadway. And the whole conceit of the show is that she spends the whole time talking about the Constitution.

And because when she was a little girl, she used to debate the Constitution in little programs that would be held at American Legion Halls and stuff. And she actually made her way through college with the money that she made talking to people about the Constitution. Well, she's decided now that she doesn't understand why she could have liked the Constitution so much. And as she says in sort of the penultimate part of the play, she's finally realized that the Constitution is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to protect the interests of rich white men against everybody else. So at the end, she polls the audience and says, who thinks that we should abolish the Constitution and make a new one? And in most, as has been told to me, and certainly the night I was there, it's a very close-run thing.

Sometimes the audience is overwhelmingly in favor of abolishing it, and sometimes it's split 50-50. And now that just tells you something about New York audiences, I guess. But it's coming to Washington here next week to the Kennedy Center. And I was trying to think, Jesus, if you actually have an audience full of bureaucrats and politicos and journalists and stuff, and if they think that we ought to do away with the Constitution, we're really, really in trouble. So I'm going to watch what goes on at the Kennedy Center closely. Which is a sentence no one has ever said, by the way. Andy, so it's Rob Long here. So I have to ask you, I mean, you sound concerned. Why would, what on, of course, the collective bureaucrats and, you know, mandarins in D.C.

want to abolish the Constitution. It's the only break, really, that we have on their power, that it was designed to be a break on their power. But the great thing about the Constitution is there are ways it can be amended totally and utterly. It could be in, you know, a decade, say, a completely different document. All you need is the votes. Do you really think that this movement would ever have any votes? Well, you know, I don't know. I don't know where this sort of free-floating hostility to America's traditional institutions, where this is going and how big it is. You know, I mean, you know what it's like just to be in Manhattan. I live in Washington. You know, there's a lot of that there. There's a lot of people sick of the Constitution, sick of the Supreme Court, sick of the electoral, thank you, college.

You know, and it's just sort of this animus about the things that have always kind of upheld our process of government. And I don't know how big that is. You know, is it just New York, just Washington, just college campuses? You know, I don't know. I, um, but if, if it's any bigger than that, then it's, it bothers me a little bit. It's also what you would expect after, you know, what 40 or 50 years of not teaching civics to anybody in school. Andy, Peter here. Hello, Peter. Listen, you and I have this conversation a lot, but I'm going to ask you to dredge it up for me here because I think Rob and James should hear it

and so should, well, they'll find it interesting. They may have some questions for you. So I sort of resist this, although I feel the weight of the argument. And you've been concerned from the get-go that Donald Trump would somehow or other just debase the character of American politics. Well, here we are, more than halfway through his first and possibly only term. Are you becoming— are you learning, what is the situation, are you becoming numb? Are you learning to live with him? Now that he's appointed good justices to the Supreme Court and good judges to the federal bench, are you finding aspects of this experience to admire? Where does Andy Ferguson stand right now? How rests the head? Do you sleep well at night?

Are you enjoying yourself? Are you enjoying the town that you love, Washington, D.C., right now? Well, no. I mean, enjoyment is simply beyond my capacities. But he's every bit as bad as I thought he was going to be. And I don't know. I go back and forth. Sometimes I just think I truly am a never-Trumper.

I think the damage that he does in the way he conducts the presidency far outweighs any good that he does in more particular policies and appointments and so on. And Heidi Schreck would be an example of the damage he does to the culture. She would have been unthinkable. An anti-Constitution show on Broadway would have been unthinkable during the Obama years, right? Is that an example of what you mean? Well, I don't think you can blame a guy for his enemies, really, for the behavior of his enemies. It's certainly true that Trump drives people absolutely crazy, the people who oppose him. I'm worried about what he does to his friends, just by sort of forcing people to justify the appalling, repulsive way that he goes about conducting himself in office. And since most of those people are,

you know, to speak generally on our side, um, I worry about what's going to happen to our side when he's gone, which I think will happen someday. I hope. Um, so anyway, I don't know. I, you know, it's, but again, you can't blame him for Heidi Schreck or for, you know, Pete Buttigieg or any of these other people who've kind of been coughed up by the system. The real damage that he's doing are to the people who I thought always kind of upheld traditional values and traditional ways of doing things. And what about the coming campaign? Well, the campaign is already underway. Does this get your political juices. I'm required to hate you for it. You write so beautifully. But you've shifted pretty much to culture.

Are you just done? Are you sick of politics? I guess is what I'm really asking here. Yes, yes, yes. That's absolutely true. It's partly just a selfish thing. When I was covering presidential campaigns like in 88 or 96 or 2000, you could get to a candidate, even sort of a major candidate, six months before the New Hampshire primary, and you could spend time with him. You could probably drive around the countryside with him. Certainly, you could go to events, and the candidate would have time for you to talk to you,

and you'd sort of get a sense of what was going on. Now it's impossible because the campaign starts so early, for one thing, so that by the time we were where we were earlier this summer, seven or eight months out from the first primaries and caucuses, these guys have all hunkered down. They've perfected their patter. They don't have anything interesting to say. In fact, they're emphatic about not saying anything interesting. And they're covered by an army of kids, basically, in the press corps.

You know, they're all like 26 years old, and they actually like doing things like sleeping in a Hampton Inn for seven weeks straight, and stuff that I can't really handle anymore. So I've kind of just, I've kind of just turned my head, and as I said last night, I didn't even watch the debate, so. Well, if we lose you on politics, at least we have you on culture. And that's great because you write things as you did about Malcolm Gladwell. Now, I believe that one is supposed to spend 10,000 hours on something before you get really good at it, as Gat Gladwell told us. So you must have spent 10,000 hours taking down Malcolm Gladwell before you wrote your piece. Explain why you think the guy's full of it.

Well, first off, you have to read his books, and then you start to get an inkling. I don't know. I've read most of what he's written, I think. And you read his newest, The Point of Departure is the new book, Talking to Strangers. Talking to Strangers. It came out this week, in fact.

Right. It was published this week. And it's sort of, you know, there's a kind of drive to what he did earlier. I always thought he was just a showman and kind of a charlatan. He, you know, goes through all these old social science journals and stuff and finds counterintuitive findings that are, whether they're scientifically sound or not, it doesn't really matter to him. And he throws them up and he strings them together with a bunch of anecdotes and then with some kind of punchy theme. But I think he's kind of tired it out now.

He's this new book called Talking to Strangers. It really doesn't have any theme. It doesn't have any kind of potency at all. I mean, it just looks like he's kind of bored by it. And so was I, to tell you the truth, when I read it. Well, that's why... I'm sorry. An insertion, and then back to you, James. But aren't we meant to rally to Malcolm Gladwell because, well, for this reason, he sells books in this age of Twitter. open a book, find themselves engaged enough to pay the money and take it onto the airplane and read a book instead of watching a video or going on Twitter. Aren't we meant to rally behind such a person or aren't they perhaps a social signifier? Those books that tell everybody what sort of

person you are. Yeah. I actually think people, from what I can tell, people actually did read his other books. I mean, they go down like cream. It's just, you know, he's a master at what he does. But I think that those bestsellers are actually the rare kind of bestseller that's actually read by people. But, you know, he sells a lot of books, and that's good for anybody who's in favor of reading. But, you know, a lot of books get and that's good for anybody who's in favor of reading. But a lot of books get sold now. That's true. The demise of the actual book, the kind that you buy at an airport or in a bookstore or from Amazon, was really oversold.

People are selling more books, I think, than ever now. It's not just Malcolm Gladwell. So we don't need to rally behind that bastard. No, open fire. Yeah, that's right. So then, going forward, folks, take your money out of The New Yorker. You don't have to read Malcolm Gladwell. It's more fun to read Andy's takedown of him.

So take your money out of The New Yorker, put it into the Atlantic subscription, and you're good. Andy, thanks for joining us today. We look forward to every single phoneme, syllable, punctuation, etc. that you continue to produce. Talk to you later. Anytime, guys. Anytime. Thanks, Andy. Take care, Andy. So here we have Peter confessing that a couple of things. He's told Brother Rob how much he liked his last piece in National Review. He's envious of Malcolm Gladwell and how many books he sells. He's envious of, uh, of Andy Ferguson, of you and India's of Andrew Ferguson for his

ability to write. In other words, Peter's got things bothering him and I'm suffering writer's block as you are correctly, as you correct. By the way, James. So, as you know, I love you both like brothers, but you're so talented that I'm required to hate you both. And I do just all the time. So here, James, is a question for you. Wow. This is classic. Have you low down?

No good son of a bitch. Have you ever suffered writer's block even for 10 stinking minutes in your entire life? Or does it all just flow and has always done so? No, I don't. I mean, there are many nights where I have to start a column and I say, I don't know what I'm going to write about. But then I start writing and the idea presents itself. So we can talk about you can talk about tricks and techniques and ways to visualize and the rest of it. But some people have that sort of cost of nature when it comes to getting the stuff out.

The empty pages is a, is a, is a, is a blank wall of a hand in front of their face. But for some people, it just is what I do. So I do it. You are the pump that never needs to be primed. And what about you, Long, you bastard you? Well, gosh, I have lots of writer's block. There was only a place I could go for counseling on this issue. Thank you, Rob, because really, Peter inadvertently has been doing the most elaborate and yet unplanned, unconscious segue ever in the history. I've never seen anybody tee it up like he did without even knowing it.

Listen, if there's anything that interferes with your happiness that prevents you from achieving your goals, like being able to write whenever you have to write, like Peter Robinson, who apparently is lucky if he gets out an article and a preposition in the course of a day. Better help online counseling is there for you. Better help. Connect and find a... Really, I'm legit here, folks. This is an actual thing. Connect and find a professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. It's so convenient. You can get help on your own time at your own pace. You can schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist if you want. Licensed professional counselors who are specialized in, well, depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, sleeping, trauma, anger, family conflicts, LGBT matters, grief, self-esteem.

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on mobile, web, Android, iOS apps. Schedule weekly video and phone sessions. Financial aid is available for those who qualify. It's secure. It's convenient. It's professional. It's affordable. Best of all, the affordable part can help if you want to talk to somebody. The Ricochet podcast listeners get 10% off your first month with the discount code Ricochet. Why not get started today? Start first month with the discount code Ricochet. So why don't I get started today? Start figuring this stuff out. Go to betterhelp.com slash ricochet. Simply fill out a questionnaire to help them assess your needs and get matched with a counselor you'll love. That's betterhelp.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. All right, Rob,

was I correct that you have to run out soon? Because if you do, that means we've got to have the long poll for which there yet is not a sounder, but I'll announce it portentously. It's week two of the long poll. Yeah, we don't have one yet. I'm sorry. Right. We do have one.

I just got confused because it's sort of the reverse of of last week's poll, which is which Democrat do you think has the best chances against Trump? So which is the one you put yourself in the in the in the if you're if you're in the campaign mode, which one are if you're in the Trump side, which one are you the most worried about? I mean, who do you think's got got legs? Right. And I guess the answer for me probably would be Biden. But I suspect that. I suspect that Elizabeth Warren is probably more, it would be more trouble than we think. She'd be my choice in the long poll this week.

I think she would be a lot of trouble. It's weird because I get why she's easy to dismiss and I understand why her negatives are so high, but just watching her last night especially, I feel like she, just looking at it from the other side, I feel like she has the fluency with vague socialism that American voters do find appealing. And they find appealing on the right and the left. Well, it's like now you start giving away Medicare Part D and not touching entitlements. There's a lot of populism on the right and the left. Well, you know, it's like, you know, you start giving away, you know, Medicare Part D and not touching entitlements. There's a lot of like, there's a lot of populism on the right, too. And it's very, very popular. By the way, Rob, could could would you be willing

to pledge right now that next week you will not do what you did this week, which is to say, well, you know, everybody who participated in the long poll got it wrong. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it was actually, that's why we rewrote it now. I suspect maybe it was misworded. Oh, I see. Yes, yes, yes. It's not quite clear what, I'm actually asking, you know, the collective membership of Ricochet to sort of put on their, you know, their political hats, their analyst hats, their pundit hats. This week, the question is totally unambiguous. I got it. Right. I see that. So they have to include candidates who have a chance of actually getting the nomination.

Because I foolishly think that Amy Klobuchar, even though she's not catching fire at all, would give a weary nation a sense of normalcy again. And she's not a raving socialist. We'll give you some things, but we'll take away some others. We can't afford everything. But then again, she's pulling at 0.001%. So that At this very moment, there's a huge picture of Amy Klobuchar on the Drudge Report. And the headline reads in halfinch tall letters, Klobuchar Breaks Out Dem Heartland Hope, Debate Ratings Surge. Ha! Well, you know, I called that at the National Review Cruise, I think, in 2016 or something. I said that they made it, so at least I'm on tape going way back. And the other part is that I could probably wrangle an invitation to the White House since I got her dad's old job and my wife knew her at some point.

Okay, so small town incentives, I get it. Exactly. All right, well, the other feature that we have, of course, is my member post of the week segment, which I should probably announce portentously. James Lilex's member post of the week. No, I'm not going to do that anymore. Why do I do this? Well, every week I'm going to pick the favorite member post of the week. No, I'm not going to do that anymore. Why do I do this? Well, every week I'm going to pick the favorite member post of the week. There are so many, and we'll discuss it on the show. Disclaimer, the judge's decision on the Lilacs post of the week segment is final. No prize is awarded until we get a sponsor for this segment.

Although the winning Ricochet member is encouraged to lord it over the other members on Ricochet.com as much as they wish. And this week I chose Skyler, who wrote How Liberals Pass Unpopular Laws. Now, you're going to have to go to Ricochet, and you're going to have to click on it to read it. But basically, I chose it for a couple of reasons. One, I liked him reminding us of something that we forget, which is that statism always expands, always, always, always. And one of the ways they do it is by saying, we're going to do this thing. And everybody is absolutely appalled. You can't take $10,000 of my money to do to spend on that. And then they step back and say, all right, we're going to take $100 of your money to do this. And people are relieved as though somehow there's been a moderation. Well, no, there's just been a more

incremental expansion of statism. And he puts it in the context of some homeless ordinances in Texas, which is another reason that I like it. And one of the reasons they think that they can flip Texas, which would be interesting. Gets you into the whole Beto and his I'm going to take your guns and all the rest of it stuff. So it's a great member post. It's one of those things that, you know, guy's not a political scientist. Guy's not a professional pundit. He's making an excellent point with clarity and amusement. And it's typical for a ricochet. So there you go. Schuyler's post, how liberals pass unpopular laws. So before we go, last thoughts. It was 9-11 this week,

and I find myself on that day 18 years later still getting morose and angry, angry. And I'm not sure that's a healthy emotion. But then again, it's not something that I necessarily ever want to let go or forget. We do. Time changes. Things fade. But how did it strike you this year? And do you think there's going to come a time when any of us will say, ah, it's just another day on earth? Well, I mean, that time is rapidly happening, right? I mean, 50% of Americans have no immediate memory of 9-11. They were either not born yet or they were too young. Right, right.

It's always a difficult... I lost a college classmate in the tower that day. So there's, it's obviously thousands of people lost people they knew or classmates or family members or friends of friends, that sort of thing. And so it stops me cold every year. It just stops me cold. But Rob's point, this is, I was thinking about this when we were talking to andy i don't want to launch a whole new subject here but how do you convey to rising generations what it meant to those of us who saw it happen how do you convey any piece of history that you know was important because you felt it and saw it. I just don't know.

It's because it's impossible. It's impossible. I mean, what made 9-11 9-11, for those of us who were around then, was that it was the unthinkable. And it's now the thinkable. Everybody knows what happened in 9-11. So the impact of it is lost. I mean, that's just the way the world is. We now know that we can think about this. This is not unthinkable.

The difference, I used to say, the difference between, you know, America pre-9-11, America post-9-11 is in Flight 93, because the passengers on Flight 93 knew what was happening. It was no longer unthinkable. They didn't think, as the passengers on the other flights thought, okay, we're hijacked. We're going to land somewhere. There's going to be this protracted negotiation. I'm going to be on CNN. It's going to be miserable.

But we'll probably get out alive. People on Flight 93 knew exactly what was going on. And so they took action. That's who we are now. We're either on Flight 93 or where we have that knowledge. And so the problem is that the the the for those of us who are alive, those things are all wrapped up in the stories of the people that we either knew or heard about in the towers or in the planes. And I think that that is just the way of the world, unfortunately. The people who fought World War I couldn't believe that we were about to fight World War II.

And the people who came back from World War II couldn't believe that we were, how quickly we forgot how savage it was. Maybe that's just the way we have to, what we have to do, the kind of forgetting we need to do to cope. So how do you teach future generations? You show them the pictures. You show them the videos. You gather as many as you can from YouTube before they scroll away. You find the ones that have the people throwing themselves out of the building. You find them the ones that have people on the very top of the floors waving their handkerchiefs, doomed. You show the buildings collapsing. Show all of it. You show the wreckage, the remains. You show them that, and then you tell them who did it. You tell them why they did it, and you tell them who those people are today. Put it in context. You may not be able to have the same visceral reaction that we did when we were

there but this is ongoing and this will happen again unless we continue to remind ourselves that there is a vast civilizational force out there arrayed against us it's subtle and manifests itself in peculiar ways but if i could put it under one thing, always look around and ask yourself, who hates the Jews? Start there, because that's a pretty good indication right there. That's true. From that, you can go to all the forces inimical to democracy, including those people who want to rip up the Constitution and replace it with essentially something that just says everything shall be given to everybody and that'll all work out fine. We just gave you an hour and 15 minutes or so of a podcast. Free of charge.

Free of charge. Just think about that. And then think, gosh, how can I possibly repay you? Oh, that's easy. Go to Ricochet.com. Sign up. Also, we were brought to you by Bowling Branch, by Quip, and by BetterHelp. Support them for supporting us, frankly.

And I was just on iTunes the other day, and I was leaving five-star reviews for everything that I loved because I'm a good person. If you're a good person, you'll go and give us a five-star review, too, so other folks can find us. No, you're not. I don't care. If you want to live with yourself, that's fine. Peter, Rob, it's been a pleasure. We'll talk to you next week and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.5 stars, would it kill you to give us a 5 star

next week boys next week there's a blood red circle on the cold dark ground the rain is falling down The church door's slowed open I can hear the organ song The congregation's gone

My city of ruins My city of ruins Now the sweet bells of mercy Drift through the evening trees Young men on the corner like scattered leaves the boarded up windows the empty streets are my brothers

down on his knees my city of ruins my city of ruins My city of ruins Come on, rise up Come on, rise up Come on, rise up Come on, rise up Come on, rise up. Come on, rise up.

Come on, rise up. Come on, rise up. Come on, rise up. Ricochet. Join the conversation.