The Ricochet Podcast - Go Ahead, Make Our Day

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Western elites have run into a recurring predicament over the past decade: In a democracy, you can't abolish the voters. Populist coalitions are on the march in Europe, and while they've yet to take over their respective governments like their American counterparts, they aren't going away. So Henry Olsen returns to the podcast to give us the scoop on everybody from the Romanians, who just had their delayed election, to the Poles and Hungarians who have some coming up, along with Reform UK and AfD. We also dig into Trump's so-far successful 'Dirty Harry' theory of justice and the limitations any politician's gotta know — including the transformational ones. Plus, Lileks and Hayward yap about the latest with Harvard, the "stochastic terrorism" that killed two young Jews in DC, and Original Sin...- Soundbite from this week's open: UK PM Kier Starmer pivots on immigration

All right, we're going to leave you now. I'm going to make a bunch of Andor references. So I know that would be so totally over your head. I don't want to embarrass you. So yeah, no, well, look, I'm cool. Yep. Hit my brain. Make him go away.

Guys. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet podcast with Stephen Hayward, not Charles CW Cook at last, but I'm James Lonex with you. And we're going to talk to Henry Olsen about events in Europe and elsewhere. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

Now in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers. So yes, I believe in this. I believe we need to reduce immigration significantly. Pete Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 742. I'm James Lalex from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I'm joined by not Charles CW Cook. Last we heard of him, his roof was leaking. So for all we know, he is standing in a flooded house bailing or he's just off having lunch somewhere in sunny Florida. Stephen Hayward in California, I presume. Stephen, how are you today?

I'm good. Busy week. It's hard to keep up with everything. So much stuff to do. Well, we could go with something that actually happened minutes ago, I think. Well, three hours ago. A little tweet from Harvard here, it says, without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard. That struck me at first as the University of Minnesota saying, without our students from Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota is not the University of Minnesota. I think it possibly could be. But the idea of the international students somehow having an automatic cache because they simply are not American and when you are not American you bring an ineffable quality

to things. Well, we're about to find out how that plays. What do you think Stephen of this idea that the administration has said, well you know what, uh nope sorry no more international students, none of that wonderful full tuition that they pay, um sorry is this just another negotiating tactic like what I believe is a fairly significant tax on endowments to get them to do what exactly as you see? Yeah, so first of all, I think James you mispronounced the word cash. You said cache. Yeah, I mean this is of course a business model for many universities is to have foreign students come who pay full freight. Some students

have some colleges have high numbers of Chinese students who will pay the full freight for universities. And I've had college administrators confess to me that it is a primary revenue model for them. But second of all, Harvard is not Harvard without its apparently 7,000 foreign students is their average number that they enroll was the number I've seen reported. And Harvard wouldn't be Harvard without their foreign students. And I thought, oh, maybe they're starting to get the point here, that Harvard isn't Harvard.

That's the object of the Trump administration. And, you know, I'm all for them. I mean, I know some Harvard faculty that are good, and I feel bad for them, except most of them privately say we richly deserve it. So anyway, I think this is just one more turn to the screw by the Trump people. And Harvard has, I think, late yesterday or maybe this morning filed suit saying this is an illegal move. But you know, Harvard can afford a lot of lawyers, but the Trump administration has an unlimited number of lawyers in time to pursue this. So I'm sure the funded judge who believes and agrees with them Yes, you see this back and forth all the time you have a judge who says no you actually can't fire those people because

That impedes their ability to do the aid the work of the agency in such a study which you know It is got to come to some sort of point where these judges simply are not are Restrained shall we say from over reaching their bonds because we're where these judges simply are not, are restrained, shall we say, from over reaching their bounds because we're reaching a point where there's a legitimacy of competency and confidence in the courts, which is not a good thing. People may say, good, good, they're a bunch of robed activists, get them out of here, let's just spend,

you don't want that. You really don't want that post court, post rule of law world. You mentioned, you know, some Harvard educators who believe that they richly deserve it. Why? Well, because the administration has coddled the left for so long and allowed all these affirmative action programs, quote, the DEI stuff, ideological hiring. Also refusing to hire, I mean, I'm familiar with a few hiring cases where they had a strong conservative candidate and the person who ought to have been hired was rejected.

This is going back 20 years now. I mean, there's been systematic bias, not just at Harvard, but a lot of universities against hiring well-qualified conservative professors. And so I think the Harvard faculty is the most lopsided. I think it's 98% registered Democrats. That's what I figured. But so you're speaking to the 2% who are not the people who are supposed to you with the, you know, with a cone of

silence over there. You were going to mention something else about this. Well, I thought you mentioned, you know, judges and injunctions. I thought maybe you had in mind this case that came out on Thursday, Trump v. Wilcox. It's one of those shadow docket rocket docket cases. It's not a complete case, but by a six to three vote, the court said, you know what? Trump can fire members of some of these boards and commissions because, you know, they've been saying, oh, these are independent agencies. The president can't do that. And so anyway, this augurs well for this when the full case comes before the court to overturn

the old Humphreys executor's case that said a president couldn't fire the head of the Federal Trade Commission. There is one sentence in Justice Kagan's dissent that really jumps out at me. It's very short. She said that the principle that a president can't fire somebody. Here's a quote, undergirds a significant feature of American governance, bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure

of independence from presidential control. That is the most perfect one-sentence encapsulation of the progressive idea of expert government unaccountable to political bodies, whether Congress or the President. But it's also got the history wrong. And so, you know, in 30 seconds, the reason we set up the commission model going all the way back to the 1880s with, you know, five members, two from the minority party and three from the President's party, was to replicate the partisan divisions that exist between the two parties and their views of how policy should be made and what its goals should be. Congress figured out 150 years ago that you couldn't escape the essential disagreements of American politics,

and therefore, let's copy it. So, there's, by saying bipartisan administrative bodies, as Justice Kagan said, no! They're supposed, look, everybody who pays attention knows that the Securities Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, there are partisan fights in those commissions every year, every week, and that's on purpose. And so, you're trying to pull the wool over our eyes saying, oh, it's nothing here but us bipartisan expert people unaffected by politics. And it's about time for that whole game to end. Pete Slauson The belief seems to be that the civil service is this non-partisan sort of cadre of experts that floats over things and makes decisions according to the best data

unswayed by personal beliefs, which is nice to believe, but unfortunately it doesn't work out that way. And the people who seem to believe that it do also believe that the technocratic expertise will be slightly left coded if not explicitly so, because that's just simply the right, correct, and smart thing to do. So while it would be nice to believe in that sort of civil service we're being disabused of a whole lot of notions of our institutions. Which brings us something else is that if you can't get the courts to do exactly what you want to say or the courts are thwarting you, well then just figure out a novel way to go around them. I was reading a story this week that what ICE is doing, what the Homeland Security is doing,

is dropping charges on some guys. So they, you know, we need our day in court. All right. Well, you know what? We're dropping the charges, but we're arresting you right now. Yeah. Which does focus the mind. Yes. which does focus the mind. Yes. So, DC shooting, Jew shooting in DC.

I don't know how else to put it. It has had the immediate effects, as I wrote on Ricochet, was one, you're not gonna hear an awful lot about stochastic terrorism this week, where people talk about how rhetoric that seems to be inflaming people, has stray voltage that leads to actual terrorism, speeches, violence, etc. Not gonna hear a lot

about that this week. And secondly, Luigi Mangione, the previous darling of a certain set of the progressive left, has now been replaced by somebody else who has had the the courage of his convictions, hasn't burnt himself, but he's done something brave, he's struck a blow, etc. etc. And a surprising number of people are self-identifying as fans of a murderous lunatic by saying, yes, this is the inevitable result. It is a necessary result. It is what happens when you have a genocidal government.

Its emissaries are free to walk among the planet. Even though these people weren't emissaries of the government at all, they actually were, from what I understand, interested in outreach to the Palestinian community and finding some way to foster peace. But it didn't matter because it comes down to it. They're Jews. So, yeah. So, where does this go, exactly? I'm afraid it's heading in some very dark directions. You know, I have been reflecting the last several years that as bad as things are, you know, the Black Lives Matter riots and especially things going on on campus, at least it's not yet as bad as it was in the late 60s and early 70s when we were averaging, what, one bombing

every three days. I mean, there was something like a thousand bombings, including on college campuses that killed some people at the University of Wisconsin. I thought, at least we're not bombing college campuses yet. We're not having political assassinations yet. I said this before. They took shots at Trump a few months ago. And I'm worried that we are very quickly edging our way back to that. The left is clearly going to legitimize violence. We're going to get more of it. And this takes us back to the university story once again. I mean, where did this kid learn this stuff?

He was an English major at the University of Illinois Chicago, and I couldn't find out much about it, but I bet their English department is just as bad as every other one these days. But they teach this stuff at the universities, or even earlier. I mean, one problem is, is this guy, I suspect this Rodriguez kid, probably arrived at university fully Howard-Zenified already in high school. And so the problem goes all the way down. By the way, interesting news tidbit this morning. This guy's father was a guest of a Democratic congressman from Illinois at Trump's speech to Congress two, three months back. Now, you

don't blame parents for the sins of the children, I understand. On the other hand, that's going to be difficult to explain. And we'll have to see where that story goes. Pete Yeah. The grenade doesn't fall far from the tree. English major, you're probably right that the curriculum that he, into which he was steeped and marinated, was probably not the same as mine when I was an English major. I don't remember, you know, spending a lot of time on Canterbury Tales and, you know, Kate Chopin's The Awakening and deciding that I should go out and shoot somebody. But maybe when you talk about political, I mean, we can have the whole conversation about how political violence has been normalized by the left and has been exalted as the voice of the people, the unsung, etc., etc. We're told,

of course, that the biggest threat in the country is political violence from the right, but yet we keep seeing these things happen. But I don't think you're going to have a summer of riots over Gaza. I think you need some proximate cause here in the United States that gins up the particular excuse. And right now it seems to me that one of the left has a great deal of grievances about Trump. They're sort of indistinct, free-floating, confusing. It's a miasma of gnats that's just they can't really do anything to wave their hands to try to dispel them. There's no focus point yet, but there might be. Who knows? Everything changes and moves swiftly. Such as your host, moving from our general discussion to one of a

particular nature with Henry Olson, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, author of The Working Class Republican, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism, and the host of Beyond the Polls, which is an election podcast. You can find it right here on Ricochet. Henry, welcome. Well, thanks for having me. Well, we get to Europe because, yes, it matters and they had elections and they are significant,

but we want to bring up a piece you wrote last month for UnHerd. It was called Trump's Dirty Harry Theory of Justice. You explained what the voters today are unusually amenable to the president's methods. I was just talking with somebody about this yesterday. It's like, you know, if you guys don't do anything, then, and you don't do anything and you import more of the problem and you gaslight the people who say that there is a problem, eventually somebody comes along to try to solve the problems and the excesses at the margins are not going to bother the people who are concerned about these things, because fine, something's finally

being done. Is that what you're talking about? Pretty much. You know, what Dirty Harry was for people who may not have seen the 1971 movie, made Clint Eastwood's career in a sense, is he played a cop who was consistently frustrated by war and court era rulings that basically put procedure over justice and like criminals go free and employed extra legal methods to pursue justice. And I think that's what's going on here is it's quite obvious that there are millions of people here who were let in in violation of the law. Many of them are not committing crimes, but way too many of them are. And even if they aren't, they're not supposed to be here. You know, they're violating the law. And so Trump is pursuing that and sometimes

looking a little askance or looking the other way when procedure gets in the way and I think for his voters as long as he's dealing with the problem he's pursuing justice and not letting law get in the way and they're just fine with that. I was talking to somebody yesterday about the proposed Medicare cuts and they were saying this is going to be very bad for hospitals it's going to be it's going to be dreadful and I said well and again this conversation, I was not defending, I was just simply explaining what the logic was, was that there will be significant cuts because the hospitals no

longer have to, because Medicare will, Medicaid, whatever we're talking, will never have to give money again to illegals, to which the person responded, oh, well, then great, fine, they'll just go to the emergency rooms. And I said, well, no no actually the idea is is that they won't be here and that seems that that seemed to be like a stunning revelation is like that we have no choice but to fund these people because they're here the option of just saying no I'm sorry you you don't belong here you're not a citizen here you came and you slipped through you ignored all your court dates

you are going to be deported seems to be off the table for an awful lot of people. But it's pretty much everything on the table for a lot of others, isn't it? Well, yeah. I mean, look, going back to COVID, nobody could get together outdoors until you were protesting something approved by the progressive elite, and then nobody can get COVID if you're protesting racism, right? Right. Yeah. So the thing is that what they're shocked about is that somebody is pursuing matters of culture and matters of law of economics, but predominantly matters of culture using all the same techniques and the same sort of intensity that the left has pursued for 50 or 60 years. And they're shocked, shocked to discover there's gambling going on in this new federal government

state. No, you know, hello, McFly, you built it. You are now going to have to deal with that. Uh, yeah. And, and the fact is that these Medicaid cuts are not cuts. You know what they are is, well, if you serve through state funds, illegal aliens, people who shouldn't be here anyway,

that you recognize in your state law, we're going to not reimburse your Medicaid program at the same rate. So the states get to make a choice. You know, nobody is forced off the rolls. And you know, the other thing is that the biggest so-called cuts are saying, well, you have to, if you're able-bodied and you don't have dependent children and you're not pregnant and you're under the age of 65, you have to at least try to work or go to school or provide community

service 20 hours a week and the CBO says well That means millions of people lose their health care to which most Trump voters would say damn straight If you can't help yourself, you don't deserve our help so these aren't cuts and this is the sort of thing that the left is used to having a Monopoly over the language and we can't let them do that and I think what they're finding is increasingly the right is not letting them do that and again they're they're shocked to discover that the right is not simply the Washington General's paid to the whole idea should note to

everybody that we did indeed catch the fact that you made both a Casablanca and a back-to-the-fut, I think, in the span of about seven seconds. And dirty Harry too, right? No, no, hey look, I am just a rolling culture machine for anything made before the year 1994. Well, James, you... I can do, I can do, I can do Pulp Fiction too, and that was 1994. I don't know, James, if you've caught the news out of California where Governor Newsom has not only announced no further enrollments of illegal aliens in Medicaid, but existing illegal alien enrollees have to start making a copay.

Maybe Henry, we should talk about, you know, Newsom's obvious crab march to the right to try to run for president. But by the way, you mentioned Dirty Harry. I can't resist this. I think it was Richard Grenier who pointed out that that was the first mainstream Hollywood movie that talked back to liberalism, right? I mean, you laid out the theme about the war in court, but my favorite scene, you may remember it, James, is when Dirty Harry Callahan gets his new partner, a young Hispanic guy named Chico, nothing subtle about that. And he looks at

him skeptically, he says, what's your background? He says, degree in sociology from San Jose State. And Hallahan looks at him and says, oh, you'll go far. I mean, that's just perfect, right? I mean, 50 years ahead of the whole DEI world we see these days, right? But look, I was especially interested in catching up with you on the scene in Europe, which is of a piece with ours in a lot of ways. And you know things down to the precinct level, which is scary, because I don't, I mean,

there's something wrong with you, Henry. I've been saying this for 40 years. But let's start with the United Kingdom. You know, I woke up here two weeks ago and saw a tweet from Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying, you know, immigration to Britain is not a right, it's a privilege that has to be earned. And I thought, well, this is new, for those guys are even more open-border than Joe Biden was.

And then I picked up the news that Nigel Farage's Reform Party swept the municipal elections. That was hardly reported in the US press. I had to go to the British press to see the full dimensions of it. It was staggering. And they're now polling number one, and I think the Tories have fallen in number three. So, first of all, the two-part question is Farage for real? I mean, is reform now going to replace the Tories? Are the Tories in such deep trouble that will they come back? I mean, give us your thumbnail assessment of what the turmoil that's going on in the UK. Yeah, parades is for real, reform is for real, and the Tories are in an existential crisis.

There's a book written many years ago about how the Liberal Party went from running Britain during the strange death of Liberal England. There's a better than 50% chance that we are in the middle of the strange death of conservative England, that the Tory party and the basic question is simple, is that throughout the Western world, conservative voters are increasingly pushing back against a liberal elite. And liberal includes many conservatives, because I mean the liberal with a small continental L, that doesn't care about nationalism and doesn't care about citizenship. And you see it in immigration, you see it in trade, they just don't care. It's open borders all the way. And conservative voters say, no, actually, we don't think that's right.

We think that you owe us a duty as citizens. And that means protecting our way of life and our standard of living to which most elites in the conservative movement say sorry I can't hear you you say you want more freedom more liberty and that's not what they're saying so what's happened is is that the right and britain has finally given up on the conservative party is that the right in Britain has finally given up on the Conservative Party. They ran things for 14 years and didn't keep any of their promises. And the most stunning thing was in 2019 when they basically have a Trumpian victory where they win votes that they've never gotten before

from blue collar former Labour voters and then they proceed to govern and ignore all of their promises. And what reform is doing is getting the right of the Tory party and the former Labour working class voter in the same party, and that's a plurality in British politics. Well, with the dirty hairy bit, you know, where people are constrained by what they believe they're allowed to say and to think, and there's an inevitable reaction that exceeds what people thought it would be. Is this not going all the way back to Enoch Powell? Is this not going back to the idea of some sort of British identity that deserves to be maintained? It's an idea that's been delegitimized in the upper

British culture. For all time. Well, it is and it isn't. You know, the thing is that Enoch Powell spoke in a language that Nigel Farage never uses, you know a language that Nigel Farage never uses, you know, right? Nigel Farage never talks about rivers of blood. There are plenty of non-white British citizens who are part of reform, which is one of the things that always shocks people is why is it that, you know, the chairman of reform is somebody from either Pakistan or India?

I forget where Zia Youssef is from. And the fact is that there are plenty of people who are British, even though they are not of white heritage. And that's not something I think that Enoch Powell could ever have admitted. And then you've got the non-conventional economic. Well, just look at the leader, sorry to interrupt, but just look at the leader of the Tory party right now, Kemi Badenoch, right?

Born of Kenyan parents. Yeah, okay, sorry. And succeeding Rishi Shunak, you know, a Hindu, a Hindu of Indian parentage who is British, you know, born in and raised in Britain. But that's the Conservative Party, and the fact is the Conservative Party, like all Conservative parties built in the post-war era, is coming apart. It's coming apart because the liberal and the, as John Howard of Australia said, that the liberal party of Australia, which is the conservative party down there, Big L like classical, could contain liberal and conservative elements.

You know, we should say people who are concerned first about freedom and people who are concerned first about tradition can find their homes here. What happens is people who are concerned, who are upper income and educated now, don't care about conservative culture. They care about the left. And there's no longer a chance to combine them in opposition to something when the center, when the left has in fact embraced some form of capitalism. So all of these western parties are finding their 1945 to 1999 era coalitions going away and the Tory party remains split between people who would actually rather be the right wing of the left than those who would rather be the establishment wing of the right. And I don't think they'll solve that problem before the next

election, and I think they will be, I think there's a better than 50% chance that they'll have fewer than 50 seats in the next parliament. Wow. Well, one more question about the Tory party. You know, in America, we still talk about our rhinos, right? Republicans in name only, who really are an endangered species, like African rhinos. And you know, the Republican Party became more self-identified conservative party, we're going to see that. Now what I hear from our friends like Andrew Roberts and others is that that never happened to the Tory party in Britain, even with the strong influence of Margaret Thatcher, after she left it snapped back and you have a lot of, I guess we'd call them, Tinos.

Tories in name only, right? Pete Slauson Right. Pete Huston And I mean, Andrew says, you know, half the members of the Tory party in parliament, and this was true under Boris Johnson, are actually not very ideological. They're Tory party members out of convenience and ambition, because that's the way their constituency rolls.

And I think you can see that, that the party really lost its way. And I don't know, is there a chance that they can, well, you said your prediction is they're going to get wiped out but does that solve that problem if they're ever going to come back I think those of us who are small c conservative all not but not to be wedded to the big c conservative yeah okay yeah I would have voted reform if I were in Britain in 2004 I am enthusiastically for reform.

Not that I agree with everything Farage says and so forth. Because I think the Tory party in Britain is essentially now an expression of class preference. Yeah, the people I know who in Britain who are voting reform were not Tories before. So there's this, there's a spectrum of legitimacy, it seems, in Europe, right? There's reform, then maybe AFD, and then down below that, the French because the French are always castigating their own right. But respectability seems to be coming up somewhat. Let's look at AFD first, which I believe was, you know, investigated

and found to be beyond the pale, but they're not going away. No, well, that's the thing is you can't, in a democracy, you can't abolish voters. And the elites have this sense that, well, if we can hold control the narrative or we control the leadership, you know, we can put this thing to bread but in a democracy public opinion is everything to quote somebody who once had a beard and ended the Civil War yeah is that so they could ban AFD tomorrow and it wouldn't matter it wouldn't matter because a quarter of Germans want the policies that AFD have. So somebody would come and create a new party called DFA.

This happened in Belgium. It was that they had a right-wing party, a populist anti-immigrant party, and they actually moved to abolish Vlaams Blok. And Vlaams Blok dissolved itself ahead of the court hearing and reconstituted itself as Vlam's belong. And guess what? They're still getting votes. AFD though, for those people who don't know, describe what their two main things would be. Their two primary issues that are gaining them popularity. Well, the two primary issues that would be gaining them popularity, you know, first of all, overwhelmingly

is immigration. And the second is, I would say, German culture. You know, where does AFD do best? It does best in places that are not doing well economically, and they also do well in places that historically have been very supportive of particularly Catholic identity. You see where they take a look at the same regions on the Czech Bavarian border that backed the Bavarian People's Party and the Weimar Republic and gave huge majorities to the Christian Social Union in the post-World War II environment are still voting for the CSU, but they're giving the AFD their strongest level of support in the West. And that's not depressed industrial territory, that's Catholic territory. So it's mainly those two things that are gaining them support.

Pete But they are tightly bound together, the immigration and the idea of German culture. John Well, they are tightly bound together, but they're also severable, you know, and this is the thing is that if suddenly the government tomorrow decided, well, actually, we're just going to steal AFD's immigration policy. So it's just what the social democrats did in Denmark. It wouldn't mean the AFD would go away any more than the populist right went away in Denmark. You know, the populist right in Denmark still gets about 20% of the votes split moving a number of different parties Because there are other things that are pushing it It's not a one-issue thing and that's one of the things that people tend not to understand they tend to think well

This is just a protest party and you move the sorts of the protests and the party will go away No, this is an identity thing. This is a worldview that has its expression and its salience from immigration, but it extends well beyond that and is simply uncoalitionable with a political element that is dominated by a progressive left that sees nothing. Basically, the progressive left's argument worldwide now is if you back a system of government and a series of laws that were normal throughout the West when we defeated Nazism, you are now a fascist. Yeah. Yeah.

And so these people still believe that, you know, the system of laws that we had as recently as like 1980, you know, the system of laws that we had as recently as like 1980, that society was actually pretty good. Why can't we have something like that today? You know, not turning back the clock, but preserving, conserving, if you will, those values. And that is simply uncoalitionable with the modern left. Yeah. Well, let's head east a little bit. I mean, we know that they're doing lawfare in France against Marine Le Pen and in Germany against AFD And we'll have to see how that plays out But in Eastern Europe, you're seeing other weird things that hard for Americans understand because of those peculiar Parliamentary systems and by the way, sometimes when you post the euro polls Henry

I can't tell is the color coding also red for a conservative and blue for liberal I know everywhere else in the world blue is conservative. Is that okay? Because and then you also have eight parties to cope with it's just a nuisance But but you know, so you have Poland and Romania in the Netherlands, but go right. Yeah the smaller the country the more parties Like you know, I want a party for my own block, right It's for Prinz and Grokden, I don't know. So Romania invalidated an election because of- You get elected in the Prinz and Grok area. It's too- Oh no, I knew that was a mistake for me to break that up. So Romania, they invalidated

an election here recently because of supposed Russian interference. I don't want to say supposed. I'm sure there was Russian interference. That is not new. I'm well-schooled on the way Russia has mucked around in Bulgaria's politics for at least the last 25 years, and we don't seem to be bothered by that, or invalidate their elections. But they invalidated and then the establishment candidate managed to squeak by here in the last few days, I guess, and then I'm confused in Poland, too, where I think there's similar lawfare and shenanigans going on. Break those two down for us briefly, if you will. What happened in Romania is that, the thing to remember is that in what gave Trump his victory

was over the span of a decade, he has transformed a minority movement into a tenuous majority coalition, you know and he's done that by gaining the support of people who actually don't like a lot of his policies but they prefer him to the left and that's kind of like the Nikki Haley wing of the Republican Party and by adding Populist and working- class voters across the spectrum from Democrats who have just thrown up their hands at a modern party that doesn't seem to care about them anymore. That's how he gets to a majority. The Europeans haven't gotten to the majority status yet.

Okay. And that's basically what happened in Romania is that this party that didn't exist seven years ago has suddenly come and gotten 45, I think they ended up with about 46% of the vote. And what held them back finally was that it's just too new, it's too radical. So the sort of people who say, well, I prefer Trump to Clinton,

said, well, actually I prefer this Nicosia Dan to George Simeon. So the center right, the Haley voter of Romania backed the establishment. said, well, actually, I prefer this Nikasher Dan to George Simeon. So the center-right, the Haley voter of Romania, backed the establishment. In four years, that may not be the case. Yeah. Okay. And then you've got inter-ethnic things, you know, like five to eight percent of the population

is Hungarian, and this guy is an ultra-Romanian nationalist, so the Hungarian vote turned off en masse to oppose him, and that was another reason why he lost. In Poland, yes, the establishment is going on lawfare against law and justice, which is the populist conservative party there. But guess what? You can't engage in lawfare against 20 million Poles. And well, you can, but that's called Putin's Russia. And even the establishment in

Europe isn't willing to actually, like, have phony rigged elections and put people in jail, and have people fall out of fourth floor windows consistently. So what's happened is, is that you've got the mayor of Poland, the mayor of Warsaw, who is a cultural liberal and an economic conservative, perfectly at home as a Nikki Haley Republican, who is running for president. He has called for abortion in a country that's the most religious in Europe. He has called for the ban as mayor of Warsaw. He's imposed a ban on the wearing of religious symbols, even at your desk, so you can't have like a crucifix on your private desk if you're a Warsaw person. He supports LGBTQ rights

issues again in a country where people have traditional views about homosexuality and same-sex marriage and his coalition that got him into parliament included socially conservative rural voters who didn't like law and justice. So guess what's happened? Now you look and they say well if we support this guy then we're basically endorsing social liberalism and a lot of these voters refuse to do that and that gives law and justice a chance to win the runoff is that their candidate finished second, the three anti-abortion candidates got a majority of the vote and a very high turnout first round where the turnout was highest in the cities where the

liberals you know the Haley Republicans and people to their right and to do well. So if you look at this and you say in a democracy, public opinion is everything. The center left and the establishment allies on the right continually thumb their nose at public opinion, considering them troglodyte or fascist. And guess what? It's, you know, the revenge of the Jedi. My point is that Poland is divided like we are, and public opinion matters. And if you're going to be an elite that basically says public opinion doesn't matter because

we're right and you're wrong, you should expect to have it come up and sit the balance box at some point. And I think Europe is maybe five to eight to ten years behind us and a strong minority becoming a tentative majority. Well, now, one of the interesting things about Poland right now is that, and I was not aware of this, but their economy has been booming. And I think, like, they already have passed Japan in per capita income, which is an amazing thing to think about. And that suggests to me that the election really is going to be decided not on the old mix of economy and culture, but it's going to be culture over economy. Maybe, I don't know. Sounds like it might happen that way. Yeah. Okay. Well, now,

now let me, let me ask you, let's turn to Hungary for a moment. We're less than a year out from another national election. I hear polls showing Orban and his Fidesz party is in running behind, is in some trouble, but they've always been very clever and hearty campaigners. What, maybe it's a little early for you to make a call but uh what are you expecting what are you looking for there what what what do we want to call an election not a ten and a half i know i know but no look what i already have they out have they outlayed their welcomes it's just they're tired of having this one party in for 15 years or there's

something else happening what i argued years ago is that, again, let's be honest. Orban has engaged in some what would be considered thuggish techniques, which is to say he doesn't put his opponents in prison and so forth, but they do have some sort of consolidation over a lot of mass market media through interlocking ownerships and so forth that tends not to report about the opposition. You know, not just attacking like they do here. You know, it's not like they'll at least mention Trump's name and, you know, give him a chance to say something before they have 90 seconds of telling you how terrible he is. You know, Orban doesn't even do that with some of the media control. They don't even mention the opposition. But again, public opinion is everything.

Unless you're going to abolish the voters, Orban is kind of facing the same problem that the elites in Brussels are facing. And so the argument I made years ago is why should you be surprised that Orban wins? Is that he's combined economic capitalism with social support and Hungarian nationalism. And oh by the way if you look at every single election going back to 1990 which are the first free elections after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that coalition gets a majority. It used to be split between four parties and now it's in one party. Why should you be surprised that a guy who I don know, represents public opinion of Hungarians wins an election in Hungary. Right. Yeah.

So what's happened? The economy is in the toilet. They've got high inflation, they're cutting back on subsidies and so forth, and they're desperate. They're engaging in price controls. They're desperate to restore economic growth and low inflation before the election. And they're running, it used to be they were running against representatives of the Brussels elite. And, you know, it's kind of like if you were, if you were the mayor of New York in Ghostbusters, here we go. And you had a choice between Dr. Venkman and people who say there's ghosts or the guy in

the beard from the EPA department. Right. And, and what is it that Bill Murray says? He says, you know, that if you believe us, you know, you'll, you know, you know, we, you know, basically, we represent the people you care about millions of registered voters. And that's when they get the okay to go check out goes or on the they used to run against elites who are social democrats who were based in Budapest. Now they're running against a former Bidesh person who is basically saying you can have what you like about Orban with me, Hungarian nationalism. And so it's kind of like Orban Plus.

And so yeah, he's running ahead in the polls. I have looked at all all the constituencies. I know exactly where the election is going to turn, somewhere around Lake Balleton, and I might be there to... Pete Slauson I'd like to ask one of my trademark vague, interminable, and ignorantly sourced questions here. We're seeing the rise of nationalism, obviously, and I just remember all my life being told this is a very bad thing. By the left, nationalism is bad. Nationalism gave us World War I, World War II. Nationalism

is good when Woodrow Wilson is trying to give everybody their own little country, but nationalism is bad. Nationalism now is good for Gaza, the Palestinians, and on some parts of the left, nationalism is good for Ukraine. It's nice to see them standing up for Gaza, the Palestinians, and on some parts of the left, nationalism good for Ukraine. It's nice to see them standing up for that. But in general, no, it's a bad idea. But what we had there, eventually, in the post-war Europe was a movement towards a unified Europe, the common market, the EU, etc., that would respect national identities, but at the same time subsume them into a general transnational project. And my question to you is, might that have worked?

Because I think that it would have. I think it would have been possible to create a regulatory legal economic structure that spanned all of Europe, but at the same time was keenly interested and invested in maintaining national identity. But I think that it fell apart because of the overweening desires of the people in Brussels to absolutely control every elemental atom in the various constituent states.

I think Brexit happened when people woke up one day and looked at a story on the front page of the Telegraph and the Mirror and every other paper that said the EU was about to regulate kettles and how fast they boiled in order to stave off climate change and I think that's when that's when people said that's it I'm not going to be part of this anymore So did they just was it overreach that doomed the project or were the seeds of its downfall there in the construction of it in? The first place I think a little bit of both. Um, you know is that Let's take a look at the United States of America. The United States of America started as 13 separate colonies, and they became a country

through a shared struggle, the war for independence. And then it took many years afterwards to finally settle on the way in which you could maintain diversity and unity, and that was the Constitution. The fundamental thing about the Constitution was that it was not intended to have a government in Washington that would regulate the things that most people would deal with on a daily basis. They would be one with respect to the shared project which is foreign policy and removing the seeds for discord among the states, hence why there was effectively established a free trade zone among the 13 states and everything else was left to the

states. And first of all, the European Union was not born out of a shared struggle. It was born out of a shared failure, the defeat of World War II. So you didn't have that sort of buy-in. You know, initially what you had was a buy-in from the six original members, which were basically the countries who had been conquered by one or another of them. You know, the Germans conquering the other five and then being conquered in turn by the allies, who basically said, we're going to bind ourselves together in an economic, not a political union, so that we never go to war again. That could have

worked. Yeah, all right. I mean, remember, I mean, it began as the European Coal and Steel Union, right? And now we outsource the steel to China and we've outlawed coal. So what's left? Well, what's left is the Eurovision Song Contest. So it's not going out of a huge struggle. And then what you have not done is create that clear division of responsibilities. In a weird sense, they've inverted the American Constitution. They try and regulate directly or indirectly everything that's economic and They have no common foreign policy And so, you know, I would say the the the invasion of Ukraine gives them an opportunity to Actually create a shared struggle, which is the preservation of freedom throughout the European

Subcontinent or the European continent outside of you know the parts that Russia controls by creating a unified common defense and reverting almost everything except for free trade and a common currency and a central bank to the nations. Now of course that would mean there's no such thing as a green new deal that would mean there's no such things as a European Court of Human Rights. In other words, the left can't go along with it. But that, I think, is what the populist right would be accepted, would find acceptable. But absent that, then this can continue to be a project that is neither fish nor fowl

and as a sense just flounder. Pete Yeah. All right, Henry, let's get out today with one question. It's a big one about a scene here at home. So, you know, you have been an acute, an early perceptor, I guess I'd say, of, you know, Trump's abilities, his appeal, the coalition he's put together. You mentioned earlier that it's a somewhat fragile one. So, this is a big subject, so I'm going to limit you to giving us briefly the top two vulnerabilities or hazards that Trump and his supporters should be on guard against right now. Um, the number one thing is failing to recognize the breadth of your coalition.

That typically what's happened in the last 30 years is that people campaign to create a new coalition and then they abandon the new elements of it when they take out, give power to the base. And you see elements of that in the Trump thing, you know, which is, there's no real desire for abolishing the department of education. It may not be something that is particularly of salience to people who voted for Biden and Clinton and Obama. But those aren't, that's why Trump has got a majority is because of those voters.

So by, by, by giving into the temptation to satisfy the base across the board and ignore the swing voter That's the first thing you have to worry about and then just from an issue standpoint You can't have You have to again deal with public opinion when public opinion wants is an economy that Doesn't go into recession and where inflation is under control but that the gains to the economy accrue more to the workers on the margin than to the owners of capital. Trump has been very uneven about pursuing this and you know the fixation on tariffs on, tariffs off, hot tariffs, cold. People don't want that. They'd be happy and would be willing to give a chance to a new economic policy that promises to, over the long run, being

a political four years, put us on a new trajectory. But hot, cold, up, down, yes, no, is not something that they want is that Trump's job approval rating started to go south on on or around Liberation Day. It stopped going south on or around the deal with China. Yeah. And it started going back up, you start going back to the up down, up know hot is cold you know blue is red sort of what's going on then and I guarantee you that by July 4th Trump's job approval rating will be down again. We will consider your fourth pop culture reference to be tariff on tariff off as a reference to Karate Kid and for that we salute you and for many other reasons. Andrew's book The Working-Class

Republican Ronald Reagan and the Return of the Blue Collar Conservatism and of course he's the host of Beyond the Polls which you can find right here on the Ricochet Audio Network. Henry, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been fun. We get into another 45 minutes but next time we're going to talk to you and we expect a sprinkling of pop culture references from the late 90s or even the early aughts. So stretch your horizons in your cultural cupboard.

Thanks, Harry. Cheers. Before we go, there was a book, it's called Original Sin, just lighting up Washington. Everyone's a buzz about it, I'm sure. I see the authors everywhere being asked a series of just absolutely tough questions, just every one of them being skewered, hoisted, petards, the whole business or not. Steven, what do you, what do you make of this? I mean, it's, I, the couple of things that amuse me this week is, well, we

shouldn't be talking about any of this because Joe Biden is sick and that why did the president release the her tapes now when oh he's just trying to just take attention away from his own failures and the rest of it. Chuck Schumer saying we want to move on we're focused on the future which is what they always think that people want to believe but I think there is a general growing national question about who exactly was the president anyway. And when you have revelations about the role of Hunter Biden, I don't think a lot of people actually bought into that guy having a role of any significance whatsoever. The Hunter business is the stuff that makes my eyebrows go up the most.

That and the auto pen, that and the inability to do anything past 11 o'clock in the morning. Do you think there's going to be an accounting? Because I don't. Well, there should be. And apparently the House Oversight Committee says they're going to resume hearings and they have not yet subpoenaed

the senior White House staff under Biden, but they should. And if they resist the subpoena, then I think that there are actual prosecutions of this. I mean, one of the problems with this book is that it hints at who was running the White House, but seems incurious about what the process was in asking about any particular or specific decisions. Like really, how did Joe Biden review 2,400 pardons all in one day in January, right? I mean, this is absurd. It's a whitewash for the media.

By the way, you're going to love this, James, here are two headlines from the last week. The Washington Post editorial board headline, was Biden too frail for the job? Voters should have been informed. And USA Today, Biden's cancer diagnosis raises the question, was he ever in good enough health? Well, you know, gosh, somebody could have told us who might have been that, right? I mean, you know. It's just a mystery. It is.

Now, I, you know, here I'm sorry, I'm going to be very harsh and rude and people think I'm a moral monster, but I think that there's a fitting irony of Biden's diagnosis of cancer, an advanced case of it, apparently, because he has been a malignant force in American politics in his entire career. I mean, I think you can put an awful lot of the blame for the toxic character of American politics on his behavior in the Bork nomination 35 years ago. You know, there's a great quote I have in one of my books where Biden said in 1986, right before he became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he said, if President Reagan sends up Robert Bork, I'd probably have to vote for him. He's qualified,

and presidents should get their appointees if they're qualified. And if the groups tear me apart, I'll just have to live with it. I'm not Ted Kennedy. Exact quote, memorized. And of course, within 30 seconds of the Bork nomination, Biden capitulated to the groups, who also we now know ran his White House, the groups, and then to Ted Kennedy, right? And he totally distorted the judicial politics ever since, and I think that's spread across the board in politics. And I think, and they've tried to run that drill over again, right? Just ask Brett Kavanaugh, just ask Clarence Thomas, just ask any number of nominees and other figures that we now decide that personal attacks are legitimate and is now a main part of the Democratic playbook. He was the author of

that. So it's always been a myth that he was, oh, good old moderate Joe from Scranton. He never really stood for anything except himself, and I think that's now fully revealed to everybody. And my last word is, all those people who work for him, Donilon, Jake Sullivan, Steve Reschetti, all the rest, they should never have a a job again ever anywhere in politics and certainly not in government. I was having a conversation last year with somebody in England who was a member of the Who Wrote Columns for a very influential paper who was just, who was saying that Joe Biden struck her as a kindly grandpa figure. And I said, no, no, that may be because he's dim and he's in the marbles have all rolled

down a hole in his spine and clattered out somewhere in the floor. But let me tell you, this man is a prevaricating intellectual nullity of boundless self-regard. He's an awful man and anybody who's been watching him all these times knows that he is an awful man and the way his positions have shifted from this to That with equal conviction. I mean just because he got soft as pudding in his dotage doesn't mean that he hasn't been a nasty fellow before and again the self-regard the the inflation of the resume the plagiarism The constant need to it. I mean, it's okay to be a guy from Scranton who makes it into the Senate. That's accomplishment enough, but he's always going back and finding apples from his

past and polishing them a little bit more. I just cannot stand the man regardless of politics, regardless of them, because there were times when I agreed with some of the positions that he had, but there was just a sneer and a pointedness to him that I just... that coupled with the egotism just made him, I thought, an incredibly unattractive figure. But then he got old and then he got... then he was the then he was the gravitas plug that was dropped into the Obama administration to bring it weight because we were so concerned about the the inexperience of the occupant. Oh good times, good times, as the kids say. Before we go out, one last little thing that we

do that bores everybody because they don't care, but I'll ask you, Stephen, what are you watching on television? Nothing right now. I'm so far behind on so many projects and I'm about to go traveling for a month overseas, although I'll still show up for our weekly conversation. So I haven't been watching anything.

You don't? Not even the news, but. You don't load up your iPad or your iPhone with with Content before you go on a trip so you can watch something one of those guys who sits there in the plane it just looks Yeah, right. No, I probably will do that, but that's ahead of me not behind me. So well my upcoming flight I plan to take as usual to Perry Mason's because there's nothing better sitting down for your little airplane meal than with a Perry Mason You are guaranteed a story. You're guaranteed a mystery, you are guaranteed a resolution, and then it's done. Unlike most of modern television,

which will go on and on and on for 12, 15 episodes and drag you to the last episode where there's a cliffhanger and then you gotta wait for another two years before they gather everybody together and do it up again. I am, however, happy to say that of the many shows that I have queued, I blasted through one end to end, two a night sometimes, with the first season of Andor as a man who was utterly completely disgusted with Star Wars and tired of it and found it to be the children's show that it actually revealed itself to be. I was stunned to find that they actually

made a grown-up version of it that was an extraordinary piece of storytelling. So now I got to start season two tonight and maybe if I'm on the plane, I'll watch the last episode, stand up a cheer at three o'clock in the morning as the plane is arcing its way through the dark night. Folks, you gotta go to Ricochet is what you have to do. If this is your 741st podcast and you've never gone there, I don't know, what's the matter with you?

It's unlikely, but it's statistically possible. If you go there, you will find in the member feed, oh, sorry, you can't because you don't belong, but we'd love you to belong. Everybody can read the main page. You're going to listen to the podcast. But the member feed, well, just the other day we were talking something about politics, something about Judaism, something about music because one of the members had attended the great long Malarian love fest in Europe. It's everything. It is the sane civil center-right conversation you've been looking for on the internet. You won't

find it on Twitter, ex, you won't find it in Facebook, you'll find it at Ricochet. And yeah, you got to pay a couple of shekels for it and that's fine because that keeps everybody with, as Rob Long used to say, brother Rob, it keeps us well, it keeps you with skin in the game. I'm James Lollix here in Minneapolis, Stephen in California. You, the listener, are wherever you are. We thank you for dropping by and we hope to see you in the next episode of the podcast. In the meantime, we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Bye-bye. Next week, James.