The Ricochet Podcast - It's A Beautiful Day

Episode Date: February 21, 2013

This week on The Ricochet Podcast, social conservatives make their case to Rob, Haley Barbour makes his case for a new party coalition, Victor Davis Hanson is optimistic about the future and schools us in the finer points of pistachio farming, Lileks defends cruising, and Peter is under the weather. Still, it’s a sweet day for a podcast. Music from this week’s show: It’s A Beautiful Morning by The... Source

Activate program. What is it about right to work that you oppose so much? Get the f*** out of my face! You do your work, and we will do our best. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs, and our guests today include former Governor Haley Barber and America's favorite classicist professor raisin farmer, Victor Davis Hanson. There's a lot to talk about, so let us have ourselves a podcast starting right about now.

Yes, indeed, this is it. Ricochet Podcast number 157. It's brought to you by Hillsdale College and their new free online college course. We bring you all these free things. Well, what's this one? This free course is the Constitution and Western Heritage. We'll be talking about it later in the show, but right now you can go to ricochet.com slash Hillsdale to sign up for free.

It's as close as you can get to being a Hillsdale student without ever leaving your house, really. Well, welcome to the other guys who are stuck in their house like the rest of us, in their pajamas probably, not even shaven, just a to the other guys who are stuck in their house like the rest of us, in their pajamas probably, not even shaven, just a couple of smart guys who issue things like hygiene and social skills

to focus on their thoughts. Peter and Rob, how are you doing? Peter, I understand that you are slightly under the weather today. Oh, I have a rotten cold again. As opposed to a really good, fine, fragrant sweet one you have. High class cold. Nobody ever gets one to a really good, fine, fragrant sweet one, yeah. High-class cold. Yeah, nobody ever gets one of those.

Rob, how about you? James, I'm fine. I sleep the sleep of the just and the pure, and I wake up in full, fine health, I think maybe because I live right. As do I. How many hours do you get? I don't know about anybody else, but just me.

Cough, heck, cough, heck. I'm muting myself to blow my nose and disgust demons inside you peter how many hours do you get rob how many hours do you sleep in contiguous blocks really you know i don't um you know i obviously what i i'm my aim is 12 actually my aim is 22 um that's a friend of mine, a Marine, said that when he was in Iraq, most of it, you know, you eat until you're tired and you sleep

until you're hungry. I don't find that actually, that Iraqi analogies tend to work well up here in my life, but I try to get a good seven hours and then I take a huge nap in the middle of the day, which restores me and keeps me going until 1, 1.30 in the morning, if I wish. Oh, yeah.

That's what I like to write. And after I've written, I go on the web, and I read, and you go to Ricochet, for example, and you find that a reader has taken two tasks. You, Rob Long, Jonah out there, if he's listening, and the Yeti, who is attached to this as well, of course, fiddling with the dials. He's got this open letter post, which I'm sure you saw, Rob, which essentially, if I get the conversation right, is berating the people who don't want the SOCONs to have as much of a voice as they would like or should get or what. Explain exactly how you saw it. Well, it's complicated, but I mean it's a really good post,

well-written and well-thought-out. And he sent me an email message um, a message, uh, yesterday cause I missed it over the weekend. I guess he posted over the weekend. And of course, as things do Monday morning, everybody's posting. And so this thing slipped to the second page.

And so he was correct that I would have missed it. Um, like a lot of people. So this is kind of good to talk about. Uh, and he, you know, he lays out a very cogent argument for,

uh, for what, what it really means to be a social conservative, what it really means to say the thing that a lot of social conservatives hate when they hear when people say, hey – no, I'm a fiscal conservative but I'm socially liberal. For legitimate reasons. So it's a very good post. I don't want to summarize it.

It's too long frankly to be summarized appropriately and fairly here. But it's great. It's really well written and the conversation is very good. There's a certain amount of taking me to task but it's all done in I think in really good faith and I sort of respond to my own little way. I basically said this is that it's often people say, well, I know you feel – I don't know why you feel you have to say that. Is it just so that you can get fired or that you continue to work in Hollywood

in this sort of liberal environment? And the truth is no. The reason I say the things that I'm socially liberal about or I don't know what that even means but the big moral issues on which I may differ with my conservative colleagues and friends, I'm not doing it because I'm

adjusting my viewpoints to suit my environment. I'm doing it because I really do feel that way. Right. I understand, and I think that when you say the big issues, I think on the really big issues, I don't have disagreements. I have disagreements on the smaller issues and disagreements as to the extent to which those smaller issues

should occupy the party's mind. I think the gravest problems the country faces are economic and that needs to be addressed first. After that, we can fix. We get back in power and fix that stuff. So it's a question of priorities and you, Robert, being taken to task essentially for insufficiently proper ordering of your priorities. Is that how you see part of it?

I analyze it this way. I mean, we're talking about two specific issues about abortion and gay marriage. I kind of feel like those are cultural and those are open to persuasion and the persuasive elements of

all of those issues on all sides of those issues are waging a war and our side isn't waging the war quite as well. The American people are persuaded. You could go back in 20 years and tell, you know, an ordinary Democrat, an African-American Democrat, the most, you know, the part of the party base that in the future, Democratic president, not that distant future,

Democratic president and their party would come out strongly in favor of gay marriage. They probably look at you like you had two heads, but such has been the power of that persuasive lobby that they have actually persuaded a huge portion of Americans, the majority of Americans, that it's OK. That is in the direction you want it to go in, but that does show you the ability to persuade the Americans of something that is possible. Likewise, I say I feel like the pro-life movement, it would be better, and I think they're showing green shoots of success in trying to persuade Americans that the – that life begins at conception. And I think that as people get older and have children and it certainly shows that with women who've had children, they are open to that argument and open to that persuasion. And that would be what we should do and take it out of the political realm for now because i think we'll lose the political and i think in several decades when we've successfully grafted a second head onto people's shoulders your statement people would look at you like you had two heads will be example of by noggin prejudice and just decide it means like saying

queer is a three dollar bill the hateful language it flows out of you rob is extraordinary oh peter's dead i'm sorry prod him i am because he's oh he right. No, no, I'm with, I am with you. You were outside of this, either having a cold or writing the cold war history, but nevertheless, um, how do you come, how do you come down in this big tentism? Oh, I'm in favor of, well, I mean, I'm in favor of having Rob around. It's like a, Rob gives me something to chew on. Rob gives me something to chew on. The one place I disagree with Rob, and I think it's just, I may have to pull together a post on this if I live through this cold. Rob says that the pro-life movement has – I think your argument is that they've spent too much time pursuing their arguments in the court and not enough time trying to persuade people. And I believe that you're just not aware of the thousands of clinics and places that have been set up in church basements across the country to help women with unwanted pregnancies.

There's just an enormous amount of work that's been and has been done for many years now. So I have a feeling you're just not up on that in Venice Beach. But maybe you are and that's not your point. I don't question the manpower and I don't question the enthusiasm. I don't question the faith. I mean that's part of what you want to encourage in all people is this kind of like belief in your – firm belief in your moral position and a willingness to stand up for it. My question is how effective it's been. Well, OK.

You could – I mean this is – Roe versus Wade was 40 years ago now and all the liberals, certainly Justice Brennan who wrote the opinion, believed that was that. Put this issue behind us. We now have it. We will very quickly achieve a national consensus on this and let's move along. And no such consensus has ever been reached. Yet, contrary, in the recent years, the number of people, polls have been indicating less support for abortion and more support for the pro-life movement. So that strikes me as a huge achievement.

But not really. It's been 40 years. We just elected and reelected the most pro-abortion president in American history. He has taken his socialized medicine to the churches. He has abridged, I believe, abridged the religious freedoms of churches. He has essentially told people of faith who, who, who believe, you know,

in good faith, strongly from their heart in the pro-life position that they, they just have to suck it up and pay for other people to commit what they consider to be infanticide. And he did that and he got reelected for it. And he's been president for the next four years. So I don't think – These are both facts.

You may make of them what you will. I just find it very impressive that inch by inch, state law by state law, clinic by clinic, pregnancy help center after pregnancy health center, that battle – let's – at a minimum, they're not, there has been no surrender. And to the contrary, in recent years, the polls have been moving in favor of the pro-life position. That's a fact. What you said is also a fact. You may interpret it any way you want, I suppose, as a failure or as an achievement. Well, I put it in this context. The Koch brothers, the wonderful Koch brothers, have undergone this thorough going of everything they spent and what they spent it on and who got it. Every single one of their operations.

They have a very complicated political operation. And I'm not going to do it justice here. I should probably be looking it up rather than winging it, but I'm winging it now. They fired everybody basically. They shut it all down and they're redoing it all. They've canceled or postponed their two big events that they have every year to rethink their strategy and rethink the efficacy of what they're trying to do. They haven't given up.

The Koch brothers are still very, very passionate free market activists and proponents. But they are reviewing every single thing they did and rethinking and they are looking very closely at what Obama did on that.

That strikes me as very smart. Right. And you don't believe that the rethinks of that kind of take. I mean the Koch brothers are huge. They're both worth strikes me as very smart. Right. And you don't believe that the rethinks of that kind of take, I mean, the Koch brothers are huge. They're both worth many billions of dollars when they run politics.

What I find impressive about the pro-life movement is it's entirely grassroots. There's very little national organization that has any size or heft at all. Anyway, so I think we're talking about two different things. However, I grant your point. I grant your point. It is astounding that what you said about if you said 20 years ago to an African-American, that if you said 40 years ago

or 42, 43 years ago to Jesse Jackson, who was pro-life at that time, that 40 years later, he and every prominent African-American politician would be pro-choice or for that matter, if you had said it to a union, to George Meany or Lane Kirkland, a union, that the Democratic Party would become so vigorously, vehemently, insistently, rigidly pro-choice is not a happy development. No, and I think especially in light of Charles Murray's book and others, and of course Freakonomics was a great one for that. When you realize that the one – certainly one lens that would be appropriate and completely defensible for the African-American community to look at abortion through, complicated sentence but you know what I mean, would be the lens of race and racial politics. And it is without doubt that the abortion movement has more than a tinge of liberal eugenics to it. Agreed. Somebody who's pro-choice, but I'm surprised that no one on the other side is making that argument. They're too wrapped up and locked into their bizarre pseudo-theology of liberalism, socialism, and government control. Yes, well, indeed. When people use words like that, liberty, equality, they mean different things now than was meant exactly at the time when the country was founded.

They mean different things in the Declaration of Independence. But what does it mean exactly? Well, we, the people, a phrase you may have heard before, need to understand what it means to be free. And that requires a history lesson, friends. And who will teach us who better than Hillsdale College? Hundreds of thousands of people took the Constitutional Western Heritage courses. Now Hillsdale offers what the country needs at just the right time and, might I add, at just the right price. At ricochet.com

slash Hillsdale, you'll see that Hillsdale has created a 10-week online history course called American Heritage. It's based on the course that all the students at Hillsdale are required to take in order to graduate. Now this 10-week course, you'll hear from President Dr. Larry Arnn, other members of the history faculty on topics like the American founding, the crisis of the Union, the Civil War, America's rise to a global power, and the Reagan Revolution.

The course has lectures, readings, quizzes. It's as close as you can get to being a Hillsdale student without ever leaving your home. And we know how much we hate that, especially when it's seven below as it is in Minnesota. Best of all, it's free. And after you sign up, you can take the course at your leisure. Sign up now at ricochet.com slash Hillsdale. Take the free American Heritage course to understand how we can recover the republic and our rich American heritage. And of course, we thank the fine folks at Hillsdale for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. And we're happy to bring back to the podcast the 62nd governor of Mississippi, our Ricochet favorite,

Haley Barber, from 2004 to 2012. That's when he was in office, and he gained national spotlight in August 2005 after Mississippi got whapped by Katrina. Now, before being elected governor, Barber had a long career in the national stage. Lawyer, lobbyist, served as the chairman of the RNC from 93 to 97, during which time, incidentally, the Republicans captured both the Senate and the House. So, you know, maybe he's got something to tell us about what to do in the future. He's now the founding partner of the BGR Group in Washington, D.C., and we welcome back to the podcast Governor Haley Barber. Haley, this is the first time we've talked since the election.

Were you expecting better? Well, I was expecting better. It's a very interesting election. If you said the last Friday in July who's going to win, everybody would have said, oh, Lord, Obama's going to run away with it. The last Friday in August, you'd have said, dang, Romney's caught up. The last Friday in September, Obama had opened his lead back up. Then the last Friday in October, Romney had pulled ahead in the national polls and was closing in some of the target states. I don't remember an election that swung that swiftly that often.

And then, candidly, Sandy was like a gigantic wet blanket on the whole election. For about a week, nobody talked about taxes or spending or unemployment or health care. Everybody focused on this big megastorm in the most heavily populated area of the country. And I really believe that helped. Well, there's no question it killed Romney's momentum, which was not gigantic, but was clearly continuing. And nothing Obama did stopped Romney's momentum. The storm did. And also, it helped Obama look a little more bipartisan, a little more presidential.

And the late, late deciders, if you look at the polling, normally vote against the incumbent, in this case voted by fair margin for the incumbent. And I think that that wet blanket on the campaign for the last few days played a real major role in that. But having said that, usually an incumbent president wins. They don't lose very often. If you go back to 1896, only once has a president won the White House away from the other party like Obama did, and then turned around and lost in just four years.

That was Jimmy Carter. So it wasn't unexpected, but I do think the way it played out, it looked at the end as if Romney had a chance until the storm blacked him out. Haley, so are we supposed to conclude that we did about the best we could, now we just dust ourselves off, pick ourselves up and start all over again? Or are there two or three very specific lessons that we should learn from what took place? Well, no, we didn't do the best we could. And let me tell you, this is my 12th presidential campaign, 44 years. I dropped out of college in 68 and ran 30 counties for Nixon in the 68 campaign. One of the first things I was taught in politics among the Ten Commandments is an attack unanswered is an attack admitted.

If you let somebody attack you over and over and over and over for the same sins, and you never hit back, if you never show that that's not true, then it sticks. And Romney had a period from about April, frankly for the rest of the campaign, but from April to August particularly, where he was attacked almost always on personal grounds. A vulture capitalist doesn't care about people like you, ships jobs to China, takes health insurance away from people so their wives die, which turned out to be a totally fabricated story. You know, that he was just a blue perfect plutocrat

married to a known equestrian. I mean, it was never Romney's bad on the issues like when they attacked Dole in 96. It was personal, personal, personal. When you looked at the polling in late October, you continued to see a powerful residue that Romney was a rich white guy who doesn't care about people like me. And I don't like what Obama's doing, but I don't feel comfortable with him. I think that's part of the reason that millions of people who voted in 2008 didn't vote in 2012. When you look at where a lot of these declines in votes came from, they were from blue-collar workers, rural whites, who just, that attack on Romney or those attacks on Romney stuck. So we should have hit back, and there was plenty to hit back with, and I don't mean attack Obama's record hit back. We should have hit back calling the fact that this stuff was mostly a bunch of lies.

If there's anything about Romney, he is a gentleman and a fine person who's extremely generous and upright. He is not a sleazy person by any stretch. But secondly, we did a very poor job and have done a very poor job in recent years in reaching out to other voters who are willing to vote Republican but aren't just kind of standard Republicans. And particularly, we see that demographically. To me, it's astounding that Asian Americans voted for Obama by a higher percentage than Latinos.

Latinos were the object of the Obama campaign, and Romney's saying that people should self-deport. I mean, that's a welcoming statement for somebody you want to vote for you. I want to send your mama home. Yet Asian Americans voted by a higher percentage for Obama than Latinos. You know, Peter, when you and I were growing up, and I'm a little older than you, but, you know, the Chinese Americans were almost all Republicans. The Vietnamese Americans were almost all Republicans. In fact, anybody who came to America fleeing communism knew the difference between Democrats

and Republicans. Well, maybe it's because they're smart. The Indian Americans, hugely successful people, entrepreneurial professionals, and yet Asian Americans vote more for Obama than Latinos. So we've got to reach out to people, and not only with our message, but we've got to go out and make people understand we want your vote. We want your support. We want you to be part of what's going on and make America successful.

And we did a poor job of that with statements like self-deportation and I want to be the most anti-immigration person in the Republican debates, which was clearly a Romney strategy. And I think it was a very bad strategy. Those are just a couple of examples. Haley, apart from anything else, what's occurring – this is Peter here. I've got a cold. I don't know who I sound like, but it's Peter. If you take Hispanics – Peter with a cold here. I've got a cold. I don't know who I sound like, but it's Peter. If you take Hispanics –

Peter with a cold. Exactly. Peter with a cold. If you take Hispanics and Asians out of the equation, I'll tell you one thing you've done. You've lost California permanently and by big margins. You've turned California into a one-party state. So here's another thing that I was trying to – I was thinking what do I want to ask Haley in his limited time? Here's the next question and then I'll shut up because I know Rob and James also want to ask questions as well.

I'm going to be in Washington next week where I'm going to interview a couple of governors, Scott Walker, Sam Brownback. And to prepare for these interviews, I read up on what Republican governors are doing. Now, you know this is better than almost anybody else in the country because you just step down after eight years as a governor in Mississippi. The governors are doing fine. We have 30 out of 50 governors and they are active. You read their statements, their morale is high. Support for them varies. I guess Bobby Jindal's support has just eroded. Scott Walker's, however, is solidly over 50%. So out there in the heartland where the press does not report, where there's not much influence on the national perception of the GOP, you've got a very, very impressive set of governors who day by day are taking conservative principles and fashioning them into specific policy solutions to the problems they face.

It's really impressive. And then in Washington, where the press does report, you've got Republicans on the defensive. Why wouldn't they be? You've got the press and the president of the United States against them. But how do you square that circle? How do you enable governors to have more of a role in shaping national perceptions of the GOP? Well, of course, when I was chairman of the party in the 90s, Peter, we had Tommy Thompson, John Engler, Bill Well, Pete Wilson, George Bush. We had a bunch of outstanding governors from little states like Mike Leavitt in Utah to great big states. And you learn in a state, the governor is the most influential, powerful, and often most popular person in that state.

And that was clearly the truth with us in the 90s. If you remember, Republican governors wrote the welfare reform bill that President Clinton ultimately signed. They were the cutting edge of welfare reform, of school reform, school choice, charter schools. And so they're doing things that matter. school choice, charter schools. And so they're doing things that matter. The thing you didn't mention I think is so critical today,

the economic policies of these Republican governors is almost exactly the opposite of the economic policies of the Obama administration. All Obama wants is to spend more money. He thinks what's wrong with America is the government's not spending enough money and your taxes are too low. Frankly, I don't hear that in the Kroger bunch. But the Republican governors

are actually achieving savings while their states are getting better. Some of the ones who have the most economic growth are the ones who are controlling spending the most aggressively. The federal view is that federal spending is an economic benefit. And I think most of us know that when the government soaks up all the money, it's impossible for the private sector to grow. That the fact is growing government usually leads to a smaller private economy.

And what we need in America is a bigger private economy. And these governors are supporting policies to help make that happen. And Obama is doing just the opposite. Hey, Governor, it's Rob Long in Los Angeles. How are you? Hey, Rob. I'm great. You know, just as a side note, I was in the great state of Mississippi about three weeks ago. I can report it looks beautiful as always. Well, thank you very much. But you just talked about government sucking up all the money, and in two weeks we got another fiscal face-off I guess.

And sequester – the sequester that was agreed to about a year and a half ago by Republicans and Democrats might start March 1st. And the question everybody is asking themselves is, okay, if it happens, who's going to win this? Obama seems to think he's going to position it as the draconian – a second coming of the famous Newt Gingrich government shutdown. And the Republicans are trying to think that – or thinking that they're going to pin this all on Obama. After all, it is his sequester idea. It is the thing that he created and was the architect of. How's this going to play out? Well, first of all, I believe that the Republicans will not flinch. They are enjoying seeing Obama, who was, as you mentioned, the author, the original proponent of the sequester, now Obama's squirming because he never thought the Republicans would be willing to accept the defense cuts

and therefore that all the discretionary domestic spending for Obama's pet programs would be safe, protected by Republicans' protection of the defense programs. The fact of the matter is, a bunch of spending is going to be reduced on the domestic side, and it needs to be reduced on the domestic side. There are some bad cuts involved in here. We've already cut the defense budget by a significant amount, and this is going to be more defense cuts.

But the Republicans, in my opinion, are going to hold firm. They're not going to flinch. We're going to start these cuts. And as soon as the sequester goes into effect March 1st, I hope the Republicans are going to start having hearings on the continuing resolution, which is funding the government now, as your listeners know. We haven't had a budget in three years.

Each year, instead of the budget process being completed, Congress just passed what's called a continuing resolution, which essentially put, for all intents and purposes, put government spending on automatic pilot. Now, the Senate hasn't even tried to have a budget. To their credit, the Republican House the last two years has passed a budget. But the Senate doesn't even take it up. Here's the president acting like he's concerned about fiscal policy. Well, how can you be concerned about fiscal policy? And he has never peaked about there not being a budget for the last three years. Well, now for the first time, I think the Republicans are going to take the continuing resolution as it gets negotiate on this or whether they're going to shut down the government.

So your advice – if you were giving advice to the Republicans in the House and Republicans nationally, it's stand firm. Stand firm, but on the CR, the House needs to pass its version of the CR, send it to the Senate. Right. Because we should never do like the Democrats do, and that is not offer the Americans an alternative or our version of what ought to be. But I think this is going to be the second biggest big round of attempted savings. And then you've got the actual budget for fiscal year 14 that normally we would already be involved in that process. So if you look back on had a budget so many years, we're cleaning up the mess from Obama's last three years. So if you look back on the past sort of year and a half, even it'll be two years of this wrangling between John Boehner and Barack Obama, it's starting to look a little like John Boehner outsmarted him.

Or am I overthinking it? Well, I think you have situations where the president had such an overwhelming advantage, such as the fiscal cliff. Republicans were not about to sit there and allow the taxes of 98% of the Americans who pay income tax. And let's remember, a huge percentage of Americans don't pay any net income tax. But Republicans were not about to allow the taxes of 98% of income taxpayers to go up when the fiscal cliff came. They wanted to get some spending cuts put on. They wanted to do a couple of things that they actually did get done. I think there is a positive view of what they did on the estate tax, the death tax.

But Obama couldn't lose that argument. He knew that the Republicans weren't going to let everybody's taxes go up. Then the Republicans outsmarted him on the debt ceiling. He just knew the Republicans were going to use debt ceiling as the first vehicle to try to cut spending in 2013

and that the American people would not want to have the risk of America's credit rating to be reduced, or even worse, for the American government to default. So Boehner was smart enough, and McConnell, to say, we're going to move that to fight come over sequester, because we first battle, and it's because the circumstances are quite different than from the fiscal cliff. Right. So I guess, forgive me for being hopeful, I guess. I was sort of despairing, and I'm well known as a despairing type, but it does seem like we have an argument that we could even win.

Do you think it's because – I think we will win. Yeah. I think we will win. I think with few exceptions, most people won't even notice the sequester. With few exceptions. That's right. When I was governor, we have to have a balanced budget in Mississippi, and under the Constitution, the governor has the authority, if the legislature is not in session, to make spending cuts based on, you know, below what the legislated budget is.

I cut spending 9.4%. Nobody noticed. I mean, you know, nursing homes didn't close. Hospitals didn't start throwing out patients. They didn't start parking police cars. They didn't start parking police cars. They didn't start running out of gas. Nobody noticed. Yeah, what are they going to do, cancel Saturday mail?

Well, it isn't because of this fiscal crisis that we're canceling Saturday mail, I can tell you that. One other thing that I think is very important about the election and what's going on now, Obama is pretending that he's got this big mandate, that he had this huge victory. He got 51% of the vote. He doesn't have a mandate. His own re-election campaign chose not to run on his record. You know, Peter, you never heard anybody say it's morning again in America. That's for sure. In the Obama campaign. His whole campaign is Romney is bad. Romney doesn't care about people like you. Romney is a rich plutocrat not Obama's done a good job

so he doesn't have a mandate and people know that the news media sometimes seems to forget it but he has been acting as if he could just shove things down the country's throat like he did Obamacare

that dog won't hunt in this Congress Governor Barr we thank you for stopping by today and if you do he did Obamacare, that dog won't hunt in this Congress. Governor Baru, we thank you for stopping by today. And if you do start up a website and start blogging, I'd like you to call it What I'm Hearing at the Kroger. There's a lot of good stuff going on at the Kroger. Absolutely, sir. Thank you for dropping by. Haley, you cheered us all up.

You cheered us all up. It's not as bad as I thought. Thank you. Take care. I was first introduced to Kroger when I was doing a tour of duty for Northrop King in the South. I loved going to the Kroger's because that was the really big, great, shiny store down there after little dusty, small two-aisle grocery stores. It was a pleasure to reenter the cool air-conditioned joys of a Kroger. But I wanted to ask him. Unfortunately, we didn't have the time and maybe we can talk to Victor about

this. Is it he mentioned that we're losing the Asian America, the Republicans are losing the Asian America. Could it be possibly guys that you have a very smart demographic that says we would love to be a pro capitalist and pro business, but frankly, we see the way things are going. This is a corporatist society where you wear access to power and sucking up to the gov is the clearest route to your success. Why would we follow the party that's really bad at the ideas we'd like to have? I think that's undoubtedly true, actually, James. I think you're right on. It's mostly an urban vote, mostly urban small business owners. Certainly in Los Angeles, that is true. That's true throughout California, the Asian vote I mean. And it makes sense for them to be active members of the Democratic Party because the Republicans have kind of given up having a voice in the cities.

If you're in LA and you're running a small business or just – or God forbid you're successful enough. You own three little – those two- two aisle grocery stores to talk about um you know you the smart move is to is to be a local democrat is to support local democratic politicians and to remind them that you did that and that way you've got a city councilman and a county commissioner and you've got a state you know maybe a state assemblyman who really who know you who you are know your name or in power i mean it's logical. We're not competing there. So we're asking people to vote for us because they – especially those people because they ideologically agree with us.

But if you're a practical businessman, what are you going to do? I don't know. Well, we have the problem here too in Minneapolis where we've got new laws that say maybe you'll be able to take goods from your store and advertise them out on the sidewalk. Now, you picture a little grocer, you know, with a fat Irish cop on the beat walking by and lifting an apple. I mean, that kind of display of wares. And it's the individual small grocery store owners who want to do this. And these are the guys who are looking around and they don't see a single Republican in office anywhere in the city. So naturally, they're going to gravitate to and give money to the people who can dole out the favors.

So, I mean, if you want to talk about this in a historical perspective or from the perspective of somebody who actually comes up against rules and regulations in the course of doing the other thing he does besides being brilliant, you would look at Victor Davis Hanson. You know him, of course. You've seen him.

You've read him everywhere. World-famous military historian, columnist, political essayist, classicist, professor, scholar of ancient warfare. He's currently the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and incidentally runs a family farm in Selma, California, where he's talking to us from today. Welcome back to the podcast here. Thanks for having me, you guys. You know, Victor, I was hearing you on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday, and you were talking about, it was a great conversation,

about what it means right now for America's position in the world to be doing the military drawdown, and also not just the logistical drawdown, but the loss of talent in the armed forces itself. Could you briefly speak to whether or not America has peaked, or whether or not there's some hope here that we can restore our preeminent position and keep it? Well, I was trying not to be alarmist because the U.S. military still spends more than the next 25 militaries combined. And it's still much more powerful than China's. And it's grown enormously since 9-11. All that being said, I was worried that we had five four-star generals in just four years under Obama in Afghanistan.

We only had two during seven under Bush. And some of the generals that typify the fighting spirit, so to speak, the patent wing of the military, whether it's General Allen or General Mattis or General Petraeus or General McChrystal or General McKernan, have all left under dubious circumstances. And the people who are being promoted, I think I've met and talked to Martin Dempsey, but whatever one thinks of him, he's more of a bureaucrat. And I think that the military is sort of being politicized because I think this administration believes that if you need social change, whether it's gays openly in the military or women on the front lines or

whatever particular wedge issue appeals to constituencies, they can take place in the military without a national white paper or investigative discussion or congressional debate or hearing. You just snap your fingers and the military can do it. So what I'm worried about is I think that the military is transmogrifying into something other than, and I'm not, I mean, under Bush, he ran against Nation Bill and then he Nation Bill. I understood that. But this is even more, it's back to Clinton and all of these social,

economic, cultural changes that are so attractive for the left when they look at the military and they see that efficiency and that ability to implement change immediately. And I think it has repercussions on our fighting the tip of the spear, so to speak. Hey, Victor, it's Rob Long in L.A. I got a question. If this sequester goes through and if there are these draconian cuts, especially to the military, what do you say to people kind of like me who think, well, let's first bring everybody home from Germany. Why are they in Germany?

Let's first bring everybody home from Japan and the Pacific. Why are they there? Let's first sort of pull in our troops overseas and stop having these bases in strange places. There's still bases in Italy, for heaven's sakes. Why don't we just all bring those home first? Let's do that first and we can have all the robots and drones and flying things we want. And then we'll get to that later. But we won't cut in Afghanistan, obviously.

We won't cut where we need to, where our interests are really clear. But I don't think we have an interest in West Germany and I don't think we should have an interest in Japan. I think Japan should start taking an interest in its defense, and I don't think we should have an interest in Japan. I think Japan should start taking an interest in its defense, and I don't know why we're in Italy. So isn't there a way to... Well, we can say two things, and I have some sympathy for your point of view, actually. One is that when we talk about draconian cuts, I think we shouldn't be cutting the defense budget, but nevertheless, we're talking about a cut in the increase. Even Rand Paul had a pretty good little take on that with Wolf Blitzer the other day. If you look at 2008 to 2013 with the sequester, we're still going up about 2% or 3% a year.

So we're talking about cutting the rate of growing. If we cut $100 billion this year, we're still going to run up almost a trillion dollars. So it's not going to be as draconian. And you know the military is no different than the local university. When they get cuts, they always lay off the French professors and never the diversity czar. So they're going to deliberately cut the Blue Angels or say that a carrier can't go, but they're not going to cut the biodiesel fuel $27 gallon program or the band. But that's one thing.

The other thing is that there are certain reasons why we have troops there. And one of them is the anomaly of Germany, because since 1870, it's been the German problem. It's so dynamic, it's so powerful, that it was 1870, 1914, 1939, and the solution since 1939 had been A, to divide it. That's no longer operative. And then B, to occupy it, and we're not really there much. Well, I think we have 30,000 troops left after 204, and then C was sort of to have it on our side in the Cold War.

Well, there is no Cold War anymore. So all I'm saying is that there's an anomaly, and that is that the most powerful state in Europe does not have a military, and unlike Britain and France that are much weaker, it's not nuclear. They could build them like Mercedes tomorrow. And if we pull out and we say, you know, Europe's on your own, and I'm sympathetic in some ways, we didn't have to be an adult enough to say, you know what?

In 15 years, there's going to be a Wehrmacht again, and there's probably going to be a nuclear Germany, and that's okay. And the same thing is true of Japan. We say to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, maybe the Philippines, look, don't worry about China. You're under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Don't worry about North Korea. We've got this tripwire in the 38th parallel. And all of you guys, especially Japan and Taiwan and South Korea, could make nukes like you do Toyotas. They'd work, unlike North Korea. But don't do it, because we're going to protect you. We're going to have bases there and et cetera. We're going to make sure that China doesn't get in your territorial waters, just like Russia didn't. And if we don't want to do that, and it's very expensive, we can just say, you know what, we're not going to do that. We're going to go back to 1939 and let China and Japan duke it out over a stupid island

and let South Korea build its own nuclear deterrent against North Korea and tell Taiwan, you know what, if I were you, I'd go nuke, because then you'd be protected. And they would. They could do it easily. I don't think it's realistic to say we can just pull out and everything's going to be the same as it is now. So we know the cost of a U.S. high-profile, high-cost presence, but we don't know the cost of not being there, and we should find out if we want to.

I'm not trying to demonize anybody. I just think, you know what, if that's what the United States wants to do, then let's get back out and let those countries assume their natural military stature that would be commiserate with their economic power and population. And Germany and Japan had been amorphous anomaly because it doesn't make any sense that such powerful countries historically do not have militaries commiserate with what they could and they will if we get out they'll have to you can't ask the japanese to sit there right with the most sophisticated and then they have a north korean test missile go over its international waters or over its its landmass you can't tell germany

every single day to sit there and be insulted by whom? Greeks? Italians? Portuguese? Insult them every day and then tell the Iranians, say, hey, someday we're going to get a three-stage rocket. And I'm thinking, these guys built something like an Abrams tank 70 years ago. Come on. You can't do that. I mean, they're going to do that again, no matter what. If we get out, they're going to do that. And you know, when you go to Germany today and you talk to a German after the second glass of beer, you start getting a little weird because he,

he wants to fight, you know, the battle of curse with you and tell you how they actually won the battle. He wants to tell you that they could crush the Greeks in a second if they wanted to. So those tendencies are still there. Yeah. They haven't manifested itself because of us.

And the French, of course, are in North Africa again, intervening in North Africa against Islamist foes. So there you go. Yeah, absolutely. And we're haggling over them about whether to supply them tankers or not. But I think it's a larger question that Obama was absolutely brilliant as far as the foreign policy, because in a very Machiavellian way, he sensed that Americans were on the right as well as the left,

getting more isolationist. They were tired of Afghanistan, Iraq. They were tired of being trashed abroad. And they were receptive to cutting the defense budget, and they wanted more entitlements they like this idea of half the people not paying taxes 47 percent on and so they it sort of synced hey you guys they don't appreciate us overseas we cause trouble what's we don't have any moral authority anymore let's just come back and take the money and enrich us. And that's where we are right now.

Hey, so Victor, we should just say that I'm getting frantic messages from Peter who is on, but his microphone – He's lost his voice. He's lost his voice, which is – since we all know Peter well, we know that he's baffled and – Well, he's sending out questions by killing Pigeon, which should be here soon. Can we talk a little bit about... Can you hear me now? Yes. Hey, Victor,

it's Peter here. Listen, here's what I want to ask. You've been writing for, oh, some years now about the decline of California, rising illegal population, six or seven million illegals, crumbling infrastructure.

And then this autumn, you write a piece in City Journal entitled California, Here We Stay. And did you read it? Of course I read it. And this month, you've written, after talking about the election, terrible news, things are not going well, you have a piece out called America's Bright Future. So my question is, what are you suddenly so cheerful about? Well, there's two things there. America's Bright Future was not based on – if you read that carefully for defining ideas, it was based on things that the government didn't do that are under the radar. And I listed three of them. One, this petroleum renaissance. We're going to be the largest natural gas and oil producer

in the world by 2025, and California may play a role in that. And then second, people don't realize we're in the biggest agricultural boom, despite not because of the government we've ever been in. California, I spoke yesterday to the pistachio growers. 10,000 an acre, they're clearing. Raisins, walnuts, it's unprecedented. And the country's going to earn almost $200 billion in exports. So ag is really good, and fuel is good.

And the Constitution is, compared to the EU and the Arabs and everywhere else. We have a stable legal system. And then demography is not great, but compared to China, Russia, Europe, it's great. So that was what I was looking at, and I ended that article by saying, you know, that article was given the rich inheritance that we had from our grandparents that built the UC system and the infrastructure and Napa Valley and everything. And given the natural wealth that we have, the oil, the agriculture, it's going to take a long time to screw it up. And I don't see I'm sitting right now. You know, it's a beautiful blue day in the valley. It just snowed in the Sierras.

I just went down to San Diego, and I'm thinking of this state, and a recent Times education survey, the top 400 universities, California had five of the top 12, more than any other single country except the United States. Caltech was one. Stanford was two. 12, more than any other single country except the United States. Caltech was one, Stanford was two, and then boy, UCLA and Berkeley and USC were right after Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. And then you add, look at Facebook, Google, Hewitt Packard, Wells Fargo, Chevron, all right in the Bay Area, which is a socialist republic basically so what i'm suggesting is that there was

so much wealth here and there was such a dynamic generation that it's going to take a while to dismantle it and we're doing it very fast as you know if you let in seven million little aliens are not able in one generation to assimilate or integrate or intermarry given the multicultural paradigm, and our schools are 48th and 49th in the country in test scores, and our taxes are the highest, our infrastructure is rated the worst, well, then you're going to have things like Apple putting a new campus in Austin or Hewitt Packard thinking of moving or Campbell Soup shutting down. That's happening, but all I was trying to say is at my age, I'm just sort of enjoying the fumes of yesteryear.

It's still a nice place to live. This optimism, this is depressing. I mean, we all have this. It's kind of like being in Rome. It's like Augustine writing the Confessions in Hipporygous when he was surrounded by vandals. It was still pretty nice in the city walls, but he knew it wouldn't be in a year or two. We have a standard boilerplate idea, though, of California is the apotheosis of everything wrong with liberalism.

If things actually start to go well, we're doomed. We don't even have that anecdote. You mentioned that. Yeah, well, everybody's saying, you know, Jerry Brown is taking credit. He thinks that he stopped. We don't know whether he stopped the debt that he says he has with higher taxes, and people haven't just left in the last 90 days. So he's going around barnstorming the state saying this is the new blue paradigm. You can raise taxes and people won't leave, and you can balance the budget.

And you say to Jerry, hey, you've got $100 billion unfunded pension and stirs and purrs that aren't going to work. And you've got these municipal bonds that are coming due and these cities are going to be bankrupt. And we're just starting the cycle, not ending it. But he's the heartthrob now of the left to say, look at California, raising taxes saved it. Well, you mentioned ag prices and the value of land. I remember before when land got really, really expensive, farmland around here, our family farm is still in our name after three generations. And the reason is because we didn't borrow a huge amount of money on it when the prices were good. A lot of guys did to invest

either in equipment or put a wing on the house or whatever. And when the prices collapsed and the land collapsed, these guys all got foreclosed on. Is there that sort of historical memory at work in the Valley? There is for me because since I came of age and started farming it when I came back from graduate school, I've seen three boom and busts where I've seen the land that I'm looking at right now go up to $17,000 and down to $3,500. And I've seen the price of what we grew, raisins, go from $1,300 down to $400 a ton. And I've seen a whole generation of people came in and did just what you talked about,

remodeled by equipment that are no longer here. But this is kind of scarier, this boom, and it's different because all the farmers that I'm looking at, the farms are all gone. And this is much different. This California boom is fueled by EU money, pension money, TGI-CREF money, that globalization is looking at the world and they're saying, ah, in California, there's 3 million acres. It's still got water. It's got the highest production per acre. It's on the Pacific Rim. There's 400 million consumers in Indian China and a new middle class that's larger than every country in the world. And they

want to sprinkle some almonds on their curry. They want to put a raisin or two in their rice. They want to eat a fig for dessert. They love pistachios to hand out with beer. And we're going to buy everything we have. And that's what's happening. And this investment money, especially in the EU, but also in pension funds, looks at California and they say, wow, commodity prices for the last five years in ag, when everything else has been terrible, have gone up 7% to 8% to 10%. Land is going up 15%. Let's put our money there. Now, all booms bust, but this one is not based on a bunch of local Californians

who are living there and farming and go through the yin and yang that I've seen in my lifetime. It's crazy. And I don't know the reason I sound uncertain when the bust is coming, because I don't know how much capital is out there, but from what I can tell, there's a lot. And the five-mile radius, I'm looking at again, to use that phrase again, there's these what I would call marginal vineyards. They were sandy.

They had Thompson seed lists. You should get three ton an acre. They only got a ton. They were ancient. They were not level. They weren't worth much, but they did have good water rights and good climate. So what you're seeing now is people, some from India and the Punjab, they come in, they tell the owner, we'll pay you $15,000 an acre. They come in with a big machine. They rip it all out in a week. And another week, they've got special hybrid almonds that can grow in sand. Then they put a computerized drip system in that meters everything from herbicide to fertilizer every hour on a schedule. And the next thing you know, when it was marginal

land that didn't produce capital for the countryside, suddenly you've got an almond orchard that is producing in three years. And you should see these almond trees. They almost fall over because they have no root system because they're fed by drip irrigation. The roots don't go out for flood irrigation. And they're such a hybrid new species that they're just so laden with almonds, they topple over. Is there a federal, sorry, is there a Depression-era federal program that requires them to set aside a certain amount of their crops to ensure a baseline price, or are almonds free for all?

No, no, it's a free market. That's raisins. Yeah, I know. So what you're looking at is, I'm looking at this orchard right now, my neighbors, and I've never seen anything like it. By any category, that should be Class C soil, but it's more productive than what used to be Class A because of scientific hybridization of crops, new types of irrigation, new fertilization. And that's happening not just in almonds but everywhere. I always thought that you could never mechanize raisins and you could never get over 2 1⁄2 ton or 3 ton.

Now they have them on 9-foot trellises and they're getting six ton an acre. And then when that happened, everybody said, well, farmers always produce themselves into depression. But the higher the price, the higher production, the higher the, I mean, the higher the production, the higher the price. So I've never seen anything like it. And when I was speaking to the pistachio growers, they were just astounded because they had two graphs that showed production going up 15% a year due to ingenuity and better methodology,

and then suddenly the prices are going up higher than the production. So something's going on in California, and I think it has something to do with the role of India and China, with a minority of its population having dollars to buy commodity exports, but that minority is huge in terms of actual numbers. And so I think Jerry Brown kind of understands that. Facebook guys like to hang out in University Avenue in Palo Alto, and pistachio trees can't grow legs and leave. And people like to ski, you know, in the morning and then drive all the way to the Pacific Ocean just four hours later. And because we have all this stuff, no matter what I do, I think the paradigm is East Germany during the Cold War.

You know, even East Germany worked in a way that none of the other communist countries did. And that's Gary Brown's attitude. California is just so naturally wealthy and such wonderful traditions that Caltech is not going to move to Austin. East Germany had the social capital of the German culture.

Before we let you go... Long term, you and I know that they destroyed Athens, they destroyed Rome, they destroyed Britain after the war. It'll happen. But for now, that's what Before we let you go through the downtown, one out of every four lights in Fresno doesn't go on. In my hometown, one out of every three is because of copper wire thefts. But I don't think it means that Palo Alto is going to be destroyed tomorrow. I don't see that happening. Speaking of Athens

and of draconian cuts, which we were speaking of before, before we go, we just when you've got a classicist on the line, tell people who Draco was. Draco, his name is dracon in Greek. It means serpent or dragon or snake. He was an

8th century lawgiver in Athens that supposedly in the transition from aristocracy to oligarchy had a law code and it was called Braco's Law. We actually have an inscription on stone a later copy of it

and it's infamous because almost every punishment was death. Death, death. Right. You know, treason, death. Death, death. Right. You know, treason, death, murder, death, rape, death. And so we got this idea of something that's

draconian today in English. It really means in Greek, it's snake-like. That was his name. And we don't know who he was. I mean, he's a mysterious figure. We don't know what the name Draco is, relationship. Why would they call him Mr. Snake or Mr. Dragon or something? We don't know much about him. We know we like him.

Yeah, the word dragon in English comes from the Greek Draco, Dracon. Death for everything. Well, when all you have is a sword, everything looks like a neck. Listen, thanks for being with us again. We can't wait to talk to you again down the road. We'll read you at National Review, City Journal, all over the place and hear you on the radio and hope to see you on TV too.

Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thanks, Victor. Thank you. We'll see you guys. Bye-bye. Thank you, Victor. If I can be heard now. We can hear you. Oh, really? Yes, there you are. I love this. Peter passes out and then somebody stabs him in the heart muscle with an ampule of amphetamine and he comes back to life.

I love talking to Victor because you can talk about a variety of subjects that are usually not conjoined. Pistachio farmers, military history, that sort of thing. Just the range of the fellow is always a delight. It's kind of irritating though too, isn't it? No. Come on, Victor. Say something dumb. I've yet to actually hear that.

That's usually my job. You know, we were talking before about, before we wrap this up, there's always these questions that are posed to us by Yeti, things that we could discuss. Because, you know, we always run out of things to talk about, don't we just? And one of them was whether or not the cruise ship, which was the big story last week and has now evaporated, whether or not this is an example of the need for regulation or the virtues of the laissez-faire, leave it alone kind of market. I'm going to ask Peter, since you've been dead for most of this podcast, would you prefer a world in which the cruise ships are not particularly regulated

and can just float along and do what they wish, or one in which they are stringently observed by American inspectors to ensure the safety and health of all? Oh, the lack of unregulated would be absolutely fine by me. Nobody has anything like the interest in figuring out what went wrong on that Carnival ship as does the Carnival Corporation. They will figure it out because they have lost tens of millions, a blow to their reputation from which it will take months and months to recover. No regulator can make them feel as much pain as they've inflicted on themselves. That's my first thought. Not to take the side of the cruise ship industry,

as you know, James, I'm not a big fan of these cruises, but look, they do 32 million nautical miles every something. There's a lot of stuff. Many, many, many cruises. They didn't quite do this very well. This is almost a technological disaster, too.

These cruise ships are supposed to be able to run on auxiliary engines but whoops, didn't happen this time. So a lot of it is like, you know, it was huge. So they may need to start thinking smaller but there you go. Well, they are virtually unregulated because

they belong to, they have Bahamian flags, shall we say. I got an email yesterday from somebody who was talking to somebody who worked on one of these ships. And they said that the crews are not treated particularly well. It's a hard job. It's an arduous job. And the crews want to work for Disney because Disney is the only line that abides by American standards as far as overtime, labor laws, and stuff like that. That's where they all want to work. That's where you get the good pay. That's where you're not

worked to death. I mean, you get the image sometimes of a fat, naked, glistening man stripped to the waist with a timpani around, banging the drum as he walks up and down the aisles down below decks. But anyway, I agree. Unregulated gives you an industry that is pretty much what we have now. We lost Rob now. Astonishing. Everything is falling apart here. The center cannot hold,

as they say. For all I know, Peter has coughed himself into a fit, is blue in the face, and can't finish as well. So I'm just going to say, you know what? Next week, maybe the ship will be what we're on. Maybe skiing. Maybe somewhere in Canada. Maybe, who knows? We're going to be on spring break.

So we will not be here next week. However, our thanks to Hillsdale College, which is always here, which never goes away, and their new free online course on the Constitution and Western Heritage. You can visit ricochet.com slash hillsdale, and you can sign up today, and you can get the course for free. On behalf of Rob Long, who apparently spontaneously combusted or went up in the rapture, and Peter Robinson, who I believe is now just settling down with the green expression and trying to have some NyQuil and get through the day. I'm James Lilacs, and I hope nothing here is contagious and everything has been entertaining.

We'll see you on Ricochet. I think I'll go outside for a while And just smile Just taking some clean fresh air For a little bit of sense And staying inside If the weather's fine And you've got the time It's your chance to wake up

And plan another brand new day Either way Ricochet. I've got to be on my way now Ricochet Join the conversation You couldn't keep it down It just ain't no good if the sun shines And you're still inside Still inside Still inside

Still inside Bye.