The Ricochet Podcast - Reclining Standards

Episode Date: August 28, 2014

This week on the podcast, a look back at the tumultuous summer in the Middle East. First up, Annika Hernroth-Rothstein checks in from Sweden to discuss the growing anti-semitism in Europe. Then, Hoover fellow Peter Berkowitz on how Israel should respond to Hamas and what part the U.S. ought to play. Also, the role of social media in bringing change to authoritarian states. And, could Mitt be the... Source

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It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs and our guests, Anna Garonsting reporting from Sweden, Peter Berkowitz on Burma, plus your testimonials on the glories of Ricochet. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Check out. It's also brought to you by Encounter Books. For 15% off any title, go to EncounterBooks.com and use the coupon code altogether now. Ricochet, that's right, at checkout. This week's featured title is Making David into Goliath. The World Turned Against Israel by Joshua Maravchik. And usually at this point we have Rob Channel's years of experience of trying to pitch a sitcom to a stony-faced executive.

And here Rob actually has somebody to hand it off to. Yes, as I promised last week. I know. Listen, there are tens and tens and tens of thousands of listeners, almost a quarter of a million across all of our podcasts. Listeners to the Ricochet podcast, we don't have that many members. I've been making

my desperate pitch all the way through 228 podcasts to try to get people to become members. It's been moderately successful, but we decided instead this time, well, why not leave it to the experts? This week's member pitch is from Richard O'Shea in Baltimore, Maryland. Take it away, Richard.

This is Richard O'Shea from Baltimore, and it's my turn this week to give you the hard sell as to why you should part with 40 of your hard-earned dollars to become a Calvin Coolidge-level member of Ricochet. I've been a member since this thing started, and it's a little weird to pay for anything on the Internet, but Ricochet is unique. Free home feed that you read anyway is just the tip of the iceberg. And while many of the conversations are political, I get a kick out of the ones that are about religion, science, music, history, and for whatever weird reason, about giraffes.

And any time I need reminded about what my $40 buys, I just scroll down and read any of the nasty comments at the bottom of any random page on the Internet. Any time I have the opportunity to attend member meetups. I've been with three, one with Rob here in Baltimore. And I found out I'm not the only Republican in Maryland after all. Finally, don't be a cheapskate. You're going to drop 40 bucks this week on a dinner anyway.

Use it instead to support Ricochet for an entire year. Now back to the three Amigos. What I love about that is that we're actually expecting people to believe that a site called Ricochet has an actual member giving a testimonial and his name is Rick O'Shea. Oh, that's true. It's not funny. Yeah, I didn't even notice that. Isn't that a peculiar coincidence? Listen, if I had made it up I would have done a better job. I should say we got a lot of great

calls. We will continue to, the phone line is open. I will post the number again on the member feed. If you've been hesitating to call, please do. We got some very, we got a great one from China, but it kept, the audio kept dropping out, so we're going to try to re-record it. We got some very, very funny ones. We're going to play

a funny one at the end, too. It was really gratifying. And if you're listening and you're not a member, follow the orders of member Richard O'Shea. And I want to say a special thanks to our newest Thatcher member, John Russell, and new Reagan members, Ed Sullivan and Chris Harper. Thank you for joining Ricochet.com. And if you're listening and you want to join, just go to Ricochet.com and if you're listening and you want to join just go to ricochet.com and join today because otherwise this entire enterprise founders and we can't have that happen we need you to pay us money we need you to write the content we need you to cut the spots and eventually we're going to

want you to print it out and hand deliver it to other people in the nation we're all in this together uh no just kidding we don't uh we don't have no intention of doing that. We do want, however, is to hear what Peter is doing, whether or not he's sitting back wincing at how crass commercialism has corrupted his child here. Peter, are you okay? I'm all right.

No, I actually, I loved hearing from Richard O'Shea. I loved hearing from, and all the other testimonials that we've gotten in. I just, it confirms every so often Rob and I need a little reaffirmation, not to go all Dr. Phil on us here, but we've been working hard on this darn thing for over three years now. And to hear Richard O'Shea say that it's everything Rob and I hoped it would be to people and then some is just wonderful. That's marvelous.

Well, that's grand. And we thank everybody for contributing. And like Rob said, he's going to post the number so you too can have your little pitch and put in your two cents for the 40 bucks or the 40 bucks for the two cents, however you wish to wrap that around. Guys, the big question on the internet this week, supposedly, and roiling the chat room or the comments at Ricochet, was whether or not Mitt is the man in 2016. This is supposedly based on a Forbes or Politico piece which says that he's considering it.

He's not. I heard the interview that he gave in the Who He Would Show. He's not considering it. He's not going to do it. So why are we talking about this? Is it because we think maybe the country would give him a chance this time or are we just bored? Wait a minute. You heard him tell Hugh over and over again, no, Hugh, I'm not going to do it in that circumstance. No, I'm not going to do it in that circumstance. And then finally, Hugh got him to say, well, but circumstances change. The fact is

a former presidential candidate who claims he's lost any interest in politics was talking to Hugh Hewitt and does so regularly. Not that often. Often. A lot more often than other ordinary Americans. For a man who claims he has no interest in running for president, Mitt Romney is popping up a lot of places. So the question strikes me as completely valid. And I have to say, I was very surprised by the overall tenor of the reaction on Ricochet, which was what, three out of five negative, almost four out of five negative. It's more every so often I put up a post just asking because I would like to know how people respond.

I myself thought Romney was only the best of a weak field and ran a weak campaign. But last time around, lots of people on Ricochet beat me with cudgels every time I said so. So I know that Mitt Romney has powerful fans. And it was a stronger reaction saying, Mitt, no, stay home. Your time has passed. Even then, when I put up I guess a couple of weeks ago, what are people thinking of Jeb Bush? And about half of our folks said, no way. It's just the hour has passed.

So to me, the surprise was very strongly anti-Mitt. Was that a surprise? No, really? I'm not sure. It was to me actually. I think often all these things get conflated between the guy. I mean Mitt Romney would have been a much better president right now. I'd rather have Mitt Romney in the White House. I voted for Mitt Romney. right now. And I guess the issue for us and then sort of as a movement or as a sort of generally sort of directionally unified group is we want somebody fresh and new and different and a little bit more appealing. And this seems to be a good opportunity generationally and I don't know, demographically and a lot of other ways. Seems to be a good moment

to find somebody new and somebody young and not young necessarily, but somebody fresh, right? Somebody we haven't necessarily heard from, somebody who may be more appealing rather than running a rerun as great as Mitt is. Listen, I mean, for me, I love Jeb Bush. I think Jeb Bush is one of the smartest, most interesting politicians around. I think what he did at Florida, I think he's a proven, effective chief executive of a state. I think what he did with education in Florida, his actual record of accomplishment is very, very high.

Well, hold on right there. Hold on right there because education is going to be the thing that splits the base. Jeb is very much pro-common core. Yeah, that could be. That could be. I agree. I'm just talking about his accomplishment as a governor. Like he actually has an accomplishment.

He can run. He's not a talker. He's not a governor. Like he actually has an accomplishment. He can run. He's not a talker. He's not a guy who appears on talk shows and talks. He was a governor of a very large, important state and he has a handful of what I consider to be right and smart and conservative solutions to problems in a state or in a group – in a political body that has required him to act politically and with strength but also with compromise. That's Jeb Bush to me and that's Scott Walker to me. That's probably Bobby Jindal to me.

That's probably Nikki Haley to me. That's someone like that, you know? All right. Well, then let me ask you guys this. Let's take Bobby Jindal. Do you think that Bobby Jindal, as much as you may like his ideas and his record, is a good presidential candidate or would he strike a lot of people as a really fast talking, smart guy who doesn't interest them charismatically? That could be. That's fine. I mean, that's all right.

Those are early days. We can wait and see. That's something that all candidates are going to have to make their case for. He may choose not to do it. Yeah, the answer to that is I don't know. I've seen Bobby Jindal in a couple of settings in which I was very impressed. And frankly, I've seen Bobby Jindal in a couple of settings in which I thought he was giving a rote speech that he'd given a hundred times before and not making much of an effort. And Reagan, who's been in the wings for years, who's a dominant figure in the party. This is wide, wide, wide open. By the way, in fairness to Mitt Romney, it's not as if all the comments were negative.

Ricochet member Stephen Hall said, I'd like to see a Romney-Perry or a Perry-Romney ticket. Romney was quite possibly the best potential president ever to have been defeated. That's a kind of sweet and sour comment, but there is a lot of sweetness in it. By the way, Rob, when you ticked down the list of people that you found impressive, I think the point you were making was that almost everyone you mentioned was a sitting or a former governor. You left out Perry. I did leave out Perry. I didn't mean to, but I – Oh, I see. But he – I mean look.

I haven't quite made up my mind about Perry, so I'm undecided yet. I don't – I mean he is in fact a sitting governor. I feel like his record of accomplishment getting things done in a state that had an opposition and a loud and vocal opposition and a powerful opposition is less impressive to me than Scott Walker or Jeb Bush. Because he did not have a powerful and vocal opposition. fight and I mean to me I'm sort of on the record right now it's my my current number one is Scott Walker simply because of what he's managed to do what he's managed to accomplish big big conservative things in a state that is not a big conservative state he's managed to do that and actually get and be popular in the very least a purple state. And I think the next president, the next conservative president of the United States is going to have to do that.

Those are exactly the skills domestically anyway that a president of the United States who's aligned with me is going to have to have because no matter – one of our problems I think that we fall into on our side and I think the zealots on the other side do too is we think that we won. We always think that everybody is in favor of us and we think that we're winning. Well, I heard this after Romney lost. Well, we kind of didn't lose. If you really look at it a certain way, we didn't really lose.

Well, we lost and we have lost a good part of the country. A good part of the country expects handouts. A good part of the country expects a giant labor union, public sector contracts. A big part of the country wants the government to take care of it from cradle to grave. And whoever is going to change that is going to have to have political skills that are almost matched to that battle. And right now, to me, that seems to come up Scott Walker. Well, Rob's right in the sense that we didn't win. And you can't look around at the political landscape and say that we did.

I understand that. But on the other hand, since since we haven't and since we've lost so much of the electorate, I always look at the presidential choice as somebody who can appeal to that middle. And I always get this sort of nervous tingle in my spine whenever we're all agreed on the right that this person is absolutely the best standard bearer. It often means that they are absolutely unelectable because they've satisfied and ticked off all of the things that we like, but the middle just finds them to be either dull or repulsive or the rest of it. You're right about Scott Walker. He had a hard job there. That was a dry shave.

And, you know, you could say this. You could say that Rick Perry has been able to have a legislature that provided him with lubricants and emollients and a culture that made that sheer genius. Glide down the cheek and go around the jowl line without work. But that's true. However, whatever shaving metaphor you want to use, And you used them all. I just did. You know the blade to use, too, and that's Harry's.

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but to thank them for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And speaking of which, on Ricochet, maybe a month ago was one of the most heart-rending stories I'd heard in a long time. It was just a tale of somebody who lived in Sweden, and by the time she got to Amsterdam, her luggage had been ripped, vandalized, soaked with coke, all because there was an Israeli flag on the luggage itself. It was dismaying.

And you know the worst part about it was? It wasn't surprising. The author of that post was Annika Henroth Rothstein, political advisor,ionist writer conservative jewish she beast that's the self-description i love it on the right and she's on the right side of young and promising she says you can follow her on twitter at at truth and fiction and we welcome her to this the ricochet podcast hi there hi there so this story uh your luggage had an israel Israeli flag on it.

It was vandalized when you're traveling from Stockholm to Amsterdam. So you imagine that something, I mean, I thought, okay, I've been to both. Who did it where? Was it somebody in Stockholm you think who ripped it up and somebody in Amsterdam? And more to the point, when you visualize the person who did it, what do you see? What do you think? Well, first of all, I can only assume that it was someone in Stockholm because they wouldn't have had enough time. That much I figured out in Amsterdam.

So it was probably some luggage handler in Stockholm who did it. And I wasn't that surprised. I was actually warned. I put a picture of my bag very proudly on Facebook before I left because this was this huge ordeal even to get to Israel because, of course, all the flights had been canceled. And I finally found a flight through Amsterdam and I was on my way and I put an Israeli flag. And people started warning me, most of all other Jews, saying that how stupid are you to travel that way through Europe. But, you know, I disregarded those comments, and I went on my way.

And I even had an altercation with someone in the cab to the airport in Stockholm with an Arab cab driver on my way there. So, no, I was not that surprised. And in my mind, it's the same kind of person who I deal with on pretty much a weekly basis, a young Arab man, an angry young Arab man. Anika, Peter Robinson here. Welcome to the podcast. So that's what I wanted to ask, whether – from this distance, I'm sitting here in California. We read often now about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. And what I can't,

what I have trouble understanding or sorting out, not all the stories do a very good job of sorting it out either. There is now a large Muslim population in Europe. I think Rotterdam is now majority Muslim, if I remember the figures correctly. And of course, every poll shows that Muslims are strongly in favor of this, that, or the other Islamic movement, and strongly anti-Israel. And so that I get. The question that I have is the extent to which the non-Muslim population, the Christian or post-Christian or whatever is the best descriptor for most Gentile Europeans these days, the extent to which they share real animosity toward Israel and toward Jews versus the extent to which they merely permit the Muslims who now live among them to express that animosity themselves.

Do you see what I'm asking? I see what you're asking. I would say that the countries where it's been the easiest for the growing Muslim population to get a voice and gain ground are the very secular countries such as my own. My country is the second most secular country in the world, according to recent polls. And those who lack national identity, these are the issues that I keep writing about, that without a strong national identity, when you are a very secular country, there is very little to defend. You don't know who you are. If you don't know who you are yourself, it's very hard for you to tell someone else who you are supposed to be when you arrive in that country.

Okay, so that's something – again, this is all – bear in mind you're talking to somebody who's sitting in California 5,000 or 6,000 miles away trying to figure it all out. All my life, which is getting to be a while now, every time somebody on the left wanted to say, all right, communism doesn't work, but socialism does. They would say, and they still say, look at Sweden. It is a peaceful country. It is a wonderfully prosperous country. Inequality is very minor. You can get a job there, a good job there. You can get a superb education. It is a kind of socialist paradise. And you're saying, you say to that, yes, but we're now open to it.

How do you answer that? I actually say perhaps in the past, no, for today. Because when there are more people, we have a social security system that is, you can live pretty well without a job here. So you can live very well without a job here. But if you get to the point where there are fewer people, we have a very high tax rate, which I guess you're all aware of. But if there are not enough people paying taxes, it's a pretty easy equation really. Because now we have a lot of people, a lot of immigration, a lot of people who are not paying taxes, but merely receiving. And that has put us in a pretty dire situation. There was actually a political debate. We have an election, a national election coming up this

September. And there was a big debate because we're going to have even higher taxes now to be able to handle immigration, the issues that have arisen because of immigration. So there has been a cultural shift in the past, I would say, 10 years. And maybe this was a haven when I was a child some 20 years ago, but not anymore. Okay. Annika, it's Rob Long in New York. How are you? I'm good.

I got a question. So all this – I mean if you're like a conservative or even like a rhino squish like me in the United States and you hear someone talk like that, you think to yourself, well, is there a conservative voice or a small government voice in Sweden who is not also a nationalist voice? Do you know what I'm saying? I know, yeah. Yeah. There always seems to be – we read – you read the news here and they always mention, well, there's a conservative, there's a small government, low taxes candidate there and then the second half of his platform is always something that's a little too nasty, a little too kind of fascist

for us. Is there a normal free market conservative there? I would say that of of course, they exist. Would they ever get to govern? No. So they exist. Well, same here, frankly. So yeah.

And most people that call themselves – when I go to a party or a dinner party and say I'm a conservative, they say, well, I am too. And I say, no, no, no. I'm actually a conservative. Because when you call yourself a conservative in Sweden, that would equal a Democrat in the U.S. Because that's as conservative as it gets. And what we call a liberal here would be a socialist to you. So it's a huge cultural and political difference that I could spend hours talking about, honestly. But it's different. So now they would never get to govern because this is ingrained in us.

We have – there's a dependency on certain welfare institutions that even the most conservative, most conservatives would fight to keep. So is there any sense – well, again, you go country after country after country, Britain, there's the UKIP party and a sense that the Tories have to do something to win re-election. Whatever is going on, the status quo is no longer sustainable. In France, President Hollande, whose ratings are below 20%, astonishingly enough, I didn't know you could be a president of France and have ratings that low, has just reshuffled his cabinet, probably being a socialist, he'll get it all wrong. But again, there's a sense that the center left status quo in France,

in Spain, in Italy, cannot continue. Things have to change. The welfare state, just as you described, is no longer affordable. There are cultural challenges. This notion of losing the national identity, having it dissolved in a larger European identity is just not working for lots of... Is there any sense of that in Sweden? Or let's say Scandinavia, Sweden, of course course Norway is more conservative, isn't it, even by Swedish standards? It is definitely and we've seen proof of that just this week as we've had a debate on the growing issue of extremism and homegrown terrorism where young Muslim men who are born in this country go to fight global jihad in Syria and in Somalia and Iraq. And Norway just passed a law to withdraw their citizenships, whereas our prime minister here in Sweden said a definite no to that. So we're handling our issues and our challenges very differently.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. It's just fascinating. The issue was somebody can go on jihad fighting against the West and the good people of Sweden will say, no, no, no. Of course, he's still one of us. Yes. Unbelievable. I know. So where do they send – do they send the benefits?

Do they send the benefits somewhere? No. But he was never one of you. That's the point. Doesn't anybody realize? No. And they are now – but he has agreed to my prime minister has so kindly agreed to head up a commission where he will investigate the

possibility of maybe filing charges um criminal charges in sweden where this person still has citizenship after coming home alive after fighting jihad in a different country and probably scheming to fight jihad in Sweden as well, he might be prosecuted. But they are also wanting to prosecute the young men and women who go to fight in the IDF because they equate those two. Of course. Wait, wait, wait. So one of them is ideological, and that's the anti-Zionism, the anti-Israel, the anti-Semitism. The other is a sort of cultural, of nationalism. But it's something more than that. I remember back in the seventies, I read this wonderful series of Swedish detective

novels called the Martin Beck series. And it was a picture, a picture of a glum, doer, socialist state. They were great books, but they were written by Marxists. And the last word literally in the entire, in the entire series is an endorsement of Marxism. Isn't underneath what we're talking about here the most absolutely born-in-the-bread Marxism that believes in dissolving not just the nation state but individual identity into this slew, this soup, this swamp of just the proles keeping aloft their wonderful Bolshevik betters? Oh, did I say Bolshevik? I'm so very sorry. So how much of this is just actual, the end result of leftism, not just socialism or progressivism, but the absolute reduced to its essence leftism

that they side with the ISIS sympathizers because those guys have the same idea, which is to extirpate the sin of Western colonialism from the face of the globe. Am I overemphasizing or stretching the truth? No, you're not actually. You're not actually. I was going to use the word self-hatred, but you said it so much better.

Because the one couldn't exist without the other. So this is more than allowing it to exist. This is standing, cheering. I was laughing. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry the other day when there was actually the Swedish neo-Nazi party was having a rally five minutes from my house. So I had to pick up my children early so that we wouldn't get caught in the riots on our way home. So I sat watching them, and then the extreme left was there to fight them. And I was almost laughing when I saw that this is two sides of the same coin, basically.

And they share a common enemy. So we're in a time of extremism in Europe overall now. And we could see it in the European parliamentary elections that it's either extreme left or extreme right. And there's no sense of normalcy. So the answer to your question, is there a sane conservative idea? Is there a sane conservative party? No, there isn't. Anika, last question from me, from Peter. You just mentioned your kids. They're under teenage, right? They're little kids, as I recall.

Yes, they are. All right. So the future for your kids, do you start thinking to yourself, I've got to get them out of Sweden? Or do you say to yourself, I simply teach them how to behave. I teach them how to behave as Jews

and as political conservatives. And if they're strong, they'll be able to,'ll be fine how do you think about excuse so the point is i'm asking a complicated question it's not complicated at all you live in a pretty scary europe how do you think about your children growing up there well there is no way to i mean i have a i've committed some sort of a double fault here because I am both conservative and religious and, oh, maybe a triple fault because I'm also a Jew. So there is no-

You're the whole package, baby. The whole package. So no, there is no future because I don't want to teach them what I myself was taught, which is how to alter your life and alter your personality, basically, and your entire existence to survive. And I love the way they are now. We were just laughing. The Communist Party has their housing right next to where we live,

and we pass through every day when I walk my kids to school. And my 6-year-old asked the flag. They had the Communist flag outside. And he saw saw it and he said, are those communists? And I said, yes. And he said, isn't it true that if I save up all my money to get an iPad, doesn't it mean that they, even if they didn't save any of their money, wants a part of my iPad as well? And I laughed and I said, yes, that's true. Yes. And he started laughing.

He said, oh, they're so stupid. When are they going to get that? That's never going to work out. And I laughed and I said, I want him to have that. I want him to still, you know, in many ways, my children are still, they're innocent enough to not have caught on. And I want them to get the hell out of here before they catch on. And to be free and proud Jews and God-willing conservatives. I would like your son to call our 800 number and leave a Ricochet testimonial. He seems perfect for

us. He should be a Reagan member. He really, really should. He really should. And I bet he would love Ricochet as much as I do, I can be the poster child. Exactly. I've been welcomed so well to this wonderful place. We're thrilled to have you. We're thrilled to have you. Absolutely so. And, you know, it sounds absurd in this day and age to say this to somebody in Sweden, but be safe. I will. I will do my best.

Thank you. Well, that's why there's an Israel. If your experience of Sweden consists of getting off the cruise ship and going to the old part of the town and the charming parts and walking through the great parks and seeing people lounging about and thinking, well, this actually might be the apex of civilization. They seem to have it figured out here. But then you realize that what they have created perhaps is a state that breeds discontent and hatred and imports a bunch of people who have more discontent and hatred than the original residents have for themselves. It's not a good recipe, and that's why you need a place, a bolt hole, if you will, or a shining example of what you can do when left to your own devices.

Whatever you want to call it, Israel is an interesting place, and in the Middle East, it is the one beacon of democracy. Doesn't that sound odd? And yet they're the most hated. Huh. Huh. How did that happen? Well, if you want an example of how it happened,

Making David into Goliath is a book by Joshua Maravchik, and it's at the Encounter Books this week. It's our pick. Here is the praises. Making David into Goliath traces the process by which material pressures and intellectual fashions reshape world opinion of Israel. Initially, terrorism, oil blackmail, and the sheer size of the Arab and Muslim populations gave the world powerful inducements to back the Arab cause. And then a prevalent new paradigm of leftist orthodoxy, which class struggles supplanted noble struggles of people of color, created a lexicon of rationales for taking sides against Israel.

Thus, nations behave cravenly, while striking a high-minded pose and aligning themselves in the Middle East conflict. To get this book for 15% off the list price or any other book for that matter, you can go to EncounterBooks.com and use the coupon code Ricochet at the checkout. Do so to get a good book, learn something, and to thank EncounterBooks for for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast well guys um you know it's it's what do you think i mean do you think the case is being overstated that uh you you read about this you read about the gentleman in la the other day who just posted on um an account of being oh yeah elon gold yeah elon gold right where he's just walking down the street and with his kids... With his kids. With his kids, yeah. With his kids and some thugs

jump out of a car and start screaming anti- Israel... Anti-Jew. Anti-Jew. Kill the Jew, essentially. That's what it all boils down to. You can dress it up in however many trendy slogans as you want to, but it's kill the Jew. Are these things just getting more traction now because we have the internet

or is this actually something that's growing? There's no space in our culture right now, in Western culture, has more stability, has more prosperity than its neighbors surrounding it? And what does it say about Western values versus Eastern values. And I said this a while ago. I saw this on Twitter. I thought it was really interesting that in the West, we're experimenting with driverless cars. And in the Arab world, they're experimenting with women driving cars. And there's no one right now in the progressive institutions,

certainly not in the New York Times, anywhere else, Sweden, is saying those things. So as long as there's a complete vacuum for the opposite, a complete vacuum for the opposite, a complete vacuum for anyone to ever remind the Arab world that their problems and their backwardness

and their instability is really a sign of their own shortcomings, as long as that's never, ever uttered, well, what do you have? You have this kind of – you have lunatics running the asylum. You have this sort of crazy town, which is what we have, which is exactly what would happen in a family if you let one child rule the roost without ever being reprimanded or ever being shown reality. I mean that's really what's going on here, right? I mean even – I remember hearing people screaming at the beginning of this latest war between Hamas and Israel that the Hamas was protesting the occupation. Well, it's been an occupation of Gaza for almost ten years. But people just don't care.

They don't care. They just simply cannot bring themselves to criticize the Arab culture. They can't bring themselves to do it. It's not allowed. And as long as that's not allowed, you'll never stop people in Los Angeles pulling over and screaming at a guy who's dressed with his family for Shabbat. You'll never stop some baggage handler destroying someone's luggage. You'll never stop it. That's entirely – everything you said is unfair, Rob. First of all, the occupation is the existence of Israel and you know that. When they say stop the occupation, it's the existence of Israel. Secondly, the point about driverless cars, again, you're just not giving them enough credit here. We may be experiencing with driverless cars, but if you remember the story of the donkey that came over the border strapped to the explosives, they're experimenting with driverless truck bombs.

OK, so there's that. Don't say they're not making progress. Finally, when you want to talk about the values perhaps that the Arab world would be wise to assume or at least look at or examine or incorporate in their own structures? Well, you know, you can pick up a book called Constitutional Conservatism, Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation. And it is by Peter Berkowitz, who happens to be our next guest here on the podcast, senior fellow with the Hoover Institute at Stanford. His writings are posted at peterberkowitz.com. And you can follow him at Peter, I'm sorry, at Berkowitz Peter. He's got a Yoda-like construction to his handle there. Welcome to the podcast.

Good to be here. Thanks. Peter, Peter Robinson here. You were – you and I were talking the other day about the work you're doing at the Bush Center, part of the Bush – George W. Bush Library down in Dallas, teaching the fundamentals of constitutional order and democracy to young people from countries that lack them. Could you describe that? Sure. Actually, it was a terrific experience. At the George W. Bush Presidential Center, there's also a public policy research center called the Bush Institute. And the Bush Institute launched this year something they call the Leadership and Liberty Forum. The purpose is to bring to Dallas, where the Bush Center is located every year,

about 20 students, grown-ups, 20-somethings, 30-somethings, who are working to expand freedom in their countries. This was the mating year. The Bush Institute brought 20 freedom activists from Burma, a very impressive group of men and women, many of whom have already made considerable sacrifices on behalf of freedom. A third, I think, of our students, a third of the 18 students, had served time as political prisoners.

And the idea was to give them an opportunity to study the classics of political and economic freedom. This is especially important for the Burmese students because their authoritarian government, their military authoritarian government, severely limits the books that are available in Burma, has eliminated political science departments from universities. The students that are available in Burma have eliminated political science departments from universities. The students that we taught, one after another, would say to us things like, we know we want freedom and democracy, but we don't really know what freedom and democracy are. So the Bush Institute, for two and a half weeks, provided them introductory classes,

high-level but introductory classes in the principles of freedom and democracy. Peter, so this, there's a larger, large question here, which I will put in a sloppy way and you will answer in a precise way, me being me and you being you. And the question would be, so these kids come from – so the question would be simple as follows. It would contrast George W. Bush and his democracy project in the Middle East with Barack Obama and his cruise missiles. And George – the argument would go George W. Bush simply overreached. At some level, the level of 18 students at a time from Burma, the world outside the United States does want democracy.

But at the level of transforming entire countries quickly and in a region, the Arab world, which has no experience of democracy whatsoever in its 13 centuries of existence, that's an overreach. And it was a mistake. And Barack Obama, by contrast, who understands that in the Middle East, it's not our job to implant democracy, but simply to do what we must do, namely kill bad guys to protect this country. There, Barack Obama is simply being more realistic and having – and in some sense because his foreign policy is more limited and more directly tied to the defense of this republic, it's more successful. I have a feeling you have good answers to that, but go ahead. I'm also delighted that you've allotted five hours for this podcast.

Peter, we need your answer in the form of a tweet. Okay, well, it'll take a few seconds to get it done for a tweet. Let's begin here. First, my view is that the Bush administration did not initially go into Iraq to impose democracy by force. That was a kind of after-the-fact justification when it was revealed that when the Bush administration couldn't find weapons of mass destruction, which was the primary reason. But nevertheless, you're right. The Bush administration mounted a campaign beginning in October, November 2003 to make the argument that it was America's mission to bring democracy to the Arab Muslim

Middle East. And I do believe, I agree with you, that involved an overreach. Not because we don't have an interest in the Middle East. It's more liberal and more democratic. We actually, in my view, have a keen interest. But we didn't sufficiently appreciate the severe limitations on our ability to bring that transformation about. My own view about the Obama administration is that it has been highly erratic, if not schizophrenic. Keep in mind that the Obama administration, that the United States ambassador to the United Nations is a champion of an extraordinarily aggressive view

about America's need to intervene in other countries. And the president, as far as I can tell, has oscillated between an interventionist view, the Cairo speech of 2009, and a more subdued, restrained, realist account. And I certainly do think that what the George W. Bush Presidential Center is doing now with its Liberty and Leadership Forum is an entirely valid and a quite good use of restricted funds. That is, nobody's forcing, in this particular case, 18 Burmese students to come. My observation is that they were all highly enthusiastic and very grateful to be there. And this is the United States doing something it can do.

That is, this is George W. Bush as a private citizen, offering an opportunity to students who are hungry to study freedom and democracy, the opportunity to study them. It's true, right now, it's not much more than planting seeds, but planting seeds is something that we are capable of. Sure. So to transfer that set of, to those of us who are trying to sort out a proper constitutionally based foreign policy on our side, you've got on the one hand Rand Paul, whom Dick Cheney has called, quote, frankly, isolationist, close quote. On the other hand – well, you've got Rick Perry who wrote a piece, a column. This would be two or three weeks ago. Apparently, as best I can tell, simply because he was just sick and tired of hearing Rand Paul.

So within the Republican Party, this is going to play out if the GOP takes the Senate in the midterm elections, which are now just a couple of months away. You can bet that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is going to become a place where this gets played out. And surely it will be played out in the presidential primaries. If we know anything, well, we don't know this, but if we're willing to bet anything, you'd bet anything that both Rand Paul and Rick Perry, among many others, will be running. So what advice would you offer as a constitutional scholar and someone with a deep knowledge of and interest in foreign policy to those on the Republican side? Well, you're kind in your description. Here's what I'll modestly offer. What I'm looking for in a candidate is someone who will first affirm and affirm strongly

that America does indeed have a powerful, a vital national security interest in a more liberal and democratic world, one. Second, I want a candidate who will acknowledge the severe limitations on our understanding of the Middle East and other regions of the world, limitation on our ability to have fruitful impact. And third, I look for a candidate who can then enter into a reasonable discussion of what we can accomplish with highly limited means to promote liberty and democracy in the world. That's where I'd begin. I think that's consistent with the constitutional vision that underlies our country.

Hey, Peter, it's Rob Long in New York. How are you? Hey, so I have a question. So you're in the Bush Center and you were speaking to a lot of young people who are refugees or not refugees but like our past citizens of dictatorships. What's the difference between dictatorships when they fall? We saw – we see what's happening in Libya. We see what's going – we can only imagine what's going to happen in Syria, what's sort of happening now. We see revolutions in Iran, what happened in Iran. How is that different from what happened in say Chile or Slork in Myanmar since you're talking about Burma or even Spain under Franco? What's – is it the way the rest of the world treats those countries as they ease away from dictatorship?

Or is there something about the quality of the dictator himself? Or are there just good ones and bad ones? Yes, yes, and yes. Although I also add this observation. What will arise after the dictatorship falls depends heavily on the culture already in place. That is, you know, if you have a culture that has, that had for some time, for some time I mean centuries, been teaching the idea that human beings are by nature free and equal, if that's deeply inscribed in the culture,

one can be more optimistic about what happens after the collapse of the dictatorship. If you have a society that is a culture and a society based on the idea that not only the fundamental moral unit is the family, but one has no particular obligations to anybody outside is the family, but one has no particular obligations to anybody who's outside of the family, then you're going to have trouble organizing a liberal democracy which does suppose that the family is the primary moral unit, but also assumes that every individual, when I say primary moral unit, unit for rearing children and so on. But a liberal democracy also supposes that every individual carries rights. If you don't have that in the society, you're going to have trouble.

One other factor I'd look at, and this is a point that's emphasized by Hoover colleague Victor Davis Hanson, at the end of World War II, what you had were two countries, Germany and Japan, that had been brought to their knees, which agreed to unconditional surrenders, which had been humiliated and destroyed and could be reconstructed. That made transition to liberty and democracy in both those countries much easier. If you have the lingering culture of the dictatorship and lingering forces that are friendly to the dictatorship, a transition to a form of government that we could admire in the United States will be much more difficult. So I guess the conclusion I'm drawing is that Burma, with its sort of centuries-old tradition of very traditional Buddhism, Chile with its tradition sort of in Spain for that matter of Western Catholicism, sort of enlightened Catholicism, enlightened Western culture,

that's different from, I mean, if you look at what happened in the former Yugoslavia, the death of Tito, a dictator dies and the war – the civil war, which was as brutal and as ugly, not quite as brutal and as ugly as anything happening under ISIS but certainly in that direction. The things that happened on European soil during that war were pretty, pretty terrible. That was a clash of two cultures that were sort of uneasily yoked together since the Ottoman Empire. I mean – OK. I'm trying to back into probably a rather impolitic point about the difference between Western and Eastern cultures and Muslim culture? Am I making too much of it? I don't think so. Look, liberal democracy depends upon certain beliefs, certain convictions. The most important one that it depends upon is that we're all bearers of rights,

or as we put it in our constitutional tradition, that we're all bearers of rights, or as we put it in our constitutional tradition, that we're all by nature free and equal. If you don't subscribe to that, and when I say subscribe to it, I certainly don't mean that it's necessary for you to have studied and internalized every detail of John Locke's Second Treatise. What I mean is, much more importantly, that you, your parents, their parents have had the opportunity to live under a regime that treats people that way. And so that it's a matter of interacting with other people. When you go to the movie theater, when you're at a stoplight, when you're in school studying with other boys and, very importantly, other girls.

You internalize the idea, even if you can't articulate it in high philosophical terms, that, you know, those other people are not part of my family, who look different, have different color skin. They're human beings, too. If they get in trouble with the police, they'll be treated in a certain, in the same way that I'd be treated with, and so on. If your culture does not teach those things, the transition to liberty and democracy is going to be much harder. I don't say it will take centuries.

Everything is hurried up in the year 2014 because we have social media, the internet, email, because even in totalitarian societies today, you can still get images of men and women behaving equally. Even in Qatar, home of Al Jazeera, young men and women, teenagers, can still see images on TV of men, Arab men, Muslim men in Western business suits, and Arab Muslim women in business attire for women sitting behind a desk, both delivering the news. That actually sends a message subversive of religious authoritarianism and sends the kind of message that we want to send about freedom and equality. Peter, Peter Robinson here again. So I'm trying, as you've been talking,

I'm trying to apply what you're saying to China. And to quote our friend Dan Henninger at the Wall Street Journal, Mao eliminated Confucianism and Deng Xiaoping eliminated Maoism. And now what you have in China is a vast emptiness and understanding of the marketplace and a country as wide open and uncertain as that in charge of a large part of the world, meaning we need to remain in the Pacific. That's a separate point. But, B, China is just in some deep sense up for grabs. What do you make of that? Unfortunately, I generally agree with it. You know, we are witnessing an experiment in China. We still refer to, and rightly I think,

the American experiment in self-government. Right. Well, we've got a, and it's, in my judgment, it's been a very impressive experiment. Well, we've got a, and it's, in my judgment, it's been a very impressive experiment. Well, we've got a different kind of experiment in China. Unprecedented movement of people out of the life of a peasant into the middle class. Unprecedented decades of growth. As you pointed out, citing Dan Henninger, nevertheless, the evisceration for those people who've moved from the countryside into the city, an evisceration of their cultural underpinnings.

And the experiment is, maybe not the one they intended to run, but the one that they are nevertheless running and we're observing is is what happens when you get massive amounts of economic freedom, but no political freedom and not a culture of political freedom. It seems to me, Dan, it's right to be very suspicious and very wary, and we should be as well. The more optimistic take is that economic freedom, the experience of economic freedom will breed a taste for more and more political freedom, for the demand of the people, for more opportunity to choose their rulers,

and for more protections in the political sphere, more protections of freedom of worship, freedom of speech, criminal protections, and so on. But we don't know. That's a hopeful hypothesis. We need to continue to be very wary as we watch this experiment play out. We like to think that more democracy means that they will elect people and eventually come around to our way of thinking. But actually, that's not the default position of humanity.

Could it be that once China actually liberalizes more, that the default position becomes nationalism, expansive nationalism? It certainly could be. And therefore, again, the wariness, you know, growing out of the experience of the Middle East, beginning with the larger Middle East, beginning with Algeria, the slogan was developed by those skeptical of democratic development to describe elections in heavily Muslim countries. One man, one vote, one time. Right. In other words, what the people choose is authoritarianism. What the people,

what majorities choose is to circumscribe rights, not to increase rights. This is a real possibility confirmed by the history of the Middle East, for sure. Yeah. Well, as Erdogan said, I think, or somebody else, democracy is like a bus. You drive it to the stop where you want, and then you get off unless, of course, you're Sandra Bullock and you have to drive it at the speed of 55 or else it explodes. I think that's what Erdogan said. Thanks so much for being on the podcast today and we'll talk to you later

down the road, especially if events change in Burma. Peter, thank you. Thanks, Peter. An old Monty Python sketch. Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion are arguing about something. The guys are in drag and they're doing their old lady voices. And one of them finally blurts out at some point, Burma.

And the other, after a pause, the other says, why did you say Burma? I panicked. And I kept waiting for them to redo the sketch on stage and have one of them say Myanmar. Because who says Burma? Who says Burma anymore? It's like saying Peking. It makes you feel like some old-style guy who says, you know, I ain't caught none to these new ethnic names that they come from.

I still say Peking just because I think it bugs people. It does. It does. And Myanmar for such a long time sounded like, you know, one of those names that they rebrand countries after they've had a top-to-bottom reordering of the society. It did not help that I think the government was known by the Lovecraftian name of Slork. Slork, yeah, the State Law and Order Restoration Committee.

And we've just pattened ourselves on the back for knowing that, but isn't it great? I traveled there during the dark Slork days. It's like something out of Ghostbusters. It really is. Zulu knew how many slorks were roasted in the depths of Myanmar in that day. It was an interesting place. And it is interesting how a cohesive and relatively peaceful – and I think Peter is on to something. Cultures matter and some cultures – cultures, let's just and say, these cultures

were misbehaving and so I adjusted them and took an axe to the whole batch because that's what people are going to hear. That you're a cultural hegemonist who wishes to extirpate those who don't conform to our values. Listen, if our culture is bad

then I plead guilty. If our culture is bad, it's our fault. If their cultures are bad, it's our fault. If their cultures are bad, it's our fault. That's right, right, right. So we have the Middle East about to explode once more. ICE is still on the march here and there. A Tripoli falls to bad guys. Fires pop up everywhere.

The president golfs. And meanwhile, a lot of people are thinking that the big issue at the end of the summer is whether or not you have the right to move your chair back on the airline. And you could say first world problems, but I kind of hate that, especially when I'm on a plane, because it does matter. And actually, just because everything else is bad, and just because some people are upset that the ALS ice bucket challenge is taking away from real suffering in the world. I just sense a perspective. Put it all to one side and let's now address this issue without apology. Are you a leaner backer, recliner or not? Peter. My position is very simple.

I have the right to recline. The person in front of me does not. Talk about snork the reason the reason i travel with a little uh what's the macbook you'd know this james the macbook air the small one is 11 inches yes okay so i travel with an 11 inch macbook air the smaller of the two not the 13 inch because i have discovered that if i'm using a 13 inch computer on my tray and the person in front of me leans back, I can't use it anymore. But the 11-inch, no matter how far the person in front of me leans – so I have accommodated myself to this reality that in the seats in which I sit, which believe me are not first class or Rob Long's business class. But in the seats in which I sit, people have the right to recline and

I just have to live with it. Rob? Well, I don't travel business. I'm a coach. I fly coach. Do you really? Absolutely. I'm so disappointed to hear that.

Well, unless someone else is paying. Ah, okay. If I'm doing it on business. That's all it is. Well, no, no. Rarely. But listen, when I'm traveling on business, if it's officially Hollywood business, the writer's guild requires first the best you could get in the plane. Really?

Yeah. But mostly I'm in coach. I do economy plus on United. And sometimes they bump me up automatically because I do that a lot. I fly them a lot. Sometimes they don't. And I take the window seat and so I do recline. I don't recline that much. I recline just enough so that to create – if I need to, to create a little gap between the window and the back of the seats where my head can be cradled there and won't move around.

Sometimes the way the seats are, I can't – my head will just flop around. So yeah, I do lean back a little bit. I believe it's your right to put your seat back and it's the person's right in front to put their seat back. I don't think it's your right to keep them from putting their seat back. I think you can ask politely. That little contraption I think is probably a mistake. But I mean Josh Barrow had a good piece in the New York Times yesterday where he suggested that, listen, why don't we just make it a market? You could pay the guy in front of you not to lean back. Make him an offer.

I like that idea. I don't lean back. I usually have an aisle seat and if I lean back, that means that they're going to wake me up when it's time to land. Even if you've reclined three-eighths of an inch, and I generally don't. However, on the other hand, I'm a fairly wee lad, so I don't need the extra room. And I understand why people who are of NBA player proportion sometimes feel the need to put it back. What I hate is when the guy behind me decides that he's going to get up and the only way that he can possibly leverage his bulk is to grab the back of my seat.

That's right. Which always wakes me up and always, always creates – well, it doesn't create a stir at all because you don't want the plane to be diverted. But really, please, honestly. Okay. My last pet peeve about flying is I don't mind crying babies. I don't mind any of that stuff. I am

unhinged at the noise that I hear from other people's headphones. Really? That to me just drives me crazy. I don't because I have noise-canceling headphones which tend to put me in my own little cocoon.

One of the reasons I don't recline though is I think that I'm paying penance for something that I did many, many years ago on the Amtrak Express going from D.C. to New York. I'd leaned back. I'd leaned back all the way. I confessed that I did. I was reading. And then at some point I decided, well, we're pulling in maybe or I just – I wanted to pull my seat back. And so I leaned forward in my seat and I pushed the button that

returned my seat to its upright position, not realizing that not only the fellow behind me, not only was his tray down, but on his tray was a selection of beverages, foodstuffs. And so I dumped everything in his lap on the way to some business meeting. And he probably didn't get the job or close the Johnson contract. So I feel guilty about that sort of kind of – well, I remember. So there's that. Anything else here in the world we should discuss before we let go? I have to get to the state fair. No, you got to get to the state fair.

Let's get you to the fair. Yeah. Yesterday we had a live broadcast where I learned how to break dance, which was an awful lot of fun. It didn't happen. It did happen. As a matter of fact. I tweeted out about it, and some people were asking whether or not some sort of intervention was necessary.

It wasn't so bad that people wanted to throw me down and put a tongue depressor in my mouth so I didn't bite myself, but it was fun. And then today's video up at StarTribune.com concerns the Fine Arts Building, and I know that people laugh and scoff at the idea that us hicks up here, let alone that a state fair can have anything like fine art.

But it's really not only extraordinarily diverse, but the talent and the subject matter, realism, actual realism in these paintings won the awards and beautiful pictures exquisitely rendered of farm scenes of winter and the rest of it. If you want to really

be a controversial artist in this day and age, paint something people recognize. That's the up-and-coming thing. Well, what you won't be doing is, of course, painting the inside of the porcelain bowl in your sink with blood because you won't cut yourself if you go to Harry's. It's only the finest blade you can get from the finest price. And Harry's Shave, well, you know, they've got to deal with Ricochet.

If you enter that coupon code, you're going to get five bucks off your first shipment. Harry's.com. Also, go to EncounterBooks.com, 15% off any title. And we advise you to look at how David turned into Goliath, look at how Israel got demonized even more. And one last note. Yeah. And one last note. And for goodness sake, tell Rob Long not to stop his sales pitch on the podcast. It's kind of a kick hearing someone from Hollywood beg for money. See you later.

Which is so amazing because that's all we do in Hollywood. That's right. And Rob will be posting the phone number again so you can make your passive-aggressive little commentary on everything that we do here if you just call in. I'd like to say next week we're going to have more membership testimonials and pitches, but we won't because we're going to be off next week as a sort of attenuated Labor Day thing. Hey, we got rights too here. We haven't unionized yet, but we're banded together. We got placards that say unfair.

We'll only deploy those in case the, you know, thousands and thousands of people listen to this and nobody ponies up. So pony up and have yourself a great weekend. And thanks to our guest, Rob Peter, and we'll see you all at Ricochet 2.0. See you in a few weeks,

fellas. Thank you. But the air is so heavy and dry Strange voices are saying What did they say? Things I can't understand It's too close to comfort This heat has got right out of hand It's a cruel, cruel, cruel summer Ricochet. Join the conversation. It's too hard to handle, so I gotta get a new gun. It's a cruel, cruel summer.

Leaving me here on my own. It's a cruel, it's a cruel, cruel summer. Now you're gone. You're not the only one. It's a cruel, cruel summer. Bye. you