The Ricochet Podcast - The In Crowd

Episode Date: April 15, 2017

Another Saturday edition of the Ricochet Podcast with a super-sized running time and a legendary guest: The Podfather himself, Norman Podhoretz, whose seminal book Making It has just been re-released to mark its 50th anniversary. We talk about the book, and about the world, both past and present. Also, in-fighting at the White House, North Korea saber rattling, and what was your first concert? Source

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That is not who our family at United is. This can never, will never happen again on a United Airlines flight. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lallex, and our guest today, Norman Butthoretz. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody, to this, the Ricochet Podcast. It's number 348, and how do we get that far?

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That's free by going to ZipRecruiter.com free trial. And back from the abyss, back from his great, the lacuna, the Rob free time. He's staggering back, clutching his chest. Sick as a... It's always the case.

Always the case. Always the case when you're in production or you have a big project you're doing and you're sort of stuck on it. Your body says, don't get sick. And the minute it's over and you have a moment to catch your breath, it all catches up with you. So I have this terrible cold. But allow me to say, if you are sympathetic to this strain in my voice and you're listening to this podcast and you are a fan of podcast, and you are not a member of Recom and become a member, we really, really need you.

It's the home of Center Right Smart and Civil Conversation. We only need 1,500 new members, so you could actually put us over the top. You could be the one. If you've been thinking about it and putting it off, please do not do it. It is very, very important for the organization. I'm not kidding. And you can give a gift subscription. It's the best gift you can give to a smart and civil

person in your life. And you should subscribe to The Daily Shot. So just even if you're like, okay, I'm not going to do it, Rob, so shut up. But go to Ricochet.com, subscribe to The Daily Shot. It's our free daily email newsletter. It's a great way to keep tabs on current events and see what's going on on the center right side of the world and

get a bunch of laughs and win any argument with the liberal you encounter during the day. DailyShot, Ricochet.com. We need you. If you've been putting it off, please don't put it off. Do it today. Ricochet.com. You get a free month risk-free to you.

And we will not siphon off your money and pay for penicillin for Rob. However, we are performing clinical tests on Peter Robinson who usually has a cold now and then. If we can build up your antibodies and find some sort of vaccine, if nothing else comes out of Ricochet, then a cure for the common

cold might not be bad. But then again, perhaps colds, such things, will be irrelevant because a lake of fire is about to descend on America if the North Koreans have their way. Peter, it's another one of those weekends where everyone's saying, oh, gosh, 67 times we've been through this, but maybe 68 times will be the time something happens. We're looking at North Korea, staring across the parallel. We've got a lot of assets in the region. China's got troops on the border.

This somehow, though, feels a little different because the guy in charge is a little different and there's sort of a weapons free attitude that prevails now with the military is this different um is something about to happen and if so are all the predictions of catastrophe for everyone else if north korea is ever touched that was really true oh beats me beats me well here's what we know we know that north korea is a militarily extremely difficult problem thanks to barack obama and in fairness thanks to george w bush who's five way talks five different governments didn't actually accomplish a darn thing in north korea and thanks back to bill clinton with whom the koreans entered into a promise not to do this that and the other and then broke all the promises so we've got over a dozen years now of the north koreans being permitted to do what they wanted to do violating promises thumbing their noses at us

and most critically developing nuclear weapons why don't we just go in there and drop a mother of all bombs on wherever their nuclear facility is? Well, we don't know quite where all their nuclear facilities are. And more to the point, take a look at the map of South Korea. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is very close to the border of North Korea. It doesn't take nuclear weapons for North Korea if we were to move against them, if the Chinese were to move against them, if the Japanese were to move against them to do an enormous amount of damage to Seoul using fairly old-fashioned

artillery, which they have now spent decades digging in into the mountains of the south of North Korea. So this one is a very, very hard problem. We can display a show of force, but we can't go in and simply drop 59 cruise missiles on a runway and solve the problem that way or send a message that way. We could send a message, but the dangers are enormous. And we can't simply drop the mother of all bombs on their nuclear facilities.

This one is hard. What will happen next? I do not know. It's hard because we make it so. I mean, because we're bound by certain ethical considerations and political considerations. It's not hard if you drop a nuke on every one of their suspected facilities and Pyongyang. It's not hard. Solves the problem.

But we're just not prepared to do something like that. Rob, what say you? Or are we? Is there a new crazy Jack D. Ripper, Curtis LeMay Stone Age mentality at work? We really are. It really would not be – it would be not just imprudent, but it would be sort of madness to nuke North Korea. We're not even convinced that North Korea has the ability to deliver a nuclear bomb. What they have the ability to do is to scare us and to use us as leverage against the future, the future being really bleak for them because they enter a famine every six years. The irony here is that the most plain talking about North Korea we've heard from an American leader in years has been from Donald Trump to the Chinese premier.

And he said very – apparently he said very clearly, this is your problem. Why aren't you solving it? And the truth is it is China's problem. China knows it's China's problem. If it all hits the skids and it all falls apart those 23 million emaciated north koreans aren't going south the south is highly fortified south is filled with troops the south is where the if there's going to be a north-south war that that border will be where it takes place they're going to go north they're going to cross the yalu river which is about the

size of a you know that as wide as a football field as wide as a football field. As wide as a football field is wide. It's not even 100 yards wide. And they're going to stream into the ancient Koryo Empire, also the Chinese known as Dongbei, Manchuria, and they're going to try to be refugees there, which the Chinese cannot stand. That's why the Chinese are the ones sending food

and aid begrudgingly. And every now and then when North Korea wants to make trouble, they show a nuke off off the weird thing here is that north korea the north korea finally has a president of the united states that is the most understandable to them right i mean if we ever have had a a president who's the most like a north korean leader which he's always right he always plays all he wins he's the best i mean i think kim i don't know if it's kim jong leader in which he's always right. He always wins. He's the best. I mean, I think Kim Jong-un, the other one, who would play a round of golf, and every hole was a hole-in-one.

It was reported breathlessly in television. It's a lot like Donald Trump reporting and tweeting about himself, how great and perfect he is. What we've discovered, however, is that the north koreans actually believe that so we have hit reset on that relationship which i think is good uh donald trump i think wisely whether wisely or not or just practically dumped a lot of it in the chinese lap uh a week a week or so ago in mar-a-lago um i'm actually feeling like there's i'm not sure i i have i don't know

i'm not sure he dumped it in the chinese lab i as best i can tell the conversation went more like this everything we're saying of course is an oversimplification but as best i can tell the conversation went like this either you do it or we'll do it, but it has to be done, which isn't quite giving it all to the Chinese, I don't think. Well, no, but it is the implicit threat. Yes. If we do anything, it's going to – it's a fragile place. Right, and we sent a carrier group over there. That is a carrier and six other ships.

This is – there's no doubt that there's a display of force going on. There's all – so what – I mean what – I had a chat. The great thing about the Hoover Institution is you run into people in the hallway and I ran into somebody who knows a lot about North Korea. And a great deal of what is going to be going on, what is going on will turn on intelligence that the Chinese have and Donald Trump has. But we amazingly enough, Rob and James and Peter don't have. So, for example, why don't the Chinese simply overturn this no good and send almost any other Korean would be better than this guy? Well, it turns out that he's been assassinating people within his circle who might be likely replacements. This apparently is one of the reasons he literally apparently fed his uncle to the dogs he had him set him on set upon by dogs apparently this is one of the reasons or the reason why his half brother was assassinated passing through an

airport what was it three weeks ago because they knew people in china they were people the chinese could deal with so he's trying to knock out all the alternatives are there alternatives do the chinese have a list of another two dozen people they could deal with? Who's going to pull the trigger on this guy? How many agents do the Chinese have on United States is run now by a military operation. That is to say, Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster, McMaster at the NSC in the White House, Mattis, the secretary of defense, who's backed up by a chief of staff who do not mind taking action. Right. I think you're right. do that, if you actually have that, you drop those bombs, you have that, if the regime breaks, the refugee disaster for the Chinese will be, for them, absolutely unprecedented. As is the Chinese use of

foreign policy strategy to replace and to affect regime change. They've never done that either. The Chinese are total amateurs at this. And they hate, especially they hate having non-Han, ethnically Han Chinese, more of them anywhere in China. There already are these kind of weird breakaway feelings in the Koryo Empire as there are in Western China, as there are in Southern China. And so the Chinese, the interior Chinese government does what you do.

You send a million Han Chinese to the breakaway regions about every year to try to sort of make them a little less what they are and a little more Han Chinese. If 23 million, 23 million emaciated North Koreans, where are they going to go? They're going to go across, they're going to go to Manchuria. There'll be tent cities and refugees and they'll be, and look like those chinese too because those chinese have korean features it's just a disaster for beijing and i think the smart thing is what donald trump did in madison and mcmaster say okay fine we only know how to do it the hard way right we only know how to fly bombs in there and if we do the mess is going to land right on your lap. So you better clean it up.

And this is something the American president should have been doing. The five-party talks, 20-party talks, two-party talks, the only two groups that need to talk

are America and China. Correct. And that is finally what happened. And I, you know, look, I don't like this president very much, but maybe he far as

gumped his way into this, but this is a solution or the solution and he gets credit for it. Well, the question is whether or not the sociopathic butterball running North Korea actually thinks that something has changed in Washington. I mean this is somebody whose entire worldview consists of growing up in privilege and nobody ever telling him no. And when you're saying that he's eliminating all the people who might be potential i understand that but is china trying to find somebody who has that magic wonderful lineage back to the the glorious mountain where zhush was born i mean is that's what's necessary in order to keep some sort of civil fiction going in korea beats me rob made a very good point the chinese really don't do colonialism and so they don't have they don't have neither do we, although we have the experience of the Philippines.

They really don't have an experience like that. They either do – look at Vietnam, for example. During the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh's principal clients was the Soviet Union, but the Chinese sent in troops. They were extremely helpful. Ho wins – or the North Vietnamese win the Vietnamese war. We're out of there. They unify the country. And what happens?

They turn on the Chinese. There's a war between Vietnam and China. It doesn't get a lot of coverage here. Nobody knows the details of it. But it doesn't seem to have turned out all that well for China. That's one example where you try to work with. They're hated on their periphery tibet the tibetans still are attempting as best one can tell to maintain an independent their own culture they're not

even though the chinese took over tibet and did exactly what rob said they do on their periphery moving in more and more han chinese over the years they're just not good at dealing with other countries other cultures on their regions dealing with them they can dominate them they can take them over they can crush them but dealing with them moving somebody in what they're as robin pointed out what they want is an intact north korea they don't want north koreans streaming right so that's the deal is we have to find a way then with china to somehow negotiate the the the change in temperament and character of the regime, but not necessarily provide anything.

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of vittles in the lunchroom, but otherwise it's still going to remain our prison. I think to be clear, we're not saying that we have to do that. We're saying that China has to do that. We're not saying we're going to do that. We're not saying we know how to do that. The North Korea is not a client state of the

United States. We've been sending them food and aid and trains and they don't border us. They don't have an efficient or slightly inefficient banking system in Beijing. That's not our job.

It's China's job. I think we've achieved some kind of clarity in America today, which is that the Chinese now know that it's on them, which is something they've been avoiding, wisely avoiding. There's no reason why they should have taken it on.

They've wisely avoided it, thinking this is all resolve itself, but it doesn't seem to be resolving itself. And now it's a mess that they have to solve. I mean, everyone's acted very rationally here. Even the North Koreans, like they're, rather than starve, they decide to hold the world hostage uh and that's smart but at a certain point we we needed to say to the chinese we're sending in gun gun boats you fix it your way guys at a certain point american interests

have to prevail and sorry china sucks to be you but you don't deal with that just as we have to prevail. And sorry, China, sucks to be you, but deal with that just as we have to deal with things over this part of the world too. I understand the whole looking at the world from a global perspective and a very Obama-esque perception that is, but at a certain point, you got to shrug your shoulders and say, are the Chinese that concerned about what our border situation is? Nah, they couldn't care less. Hey, listen, folks, what I want you to do right now is pity Rob, who has absolutely no opportunity whatsoever to step on the Segway because there isn't one. But I want to tell you about Vistaprint. And this is something that happened to me the other day when somebody asked for my card.

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Code Ricochet. And we thank them for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we're honored to have on the podcast, Norman Pothoratz. He was the editor of Commentary from 1960 to 95, and his book, the seminal book, Making It, has just been reissued by the New York Review of Books Classic Series to mark its 50th anniversary. And of course, he's also the father of John Pothoratz, which is why we call him a podfather, but mostly we call him one of the great minds of the movement and we're, as I said, honored to have him on. How are you today, sir? Well, even better than I was after hearing that luscious introduction. Luscious indeed it was.

Well, we'd like to butter you up before we ask you the tough questions. We were discussing North Korea, and of course we're all just wonderful armchair experts who can solve the situation in mere minutes. What do you think of the NORC situation at the moment and what America could do? Well, just to sustain my age-old reputation as a warmonger, even though by now I'm 87 years old, I would risk bombing their nuclear facilities. And I know very well what the dangers would be,

but nothing else has worked in the last, whatever it is, 20 years since one administration after another has tried to bribe them out of developing nuclear weapons. Norman, Peter here, Peter Robinson. You say you know very well what the risks are and so those risks include as you know those risks include that whatever is left of the north korean military and as best we can tell the whole country is militarized would open up on seoul with artillery and kill thousands of people before we could pinpoint each artillery site

and take it out. You're willing to pay that price? Well, I'm not sure that that price would have to be paid. It's very difficult to tell what the consequences would be. And in fact, the strike might scare the hell out of them and they might not respond as we expect. I just don't know. The question is whether we can afford to allow them to go on developing their nuclear arsenal,

especially as it gives Iran an even greater incentive to do the same and probably in less time than the disgraceful agreement would allow them. And I regard Iran, a nuclear Iran, as a much more dangerous enemy than the North Koreans. All right. Let's turn to the Mideast then. Again, it's Peter here here since the last time we had peter yeah it's the since the last time you were on with us here's what's happened donald trump has astoundingly been elected president of the united states he's named james mattis

a four-star marine general his secretary of defense he has now named hr mcmaster a three-star Marine general, his secretary of defense. He has now named H.R. McMaster a three-star army general with deep combat experience in the Mideast, his national security advisor. He has repaid Assad in Syria for using chemical weapons with an attack of 59 cruise missiles on an airfield in Syria. And he has dropped the largest non-nuclear ordnance we possess on a network of Taliban tunnels in Afghanistan. How has that changed the complexion in the Middle East? It's changed it radically, it seems to me. That one bomb alone may have altered the direction of Middle East policy and history. It remains to be seen what the follow-up is, but it had a political and, I would say, spiritual resonance far beyond the power of the munitions itself,

and especially added to the mother of all bombs that was then used subsequently. Look, I supported Donald Trump, not enthusiastically, but as the lesser of two evils. and I've been amazed at, well, less amazed actually than I would have been otherwise, to see what he has been doing, especially his appointments to the Cabinet. Even during the campaign, I paid less attention to what he was saying, which I could hardly bear to listen to half the campaign, I paid less attention to what he was saying, which I could hardly bear to listen to half the time, and watched who he was hanging around with. He was hanging around with staunch conservatives like Jeff Sessions and Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani. It seemed to me that that told us more about him

and about what his administration would be like than some of the statements, especially the fatuous ones that he was given to making or tweeting. Hey, Norman, Norman, Peter, I want to quote, I want to give you one quotation to hear how you respond to this and then turn you over to Rob Long, who's champing at the bit. Here is David Frum on Donald Trump. David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, now editor of The Atlantic magazine, a co-editor of The Atlantic magazine. indications the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law and do

untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance and democratic norms around the world. Close quote. Norman Podhoretz responds how. Well, I couldn't think of a statement more inaccurate than that one by David, although there have been a few made by some other people just as foolish. I think that Trump is already making fools out of the people who said things like that. Not everyone who opposed Trump said foolish things about him. I mean, there was certainly a serious case to be made, but the serious cases were rarely made.

Mostly there was hysteria of a kind that I don't remember seeing in all my years of observing politics. It was an astonishing phenomenon, really. And the notion that Donald Trump alone could accomplish all those terrible things was inherently foolish. Just as it was, by the way, foolish to think that electing Hillary Clinton meant electing some empress. I mean, the problem with Hillary Clinton was not just herself, but the fact that she was dragging along with her a political party

which had become dangerously leftist, and that whatever, even if she had certain good intentions from our point of view, they would have been frustrated by what was happening to the Democratic Party, considering somebody like Keith Ellison, the head of the DNC, for example. Hey, Norman, it's Rob Long. Hi. So you managed to get through the campaign without listening closely to some of the things that he was saying. But a lot of his supporters listened closely to the things that he was saying.

And, you know, this is a guy who's got in with about 30 percent and he's stuck at 30 percent. And some of that 30 percent is not happy with his more interventionist policies in Afghanistan. They're not really happy with the fact that he seems to have surrounded himself, I mean, you say staunch conservatives, Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani, but a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump think of those guys as horrible rhino squishes. So if you were, as a man who has known presidents and known the presidency and studied the presidency, if you had two or three solid pieces of managerial presidency-related advice to give to Donald Trump, not that he would want to hear you, what would you tell him to do? I think its success, its foreign policy success certainly, recently, is kind of adrift. I mean, you open the New York Times, look at the front page of the New York Times, 10, 15, a dozen articles about the disarray within it.

What advice would you give them? Well, first of all, I'm not altogether sure that you're right about the 30%. I haven't seen solid evidence that they're turning against him. Those people seem to be willing, as he himself said, he could kill somebody in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and they wouldn't abandon him. So why would they abandon him over something trivial like bombing Syria and Afghanistan? It's not just that. He said he wouldn't do that. He said doing that was stupid. And then he said that China was a currency manipulator. And then he said it wasn't a currency manipulator. So all of the boogeymen he ran against, or many of them, he's now turned against.

Right. Well, that's why I said I paid much less attention to what he was saying than the people he was associating with. I'm a great believer in the ancient principle of guilt by association. He did seem to be throwing in his lot with the Republican right. And so I've been less surprised. What's happening now, I mean, these so-called turnarounds, from a certain point of view, some of them aren't turnarounds at all. I mean, they could be interpreted as ways of making America great again,

which was, after all, the central theme. Now, my advice to Trump, I have no advice to, I mean, presidents, who was it who said, where you stand is where you sit? It's not unusual for presidents or even congressmen to experience changes of mind and heart once they get into office and assume responsibility. You're out of office,

even if you're a senator. You don't really have much responsibility. You have to decide on life and death actions. You can just kibitz, which is what many of those people are. The minute you get real power into your hands, you inevitably become a different person, unless you're crazy, and I don't think he is crazy. I think it was admirable of him, for example, to say simply, I changed my mind. You know, what he did, what was he saying

about China, did he? I can't remember now. Something. One of the things that he changed his mind about. He said it, Peter here, he said it the other day about NATO. He met the NATO Governor General and he said, I called it obsolete. It was obsolete. They're changing their strategy. It's not obsolete anymore. So, Norman, if I may follow.

He took credit for that, characteristically. He said, I criticized them, and then they started giving more money and so on and so forth. Exactly. So, Peter, here, once again, I want to follow up on a little bit of what Rob said. So, here's what doesn't bother me. I'm with you on this. His appointments look very impressive. Neil Gorsuch is now a member of the Supreme Court.

That is an astonishing thing when we all, when we consider that just a few months ago, we all expected Hillary Clinton to be president and making the appointments. And I have to say that as an alum of a White House, which now is being held up as a model of good order and decorum, the Reagan White House, I can tell you that the infighting in the Trump White House doesn't particularly bother me because the infighting in the Reagan White House was intense.

It didn't make it into the press. Absolutely, I remember. Ed Meese had his guys, Jim Baker, there was blood all over the floor. Okay, so that doesn't bother me. Here, though, is something that I think bothers all three of us, and I'd like to know what you have to say about it. All three of us have spent our lives with words. Excuse me, James as well, but Robin, you and I have been the ones talking here. So all four of us have spent our lives with words. We believe words are important. We believe that meaning matters. We believe that what you say, you should think carefully about what you put in writing and what you say. seems to have an amazing disregard. He has no more regard for factual analysis, for careful thought,

than a New York cab driver chosen at random. Does that bother you? Can you actually run the country when people can have no faith in what you actually say? Well, it does bother me, and for the very reason that you mentioned, though, this is why I said earlier I could barely listen to the things he was saying, so I watched the things he was doing. But I believe that the words he will be using from now on, most consistently,

will bother the four of us a lot less. Look, I thought that George W. Bush made some of the greatest presidential speeches ever. This sounds a little crazy to some people, but I've defended it in print, and I'd be willing to defend it again. And poor George Bush's great words, noble words, crafted by some very, very good speechwriters, seemed to make no impact on public opinion whatsoever, and certainly not in the world of words. He was thought to be inarticulate, stupid, illiterate, because he read more books than most of the people who were calling him illiterate. And this was very frustrating to me.

I remember making a passionate defense of him at a meeting of conservatives, and one of them said to me, well, why doesn't he say that? And I said, but he has said that ten times. And one of them said to me, well, why doesn't he say that? And I said, but he has said that ten times. Norman, James Lalick's here in Minneapolis. And you know one of the longest journeys in the world is from Fargo, North Dakota to Minneapolis. So I thought, but it turns out that the one from Brooklyn to Manhattan is even longer and more fraught with peril. You wrote about it in Making It, which has now been reissued. Now, when you became part of the New York Circle, you entered a world, a rarefied atmosphere that a lot of people say was the beginning of the thing

that Trump had to fight. In other words, people who were Trump supporters, who were probably smarter and had a more well-developed sense of the world and politics than Trump did, nevertheless voted for him because they believed that putting in Hillary Clinton would not install an empress, but would be a chance for the left to solidify again this transnational progressive mentality and its hold on the country and the economy. And a lot of people trace back that idea not to classical liberalism or the liberalism of New Yorkers as we knew them, but the ideas that came out of the new left in the 60s. And you were there.

Describe, if you will, the intellectual atmosphere amongst these people who must have been thrilled at the opportunity to remake this benighted nation into something much more wonderful and egalitarian, with them at the top, of course. Well, I've said that I've spent the last 40 years, and now it's become 50, trying to atone for the damage I did in collaboration with all those ex-friends. The fact of the matter is, I mean, I see the history, the political history of this country in very simple terms. What happened was that the New Left, which was a tiny marginal movement when I first came in contact with it,

it wasn't even called the New Left then, in the late 50s, made, to my own astonishment, the Maoist Long march through the institutions and finally conquered them all. So, you know, just yesterday, well, we still have a Sandinista in Gracie Mansion here in New York, and we had someone who, if not a Stalinist, a radical leftist pretending to be a centrist in the White House. Yes, we do. to say and ashamed to say, it never occurred to me that they would triumph the way they had. I mean, they took over the Democratic Party beginning with McGovern, and it's just been with a slight diversion in Clinton's second term.

It's been moving inexorably toward where we found it by the time Donald Trump came along. The most unlikely person you could imagine to save us from it, which is what I think he did. And Neil Gorsuch alone justifies the support that some of us gave to him. Yes, he does. And I must say, many of my present friends who were turning into ex-friends, I thought I had enough of those by now, because I said that I was anti-anti-Trump, which is how my position was most accurately formulated.

The long march of the institutions of the so-called movement of the 60s was a calamity from which we, I hate to say this, but might possibly never fully recover. And what I'm praying, I don't think I'll live to see this, is that this unlikely Trump administration may be the beginning of our digging ourselves out of the pit. You know, I wrote a little book called The Present Danger during the 1980-79 campaign.

And the subtitle was, during the 1980-79 campaign. And the subtitle was, Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power? That question became even more urgent than it was then. And even though I myself never expected Reagan to pull us out of that hole, he did to a great extent. And then Carter had sunk us into it, and Obama was much better at sinking us into the hole than Carter himself was. So I think we're in a similar situation, and God knows I would not compare Donald Trump to Reagan. He has virtually nothing in common with Reagan,

except that he does embody or represent or speak for forces. What I consider the healthier forces that remain in the culture and that have been trying to resist this inexorable march for the institutions by the left of the 60s. And that's my hope, and that's basically why I supported Trump, even though not with a whole heart. You mentioned the anti- Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Jim. You mentioned the anti-anti-Trumpism. There's an analogy, perhaps during the Reagan years, you had the anti anti communists, the people who viewed being anti communist as a sign of a benighted intelligence, as a brutish McCarthyite. Right. And they themselves may not have been communist, but they had a certain sort of intellectual affinity for the general ideas, collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism.

The new left that you describe, I'm fascinated that these people could grow up and live in New York, the finest shining example, the manifestations of culture and capitalism that they can, but yet seek to tear it down, seek to blame it for something. How did they actually, how did these people make that sort of intellectual connection between what capitalism had produced and what they wanted to do to it? Well, they never admitted that capitalism had produced anything much good. They were blind to it, especially to the economic side of it. They were all very brilliant people. Not a single one of them knew anything about economics.

Well, maybe they were one or two, but virtually none. And they were, as I said in making it, which I reread for the first time in 50 years a few weeks ago, they did not believe they belonged to America or that America belonged to them. And the word alienation was the jargon term for that attitude. There's a long history behind this. It starts in the period right after the Civil War, which is when modern America really was born. And the things that began to happen in the Gilded Age, which is what turned the intellectuals and the patriciate, the wasp patriciate off the country, were maturing all along,

and they found their consummation in the movement of the 60s and left. Some of the people who joined in that movement did so as a kind of born again leftism I mean they were anti-communists they had gone through the whole thing and then suddenly here came a new radical movement

and maybe this time it wouldn't be spoiled the way Stalin spoiled their useful illusions I think a lot of them felt that way. And then there was also a fair degree of moral cowardice involved in the capitulation, especially in the universities, to these barbarians from within. Of course, it's even worse now.

You can hardly imagine it would be, but it is now. So this is, in other words, what I'm trying to say is that there's a long history going back at least to the 1860s about what happened in the 1960s. Norman, how many grandchildren do you have now? Thirteen. many grandchildren do you have now 13 wow 13 grandchildren and your book has been making it has been republished on its 50th anniversary by the new york review of book classics you're you're a classic yourself now you yeah i think you must be you're the godfather of the of conservative intellectuals in this country. What do you have to say to those grandchildren about

what is permanent and enduring about America on the one hand, and about what they are going to need to fight for in the hope of preserving on the other? Well, I've been saying it to them all their lives,

and I mean, all of them are, at least to some degree conservative. I mean, the least conservative are known as liberals, but they are conservative, every single one of them. And some of them, although not on Trump, by the way, but some of them are even to the right of me, a piece of political geography that many people think doesn't exist. But they've all, I mean, it's not a matter of direct influence, but I think there's not a single one of the 13 grandchildren that I have trouble with politically, and now I have nine great-grandchildren, the oldest of whom is four, and he looks like he's turning into a good conservative, too.

Hey, Norman, it's Rob Long, and I happen to know one of your grandchildren. He is. He's a very, very smart writer. I know you have, and I've thanked you before. No, listen. I hope he's my retirement plan, honestly. He may be. I was talking to a friend of mine last night whose son is now applying to college. And they were sort of sitting – he told me they were sitting around. Money is not an issue with his family.

There's no other reason to make these decisions. But he was talking to his son, and his son looked at him and said, what's the point of college? Do I really – do I have to go? It's like, he didn't really want to go. He thought it was a lot of money. And he was, and he's a fairly conservative kid. He was pretty sure he knew what they were going to be, you know, how

you get by in a big, fancy American university, which is where he's thinking about going. And my friend looked at me and said, I didn't know what to say. Yes, you have to go, because in America you have to go to college, but let me ask you this. In America today, should you, do you have to go to college? Do you learn anything there anymore?

Well, everything you learn there is wrong, but it turns out it is true that you still need the credential. That may change because of the outrageous expense, the biggest case of consumer fraud in the history of the world, the $60,000 a year tuition and board fees. So, and, you know, ideally, I think that nobody should go to college anymore. But so long as the, you know, the credential is necessary to earn, it's very difficult to take that risk of, you that risk of hurting yourself in any career you may enter by not having the credential. The problem is there's almost nowhere you can go where your mind won't be warped by the faculty. And that is one of the deepest cultural problems we have now.

I just this morning read an editorial in the Wellesley student newspaper, a defending censorship. It's semi-literate, by the way, I'm glad to say. Yes. But it's still shocking to me to read something like that coming from a once pretty distinguished college full of quite pretty girls, by the way, in my day. Ha, ha, ha, ha. So, I mean, I don't know what to say.

There's some consolation from history. respected throughout Europe, became placings of the rich and were no longer serious centers of scholarship. And every one of the eminent intellectuals in that period, especially in the early 18th century, I think not a one of them had a college degree. Dr. Johnson was given an honorary doctorate by Oxford when he became famous. But I don't think Edmund Burke had a university education, or Boswell or Joshua Taylor. I mean, they were all hanging out in the cafes in London.

And it's a little bit like the hope that we have now that the think tanks, the conservative think tanks, may wind up serving that same purpose. Certainly some of the best scholarship, even the new ideas have come out of the think tanks and not out of the universities in the last, what, 20 or 30 years. Well, now, of course, the college exists to just say you went to college, to give you that credential.

Back in Boswell and Johnson's day, if you weren't part of the aristocracy, you had to be a man of accomplishment. Credentials meant little. It's what you could do. Now it's what little piece of paper you have. My daughter's looking for colleges, and I tell her that every time we read a story where somebody's banned free speech or deplatformed a speaker, we draw a big black line through that college as a possible choice. So we're now down to the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, which is probably where she'll go. Or Hillsdale.

Or Hillsdale, right. The other criteria that I have is that, now that I think about it, that a book or two or many by Norma Pothorne has to be in the library. If it isn't, then you're not going there, child. Sorry. So we thank you again so much for coming with us today

and discussing the book, Making It, and of course everything else that you've done and continue to do for the conservative movement. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Bless you. Bless you for inviting me and bless you for saying all those nice things to this old geezer. Norman, thank you for joining. Give our best to Midge.

I will indeed. I certainly will. Hope to see you again when you come to New York. We'll be there soon. Great. I remember a couple of years ago I was on a National Review cruise, and I was getting my breakfast, and I'm walking along with my tray and my eggs and my French toast and the rest of it, and somebody taps me on the shoulder,

and I turn around, and that it's Norman Norman and he wanted to say hello and introduce himself. We've never met. And I was just stunned because, wow, it's him, but it's also the measure of the man as opposed to sitting there and letting an endless parade of courtiers show up and offer their admiration. He crosses the room to introduce himself to a guy he's never met before. I just – a wonderful fellow. Yeah, and like a real New Yorker too.

That's what I love about it. Yes, yes. A New York hipster from the day. There are pictures. I remember sitting with – I had lunch with John Podoritz at a restaurant, a new restaurant in Manhattan. And they had decorated a few of the rooms with old photographs of New Yorkers. And there was Norman. We found Norman.

I think he's in a picture with other glamorous people smoking a cigarette. And it was cool. It was just a cool thing to think that there was a period, pretty much entirely in black and white film anyway, where cool people hung out at parties, at cocktail parties, and dinner parties that were not fancy, by the way. They were just kind of like, you know, people put out what they put out, and you kind of made your own drink, and they would sit around and smoke cigarettes and drink, and probably drink too much, but they mixed with each other. So you had a Norman Pedoritz, and you had a movie star, and then you you had an author and then you had a down-of-the-heels reporter

and you had just a bunch of different people in the life of a city and I think it really informed his ability, I think, to be at his age to say, which I admire, to say no, you know what, Trump will be fine.

Right. You say black and white picture. You said black and white picture. Yeah. You said black and white pictures, right? But I guarantee you that that was a red and white checked tablecloth because that was the 60s, right? Yeah, you're right. So probably a wax-covered fiasci in the middle. You know what a fiasci is?

I do not. Okay, when you look back at the classic 1960s pictures of restaurants where intellectuals went and lanes and the rest of it there'd be this straw covered bottle in the middle that had candles jammed in it and all kinds of yes yes oh right right right fiaschi is a plural for from what i believe a fiasco which is a kind of flask of glass and they used to put bad wine in it and that's why the term fiasco a bad why if this wine is a kind of flask of glass, and they used to put bad wine in it, and that's why the term fiasco came up. A bad wine, if this wine is a fiasco, it's named after the container that it was in. But you'll never get bad wine.

It's a flat one. It's like for that supermarket wine, that for Portugal, Matus, that flat one. Right, but you're so intent on making that point, you forgot. I'd already transitioned to the spot. You didn't even hear. Oh, I didn't even hear oh i didn't even hear you're going to truly ruin a segue or true ruin a segue pay attention i know i feel with intentionality and i didn't do it and i apologize but luckily luckily i consider it a triumph just

to do it at all now i so i will take credit for this the man has a fever and a sinus infection no i think he's getting lazy to be frank i think he's just obviously accepting himself to be the master and he's phoning it in now i'm saying i can do it without him i'm i'm making a very a very trump administration error which we can get to as soon as you finish your spot and so we shall but you won't get a fiasco wine from wink not at all um you like good wine of course you do you like great wine well you know when you have a great glass of wine it it enhances the moment, whether you're reflecting on the day as it ends or you're with somebody you love or even like or just met. Wine is that wonderful social lubricant.

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That was it. I can't even say it, Rob. Well, no, I was just – Rob, I was just reminded that, yes, it is true. When we were talking to Norman, it is true that there are all sorts of infighting in presidential campaign – in presidential administrations, but they were rarely so ideal in such ideological relief as this one, the one between sort of the Bannon camp, which is getting smaller and smaller now only includes Steve Bannon and the sort of Jared Ivanka group, which are sort of more pragmatic and definitely more liberal and a lot more,

I would say, mainstream. It's certainly much more adroit with the press. I guess what we're seeing is, I mean, to me, the irony is that this president, like the president before him, seems to have no interest seem to have no interest and no one in the camp who's interested in the in the way the presidency works and how you get things done and how you get big things done and to me what's what's amazing i think i i am a a chorus of one because no one else seems to see it um i see more similarities between Barack Obama and Donald Trump than I do between either one of them and other presidents, just the way they run things. And they're kind of – the level of arrogance that veers into stupid, it seems to me. I mean anybody who reads – a lot of it has to do about health care, right? I mean, anybody who reads histories, the American presidency knows that when you want to get something big done, you need to reach consensus and you need to sort of reach out and you need to wheel a deal and you need to do all sorts of things.

And you have a very clear plan. And neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump seems to have spent any time. And I think what's interesting is that here you have Barack Obama, who reads, is a voluminous reader, reads everything, is an incredible reader, very smart guy, intellectual, absolutely, right, without question. And then you have Donald Trump, who doesn't read anything, but rather just watch the TV shows, has zero interest in sort of the life of the mind or any of those things. And they, both of them, neither one of them said had any interest in the job at hand, which is how an American president gets things done. They both sort of assumed they would sort of glide in on the adulation of their fans and wave a magic wand and things would magically happen. And when they didn't magically happen, they sort of get petulant and furious.

I agree with almost all of that. There's one area where things can magically happen at least at first. And it's – in my judgment, it's a danger here. They can magically happen. You can send 59 cruise missiles to Syria without consulting with Congress. And so the danger here is that Donald Trump is going to say, oh, this is interesting. This is fun. Here's where I can get six guys in the room. They give me my options. I make a decision. And within 24 hours,

bombs fly. That's easy. Getting health care reform through Congress is really, really hard. And the danger, of course, is that foreign policy becomes very, very hard as well unless you know what you're doing and bring the nation along with you. Any individual decision is easy. You don't have to consult with anybody. You just listen to options and give an order. But you do that two or three or four times and fail to bring Congress with you, and you do it a dozen times and fail to bring the country with you, and you can get into real trouble. That's a danger here i agree what's interesting though just the the missiles didn't into syria i think are a

fascinating case because donald trump was simply making good on a threat that barack obama had made exactly already not made good on exactly it is a very very i mean what was revealed i think was you know when the old warren buffett's uh um investment uh adages think, was when the old Warren Buffett's investment adage is that when the tide goes out, you find out who's swimming naked. When times get tough, you find out who's playing politics and who's really thinking about the strategic direction and interests of the United States. And you have a whole bunch of Obama, left-wing Obamaites, acolytes from the Obama administration, attacking Trump for doing exactly what not only Barack Obama promised he would do, but what he almost did. And would have done had he had the gumption right uh and then you have a whole bunch of sort of trumpites who uh who were uh who tried to convince themselves that this is actually part of the trump doctrine but it really wasn't and

and what you discover is that it is actually very hard today to find people who see the national interest in any terms other than political or partisan politics. And that's depressing. But what the good news is, and I agree with you, Peter and Norman, the good news is that at least this president, with his absolutely glancing interest in consistency or the truth, he knows a good opportunity when he sees one he took it and he questions from the chat room here virus cop asks i really don't see uh why the red line thing was a big deal is that what rob is referring to gentlemen do you think the red line was barack

obama's red line i think is yeah go ahead Well, a big deal, that's a hard question. Was it a big deal? Should he not have had one? Not issuing the threat was not a big deal, or not falling through on the threat was not a big deal. I think not falling through on the threat was a very big deal. I think in many ways it empowered the most recent gas attack. If you don't think you're going to have any consequences for what you do um you don't know why you shouldn't do it it's perfectly simple um so i'm not sure i i think it was i think it was a terrible terrible thing to do to set a standard and then to let let it be crossed ah but the defenders the

administration would say that what they actually did was instead of have a military response that would have personally brought the home the war to Assad, what they did was engage with our Russian partners in order to have conferences and meetings which resulted in the removal of all the Syrian weapons of mass destruction, right? That's what they would say. That smart diplomacy and cooler heads prevail instead of a sugar rush from a missile attack. Some do, but some say – I mean, you mean the defenders of the previous administration. That's what I'm saying. Some say – yeah, but they also said that Barack Obama wanted to have a missile strike, but he couldn't get any approval from Congress, which of course is ludicrous.

He didn't need approval from Congress to act. That's the president's prerogative, as this president, the current president showed, as the previous president showed, as Barack Obama himself showed, that he did not need congressional approval. He went to get it in a half-hearted attempt so that he didn't have to do it. He didn't really want to do it, so he didn't want to do it. Barack Obama preferred drone strikes

because they're off-camera. If they hit somebody, if they hit a village or an old man or a non-combatant, you don't see pictures of it. That's so – I think it was a mistake. It's always a mistake to draw a line in the sand and then ignore it. Here's one – sorry, go ahead. No, Peter, go ahead.

I was just going to say, oddly enough, that comparison between Donald Trump and Barack Obama that Rob just made is very interesting. Rob – because there's a lot of validity to it. I draw one distinction. This isn't to disagree with Rob, but Donald Trump – so Rob said, who's thinking about the national interest? Who's thinking in strategic terms? I can name two, Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster. And it looks to me, I could be wrong. I've never met. I do know Jim Mattis. I've met H.R. McMaster a couple of times. I've never so much as met Rex Tillerson, although I've talked to a couple of people who've worked with him over

the years in the oil business. It looks as though Rex Tillerson is a pretty tough, shrewd man who's a very quick study and seems to have been giving some thought to America's place in the world in his career in business. That is one, two, three people. Here's one difference between Barack Obama's administration and Donald Trump's. Barack Obama, cool, liberal, progressive, academic, and he could have filled all the political appointments in Washington 10 times over from six universities in the Northeast alone. Donald Trump has about three guys in the administration. Last time I looked, Jim Mattis was the only presidentially appointed Senate confirmed PAS, as they're called, at the Pentagon. There are 48 such slots.

Jim Mattis is the only one who's there. Rex Tillerson, I believe, once again, he's the only president. Where does Trump go to fill out the administration? Jim Mattis is going to need a day off sooner or later. H.R. McMaster. It's very, very thin. It's very, very. Well, part of the administration. In other words, if you so much as tweeted against Donald Trump during the campaign, you couldn't get a job in the state of New York. Well, that is not true because there are people I uh or were suspected of being a neocon uh you were not going to get a job there which meant that there were very few people who were had vetted and passed those past that that test um that i think well that was then a long jam that was then yeah that was then now if you look at the last couple of weeks well we are all bloodthirsty neocons now because between the syria attack and Moab in Afghanistan, there's a definite signal that America is ready to use big boomsticks when it comes to things. I mean, you had the sense that President Obama believed that such raw displays were de classe and a previous age and that we may live in a unipolar world, but we have to be multipolar and we have to agree and consensus and soft power and leading from behind, etc. And no better way to say that that era is over than to drop one of that out.

We're going to be able to point to this example and say, look at what happened here. All the faithful were gathered. The infidels struck. They died in a most horrible, if short, way. Doesn't that make you want to join up for our cause? And apparently people will be just streaming to the recruiting office for the opportunity to be atomized or turned to jam in some basement by another American ordinance. Yeah, well, it's an odd way to recruit people. But the best way to recruit people, of course, is ZipRecruiter. If you're hiring, you know, you know, you know, I mean, it just favor. I was making an actual point on the route to this, which I usually am, but everyone's just waiting for me to pivot.

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free trial yeah did i mention that you can go there for free you can zip recruiter.com free trial and thanks to them to zip recruiter for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast last chat here i've got a member question before we go out here. We're going to ask, uh, it was posted in the member feed. What was your first concert? And I am ashamed to say it was probably up with people, which we were dragged to in grade school or something like that.

But it may have been, um, I, I think that there was, uh, the Fargo auditorium, which itself was not the, the largest venue you can possibly imagine.

This was before the Fargo Dome was built on the outskirts of town. But in high school, actual bands that were on the radio would come to town. And the finest moment for me was looking up and seeing on this marquee that Blue Oyster Cult was coming to Fargo. Wow. I can't tell you this. I mean, this is like Zeppelin descending. This was like, because these were the guys, right? And they were coming to Fargo, and I would be able to be in the same room and possibly like within 10 rows of the stage or whatnot, and it was amazing.

And, of course, years later I was lucky enough to meet uh the the incredible fantastic guitarist for blue oyster called buck dharma in washington when he came to an aei event and you know told him this was man this was just this was the best right the absolute best hey he came i think you met you met him at a ricochet event let's be honest was it yes that's right well i met his son at a ricochet event and then he came to the AI event, and he gave me a pick. So now I have about three or four of them, and now occasionally when I'll pick up the electric guitar and practice and play a little bit, I will actually use one of the most hallowed picks. And so, yes, that was a big thing. Elvin Bishop also came to town, and nobody knew anything about Elvin Bishop except for that Fooled Around and Fell in Love tune love tune um which he i think extended to about 48 minutes with a blues guitar solo peter i think

you were present um during uh you know zombies uh with the uh i don't know who's your what's your favorite early first first i can so growing up in upstate new York, I can recall two concerts that my father took me to, and they couldn't have been more different. One was Brace Your – no, I'm going to brace myself because the two of you – Oh, I can't wait. I'm so excited. Roll on your backs. Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. Oh, Peter. oh peter bread wearing in the pennsylvanians and then the other one which made i am you'll be

pleased to hear that that made almost no impression on me but the other one was somebody that my father had danced to when he was a young man and he took me to see him so that i could just see the band and see the man and it was duke ellington go well and that was a big deal. I mean, I can take a train and then the man walks out and the crowd goes, of course, the crowd was old. It was fabulous. Anyway, Fred Waring is the only major band leader to have also produced a major

appliance. True or false? False, I think. Is that true? Is it true? Yes. Is Fred Waring? Are you kidding? fault i think wait is that true the wearing blender is it true yes the wearing blender is fred wearing wow are you kidding that's why they called it that i mean he was trading on the the uh the family app from one thing and sort of transferred it to the other is this a transition is this a segue she's not no this is i and i'm not going to talk about bob frigidaire and his in his

cool canadians right right. Wearing a blender. Rob, what was it for you? I have been racking my brain. I don't know. I really don't know. I've been thinking about it. I have plays I saw. I don't know. I don't know. can only tell you that my brain is fried because the the the event that i remember the clearest

as a kid um i mean i you know as like a i don't five six seven year old seeing were the harlem globetrotters oh yes i saw yeah my dad took everything else seems to be a giant fog i can't i don't know when I went to go here. I mean, I know I did at some point, probably when I was a teenager. But I remember going and hearing the English beat play in 1982, 81. But it was the Harlem Globoprotters. That probably had the biggest effect on me watching, because I'd never seen anything quite so crazy and so funny and so amazing.

Who did they play? Oh, I forget who they played. But they won. I remember that. Was it always the Washington – Always the Washington generals. Generals, yeah. Senator.

Sad little team. You couldn't make the NBA, so you ended up playing against the Harlem Globetrotters and losing every single night. Yeah. They came to Fargo as well, to the Fargo Stadium. The Coliseum. As did the circus, which is now gone. Yes. No more.

That's something else my father took me to see. And we got there early so we could watch the elephants being used to put up the circus tent and we stayed late so we could watch them wrapping their trunks around the huge spikes and pulling them out of the ground wow, it sounds as though my father raised me in 1880

I was going to say, yeah well, we do often wonder, Peter whether you're just some kind of strange time traveler yeah, exactly there's a painting of you in your attic. We should say that question, which is interesting, was Ricochet member Terry Kristoff. I was just going to say thanks to Terry Kristoff for that.

And by the way, if you happen to be listening to this on any sort of device that you've chosen to acquaint yourself with us on, you can go to Ricochet and join up, and you can have endless sorts of interesting little conversations.'s the main feed where uh the big stuff gets post and then there's the member feed which is a lot more individual and personal and a lot of stuff from the member feed makes it to the front page as well but you got to join that's just it you got to keep ricochet going you got to have skin in the game as rob says and keep alive the web's premier site for civil center-right conversation. If you're wondering, is it all Trump?

No. Is it anti-Trump? It's all things, those of us on the center-right side of the aisle, and even a few friends from the left as well who come in to learn or to jay- Of course. Or just to mix things up. Everyone's welcome. And by the way, this podcast brought to you by Ricochet and brought to you with pride by Vistaprint, by Wink, W-I-N-C, and ZipRecruiter.

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you'll be with us next week, unless you just come into the cold. I'll be with you next week. Unless the temporal distortion feed takes you back to the 19th century. I'll be here. And thanks to everybody for listening. And thanks to Norman for being on the podcast today. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 3.0. Next week.

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