Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 485: R.I.P. Heritage Foundation

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Episode 485: R.I.P. Heritage Foundation · Words & Numbers

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Coming up next on Words and Numbers.
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Wigovi. Canadian Healthcare Airplane
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Civility and Heritage Foundation.
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All this and more coming up next on Words and Numbers, a Civil
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original production. Check us out at civil.com.
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That's C ivl.com. Hi, I'm James.
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And I'm Anthony. And this is words and numbers.
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Aunt, what's new and exciting in your world this week?
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I have a number of friends who live in Canada who delight in
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telling me every time they go to their healthcare provider for
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free and then, you know, needle me about how much it costs in
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the US, this kind of thing. And it's hard to explain to
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someone who lives in that environment what the, the fact
0:54
that they're actually not receiving free health care,
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they're getting prepaid health care.
1:00
And I looked up some numbers, I think I've shared these with you
1:03
before, but they're worth repeating the, the average tax
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rate in Canada. And that's, that's all in.
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So they're equivalent of federal, state, local, all of
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that 42%, of course, it varies depending on how much you earn
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in circumstances. But the average 42% versus 32%
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in the US, again, all in federal, state, local.
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And there's lots of hand waving here because we're ignoring
1:30
transfers. But none the less, just a
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straight up taxes 42% Canada, 32% US, Canadian median after
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tax household income Forty $54,000 US and that's converted
1:50
to U.S. dollars US median after tax household income $73,000
1:58
well, there's. There's a bit of a disconnect
2:01
there. Yeah.
2:02
Well, that Delta 73,000 for the US, 54,000 for Canada is
2:10
ballpark what a family pays for health insurance in this
2:15
country. And that's and that's all in
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that's your part plus your employer's part, which
2:22
technically you're paying, you just don't see it.
2:24
But when all the dust settles, you've got the same healthcare
2:30
expense here versus Canada. It's just that the Canadians pay
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upfront in the form of taxes. We pay on the back end in the
2:37
form of insurance. But all of that misses another
2:42
important piece and this comes from one of our listeners,
2:46
Kartik Chandrasekhar. This is an article, I believe
2:50
Kartik lives in Canada. He sends me stuff from time to
2:53
time. That's.
2:55
Right, And this is an article about a woman in British
2:58
Columbia with a blood disorder. She says that she feels
3:04
abandoned by her health care system because the province of
3:09
British Columbia, where she lives, is the only province in
3:13
Canada that refuses to fund what she calls a life changing
3:18
medication. She was diagnosed with a rare
3:21
blood disorder in various details, but the end result is
3:26
she requires now regular blood transfusions.
3:30
This drug would sidestep all of that.
3:33
But notice what's happening here because it's a government run
3:38
entity, unlike in our country, a profit run entity.
3:43
Now in the US, you'd have to go and you'd have to deal with the
3:46
insurance companies and all of that.
3:48
But they have a profit incentive to deal with you for various
3:53
reasons, not the least of which is you can say, well, forget it,
3:56
I'm going to go over here or I'm going to, you know, talk to my
3:59
employer who's got now going to put pressure on you, whatever it
4:02
is. But in British, in Canada, the
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the healthcare system is run by the government and you would
4:09
have the same problem. If you want to draw an analogy,
4:12
you would have the same problem in Canada getting your
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healthcare provider to provide a specific drug that you need that
4:20
currently is not provided as you do in this country.
4:24
For example, asking your State Board of education to require
4:30
some textbook in the classroom. And you can picture all the
4:34
things you have to go through to even attempt to make that happen
4:38
because you're dealing with a bureaucracy.
4:40
So to here and this becomes now another costs that are Canadian
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brothers and sisters have to pay for their quote UN quote free
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health care. Well, the biggest cost they pay
4:52
is in time, right? They have to wait and wait and
4:57
wait, which is something that we in America typically never
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really think about and we've. Talked about cases like that on
5:06
previous episodes here where there are Canadians who are
5:09
coming to the US and paying out of pocket for life saving
5:16
surgeries. Because yes, they can get them
5:18
done in Canada, but the wait list is so long they're expected
5:22
to die before they get to the front of the wait list, whereas
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they can come to the US and have the thing done in a matter of
5:27
weeks. I actually met some of those
5:29
people at the Mayo Clinic, where I had my spinal surgery not too
5:33
terribly long ago. There's a hotel, believe it or
5:37
not, on the campus of the Mayo Clinic where you go and you stay
5:41
the night before your surgery so you can and they have a little
5:44
shuttle that runs from the hospital.
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To the hotel. It's perfectly ridiculous, but
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there were a surprising number of Canadians at the Mayo Clinic
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in Arizona. I'm not even talking about in
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Minnesota, where you might expect to find Canadians.
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No, no, even here. And they were uniformly of a
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mind that they did not have the time to wait and that they
6:08
actually had the money to spend. Yeah.
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And I, I find that to be particularly heartbreaking, but
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I'm going to keep us in the land of healthcare, kinda.
6:21
When I tell you, aunt about the you've, you've heard of the
6:25
miracle drugs that are going to be the undoing of obesity in
6:30
these United States, the GLP ones.
6:33
Are you talking about Ozempic? Yeah, yeah, or Wigovi.
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I'm going to specifically talk about Wigovi right now, but
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they're all built on the the same basic scientific scaffolder
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and they were meant as diabetes drugs and they were actually
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quite good at that. And then the diabetics started
6:53
realizing that there was this secondary effect, in addition to
6:57
controlling blood sugar, they were getting less fat.
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I, I don't want to say they were getting thin because let let's
7:06
not go crazier, but they were getting less fat and by
7:11
considerable degree. And and then the Hollywood elite
7:16
decided, hey, I can stay thin if I just poke myself with one of
7:20
these little prepackaged needles once a month.
7:23
That. Is a deal breaker where I'm
7:26
concerned. No, they really, it's no big
7:29
deal. It doesn't.
7:29
You don't even feel it. I, I am a diabetic, as most of
7:32
our listeners know, and I take one of these to control my
7:35
diabetes. And you take it and you're a
7:39
little squeamish for the first time and you realize it doesn't
7:42
hurt at all. The only thing that that does
7:45
feel a little weird, I have to say, is that all of these
7:48
medications have to be refrigerated, and the feeling of
7:53
a very cold liquid going into your very warm body is a strange
7:57
feeling. Anyway, the good people who make
8:01
Wigovi have decided that they're going to have this in pill form
8:06
now, and they're going to price their pill form at $149 a month.
8:13
A month, Yeah. So the people who are paying
8:16
$1000 a month on the shots, and a whole lot more people who are
8:24
who could never pay $1000 a month for shots will in fact pay
8:29
150 bucks a month without thinking twice.
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And there's a bunch of people who are going to get very, very
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wealthy from this. And I look forward to hearing
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all the hooting and hollering why it's unfair.
8:43
I can't quite figure it out yet, but I'm sure somebody's going to
8:46
be along directly to tell me what I've missed.
8:49
But this is going to be a game changer right here.
8:53
And this is for people who complain about the high cost of
8:58
of medicines. I've got to point out $1000 a
9:03
month for the shots. You can look at that and say
9:08
this is unfair, Nobody should have to pay that.
9:11
And you might even successfully arrange for some law that says
9:16
that they, the healthcare providers, have to sell it not
9:20
for $1000 a month, but for $100 a month.
9:23
And you can. You can be all happy that you've
9:26
now made the drug affordable. Except the fact that it cost
9:31
$1000 a month gave a tremendous incentive to entrepreneurs to
9:37
figure out how to come up with something that does the same job
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but is cheaper. Enter the $140.00 a month pill.
9:46
And to make it a pill instead of a shot.
9:48
And to make it a pill instead of a shot, right, Right.
9:51
Yep. So look, I look forward to
9:53
seeing how all this plays out. I'm sure you do too.
9:57
And we're going to hear about this a lot in the next six or
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six months or so. Now, I first, well before you do
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the foolishness I heard from a couple of people who take the
10:08
take Ozempic for weight loss not for diabetes that there's AI
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don't know if you call it a side effect, but there is the effect
10:17
that if you stop taking it, all of a sudden you gain all of this
10:20
weight back. Is that the case Up again?
10:22
You beef up again pretty quickly, yeah.
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Yeah. There are any number of side
10:27
effects that are probably best left off words in numbers, but
10:31
join me for cigars with James and I'll tell you all about
10:34
them. So I'll tell you all about them
10:35
there. Now, of course, this brings us
10:38
to the foolishness of the week. Can I say that?
10:41
Please do. And of course, this now brings
10:43
us to the foolishness of the week.
10:45
And for this aunt, I want to go to the Delta Airlines CEO man by
10:52
the name of Ed Bastian, who says that uncivil, incivil lousy
11:02
behavior on the part of Flyers. And, you know, there's two guys
11:07
who have flown a lot. I'm happy to tell you there is a
11:11
metric ton of lousy behavior on flights, right?
11:18
And I, I wouldn't even know where to begin to, to, to start
11:23
discussing this. But Ed Bastian says this is
11:27
because flying is inexpensive. Is inexpensive inexpensive.
11:32
Yeah, that's right. We we get this.
11:35
I think the technical term I'm looking for is piss poor
11:39
behavior on the part of the flying public because the flying
11:44
public or the great unwashed who in in generations previous would
11:49
not have been able. To afford to fly in the 1st.
11:51
Place. Well let him put his money where
11:54
his mouth is and convert all of Americans airlines to 1st class
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and charge $1000 a seat. Delta.
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Oh, is it I'm. Excuse me, It's Delta.
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Delta, that's surprising. I expect more from DD is for my
12:13
money, the best of the American Airlines.
12:16
They, they do what they say they're going to do more than
12:20
the other American Airlines do what they say they're going to
12:23
do. They're not great, Delta not
12:26
great, but it's very good. But this idea I, I think it's
12:31
really paternalistic that poor people can't have good manners.
12:37
That's ridiculous. That's absolutely ridiculous.
12:40
Why doesn't the airline have some standards?
12:45
Why doesn't this the the the flight attendant walk through
12:49
and tell people to put their shoes back on?
12:52
Why at the gate do you let half naked people into the plane?
12:57
Why do you let the drunk people into the plane?
13:00
It would be very easy to enforce standards.
13:04
The simple fact of the matter is they don't want to for the same
13:07
reason college administrators don't want to enforce standards
13:11
at the college level. These are paying customers and
13:14
we need asses in these seats. Yep.
13:17
So, you know, Ed should put his money where his mouth is and
13:24
let's see what happens then. I'd be willing, I'd be more
13:28
willing to fly on an airline that had some standards.
13:32
I'd pay $20 more for a ticket if I knew I wasn't going to have to
13:36
put up with industrial strength nonsense for the entire flight
13:40
from three people in my general vicinity.
13:44
But nobody's willing to do that, and I think the reason why
13:47
they're not willing to is painfully obvious.
13:50
So I wish I would just shut up. I'm, while you're talking there,
13:55
I just called up the consumer price index for airfares in the
14:02
US and I, I had an intuition this was the case.
14:06
But it's interesting to look at the numbers.
14:08
The the price of airfare today is of course it goes up and
14:13
down, you know, over time, but the the price of airfare today
14:17
is the same by this index as it was 20 years ago.
14:24
That's probably right. Yeah, but it's not the same as
14:27
it was in 1980. No, no, it's not the same as it
14:30
was in 1980. But the fact that it hasn't
14:34
changed in 20 years, and my guess is household income has
14:39
probably doubled in 20 years, means that relative to our
14:44
incomes, it's half as expensive to fly today as it was a
14:48
generation ago. Yeah, that's right.
14:51
And it's kind of a miracle that the price is roughly the same
14:55
because there there are forces at play with.
14:58
The prices you think it would go up because you've got price of
15:02
oil going up over time you will charge right greater demand
15:05
because the population is much larger than it was 20 years ago.
15:11
But but that's some that's fascinating.
15:13
So next next time 1 is apartment to complain about the price of
15:17
airline tickets, remember it's the same as it was in 2005.
15:23
Yeah, and because of that, now you got to put up with Rufus in
15:26
the seat next to you, who takes off his shoes and spends an 8
15:30
hour flight farting away happily without making an apology of any
15:34
kind. See you having a reference?
15:37
Were you ever on a? Flight with me when I I made the
15:39
general announcement to the people in my vicinity that
15:43
whoever it is has to stop farting right now.
15:47
No, thank God I was not. I people would would
15:51
occasionally clap when I said it.
15:56
We all know who it was. Is the guy not clapping?
15:59
You have this eerily consistent bad luck with flying that I do.
16:07
Not all all of your good luck comes on me.
16:10
I have no bad luck flying. I have eerily bad luck with
16:15
everything. James was on I'll.
16:17
I'll abbreviate the story and James can fill in the details,
16:21
but this is one of the few times he was upgraded to 1st class and
16:26
he was in it was the first. Time in my entire life.
16:31
And you were in your first class seat for what, 3 minutes before
16:36
they activated the plane? 45 seconds.
16:41
I heard the truck make contact with the plane.
16:45
People all fell over because, you know, made hard contact with
16:49
the plane. And I just gathered my stuff and
16:52
got off the plane. I was the announcement.
16:56
James was in a Can we call it a plane?
16:59
Crash. Well, it wasn't in fact, a plane
17:01
crash. It when one of the ground trucks
17:04
ran into the plane, Yeah. Real hard spent an extra 8 hours
17:10
at the Vegas airport because of the.
17:13
And when you got onto your next plane, I presume you did not
17:16
have first class. Middle seat and coach.
17:21
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Subscribe to Civil for $5 a month or $50.00 for an annual
18:07
subscription. This week, Phil Magnus joins us.
18:10
Phil is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and the
18:13
David J Thoreau Chair in Political Economy.
18:17
Phil has served as senior research fellow at the American
18:21
Institute for Economic Research and as a academic program
18:25
director at the Institute for Humane Studies.
18:28
An adjunct professor of public policy in the School of Public
18:32
Policy and Government at George Mason University, Phil received
18:37
his PhD from George Mason University's School of Public
18:40
Policy. Phil, welcome to Words and
18:42
Numbers. Happy to be back.
18:44
Yeah, it's been a while since we welcome.
18:46
Back is more like it, right? Yeah, it's been a while since
18:49
we've had you. In fact, somebody, somebody
18:52
wrote me just today or yesterday asking have you had Phil Magnus
18:56
on? As if we've had Phil on for
18:58
probably a dozen different episodes over the years.
19:01
Somebody wrote me Phil and said, thank God you haven't had Phil
19:04
Magnus back on. So you can't please everybody
19:09
all the time. Which segues nicely into what
19:12
we're going to talk about today. Because the American right,
19:17
whatever that actually means at this point, and we'll get into
19:20
that too, but the American right seems to be imploding in a
19:26
number of very significant ways. And the most significant right
19:30
now seems to be a mass exodus from the Heritage Foundation,
19:35
which has long been that lead organization on the American
19:40
right. So what in God's name is
19:42
happening over there? Well, if you go back in history
19:45
to about the mid 20th century. Remember, William F Buckley was
19:49
kind of the the founding figure of the modern American right,
19:53
original editor of National Review, just a major
19:56
intellectual presence. And when he did so, he put
20:00
together a kind of a a motley coalition that included cultural
20:05
traditionists, traditionalists, anti communists.
20:08
But there was also a third part of that coalition that was the
20:11
free market component, those that were skeptical of
20:14
government's involvement in. Economic events and Economic
20:19
Affairs something of a resistance to the New Deal era
20:21
and the Keynesian this indent see after World War 2, but that
20:25
was the coalition and that had remained kind of a stable
20:28
feature of the American right through very recent times
20:32
including one of Buckley's proteges and and really mentees.
20:39
Ed Fullner was the founder of the Heritage Foundation.
20:42
You know, 50 years. Ago Ed Faulner passed away
20:46
earlier this year and did so at a time when the political right,
20:52
that old coalition, is in upheaval.
20:54
Free market voices have been pushed.
20:57
Further and further aside by the ascendance of Trumpism and
21:00
really the JD Vance wing of the Trump administration, these are
21:04
the people that like protective tariffs, industrial policy,
21:07
government taking ownership and companies.
21:09
All the things that we've seen in recent months from the Trump
21:12
administration comes from an ideology on the right that I
21:16
would even dare characterize as right wing socialism or right
21:22
wing interventionism. And JD Vance in particular has
21:26
been a champion of this, as have some other figures in the Trump
21:28
administration, Peter Navarro, Howard Leutnick and.
21:32
Some of the characters in the intellectual scene on the right,
21:36
the think tank world, including the Heritage Foundation's
21:39
president Kevin Roberts, are very much aligned with this new
21:43
brand of. Market cultural conservatism,
21:47
sometimes referred to as post liberalism.
21:51
We we might want to take a minute and add another category
21:55
to the original list of things that drew the right together and
22:01
and and that was a a pro Israel stance.
22:04
Which? Which which leads directly to
22:08
the problems that Heritage and you might also want to include
22:14
the Claremont influence as part of the present day problem that
22:21
we're facing. And I should come out and just
22:24
say I myself am a Claremont PhD, right?
22:28
So I'm all your own tangentially involved.
22:32
I'm tangentially involved with these people.
22:35
Yeah, yeah. So that kind of brings us to the
22:37
current moment. You have this post liberal anti
22:39
market descendants on the right. And it's very closely aligned
22:44
with GET currying favour with the Trump administration and
22:47
setting up JD Vance to be the heir apparent in 2028 because he
22:51
affiliates with the Post Liberals.
22:53
And what has really happened? This has all come.
22:55
To a head in the. Last month or so, sparked by one
22:58
major event, and that is Tucker Carlson, the former Fox host
23:03
turned podcaster turned. Now he's basically a
23:06
professional conspiracy theorist.
23:09
And I mean every conspiracy under the sun makes Alex Jones
23:13
of 10 years ago obtained by comparison, he's into 911
23:16
truther ISM. He's has all these theories
23:20
about Israel taking over the world.
23:22
He has World War Two revisionism where he brings on pro Hitler
23:28
podcasters to declare the Winston Churchill's the great
23:31
villain of World War 2 and Hitler was just misunderstood
23:35
so. Tucker Carlson's really gone off
23:37
the deep end. And a little over a month ago,
23:40
he brought on this other character by the name of Nick
23:43
Fuentes, who is this sewer pedaling neo Nazi podcaster that
23:51
has emerged on the right, on the, on the, really the, the,
23:53
the fringes of the Internet, right.
23:57
And basically takes every interpretive event in politics
24:01
and declares that it's Israel and the Jews are behind it.
24:05
So it's a resurgence of protocols of the elders of Zion
24:08
projected onto modern day politics.
24:09
And, and Tucker Carlson interviews him and he gives us
24:12
really softball interview where it kind of sounded like he was
24:15
agreeing with Fuentes. And Fuentes did not hold back on
24:19
his positions in the interview with Carlson, he, he proclaims
24:22
how much he admires Hitler. He also throws in that he
24:24
admires Joe Stalin. So pretty much the worst figures
24:27
in history. And then shortly after this
24:29
interview breaks, there's a big controversy on the right.
24:32
Why did Tucker Carlson, this formerly mainstream media figure
24:37
that's gone off the deep end, host to the sky and give him a
24:40
softball interview? And then just out of the blue,
24:43
Kevin Roberts said Heritage posted this video online
24:47
declaring that Heritage will forever remain a friend of
24:50
Tucker Carlson. And we're not going to distance
24:53
ourself or separate from him over the Fuentes video and even
25:00
make some comments in there that some interpreted as as kind of
25:03
like dog whistles for some of the anti-Semitism in Fuentes
25:06
video declare. He denounced what he called the
25:08
venomous coalition of that it existed on the right between,
25:15
you know, supporters of Israel and the foreign policy arena,
25:18
which has been all but as you mentioned, a long standing
25:21
component of. That old Buckley coalition.
25:25
So this causes an internal revolt inside of heritage,
25:30
including long standing staff members that basically confront
25:33
Roberts and say, well, what were you doing here?
25:35
What were you thinking? And over the course of several
25:39
weeks, he just does a succession of really ham fisted attempts to
25:43
apologize that aren't really addressing the heart of the
25:46
matter and dancing around it. There's just a a huge internal
25:49
revolt. Well, the next thing you know,
25:52
prominent figures of Heritage's staff start to depart.
25:56
Steve Moore, who was one of their most visible public
25:59
economists, is a free market economist, but he had also been
26:02
somewhat influential in the in the first Trump administration.
26:06
So he's kind of a bridge figure actually between the two.
26:09
So he resigns. Chris DeMuth, who was a senior
26:13
scholar there, resigns and they're all say citing Roberts's
26:17
ham fisted messaging on Tucker Carlson and anti-Semitism as the
26:21
issue. And this all just really came to
26:24
a head in the last week or so where it got to the point that
26:27
three successive members of the boards of trustees of Heritage
26:32
resigned. And then just over the weekend
26:35
we had the entire economic shop, policy shop and legal shop.
26:41
These are like departments at Heritage that had multiple
26:45
members departed in Mass and joined and moved over to Mike
26:53
Pence's organization AAF, where they're new, newly situated and
26:57
this includes so their legal center.
27:00
Was you said economic, legal and policy?
27:03
What? Who's left over there?
27:05
That's all Heritage does. That's the great question.
27:08
And then you know you had. 15 people depart and they're all
27:11
senior scholars. Including the founder of the
27:14
legal center, which was Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan's attorney
27:17
general, basically a giant and originalist constitutional
27:21
thought, gives a statement sanctioning that the center was
27:25
named after Meese and it's moved over to AAF with Pence.
27:30
And then in the 24 hours that follow, Kevin Roberts appoints a
27:34
new director of these now vacant centers.
27:37
And then later that afternoon, the two new directors resign as
27:40
well. So it's a, it's a very strange
27:45
happening that's occurred on the political right and it, and
27:49
really the last several days and it's come to a head.
27:52
And I think frankly, it's a, it's a very embarrassing way.
27:57
And I, you know, I, I appreciate things Heritage has done in the
28:01
past. I've used their index of
28:03
economic freedom pretty extensively in some of my own
28:05
writing. But I worry about the future of
28:08
the of that organization at the other side.
28:12
You know, I see someone like Pence is stepping into the gap
28:15
here and saying, wait a minute, yes, there is a home after all
28:19
for free market thinkers and we're going to provide it.
28:22
And he he's built a lot of goodwill on that, including at a
28:26
time when the administration seems to be straying away from
28:29
it. And this is all part of a, you
28:31
know, a broader problem on the right.
28:33
We saw it at the Turning Point USA event when you have these
28:36
public collisions, Ben Shapiro calling out the anti Semites and
28:40
the conspiracy theorists. And then a few moments later,
28:44
the conspiracy theorists, including Tucker Carlson, are
28:46
put on stage and they have a big collision in a visible public
28:52
way. So some of these battles are
28:55
have gotten really ugly on the right.
28:56
I think the core of it comes down to an A conscious attempt
29:02
by this post liberal group, which dates back several decades
29:06
of when they first started to emerge.
29:07
But they're on the fringes. They moved into the center to
29:11
align with the Trump administration.
29:13
Well, who are the post liberals? So there's a Notre Dame
29:16
political scientist by the name of Patrick Deneen.
29:20
There's a Harvard Law professor by the name of Adrian Vermeul.
29:23
Those are probably the two most prominent figures of post
29:26
liberalism and what they are is they starting in about the mid
29:30
2000s, they they started complaining.
29:33
They said that the American right was essentially captive of
29:36
the free market economist. And you know, I've been at this
29:40
movement for as long as of both of you.
29:42
I don't think any of the three of us ever remember a moment
29:45
where the free market economists were were calling the shots.
29:49
Even when we had friendly administrations in power, we
29:52
were always second or third seat behind various other factions on
29:56
the right. But yeah, yet the real and
29:59
Dineen both decided and in about the mid 2000s that the free
30:04
market economists. Were.
30:07
Wedded to this institution of Madisonian constitutional
30:11
liberalism and their whole narrative is that this was a
30:15
mistake, 1776 was a mistake. I've even called Vermule and
30:19
Deneen. They're like right wing versions
30:21
of Nicole Hannah Jones in the 1619.
30:23
Project in this respect. That they view the American
30:27
founding as corrupted by the spirit of liberalism and locky
30:34
and individualism. And they think this is when
30:36
society went awry because it repudiated the old communitarian
30:43
fuel order of like medieval Europe, where where the church
30:48
and the community are the center of decision making.
30:50
And there are figures of authority such as kings and
30:53
Queens and Princess and Dukes that that exercise that
30:57
authority on high as caretakers of the community.
31:01
And they see basically the the entire Enlightenment project is
31:04
a corruption of that. And it's corrupt specifically
31:07
because it empowers people through economic individualism
31:11
to have mobility that disrupt the social order.
31:14
And then they have this whole almost conspiratorial Ranto over
31:17
the course of 2 1/2 centuries that degrades into modern
31:22
leftism. And then everything they find
31:24
aesthetically displeasing about the the current society is
31:29
indicted as a product of liberalism, including the
31:33
American founding, the constitutional order, and the
31:36
free market economy. So it's a really right wing
31:38
reactionary brand of conservatism that views US, the
31:44
free market individualists, as the problem and wants us purged
31:48
from the movement. And yet if you point that out,
31:50
they'll claim that they're the victims of cancer culture.
31:53
So there's the final. Twist of it.
31:55
All right, all right. We're going to get into Catholic
31:57
integralism in a minute. But before that, I have two
32:03
related questions. First, is the American right?
32:08
And maybe, maybe it would be better to ask, is the Republican
32:12
Party about to fracture into several different parties?
32:18
Right? Is it about to become utterly
32:20
pointless to be a Republican? And then related to that, is
32:26
Mike Pence the possible savior of conservative Republicanism?
32:31
Yeah, Yeah. So I guess on that first
32:33
question, yes, there are certainly fracture lines that
32:35
are emerging, and I think they're appearing.
32:39
Here's the ironic thing. Even though the most recent
32:42
iterations of the American right have all been around Trumpism,
32:46
Trump is essentially settling into what I think is a long
32:49
period of the lame duck presidency.
32:52
He is not looking so good for the midterms in terms of the
32:55
polls. And if he loses the House of
32:57
Representatives or maybe even the Senate in 2026, you know,
33:01
there's this legislative agenda that's gone by the wayside.
33:04
And on top of that, you look over what he's done over the
33:07
last year. He's done maybe one really good
33:09
thing, which is making the tax cuts permanent.
33:11
But the rest, he squandered his entire political capital and
33:14
legislative agenda on these deeply unpopular tariff
33:18
policies. And that's polling across the
33:22
board on the left, right, center, everything in between.
33:25
People hate the tariffs. And yet they've they've thrown
33:28
their entire political capital into that.
33:31
And yet the only group that seems to like the tariffs are
33:33
these post liberal types that are surrounding JD Vance, the
33:37
anti market people. And yet they're ascendant in the
33:40
Trump administration. So.
33:42
In so far as Trump becomes a lame.
33:44
Duck and the the attention moves over to trying to anoint Vance
33:49
as the successor without a competitive primary.
33:52
I'm sitting here thinking, hello, Joe Biden handing it off
33:54
to Kamala Harris. We saw how well that went.
33:58
We see how Vance is not pulling all that popularly, but he he
34:02
nonetheless wants to be the heir apparent.
34:05
That becomes a division line for the fracture.
34:07
And you have these post liberal types on the anti economic right
34:11
aligning and throwing in completely behind Vance because
34:15
he's one of them. He agrees with them.
34:16
And then you have just the regular conservatives, which I,
34:19
I, I dare say is probably the majority of the Republican
34:22
Party. It's just they've been sidelined
34:25
by the presence of Trumpism for the last several years.
34:30
You know, their their client still trying to figure out what
34:32
to do. What would a, a primary
34:34
challenger look like? That emerges And, you know, then
34:37
the question of what Pence does and what Pence's role in all of
34:40
this is, you know, Pence burned a lot of capital with Trumpism
34:45
by basically doing the right thing on January 6th, saying
34:48
this is my constitutional duty. I'm not going to buy into the
34:52
conspiracy theories about election denialism.
34:54
I'm not going to sanction rioters that are beating on the
34:58
doors. We're trying to take the
35:00
electoral vote tallies. But that burned his bridges with
35:04
Trumpism. And I think really in the years
35:07
since then, Pat's has moved into kind of the position of an elder
35:11
statesman, an intellectual that, you know, you talk to him, he's
35:17
still very committed to what a traditional Republican would
35:20
have looked like in 2015, 2016 free market.
35:24
You know, he's, he's strong on defense.
35:26
I disagree with him on a, on a lot of things in foreign policy
35:29
in that sense, 'cause I tend to be more pacifistic myself.
35:32
But he's articulating A coherent principle.
35:34
He's for a limited government and these four traditional
35:37
values and he's trying to, to, to reassemble.
35:40
I think that the Buckley era tripod of fusionism that still
35:45
respects free markets and still cares about things like
35:49
balancing the budget and cutting taxes and making sure that the
35:53
government gets out of the way of the economy and allows it to
35:55
perform. You're describing 1980.
35:59
Exactly. Exactly.
36:01
It's Reaganism. I'm thinking about your your
36:04
earlier statement that that those on the far right have this
36:11
view that we've corrupted the founding.
36:13
And I'm just astounded the examples you give which are
36:17
completely antithetical to the founding, but not none the less
36:21
I'm I'm left with this weird kind of realization.
36:26
On the one hand, it appears that the lunatics have taken over
36:30
both sides, the lunatic left and the lunatic right.
36:34
And in at least in terms of their of their social outlook,
36:39
they're both xenophobic. The the the lunatics on the left
36:45
want to force everybody to be like me, so we're all the same.
36:50
The lunatics on the right want to eject everybody who isn't
36:54
like me, but they both end up in the same place.
36:58
That's exactly, it's a they want a political ideological
37:01
monoculture that is built around either post liberalism or
37:05
critical theory Marxism on the left.
37:08
And you know, we we saw the perils of this because it is
37:10
it's political suicide for any movement to go down this route.
37:15
The left bought into woke ISM in the mid twenty 10's and the
37:20
party went off the deep end and the voters repudiated that.
37:24
You know, Kamala Harris was a catastrophic failure as a
37:27
candidate because she was the woke candidate.
37:30
She represented all of all of the crazy eclectic ideologies
37:34
that had emerged on the far left and the voters were like what?
37:36
No, you're just too far out there.
37:39
So they repudiated that. But what we see on the right,
37:42
you know the stuff on repudiating the founding that
37:46
Deneen has been dabbling in this for years.
37:48
If you read some of his his more academic, he works now he's
37:53
guarded he or I guess to use a Straussian term for James, he's
37:57
esoteric in the way that he approaches this issue.
38:01
So when when he talks and and big public audiences, he tries
38:04
to say, well, the founding is just misunderstood and it's
38:07
really a a collective common good attempt to Orient the
38:12
government. But in his academic writings,
38:14
it's all about how well the founding was corrupted by lucky
38:17
and individualism, which breeds a libertine atomistic market
38:24
economy is like this thing that he detests Adrian Vermeul is, I
38:28
think even more pernicious. So he's this law professor that
38:31
used to be a, a pretty conventional like Antonin
38:34
Scalia, clerk, conservative law professor, which is a, a rare
38:39
entity. But somehow or another, he made
38:41
his way to Harvard. Just like their token
38:42
conservative then over the past 15 years or so.
38:48
This. IS really ironically is
38:49
precipitated by the War on Terror by Al Qaeda and the Iraq
38:53
War. He starts studying executive
38:56
power and he comes to the conclusion that terrorism is
38:59
this existential emergency that requires a strong executive to
39:04
basically operate outside the normal bounds of constitutional
39:07
constraint. So this is all the Patriot Act
39:10
stuff that we know about from the mid 2000's, the Cheney wing
39:14
of the Bush Cheney administration, torture and
39:19
extrajudicial renditions and, and Gitmo and stuff like that.
39:23
So these are, are emergency exigencies to deal with the
39:28
existential threat of terrorism. Well, terrorism and the War on
39:31
Terror and all that era goes by the wayside in the early 2010's,
39:35
the emergencies no longer there. So what does Vermeul do?
39:38
He starts to reinvent his judicial ideology.
39:41
And somewhere along the way he discovers this legal theorist by
39:45
the name of Carl Schmidt. And they may be thinking, who's
39:48
Carl Schmidt? Because he's he's a fairly
39:50
obscure guy in the English speaking world.
39:52
He was a big deal in 1920s and 1930s academia in Germany.
39:58
And that gets kind of where where Carl Schmidt is going.
40:02
He was like this reactionary legal theorist who viewed the
40:05
Weimar constitution as insufficient to deal with the
40:09
exigencies facing Germany in that era.
40:12
And he argued that what what Germany really needs is a strong
40:16
leader. A unified leader who can
40:19
recognize and on behalf of the German Volk as a collective
40:23
entity, act in their interest and make judgments that the
40:26
constitutional and legislative mechanisms of the government
40:29
cannot deal with. And that leader can emerge as
40:36
someone who can be empowered to know the judgments to make that
40:41
ensure the perpetuity of the German state and the German
40:44
people. You see where this is going,
40:47
right in the lap of Adolf Hitler.
40:49
And in 1933, Carl Schmidt publicly declares himself a
40:55
member of the Nazi Party, comes to Hitler's defense, right AB
41:00
attains all these academic and judicial positions sanctioned by
41:02
the 3rd Reich. He's a he's a good friends with
41:05
Herman Goering who sustains him in all these academic jobs.
41:09
And he publishes this treatise in 1934 defending Hitler's
41:14
actions on the Night of the Long Knives.
41:16
This is when Hitler sent all the Nazi, s s and Gestapo goons out
41:21
to murder all his political enemies.
41:23
And Schmidt says, well, this is the ultimate expression of a
41:25
state of emergency. This is a a moment when we need
41:31
the Fuhrer to act on behalf of the state and certain insurance
41:34
continuity. So Vermeul became obsessed with
41:37
Schmidt as this emergency theorist because he had
41:42
applicable doctrines that also seemed to fit 9/11 and and the
41:47
War on Terror. Well, the War on Terror goes by
41:49
the wayside for Mule clings to and becomes even more invested
41:52
in Schmidt and basically comes to the conclusion that the
41:55
Madisonian constitutional order is insufficient for modern
42:01
America. It's obsolete.
42:03
It may have even been built on a an enlightenment era myth of
42:08
constitutional government and what we really need to do.
42:10
And he says, basically paraphrasing almost exactly what
42:13
he says, is we as legal scholars need to midwife a post liberal
42:18
constitutional order for a post Madisonian United States.
42:23
And that comes down to a strong executive.
42:26
The executive branch should be supreme essentially over the
42:29
other two branches. It should exercise powers that
42:33
are implicit to it, not just granted by the Constitution, but
42:36
are implicit to it. And it should do so in response
42:40
to emergencies. And over the years, though, that
42:43
list of emergencies expands from just the War on Terror to, in
42:47
2020, it becomes COVID. And Adrian Vermeul says, well,
42:52
Madisonian democracy and constitutionalism is
42:55
insufficient to deal with COVID. Therefore, we need a strong
42:58
executive and emergency powers to enact lockdowns.
43:01
And although he's kind of danced around the issue more recently,
43:04
you start to see things like the fentanyl emergency used to
43:06
justify tariffs or Trump is mad at the Prime Minister of Canada
43:11
more tariffs or someone ran ATV ad that Trump doesn't like more
43:16
tariffs. These are all, all, all the it's
43:17
like a slippery slope to everything's emergencies.
43:20
And we rule by emergency degree by a strong, empowered unitary
43:25
executive that really doesn't have any practical checks on his
43:29
on his power. And Vermule is essentially
43:31
saying, yes, this is a good thing.
43:33
Rise up and embrace it. James and I are delighted to be
43:36
working with Civil. For years we have been pushing
43:38
people to think about how we can make the world a better place.
43:41
Civil's mission of upgrading society fits exactly with what
43:45
James and I have been talking about for years.
43:47
Civil helps us by allowing us to do what we do best, which is
43:51
researching topics that are important in communicating these
43:54
to our listeners in ways that we hope they find enjoyable.
43:57
To see Civil's extensive list of content, including our podcast
44:01
Words and Numbers and our new lecture series, Words and
44:04
Numbers Live, visit civil.com. That's civl.com.
44:08
Do they not see that within of just a few years we might have
44:15
President AOC who will declare an environmental catastrophe?
44:21
Exactly. And bypass all forms of
44:24
government designed to balance crackpottery and just head right
44:31
down the lunatic Rd. Do they not see that the other
44:34
party will win that seat again? This is the ratchet.
44:38
Effect and you know Trump is blowing up boats in the
44:41
Caribbean precisely because Obama used emergency power to
44:45
drone people in the Middle East and then other presidents before
44:49
that. It's just taking actions of the
44:51
predecessor and running with them.
44:54
And I think the post liberals are committing the same mistake
44:58
that every authoritarian minded big government ideology always
45:04
does. And that's to assume that
45:05
they've reached a culmination stage in history where they are
45:10
the the apotheosis of their own ideology.
45:15
And once in power, they can never be supplanted.
45:18
The Marxists do the same thing. Once you've reached that stage
45:20
where socialism sets in, socialism can never go away
45:23
because it was destined. It was ordained by history.
45:26
Well, the post liberals are like, well, modernity was a
45:29
mistake. the Enlightenment was a mistake.
45:31
And this is just nature reverting to its itself, its
45:35
course and nature is restoring the balance.
45:38
And because of that, we're ascended and we will never be
45:41
challenged. And therefore the risk of a
45:43
future president Newsome or President AOC.
45:46
By the way, AOC is is beating JD Vance in the head to head
45:50
presidential poll right now. So that tells you just how
45:52
delusional these people are. Vance is actually the only
45:55
person that's bad enough on the rise.
45:57
We could lose to someone like like AOC, but but it doesn't
46:01
even occur to them that hey, three years down the road a
46:05
future left wing president could say climate change is an
46:09
emergency, therefore all oil and all carbon based energy forms
46:16
and all internal combustion engines are banned from crossing
46:19
the border. Or maybe we have a firearms
46:23
violence emergency and gun parts, guns and their components
46:28
are now banned from importation or trade.
46:32
You know, you see the slippery slope of exactly where this type
46:35
of reasoning goes. And you know, I look at it.
46:39
A climate change emergency is no more far fetched than Trump
46:42
declaring A fentanyl emergency over 40 lbs of it crossing the
46:47
Canadian border in the course of the single year.
46:50
Yeah. We're already at the point of
46:52
absurdity. As the late night infomercial
46:55
hosts often say. But wait, there's more.
46:59
Exactly because because we haven't even gotten into
47:02
Catholic integralists. Oh boy.
47:07
And that's the fun one. So the post liberal world, they
47:12
team to they, they tend to be very religiously traditionalist,
47:16
although there's a divide. You have the Protestant version,
47:20
which sometimes goes by the name of Christian nationalism, and
47:24
it's a view that theocratic elements of a Protestant state
47:28
should be imbued into the government.
47:30
So basically this really gets to the core of some of their
47:33
grievances about the constitutional order.
47:35
They really don't like that First Amendment about the
47:37
separation of church and state. And then the elements of that
47:40
have always been around in US politics, But this is a very
47:44
aggressive part that thinks the government needs to wed itself
47:47
to the church. So you got the Christian
47:49
nationalist Protestants and then the Catholic version.
47:52
They refer to themselves as Catholic integralists.
47:55
This comes from mostly a 19th century ideology, although it
47:59
has some precursors. You could say that actually goes
48:01
back to like Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition.
48:04
But it's the notion that there's a unity between the Catholic
48:08
Church and state. And they actually have some some
48:11
very bizarre political fantasies where adherents of integralism,
48:17
they proffer all these dreams about like the Pope coming in
48:20
and declaring a new king in America who is going to make
48:23
Catholicism the state religion. Never mind that it's not even a
48:27
majority religion internally, it's one of the larger
48:30
religions. And I'm very sympathetic to
48:33
Catholic theology. I'm very sympathetic to
48:36
Christian theology in general, but it just isn't part of the
48:41
church state relationship to have one melded into the other.
48:46
This is a repudiation of our constitutional order.
48:49
I'd also daresay it says probably blasphemous.
48:52
I mean, what did Jesus say? My Kingdom is not of this world,
48:56
and yet they want to make it of this world.
48:58
But, but here's the other twist of it.
49:00
So you have all these integralist theorists that think
49:03
that we're on the verge of the Pope proclaiming America a
49:06
Catholic state and that it'll be run.
49:10
And I've asked integralists this directly.
49:11
I said, well, what are your historical examples for this
49:14
model of government, this crazy far fetched model of government?
49:19
And the answers they give Antonio Salazar's Portugal in
49:23
the 1950s and Francisco Franco's Spain after World War 2.
49:30
So this is La La Land fantasy. And yet, I mean, neither of
49:37
these regimes are are particularly great where you
49:40
could debate all the different problems of of the Iberian
49:44
Peninsula in the 20th century. And there are many in the
49:46
socialists that those guys were opposed against were no better
49:51
than they were. But it was generally not a good
49:53
vibrant intellectual or economic society.
49:57
See that as the model. We we've gone far afield from
50:03
the implosion at the Heritage Foundation, but I think this
50:07
gives our listeners a pretty good idea of the forces
50:11
coalescing behind JD Vance and the forces that have been
50:16
expelled from that group. Yeah, Well, yeah.
50:20
And, and it bears me so. So Vance has publicly identified
50:23
himself as a post liberal. He's personally friends with and
50:26
close to Patrick Deneen and all these characters.
50:29
They were his political mentors before he ran for office.
50:34
And he's also said he's sympathetic to integralism.
50:38
Here's the other weird thing. He may be sympathetic to the
50:41
integralism or the Pope uniting with the political state in
50:45
America and declaring a Catholic theocracy or something is where
50:50
some of these guys are going. But the Catholic Church itself
50:53
wants nothing to do with these people, so that warrants
50:56
mentioned as well. Pope Leo is not an integralist.
50:59
In fact, the Vatican's nuncio to the United States, Cardinal
51:02
Pierre, just published a paper about two months ago where he
51:07
looks at the various movements of US politics on the far left
51:11
and the far right. And he singles out two in
51:13
particular, he says, that are at odds with Catholic social
51:17
teaching. One of those is wokeism of
51:21
basically the past decade, the woke ISM of the left.
51:24
And he says well, the the the right counterpart to woke ISM is
51:28
post liberalism. And he says both of these are
51:30
making fundamental theological errors in trying to take the
51:35
instruments of the church and use it for worldly political
51:38
power and worldly political end for the post liberals.
51:42
And then then the left locism, it's like a secular religion of
51:45
the left. And he says these are just not
51:47
compatible with Catholic doctrine.
51:50
And yet you have people claiming to act in the name of Catholic
51:54
integralism that are fantasizing about this political revolution.
51:58
And supposedly, JD Vance is going to be the culmination of
52:01
it. So it's a very bizarre time that
52:03
we are living in. And yes, I think sadly, you
52:05
know, the crazies on the left ran the show for a while.
52:08
The crazies on the right are certainly in positions of power
52:12
at the moment. In in essence, we were coming
52:15
back to where we started. We spent, I guess from the 1900s
52:21
through to roughly the present with politicians Co opting
52:26
economists. So if you can, if you can find a
52:29
socialist who says things that support your favorite policy,
52:35
well now you're going to leverage that and you're in all
52:38
of a sudden you're a socialist economy or vice versa with the
52:41
free marketers. But in both cases, all what the
52:44
politicians want isn't the economic system.
52:47
They want the control. Well the the economists
52:51
apparently for just those couple 100 years were a blip on the
52:54
radar because for millennia before the economist, the
52:58
politicians were Co opting the church.
53:01
So I guess we're back to that and, and again, the politicians
53:06
don't care about the religion. What they care about is.
53:09
Is the power. Obtaining the power, yeah.
53:11
It's institutions of power. And then, you know, this was the
53:14
genius of the original Madisonian system is it tried to
53:17
separate all these coalescing entities of power, divide them
53:21
up, put them in in competition with each other, make them fight
53:25
it out. And then no one would have
53:27
emerged as the ascendant dominant power.
53:29
Well, you can see why both Marxist socialists on the far
53:33
left and these kind of theocratic post liberals on the
53:38
far right see that as a problem. They hate the Constitution
53:41
precisely because it gets in the way of them obtaining and
53:44
wielding political power. Thank God in heaven.
53:47
Thank God in heaven and 200 years.
53:52
I hope it lasts another 250 if not longer because it is keeping
53:56
them at Bay. One of the best things that the
53:59
American founders did was to relegate religion to the private
54:03
realm. It is a, it's an important
54:06
thing, but it's a private thing. And I, I remember Phil, when I
54:11
was in Iraq and I was teaching, I had taught one course this
54:14
semester over there. And when I told my students that
54:18
I had no idea what religion my neighbors practiced, they
54:23
couldn't understand what I had just said.
54:27
And I said, and that's why America will be successful in
54:31
ways that Iraq never will be. And we we talked about it all
54:35
semester. And I don't think at the end I
54:38
even made a dent. And this is what our politicians
54:43
on the right now aspire to be. Yeah, yeah.
54:47
So on the left, they want just a secular version of that
54:50
religion. That's right, you.
54:51
Know Marxist the same thing just just secular.
54:55
So where do you think all of this lands?
54:57
I, I think Trump is actually already being treated like a
55:01
lame duck president. And you can see various
55:05
congressmen standing up to him at this point say no, we're not
55:08
doing that. And and also precious little he
55:10
can do. He shifted what he's actually
55:14
executing on. He's focused on building
55:16
ballrooms and putting gold leaf all over everything, thinking of
55:21
that as his legacy, renaming buildings after himself.
55:25
You know, we we kind of laugh at some of it.
55:27
But I think that shows that Trump is realigning his focus is
55:31
he knows his term is nearly over in terms of being able to make
55:35
make major policies. His signature agenda.
55:38
He split, he spent all his capital on tariffs, and it's
55:41
before the Supreme Court looking like it's going to get stricken
55:44
down. Yeah, so he's running out of
55:46
time. Dull.
55:47
Anything before the midterms? Where do you think?
55:49
We end up not in at the midterms, but at the next
55:53
presidential election. Well.
55:55
What do you what do you think the tea leaves are are showing
55:58
us right now? It's always hard to tell.
56:01
I think if the midterms, you know, if they're polled today,
56:04
the Democrats are have a massive, you know, the generic
56:07
poll lead against the Republicans.
56:10
And I'm not a fan of the Democrats.
56:12
I think their economic agenda in particular is just off the rails
56:15
nuts. But you know that that's the
56:19
reality. Historically, party switch or
56:22
the control of Congress switches in the midterms, especially
56:25
against an unpopular president. So we're looking at probably a
56:29
very difficult political season in 2026.
56:32
The aftermath of that is what I think becomes disruptive, this
56:36
push to anoint JD Vance three years out from the election,
56:42
before there's even a primary. You know, I, I think it's
56:46
dangerous in one sense, But in the other sense is that's a very
56:49
different picture after the midterms, especially if they end
56:52
up being bad for the Republicans, because that's the
56:56
opportunity that another challenger emerges and declares
57:00
and says, hey, wait a minute, you let us off the Cliff and
57:02
lost Congress. What do you think that the odds
57:05
are that JD Vance is the nominee?
57:08
I hate to put numbers on it right now.
57:10
A lot of that's actually going to depend.
57:12
Does he continue to flatter Trump enough that Trump throws
57:14
in fully behind him? I think that the the more
57:19
pressing question is, if he is the nominee, what happens?
57:23
Because I don't think he can win.
57:25
He's. Too far out there.
57:28
I think we're already seeing the polling that he, he's even
57:30
polling behind AOC, the nuttiest of nuts on the left.
57:35
And you know what? The Democrats, they, they have a
57:38
track record of, of nominating unwinnable candidates.
57:43
But if the Democrats were sensible, they'd go for a more
57:47
mainstream moderate left governor or something of that.
57:50
Or even a the, you know. Not named.
57:53
Not named. Tim Walsh.
57:55
Yes. Not not, yes, but you know,
57:58
Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Shapiro of the of,
58:03
of Kentucky, these are types of figures that I think would be
58:07
winnable at a national election. And if they're going against Jay
58:09
D Vance, I don't think the Republicans have a chance.
58:13
Both parties have demonstrated for multiple elections now that
58:17
they're not interested in fielding winnable candidates.
58:22
They just want to field a candidate who's less unwinnable
58:25
than the other guy's candidate. I.
58:28
Mean, I mean, it's like they didn't learn the lessons.
58:30
I mean, as much as I detested Bill Clinton for a lot of his
58:33
policies, he was a winnable candidate and he figured out the
58:37
formula and he would be governed on the center left, did a lot of
58:42
things I didn't like. And he got penalized at the
58:45
polls when he moved too far to the left.
58:48
But, you know, it's like, why not get back to that era of
58:51
politics, even all the problems of the Bush administration.
58:55
Bush wasn't a nut case. Bush seemed like, you know,
59:00
personally, he was probably a pretty decent guy and he, he
59:04
tried to navigate and build a broad National Coalition.
59:08
Whereas I see both parties right now, they're going hard left
59:12
into the blue states or hard right into the red states.
59:15
And you know, the part of the turmoil here, you hear about how
59:20
Trumpism supposedly flipped the Midwest, the Rust Belt, to the
59:25
Republican Party, which, yes, there's a, there's a significant
59:28
electoral change there, although it's a very, very narrow margin.
59:31
At the same time, the Republican Party veering in this direction,
59:35
It put Georgia in play. It put Arizona in play.
59:39
It completely lost Virginia. And now we're locating North
59:43
Carolina's probably in play. These are previously solid red
59:47
states that are now purple to blue as a direct repudiation of
59:53
this fringe element on the right.
59:55
And what are you picking up for that?
59:57
A maybe 5149% chance you win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
1:00:01
But Phil, is this is this just, is it predictable given the
1:00:07
system that is we have a primary and then you have the the
1:00:12
general election in the in the primary, because we're not
1:00:16
required to vote. I'm not saying we should be, but
1:00:19
the fact is we aren't. So in the primary, typically on
1:00:23
both sides, Democrat and Republican, you get the people
1:00:26
who are more fringe voting predominantly versus everybody
1:00:30
else. So consequently, it's almost a
1:00:32
foregone conclusion that both parties are going to be catering
1:00:36
up their base candidates. Yeah, this was the well we had
1:00:40
in the Reagan years. It was the Ted Kennedy problem
1:00:42
that the doom Jimmy Carter in 1980 was that challenge from the
1:00:46
far left splits the parties. But it's it's kind of reversed.
1:00:50
Although I think there's an interesting on the, on the
1:00:52
primaries, we have not had a true national competitive
1:00:56
primary in both parties since 2016.
1:00:59
That was nine years ago. 2020 we had an incumbent Republican, but
1:01:04
remember the Democrats in the middle of their primary, COVID
1:01:07
breaks out and certain figures, senior figures of the party,
1:01:12
they step in and they anoint Joe Biden and basically tell
1:01:15
everyone clear the field. 2024 Trump sucks the air out of the
1:01:21
room on anything in the Republican side.
1:01:23
So there's not really much of A primary there at all, just a few
1:01:27
peripheral candidates. I mean, Nikki Haley ran but
1:01:31
didn't really get anywhere. So Trump essentially ran as if
1:01:34
he was an incumbent, and then Joe Biden bails out at the last
1:01:40
minute because of his declining mental state.
1:01:44
And rather than having a primary, just names Kamala
1:01:47
Harris. So we have not had a competitive
1:01:50
primary even for that process to play out since 2016.
1:01:53
And now you have the JD Vance people are trying to ensure that
1:01:56
that's the case again in 2028. So I, I'd be happy just to get
1:02:01
back to the primary and yes, let the crazies fight it out.
1:02:04
But if there was an open competitive primary, at least
1:02:07
something interesting would emerge.
1:02:09
And maybe there's a chance for, you know, a sensible,
1:02:13
reasonable, broad coalition, good government type to, to
1:02:17
emerge from this. You know, I, I'd rather have a
1:02:19
situation where candidates that I disliked, where the nominee is
1:02:25
for both parties, but I at least I could expect that they'd be
1:02:28
reasonable if they got into office.
1:02:31
That's incredibly pollyannish, probably even crazy, and
1:02:37
probably the best place to call a halt to this nonsense.
1:02:41
Thanks for for coming along. And and look, it's strange,
1:02:45
right, because we started just by asking heritage comma what
1:02:49
the hell? And look, look where it leads.
1:02:52
And and I don't think people fully appreciate.
1:02:55
It's like a micro. Just how, just how monumental
1:02:58
these these little seismic shifts in comparatively small
1:03:05
things like a right wing think tank actually play out in the
1:03:09
broader electorate. So thanks for coming along and
1:03:13
and illustrating just where we are here.
1:03:16
And I'd be interested in having you back after it gets to be a
1:03:22
little more clear who the front runners are going to be and
1:03:25
maybe even after the midterms to see how that all shakes out.
1:03:29
But the people will be glad to know, Phil, that not only do
1:03:34
they get to hear you about this, but next time they get to hear
1:03:37
you about something completely different.
1:03:39
And and we'll be we'll be right back with that in a couple of
1:03:44
days. In meantime, everybody should
1:03:47
just kind of hold on tightly to whatever anchors you to reality
1:03:52
and be nice to each other and we'll see you real soon.
1:03:55
At Words and Numbers we spend a lot of time talking about what's
1:03:58
going on in the economy and the government.
1:04:00
But fundamentally, all of this boils down to one thing.
1:04:03
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1:04:06
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1:04:08
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1:04:12
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