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The fracturing of America’s two-party system · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:00
  In a world full of lies and deception, it takes courage to speak the truth.
• 0:05
  In a nation held bent on its own destruction, it takes honor to seek a return to glory.
• 0:12
  Join us in cutting through the lies.
• 0:14
  Join us in cutting through the propaganda.
• 0:18
  Join us as we seek the truth on cutting through the fog from the America Out Loud Network.
• 0:24
  And here's your host, Wallace Garno.
• 0:28
  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Cutting Through the Chaos and the America Out Loud Network, where we cut through the lies in the propaganda to bring you the out loud truth.
• 0:39
  I'm your host, Wallace Garneau, and today I want to talk about what I call the body politic.
• 0:46
  In other words, how America's political parties are realigning.
• 0:50
  And I need to start with a confession.
• 0:53
  Some people got mad at me on Facebook when I told them this, some people here might get mad as well.
• 0:58
  But my first presidential election when I was a young man was in 1992.
• 1:04
  I guess I would have been 92.
• 1:06
  I was born in 71, so I guess I would have been what, 21 years old.
• 1:10
  My friends and I were all young idealists who thought that George H.W.
• 1:15
  Bush was a little too much of a Washington insider and a little bit too little like Ronald Reagan.
• 1:21
  So we weren't big fans of George H.W.
• 1:23
  Bush.
• 1:24
  We didn't hate George H.W.
• 1:26
  Bush.
• 1:26
  We just weren't big fans of him.
• 1:29
  And what I used to do is I used to hang out at a place called Sweetwater's Donut Mill in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
• 1:35
  If you've ever been to Kalamazoo, Michigan, by the way, Sweetwater's amazing donuts.
• 1:39
  But anyway, I'd hang out there after work, and uh a buddy of mine worked there, and another buddy of mine would hang out there as well.
• 1:47
  We'd hang out until the wee hours of the morning, just drinking coffee and eating donuts.
• 1:52
  And uh one of the employees there, other than the guy that that my best friend, one of the other employees, there was a huge H.
• 1:59
  Ross Perot, not just a supporter of Perot, but he was actually working on the H.
• 2:03
  Ross Pro campaign.
• 2:04
  And so we'd talk at night, and uh, and we were all very excited to vote for H.
• 2:09
  Ross Perot.
• 2:10
  He initially dropped out of the election, uh, then he came back in and said that he dropped out because he was threatened that his family would be attacked if he stayed in the election.
• 2:19
  And uh, well, to make a long story short, we all voted for H.
• 2:23
  Ross Perot, which collectively, not just us, but everybody who voted for him, he siphoned off like 12% of the vote.
• 2:30
  And uh had it not been for H.
• 2:33
  Ross Perot, I don't believe William Jefferson Clinton would ever have been in the White House.
• 2:37
  I think that George H.W.
• 2:39
  Bush would have gotten a second term instead.
• 2:43
  Well, some people on Facebook, when I mentioned that I voted for H.
• 2:46
  Ross Perot, they were like, you POS, you put Clinton in office, and it's like, well, I was young, you know.
• 2:53
  So uh I did vote for H.
• 2:55
  Ross Perot.
• 2:56
  I have never voted for a third party candidate again.
• 2:59
  It doesn't mean I never would, but I never have voted for a third-party candidate again, specifically because that put Bill Clinton in the White House.
• 3:09
  Uh but you know, the strange thing there is I tell people all the time, if you look at the platform Donald Trump ran on in 2016, and you compare that to, for example, Bill Clinton's 20 or 1992 campaign.
• 3:23
  I tell people all the time, I don't think this is true about Trump 2.0, but a second term.
• 3:28
  But I think Trump, when he ran for office the first time, actually ran in many ways to the left of Bill Clinton.
• 3:34
  Because Bill Clinton turned out to be pretty conservative, in my opinion, at least for a Democrat.
• 3:40
  I mean, he embraced market economics, free trade, fiscal restraint.
• 3:45
  He pushed NAFTA through, despite fierce opposition from organized labor.
• 3:49
  Uh he signed welfare reform, imposing work requirements and time limits.
• 3:53
  He declared that he would end welfare as we know it.
• 3:56
  He expanded policing and strengthened sentencing standards.
• 4:00
  He also called black men, I think this is actually his wife, also called black men uh something predators, super super predators.
• 4:08
  That's what Hillary Clinton called them.
• 4:09
  That was what she said they needed to pass that for because she said that black men were super predators.
• 4:14
  So, you know, that wasn't good.
• 4:16
  Uh, but he supported financial deregulation.
• 4:19
  He even repealed Glass-Steagall, and he presided over balanced budgets and deficit reduction.
• 4:24
  Now, when I bring up that I think Clinton was somewhat conservative, what people often will tell me is that he was forced to be conservative by Newt Gingrich.
• 4:35
  And that, of course, is true.
• 4:36
  Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the House, and these they they negotiated very, very uh very they both held firm positions, and and they negotiated in such a way that Clinton was able to get some things done, but he had to give up other things to do it.
• 4:51
  So, how much of the restraint, how much of the balanced budget, how much of the conservatism that I experienced under Clinton was because of Clinton and how much of it was because of Newt Gingrich.
• 5:04
  Well, that's an open question, and we could debate that for days.
• 5:07
  Uh, but it wasn't all Newt Gingrich.
• 5:09
  I mean, in 1996, Clinton stated that this is a direct quote, the era of big government is over.
• 5:16
  When was the last time you heard a Democrat say anything about the era of big government being over or anything that implies in any way limited government?
• 5:26
  Well, that's what Bill Clinton said in 1996.
• 5:29
  The era of big government is over.
• 5:31
  Even in immigration, the Clinton administration emphasized enforcement in the rule of law and expanded deportations while strengthening border controls.
• 5:41
  Now let's contrast that for a minute with the man who may be a conservative, Ronald Reagan.
• 5:48
  If you've heard the show before, by the way, you know the story.
• 5:50
  Buddy of mine, and uh we were at a paper route, and we were putting Sunday papers together, we had to put the advertisements into the paper.
• 5:57
  And uh he asked me if I was a Democrat or Republican.
• 6:01
  I said, Well, I'm a Democrat.
• 6:02
  And he said, why?
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  And I was like, well, you know, the Democrats of the Party for the working class and the Republicans of the Party for the Rich and Big Business.
• 6:09
  My family were not rich, so of course I support the working class.
• 6:13
  And then I asked him, are you a Democrat or Republican?
• 6:15
  And he said, Well, I'm a Republican.
• 6:16
  And I said, Well, you're not any richer than I am.
• 6:18
  Why the hell are you a Republican?
• 6:20
  And I don't remember what he said.
• 6:22
  I remember that it was far more.
• 6:25
  He he he he knew far more about what he was talking about and why he was what he was than I did.
• 6:30
  He didn't just get boilerplates or bumper stickers.
• 6:33
  He actually reasoned why he was a conservative.
• 6:36
  And uh, you know, I didn't say, okay, cool, I'm a conservative too.
• 6:39
  But back in these days, when the president was on TV, he was on all three stations, and there were only three stations in Kalamazoo.
• 6:46
  You had Channel 3, Channel 8, and uh, I think 41 was out of Battle Creek or something like that.
• 6:52
  So sometimes you could get Chicago, but not very often.
• 6:56
  So anyway, that's what you was on all three channels.
• 6:58
  And before that, I didn't watch when the president was on.
• 7:02
  But after this, I began listening to the president.
• 7:05
  I began listening to Ronald Reagan.
• 7:06
  And I was like, you know, this guy knows what he's talking about.
• 7:08
  This guy makes an awful lot of sense.
• 7:10
  So then when he ran against Walter Mondale, I listened to Walter Mondale, and I was like, kind of an idiot is this guy.
• 7:15
  He doesn't make any sense at all.
• 7:17
  And so I began to realize I'm not a liberal like my parents.
• 7:20
  I'm not a Democrat, I am a Republican.
• 7:23
  And it was Reagan that that made me one.
• 7:26
  And uh, you know, he was conservative, obviously in temperament and rhetoric.
• 7:30
  But his conservatives have rested on classical liberal principles.
• 7:33
  I mean, he championed free trade and global market integration, he signed immigration reform that included amnesty.
• 7:39
  He upheld multilateral alliances such as NATO and spoke of American exceptionalism in civic terms.
• 7:47
  His economic program reduced tax rates and regulation, but it did not pursue state-directed industrial policy or protectionist tariffs.
• 7:56
  I mean, even at the end of the, at the height of the Cold War, Reagan articulated a vision of liberty that was grounded in individual rights and constitutional order.
• 8:06
  Though he remains a conservative icon even to this day, he operated within a liberal democratic framework that treated globalization, civic nationalism, and procedural neutrality as givens.
• 8:18
  If we look at today's Republican Party, well, today segments of it question free markets.
• 8:24
  They retreat from multilateralism.
• 8:26
  They accept state-directed economic coordination, and they lean into grievance-based politics.
• 8:33
  That's not my form of conservatism, but there are Republicans today that do that, a large number of them.
• 8:38
  For most of the late 20th century, both parties, by the way, accepted the same basic premises: market capitalism, civic nationalism, constitutional liberalism, global engagement, and equality under the law.
• 8:54
  They offered kind of different routes, but they moved to the same direction.
• 8:58
  It was kind of like we all want to go to the same place, but we don't necessarily agree on how to get there.
• 9:03
  My dad and I would have spirited debates.
• 9:05
  He wanted more regulation, and I he he would frame it, he wanted more regulation, and I wanted less regulation.
• 9:12
  I wouldn't frame it that way.
• 9:14
  I would say my dad wanted more regulation, and for him, it was really about more regulation.
• 9:19
  There was no level of regulation who's going to say, okay, we've achieved it.
• 9:23
  If you go any higher, I'm become a Republican.
• 9:25
  That wasn't in his nature.
• 9:27
  But he wanted more regulation.
• 9:28
  That was clearly true.
• 9:29
  I never he would say I would that I wanted less regulation, but really what I wanted was a framework for that regulation to be based on.
• 9:38
  To me, it's not about more or less.
• 9:41
  It's not about what is the proper level of regulation.
• 9:44
  It is what is the purpose of regulation and what kinds of things should be regulated.
• 9:49
  And uh that would mean a lot less regulation, yes, but I don't want to get rid of all regulation.
• 9:54
  It's not like I look at a regulation and say, that's a regulation, we should get rid of it.
• 9:58
  No, regulations do things.
• 10:00
  And I look at regulations and say, do we want what that regulation does?
• 10:04
  Does that regulation make sense?
• 10:07
  And from my perspective, I've written about this before too.
• 10:10
  There are only two things I think that the government should get involved in the economy for.
• 10:15
  The first one is to promote and protect the efficiency of the markets.
• 10:18
  Markets do not naturally lead to their most efficient state.
• 10:23
  There are things the government can do to make them more efficient, such as truth in advertising laws.
• 10:27
  That's a great example of something government can do to make regulations or to make the economy more efficient.
• 10:33
  Force advertisers to be honest, truth and advertising.
• 10:36
  So that's that's a great example of something the government can do to make markets more efficient.
• 10:41
  The other role for government is to provide for those legitimate societal needs, a societal societal needs that run counter to market efficiency.
• 10:51
  And the key thing here is their societal needs.
• 10:53
  They're not individual needs, they're not group needs, everybody needs it.
• 10:57
  Classic example there would be, for example, uh environmental protections, particularly when they when environmental things like the air cross state lines.
• 11:05
  Does the government have a role in protecting the environment?
• 11:08
  Well, of course it does because there are it's there are better yes, it does.
• 11:14
  I'm just gonna go out and say, yes, the government has a role in protecting the environment because businesses have the profit incentive that could encourage them to pollute the environment.
• 11:23
  Uh, the key thing here, though, is that the second one is kind of subordinate to the first role, which means that when the government gets involved to do something like protect the environment, it has a responsibility to do so in the most efficient way possible.
• 11:37
  So the least impact on the on the economy that it can possibly do when it pursues that role.
• 11:43
  And that's it.
• 11:43
  I don't think there should be any other role for the government in the economy.
• 11:47
  If you're not doing one of those two things, don't do it.
• 11:49
  That's that's that's my take.
• 11:51
  So I wouldn't say I'm for more regulation or less regulation.
• 11:54
  I would say I'm for a structure upon which we base regulation.
• 11:58
  Does it do the right things?
• 11:59
  Does it do it in the right way?
• 12:01
  Uh but the fact of the matter is that my dad and I differed a great deal, and uh, and uh that's you know, that's kind of what happens now.
• 12:10
  Everybody disagrees.
• 12:11
  But my dad's day, both parties kind of want to go to the same place, it just had different ways to get there.
• 12:17
  Uh the parties incidentally do remain institutionally intact, but neither party resembles what it was when I began voting.
• 12:27
  You know, what appears to be chaos with the two parties, you know, it's it's it's not collapse.
• 12:32
  What it really is, I think is uh kind of a recomposition.
• 12:35
  You know, the organs of the body politic you might say still function, but they are pulling apart and they're carrying the country with them.
• 12:42
  They're tearing the country apart.
• 12:44
  And as I said, my first vote was for Ross Peru.
• 12:47
  But the first election I remember was actually Carter and Ford.
• 12:50
  I remember I was five years old, sitting in my parents' bedroom on the floor while they watched the news, and I looked at the two men, and I remember saying I like Ford.
• 12:58
  My dad said, Why?
• 13:00
  I said, Well, he's got hair.
• 13:01
  My mom corrected me and said, No, Ford doesn't have hair, he's the bald one.
• 13:05
  Carter's the guy with hair.
• 13:06
  And uh I immediately switched my opinion, and I said, Oh, well, in that case, I guess I like Carter.
• 13:11
  That got my dad to launch into a rant about how people vote based on appearance and how that helped put John F.
• 13:17
  Kennedy in office.
• 13:18
  And I hate to say it, my dad actually said women vote for people based largely in how they look.
• 13:24
  I don't think that's entirely not going to disparage women the way my dad did there.
• 13:28
  I think women vote the way they vote, and I think many women, I mention sometimes vote that way too.
• 13:33
  So, you know, I don't think there's really a difference there between men and women.
• 13:36
  But my dad did say that.
• 13:37
  That's that's actually unfortunately true.
• 13:39
  And he specifically said, John F.
• 13:41
  Kennedy, good looking guy, that really helped put him in office.
• 13:44
  Well, this is the Carter election.
• 13:46
  I actually voted for Jimmy Carter in an elementary school mock election.
• 13:50
  And Carter actually won the school, but of course he lost the country to Reagan.
• 13:54
  And then Reagan from 2000 from Ronald Reagan all the way through, I think the 2008 campaign, you know, both parties kind of operated within a liberal democratic consensus.
• 14:06
  Didn't agree in everything.
• 14:07
  In fact, they disagreed intensely, but they were able to work together because they both wanted to move the country forward, and what that meant to them was similar enough that they could compromise.
• 14:20
  Well, then we get to 2008.
• 14:22
  Obama, of course, ran as a moderate in 2008, but as soon as he was elected, things changed.
• 14:28
  In his inaugural address, he promised radical transformation, and that is a direct quote.
• 14:34
  Uh he didn't fully deliver on that promise, but he did change the nature of both parties.
• 14:40
  Earlier, Democrats had combined organized labor, industrial workers, the civil rights constituencies, and institutional moderates.
• 14:48
  Early Republicans, before 2008, unified neoconservative foreign policy leadership, Christian conservatives, free market globalists, and uh constitutional or libertarian thinkers.
• 15:01
  Both parties fought over regulation levels.
• 15:03
  As I said, my dad more and me, I wanted more of a framework, not necessarily less, but a framework.
• 15:08
  And they they fought over that, they fought over tax rates, welfare policies, and they fought over cultural norms.
• 15:14
  They did not fight over whether the economy should rest on market capitalism or whether we should go all red.
• 15:20
  Nationalism was not labeled fascist back in the day either.
• 15:24
  And enlightenment assumptions about truth and law still carried public authority.
• 15:29
  Everybody agreed on those things.
• 15:31
  Clinton, by the way, in 1992.
• 15:33
  He's often remembered as progressive, but he ran on fiscal restraint, trade expansion.
• 15:38
  I mentioned welfare reform earlier and global integration.
• 15:41
  One of his slogans, as a matter of fact, you can buy uh you could buy uh on eBay, you can actually buy bumper stickers and and uh pins and things like that.
• 15:51
  One of his slogans was make America great again.
• 15:54
  Believe it or not, yes, that was actually a Bill Clinton and uh in Al Gore.
• 15:59
  You can buy the button.
• 16:00
  I mean, it's you can buy an eBay.
• 16:01
  That was one of their slogans, make America great again.
• 16:04
  Now everybody hates make America great again on the left.
• 16:06
  But 1992, that was their slogan.
• 16:09
  Both parties back in the day treated globalization as an engine of prosperity while recognizing the nation-state as the primary political unit.
• 16:20
  That shared direction no longer holds.
• 16:24
  As a matter of fact, the parties have pulled apart, the attacks turn more and more personal.
• 16:29
  They don't longer simply disagree.
• 16:32
  Increasingly, people in the two parties hate one another.
• 16:36
  Now, this country has, of course, known this kind of division before.
• 16:40
  Uh but if we look at the time periods where we were this divided, this kind of division has never strengthened us.
• 16:47
  And I think there were three forces that unsettled this equilibrium that we had, as I put I almost make the 1990s sound like a golden age.
• 16:56
  Of course, it was not a golden age, but in some ways politically, we were a lot better off than we are today.
• 17:02
  Um so that was kind of an equilibrium we'd met, and there were three forces that I think kind of threw us off kilter.
• 17:08
  The first one was uh was what I would call an economic realignment.
• 17:12
  Globalization hollowed out industrial regions, wages stagnated for non-college workers, and in large cities, the managerial class.
• 17:20
  In some cases, it exploded, even in even Republican cities, it expanded.
• 17:25
  Second became uh came institutional consolidation, media ownership concentrated, the administrative state expanded, universities and NGOs gave cultural authority, and corporations and regulators began to overlap.
• 17:40
  You know, it was public and private power started to blur.
• 17:43
  The regulators started to help businesses rather than trying to control them.
• 17:48
  Uh, and and you know, people saw that.
• 17:51
  The third thing was uh shifts in sovereignty and integration.
• 17:56
  We saw where multilateral institutions they rose more in prominence, and policy increasingly coordinated through transnational frameworks.
• 18:04
  Now, this affected both parties.
• 18:06
  We'll talk about both parties, but let's start with the democratic transformation.
• 18:10
  Because the Democratic Party is no longer the labor populist machine of the late 20th century.
• 18:15
  It still speaks the language of unions, and of course, it's still happy to take union money, but its center of gravity has shifted, it shifted a great deal.
• 18:23
  And the working class, well, it's no longer its organizing core.
• 18:27
  It's based now disproportionately college educated.
• 18:31
  Almost everybody in the Democrat Party, it seems like now went to college.
• 18:34
  Influence concentrates among professionals in academia, media, the permanent bureaucracy, nonprofit leadership, regulatory agencies, and even corporate management.
• 18:45
  Back in the day, you know, I told my buddy at the at the with the when we were delivering newspapers that the Democrats were the party of of the working class.
• 18:56
  Well, it's not true anymore.
• 18:58
  They are no longer the party of the working class.
• 19:00
  They are now the party of corporate management.
• 19:03
  They are now what my dad said Republicans were in that regard.
• 19:06
  The party increasingly reflects the worldview of a technocratic moral and intellectual elite as well.
• 19:12
  It believes that only it possesses the knowledge required to govern.
• 19:16
  Those who disagree are increasingly dismissed outright and increasingly looked at not as wrong, which is normally what you call somebody you disagree with, but as dangerous, as evil as all kinds of terrible things, you know, fascist, racist, all of the things that they throw at their political at their political opposition.
• 19:35
  Well, that's what they do.
• 19:36
  They just, you know, they dismiss them outright, basically.
• 19:40
  And uh the mindset of this uh moral and intellectual elite, that's we saw what they want during COVID when they talked about a great reset that moved from being just a fringe slogan that you'd see in the WEF to an open aspiration with pandemic controls discusses foundations for permanent redesign.
• 20:00
  Be it for a climate emergency or some other declared crisis.
• 20:04
  Now the Great Reset was never formal party doctrine within the DNC, but it didn't need to be.
• 20:10
  Its assumptions filtered into policy conversations that many Democrats endorsed, and much of the media echoed that.
• 20:17
  Legislative compromise yields to executive rulemaking when Democrats govern.
• 20:21
  Regulatory coordination expands.
• 20:23
  Policy flows through administrative channels rather than Congress, and authority consolidates inside credential network surprise expertise, procedural control, and institutional alignment.
• 20:35
  Out of power Democrats increasingly treat the other side as illegitimate, not just wrong.
• 20:40
  And at the same time, the party has drifted from civic nationalism toward globalism.
• 20:45
  It frames immigration expansion as a moral duty and an economic necessity.
• 20:49
  Under Joe Biden, as I've said before, as much as 195 billion dollars a year.
• 20:57
  That's coming from Elon Musk's Dodge disclosures.
• 21:00
  Move from USAID into NGOs that openly facilitated large-scale migrations of people illegally into the United States.
• 21:08
  Your MyTax dollars, 195 billion a year going through USAID into NGOs to pay to migrate people illegally into the United States.
• 21:18
  That's a lot of money.
• 21:19
  The party has embraced collectivism, though it now is kind of divided over what kind of collectivism it wants to pursue.
• 21:26
  You've got, of course, the more Marxist socialist faction.
• 21:31
  You have the other Democrat faction, which I like to call economic fascism.
• 21:36
  Now, fascism is often used as a slur.
• 21:38
  I'm actually using it here as a structural term rooted in the philosophy of Giovanni Gentili, who is the guy that coined the phrase.
• 21:46
  My attitude is if you want to know what Marxism is, you go back to Marx.
• 21:49
  Well, by the same token, if you want to know what fascism is, you should go back to the guy that invented it.
• 21:54
  That's Giovanni Gentili.
• 21:56
  So when I define fascism, I'm using Gentelli's definitions because it's his philosophy.
• 22:02
  Now, fascism, like communism, contains political and economic components.
• 22:08
  Politically, it is hypernationalist and totalitarian, casting a dictator as the living embodiment of the people and subordinating the individual to the state.
• 22:17
  I'm not saying Democrats want anything to do with that.
• 22:20
  Democrats reject that political structure, at least for the most part.
• 22:24
  Fascism, however, also includes an economic system.
• 22:27
  When Democrats call themselves democratic socialists, they're detaching Marxism's economic model from its authoritarian political form, and they're overlaying it with a different political system, democratic socialists.
• 22:40
  The same structural separation applies to fascism.
• 22:42
  One can take Gentili's economic structure and put it under a different political shell.
• 22:47
  When I say economic fascism, that's what I'm talking about.
• 22:50
  So I'm not saying they want dictatorship.
• 22:52
  I'm not saying that they want ultra-nationalism and all of that.
• 22:57
  I'm saying if they want the economic provisions under fascism as defined by Giovanni Gentili.
• 23:04
  Let's talk about what those are.
• 23:06
  Fascism permits private enterprise, so long as it advances the state's central plan.
• 23:11
  So central planning is a part of fascism.
• 23:13
  Ownership remains not only private under fascism, but it operates under state control.
• 23:18
  Pay and profit reward compliance with national objectives.
• 23:23
  The firm exists, but the firm doesn't really have any power.
• 23:26
  It doesn't rule the you you own the company if you're the owner, but you have to do what the state does, what the state tells you to.
• 23:32
  Firms either comply with the central plan or they lose control.
• 23:35
  Good example of this in America would be when President Obama removed the CEO of General Motors.
• 23:40
  China incidentally offers what I would call a modern hybrid of communism and fascism.
• 23:45
  Corporations operate in markets in China, but in the Chinese model, they remain instruments of the state, with the state government, with the government holding ownership stakes and decisive control over all of their major firms.
• 23:57
  Many on the Western left, incidentally, including Mark Cardi have spoken favorably of this model, despite China's openly authoritarian political structure.
• 24:06
  So they say we don't want the authoritarianism, and then they look at China and say, ooh, wish we had that control.
• 24:13
  All of these systems, though, whether it's the Chinese model, the economic fascist model, or the socialist model, whatever blend of that you want, communism, democratic socialism, whatever brand of socialism you want to use, they all share a core.
• 24:27
  They centralize economic direction and they subordinate production to state priorities.
• 24:34
  Because labor is a big part of that.
• 24:36
  You know, labor is part of the means of production.
• 24:39
  This necessarily subordinates the individual to the collective, even when the collective expands beyond the nation state.
• 24:48
  Technocratic elitism depends on institutional stability.
• 24:52
  It seeks cohesion and manage continuity.
• 24:55
  The activist wing, however, thrives on disruption and moral confrontation.
• 25:00
  You might remember CNN in what uh many journalists call the summer of love, had trouble finding camera angles in American cities where you couldn't see buildings on fire.
• 25:10
  That's the activist wing, thriving on disruption and moral confrontation.
• 25:15
  And together, the way this works is activists destabilize opposition institutions whenever they're out of power, while technocrats consolidate authority whenever they have power.
• 25:25
  Through the party's most energetic spoise to speak in Marxist terms, by the way, that seems like that's where all of the energy is.
• 25:32
  Understand durable authority rests with the technocrats.
• 25:35
  The modern Democratic Party today is technocratic, globalist, and collectivist.
• 25:40
  It no longer defends the classical liberalism upon which the nation was built, and it grows increasingly intolerant of any form of dissent.
• 25:50
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• 25:54
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• 26:04
  Don't go anywhere, still have a lot to go over the other side of the break, so we will be right back.
• 26:12
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• 26:13
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• 29:23
  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to cutting through the chaos on the America Out Loud Network.
• 29:28
  I'm your host Wallace Garneau, and we are talking about the body politic.
• 29:33
  We talked about before the break how the Democrat Party had transformed.
• 29:37
  Now we can talk about how the Republican Party is transformed.
• 29:41
  Before we do, also note you can follow me on Substack at Wallace Garnot, Substack.com at Wallace Garnot.
• 29:48
  You can also more increasingly read me on uh White Rose Magazine.
• 29:52
  Different articles than what we have here, uh, but still solid content.
• 29:55
  So you can see me in multiple places.
• 29:57
  At any rate, the Republican Party has also.
• 30:00
  Transformed.
• 30:00
  It did not sit still while the Democrats changed.
• 30:04
  For decades, when I was growing up, I don't know how far back this goes, but longer than I've been around.
• 30:10
  It ran in a trifecta.
• 30:12
  You had the neoconservative interventionists, they set the foreign policy.
• 30:16
  Christian conservatives shaped the moral language.
• 30:18
  Free market globalists wrote economic doctrine, and none of these groups, you know, they all had different focuses.
• 30:25
  So as groups, as individuals, of course, people don't stay in one lane.
• 30:29
  But as groups, they really didn't have a lot of overlap.
• 30:32
  So they formed a durable coalition, and that coalition shaped party leadership.
• 30:38
  As a result, trade liberalization, deregulation, Christian morality, and an assertive posture abroad formed the Republican base.
• 30:46
  The Trump era did not create dissatisfaction inside the party either.
• 30:51
  The Tea Party did that, directed first toward Obama and the Affordable Care Act.
• 30:56
  And then later toward what the Tea Party called Rhinos, which, as we all know, stands for Republicans in name only.
• 31:02
  Trump gathered that dissatisfaction, though, then he named it, and then he weaponized it.
• 31:07
  Non college voters, especially in declining industrial states and rural regions, had already felt the ground shifting beneath them.
• 31:14
  Well, when the Democrats moved away from the labor vote, guess what happened?
• 31:18
  Many of these people became a part of the new Republican base.
• 31:22
  Economic displacement collided with cultural marginalization.
• 31:26
  Both filter through deep distrust of elites.
• 31:29
  Trade skepticism replaced free trade as an article of faith.
• 31:32
  Economic nationalism displaced global markets.
• 31:35
  Globalization began to sound kind of like a sermon preached to people who had already lost their jobs.
• 31:40
  Certainly that was the case in places like Michigan or Pittsburgh or what have you.
• 31:44
  And Republican economic policy, now it reflects that shift.
• 31:48
  On key economic questions, much of today's Republican coalition definitely sits to the left of Bill Clinton's 1992 platform.
• 31:56
  I mean tariffs are no longer taboo.
• 31:58
  Industrial policy is no longer a dirty phrase.
• 32:01
  Supply chains are treated as national security assets.
• 32:05
  State coordination, it's discussed openly.
• 32:08
  In the 1990s, none of that would have survived Republican primary.
• 32:13
  Well, today it draws applause.
• 32:16
  The cultural register has shifted as well.
• 32:18
  The conservative, the Christian conservative movement has kind of taken a back seat.
• 32:22
  That's not to say there aren't Christians in the Republican Party.
• 32:25
  Of course there are, I am one.
• 32:27
  The Republican Party is still majority Christian.
• 32:29
  It just doesn't drive the leadership or the direction of the party as much as it used to.
• 32:36
  It's kind of, as I said, it's taken kind of a back seat.
• 32:39
  Grievance-based rhetoric has grown sharper within the part within the party.
• 32:43
  We even have identity language, was once confined entirely to the left.
• 32:47
  Now it appears in conservative circles, framed not around minority status, but around cultural displacement.
• 32:53
  The left and the right, or the right rather, and the alt-right are often conflated as if they're the same thing, but they are actually different things, so they're distinct.
• 33:02
  Classical conservatism rests on civic universalism.
• 33:05
  It treats the American project as constitutional and cultural, and it rejects identity politics.
• 33:12
  We may focus on culture, we don't focus on identity.
• 33:15
  Historically, conservatives focused on negative rights and general principles rather than targeted policies for specific groups.
• 33:22
  Well, the alt-right rejects that foundation.
• 33:25
  It grounds political identity and race and hierarchy.
• 33:28
  It treats demographic composition as destiny, and it even argues, it uses this phrase that culture flows from blood.
• 33:36
  There's a certain caricature that the left likes to frame the right with.
• 33:40
  You know what it is.
• 33:41
  You're a fascist, you're a racist, you're Hitler, you're all these terrible things.
• 33:45
  You know exactly how the left likes to caricature the right.
• 33:47
  I don't have to spell all that out.
• 33:49
  What I do want to spell out is the alt-right is that caricature.
• 33:54
  They are exactly what the left pretends the actual right is.
• 33:59
  They embody that caricature, the character of the left as so long projected into conservatism, which is crazy because they're not conservatives.
• 34:07
  There's a rhetorical overlap between alt-right voices and Republican policy uh populists around things like demographic anxiety and civilizational decline.
• 34:16
  In that language, that can sound similar.
• 34:18
  But the foundation of what they believe is not similar at all.
• 34:23
  The outright began with the fringe, but figures such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have echoed elements of its rhetoric and given it oxygen.
• 34:31
  And that carries risk.
• 34:32
  If the Republican Party becomes the excuse me, becomes the Democratic Party inverted on race, well, at that point no major party will still defend classical liberalism and the American experiment will fall.
• 34:46
  As populism rises, the party's center weakens.
• 34:49
  Neoconservative foreign policy recedes.
• 34:52
  Free markets no longer dominate.
• 34:54
  Libertarian voices, they remain, I'm one of them, but they compete with nationalist ones, and the old guard no longer commands so much as it bargains.
• 35:03
  The move away from blind faith in global free markets, incidentally, makes a certain amount of sense when adversaries and trading partners begin to weaponize those markets against us, which they've been doing for a long time, by the way.
• 35:14
  But abandoning markets altogether would be a huge mistake.
• 35:17
  The Republican Party must defend free enterprise, particularly within our own borders, and it must use free markets globally, at least with trading partners that we can trust.
• 35:28
  Republicans must uphold Judeo-Christian moral norms as the cultural engine of our country, and we have to do that.
• 35:34
  We'll continue to defend equality under the law and individual liberty.
• 35:38
  Those have to be things we hold firm to.
• 35:40
  We can't let our party we can we can move right, we can't move alt-right.
• 35:44
  Alt-right is something else entirely.
• 35:46
  We want to stay as far away from that as we possibly can.
• 35:50
  Today's Republican Party, well, it includes old school Democrats that have been alienated by the modern left.
• 35:56
  Along with traditional conservatives, constitutional conservatives and libertarians.
• 36:00
  People say, are you really a libertarian?
• 36:03
  I would call myself a small L libertarian.
• 36:06
  When you look at the libertarian movement, it kind of butts up against constitutional conservativism on one side, kind of butts up against anarcho-capitalism on the other side.
• 36:16
  I am not on the anarcho-capitalist side of the libertarian movement.
• 36:20
  I am very, very much butted up against constitutional conservatives.
• 36:24
  You could call me a constitutional conservative just as easy as a libertarian both work, because uh I'm kind of right there with the two butt up against each other.
• 36:33
  But at any rate, today's Republican Party remains deeply patriotic, but less focused on limited government and less focused on free markets.
• 36:42
  The right has in fact become a very large tent of competing interests.
• 36:46
  It spends far more time now attacking the left than it does articulating coherent vision of America's future.
• 36:52
  That's not because Republicans lack ideas.
• 36:54
  It's because the coalition, basically what in 1992 kind of spanned both parties.
• 37:00
  Well, it lacks broad agreement.
• 37:03
  The political right, however, as I said, has to reject the alt-right outright.
• 37:08
  If Republicans chase those votes, the country will lose.
• 37:12
  Now let's talk about the middle, because everybody talks about I want to be a centrist.
• 37:15
  Where is the middle?
• 37:16
  Well, the middle's largely gone.
• 37:18
  It has been completely hollowed out.
• 37:20
  And uh we can see that because there was a time when the party still spoke a common language.
• 37:25
  They argued over tax rates and spending levels.
• 37:29
  They fought over the size of government and the pace of reform, and they clashed over welfare policy, defense budgets, cultural norms, you name it.
• 37:37
  But they did not fight over the meaning or the purpose of the country.
• 37:41
  Both parties operated inside a liberal democratic framework.
• 37:45
  They assume the legitimacy of the Constitution.
• 37:47
  They assume the primacy of the nation state and the value of free markets, and the equality of citizens under the law.
• 37:55
  Elections decided policy direction, not the identity of the regime.
• 37:59
  Courts interpreted law, but they were not treated as partisan actors.
• 38:03
  The press criticized power, but was not broadly viewed as an enemy of the state, and though disputes were sharp, the architecture was shared.
• 38:11
  That common ground, ladies and gentlemen, it's gone.
• 38:15
  The Democratic Party now pushes managed global integration and rule by credentialed elites.
• 38:22
  It treats borders as negotiable, speech is regulatable.
• 38:25
  Equality is something to be engineered rather than protected.
• 38:30
  Institutions are not neutral referees, but mechanisms for producing approved social outcomes.
• 38:35
  Expertise now is elevated above consent and administrative authority expands as legislative compromise recedes.
• 38:43
  Conversely, the Republican Party now pushes national sovereignty and economic intervention on behalf of our citizenry, and wants mass wants mass deportation of illegal immigrants.
• 38:54
  It questions free trade deals, formed uh polit foreign entanglements, central banking authority, and the moral legitimacy of the press.
• 39:02
  The academy and large sublings of the federal bureaucracy are also criticized.
• 39:05
  We don't now we many of us don't believe there's any legitimacy left in the mainstream press, the academy or large segments of the federal bureaucracy.
• 39:14
  Once defined ourselves by our desire for limited government.
• 39:17
  But while much of the right, much of the Republican Party still claims that inheritance, it now embraces the party.
• 39:24
  We now embrace what what the party believes market institutions have weakened the country's industrial base and uh cultural cohesion or border security.
• 39:32
  We want intervention when those things happen.
• 39:34
  And I say we as a party, I don't mean me personally, I'm still a free market guy.
• 39:38
  But as a party, we now embrace intervention when we believe that markets or institutions have weakened the country's industrial base, our cultural cohesion, or our border security.
• 39:47
  And that's just many Republicans agree with that sort of thing.
• 39:50
  That's just, I'm sorry, it's a fact.
• 39:52
  If you're somebody who agrees with me, then that's not what you want, but a lot of Republicans now they do.
• 39:57
  As I said, it's a very wide tent.
• 39:59
  You could be
• 40:00
  Basically take everybody who's voting Democrat or Republican in the 90s and the left has gone so far left that if if you're one of the people who was voting at all in the 90s, you're probably on the right.
• 40:11
  And if you agree with anybody who is voting at all in the 90s, well, you're probably on the right.
• 40:17
  Now you're gonna have people like like uh like uh well, like Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton will say that's not true, but if you look at what they believed then, look it's some homework for you.
• 40:28
  Actually do this.
• 40:29
  I actually want you to do this.
• 40:31
  Go to Google, pull up Bill Clinton's or the DNC platform from 1992, and just read it, and then go to the Hillary Clinton platform from 2016 and read that, and then go to the Democratic platform today and read that.
• 40:48
  Three simple Google searches.
• 40:49
  You will see just how much the party has moved and even continues to move to the left.
• 40:54
  Bill Clinton was not running on anything recognizable under what his wife ran on in 2016.
• 41:01
  That's how different they were.
• 41:03
  Now, Bill Clinton supported his wife in 2016, of course.
• 41:07
  And uh that's what he believes or says he believes at least now.
• 41:11
  But what he says he believes now is very different from what he said he believed in 1992.
• 41:18
  Now you could do the exact same thing, incidentally with Donald Trump.
• 41:21
  Look what he was saying on Oprah Winfrey or Phil Donahue or any of those shows in the 80s or 90s, and then look at what he's saying today.
• 41:31
  He's still the same guy, he still believes in the same things.
• 41:34
  He wanted he wanted economic protectionism in the 80s, he wants economic protectionism now.
• 41:38
  He wanted a closed border in the 80s, he wants a closed border now.
• 41:42
  He wanted to hold China accountable and hold our trading partners accountable, strengthen NATO by making their other members pay more of what they're supposed to pay for their own national defense.
• 41:52
  Everything he's saying today.
• 41:54
  He has been saying consistently going back to the 80s, going back to the 90s.
• 41:57
  Donald Trump hasn't changed.
• 41:59
  I think if somebody were to ask Donald Trump, what made you move from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party?
• 42:06
  I think he'd say that he hasn't changed.
• 42:08
  I think he'd say the Democrat Party has changed, and that is changed in such a way that put him in the Republican Party.
• 42:14
  And uh, you know, when I look at, you know, I've never voted by the way for Trump in a primary.
• 42:20
  I've always voted for Trump when he's running the general election, but I have never voted for him in a primary.
• 42:24
  And the reason, frankly, is he's just not conservative for me.
• 42:27
  I want somebody more conservative than what Donald Trump is.
• 42:30
  Now he's done some conservative things in some areas.
• 42:33
  He's been very, very, very conservative, and I've been pleasantly surprised both terms by how well he's he's done governing.
• 42:40
  What he's doing in Iran right now, by the way, is brilliant.
• 42:42
  Taking Iran down, I I think we're actually going to get, I can't guarantee this, but I think we're going to be successful in getting regime change, doing nothing but attacking from the air.
• 42:52
  That's brilliant.
• 42:53
  And uh if we can make Iran, if if we can make Iran a what it was in the 1970s, what it was under the Shah, a pro-Western modern country of wealthy people that they can go to the beach, they go to the mall.
• 43:08
  If we can make Iran what it was before the Islamic revolution, I think in 1979, oh what a wonderful thing that would be.
• 43:17
  That would that would do a tremendous amount to truly bring peace to the Middle East.
• 43:21
  It would isolate Qatar as this as as the financial engine of Islamic expansion, and uh and it would certainly help Israel have peace and and excuse me.
• 43:34
  The stability that a free Iran would give the world, doing it just from the air, no boots on the ground.
• 43:41
  If it works, it's brilliant.
• 43:43
  But uh, yeah, we've we've we've changed a great deal as a party, and we look very different than we did in the 90s.
• 43:49
  The Republican Party does, as does the Democrat Party.
• 43:52
  Uh on the left, neutrality is treated as complicity.
• 43:55
  Equity replaces equality as a governing principle, and outcomes override rules.
• 44:00
  Disparate results are presumed evidence of injustice in institutions are expected to correct them, and this is kind of an interesting twist.
• 44:07
  The way this happened is initially everybody said, well, we want equality of opportunity, not a quality of outcome.
• 44:14
  But what happened is people on the left began to say, well, how do we know if we have equality of opportunity?
• 44:19
  How can we figure that out?
• 44:21
  What could we look at to see whether or not the opportunity really is equal between groups?
• 44:27
  And then somebody said, Well, I know we can look at the outcomes.
• 44:29
  If the outcomes are the same, then we know that the we know that we have equality of opportunity.
• 44:35
  If the outcomes are different, then maybe we don't have equality of opportunity.
• 44:39
  So that's what happened is the political left began to gauge the equality of opportunity by looking at the equality of outcome.
• 44:47
  That's how they switched from equality of opportunity to equity.
• 44:50
  That's uh that's how that that transformation took place.
• 44:52
  It was as simple as saying, well, how do we know if we have equality of opportunity?
• 44:57
  And that's what would flip that switch.
• 44:59
  Today, of course, the spirit results on the left are just presumed evidence of injustice, and institutions are expected to react.
• 45:06
  On the right, those same institutions, well, they're no longer really trusted as applying the rules honestly.
• 45:13
  Courts are viewed through partisan lenses, federal agencies are suspected of ideological enforcement, media outlets are assumed to keep to have curative narratives rather than actually report events.
• 45:25
  You know, the language of weaponization is it's entered the mainstream political speech.
• 45:29
  Everything is lawfair or weaponized or or it's all we're all talking like we're at war.
• 45:35
  Now, the right still believes in the rule of law.
• 45:38
  The problem is not the rules or trusting in having rules and having law.
• 45:43
  The problem is trust.
• 45:44
  Many conservatives no longer trust the individuals and the institutions empowered to interpret and enforce those rules.
• 45:52
  We look at court cases and we say, well, that's that's whacked.
• 45:56
  How could they have, you know, you look at some of the cases against Trump and you look at the decisions judges made in terms of what evidence is admissible, and it's like, well, how the how'd they come up with that?
• 46:05
  Stormy Daniels, for example, had a lot of solitious information that she could say to prejudice jurors, but everything she said had already been accepted and admitted as true by the by the by the uh by the uh by the Trump team.
• 46:18
  So she really had nothing to add of any substance to the case.
• 46:22
  Most judges would never have allowed her to testify at all because it was immaterial to the case.
• 46:27
  It was only prejudicial.
• 46:29
  Well, this judge wanted to get Trump and he let it in.
• 46:33
  Uh, same thing with the Egene Carroll case.
• 46:35
  They allowed testimony that they're not supposed to allow.
• 46:38
  They excluded testimony that should have been allowed.
• 46:40
  It was incredibly prejudicial.
• 46:42
  The judge might as well have been a part of the prosecution.
• 46:44
  So, you know, we see that, and uh we no longer trust courts to be fair and impartial.
• 46:51
  We no longer trust institutions to be fair and impartial.
• 46:55
  We trust the rules.
• 46:56
  We believe in the rule of law, but we don't trust the people that are in charge of enforcing the laws or interpreting the rules.
• 47:04
  We just they they no longer do that in in they're no longer fair about it, they no longer do it in good faith.
• 47:08
  And that's that's a major problem.
• 47:11
  Elections, incidentally, are no longer routine contests between competing policy visions.
• 47:16
  They're now framed as existential struggles.
• 47:18
  How many times have you heard that the next election will be the most important in your life?
• 47:22
  It's like every election now.
• 47:24
  Republicans, well, we suspect ballot manipulation, administrative bias, and procedural asymmetry.
• 47:30
  Democrats, they don't believe in the vote either.
• 47:32
  They believe that there's voter suppression, structural obstruction, and anti-democratic intent.
• 47:37
  They think that Russia put Trump in his president.
• 47:40
  Well, each side now assumes bad faith in the other.
• 47:43
  Neither one of us trusts our elections.
• 47:46
  That assumption, of course, reshapes behavior.
• 47:49
  Primary systems now reward the loudest voice and the sharpest attack.
• 47:53
  Candidates fear their base more than they fear their opposition.
• 47:56
  And moderation, well, it's now treated as weakness.
• 47:59
  Cable panels and social media feeds amplify outrage because outrage spreads faster than nuance.
• 48:05
  District maps insulate incumbents from cross-party accountability, making ideological purity more valuable than coalition building.
• 48:12
  The middle shrinks because there's no political reward left for standing in it.
• 48:16
  And you want to talk about somebody who's got a safe seat, you know, Ilean Omar, absolutely she's she can say the things that she says because she knows the people that put her in office will vote for her until the day she dies.
• 48:27
  She knows that to be true, and as a consequence, she can say whatever she wants with absolutely no accountability.
• 48:33
  And she's not the only one.
• 48:35
  There are safe seats on both sides, but that's what we have now.
• 48:38
  We have a tremendous number of safe seats that allow people to have no accountability across parties whatsoever.
• 48:45
  And uh political rhetoric follows the incentives, and when compromise carries risk and confrontation carries reward, confrontation then becomes a strategy.
• 48:55
  Language hardens, motives are impugned, and disagreement becomes accusation.
• 49:00
  Now, what a country loses shared assumptions about law, legitimacy, purpose, and national identity, it becomes unstable.
• 49:09
  Every major vote becomes a test of survival, and every loss is interpreted as permanent damage.
• 49:15
  Victory is treated as temporary and irreversible.
• 49:17
  Well, defeat is treated as catastrophic.
• 49:21
  And that climate politics ceases to be a contest over policy.
• 49:24
  It becomes a contest over control.
• 49:27
  Institutions are no longer arenas for debate.
• 49:30
  No, they're battlegrounds for dominance.
• 49:32
  That's not ordinary partisan rivalry.
• 49:35
  It's structural decay.
• 49:36
  You might even say it's rot.
• 49:39
  This creates a system under tension.
• 49:41
  The American system works best when Democrats identify problems and force Republicans to confront them, and when Republicans force Democrats to negotiate solutions to those problems with an established constitutional limits.
• 49:52
  Pressure moves in both directions, but that balance no longer holds.
• 49:56
  Power in the left concentrates an agencies, court.
• 50:00
  Universities, foundations, and global forums.
• 50:04
  It trusts credentials, and it follows those who promise fairness through regulation and control.
• 50:10
  The state is treated as an instrument for shaping outcomes rather than protecting rights.
• 50:14
  Climate, equity, global responsibility.
• 50:17
  These things are framed to settle truce, not open debates.
• 50:21
  They're not open for debate.
• 50:22
  And the question is no longer whether government should expand, but how quickly and comprehensively it can.
• 50:28
  Understand, if you have a system of collectivism, every one of those is at its heart totalitarian.
• 50:34
  If you have a central plan, does that central plan not have to be enforced?
• 50:38
  Of course it does.
• 50:39
  You can't have a central plan and not enforce it.
• 50:41
  Not only that, but how do you generate a central plan in a true democracy?
• 50:45
  You know, if I tell you that I'm going to give you more cream next year, but less ice cream, well, you don't want that.
• 50:50
  You want more cream and more ice cream.
• 50:52
  The fact that they both use milk and milk is something that we do not have an infinite supply of.
• 50:57
  That's not the typical voter doesn't think in those terms.
• 51:00
  Nobody really wants trade-offs.
• 51:02
  Everybody wants more of everything.
• 51:04
  As a consequence, you get people like Bernie Sanders getting getting voted for, and you know, he's the guy that promises more of everything.
• 51:10
  He's the guy that says, I don't understand why we have billionaires and children are starving in the street, and then we have 54 brands of deodorant.
• 51:18
  I'm like, what are you gonna do, Bernie?
• 51:19
  The kids deodorant, they don't eat right guard.
• 51:23
  You know, but this is this is who gets elected.
• 51:25
  Not functional people that can build a central plan and at least try to enforce it.
• 51:30
  That's Mark Carney.
• 51:32
  No, we we elect people like Bernie Sanders that just run around screaming crazy crap about uh more of everything, and uh that's who gets elected.
• 51:41
  You can't you can you can get a central plan that way, but it's not going to be a cohesive one.
• 51:45
  It's not going to be one that has any chance whatsoever of working, even if you have really bright people trying to implement it.
• 51:51
  You know, we elect idiots.
• 51:53
  Power on the right in the meantime gathers around flags, factories, sheriffs, and of course churches.
• 51:59
  It speaks of sovereignty, border walls, industrial revival, and cultural cohesion.
• 52:04
  It questions trade agreements, central banks, intelligence agencies, and federal departments that are insulated from electoral accountability.
• 52:12
  And all of a sudden it's willing to use tariffs, subsidies, state leverage to defend domestic industry and stuff like that.
• 52:19
  But no longer defers automatically to free market doctrine when that doctrine appears to empty towns and erode the middle class and the Republican Party.
• 52:28
  It no longer trusts those in government to act as neutral stewards.
• 52:31
  One side believes authority should flow outward from expertise, even when it crosses borders and bypasses national consent.
• 52:38
  Well, the other believes authority must flow inward from the nation.
• 52:42
  Even when that choice imposes economic cost or international friction.
• 52:48
  One leans toward global governance and harmonized standards, the other leans toward national control backed by economic muscle and cultural assertion.
• 52:57
  Well, the country can't steer in both directions at once.
• 53:00
  Either you like the WEF or you don't like the WEF.
• 53:03
  Either either you want more, you want to have a government that controls every aspect of your life, or you want a government that leads you free.
• 53:11
  Either you want liberty or you want central planning.
• 53:14
  You can't have both.
• 53:16
  You can promise both.
• 53:18
  I can promise anything you want.
• 53:20
  I can make any promises.
• 53:21
  I can say vote for me and I'll make everybody in the country a billionaire.
• 53:24
  I'll just print money and tell everybody's rich and I'll do it without inflation.
• 53:28
  No inflation, you'll be a billionaire.
• 53:29
  You can buy any car you want, travel wherever you want.
• 53:32
  I can promise these things.
• 53:34
  I just can't deliver them.
• 53:35
  That's what people vote for.
• 53:36
  They vote for the person that promises the most, and then they get people that uh that can't deliver.
• 53:42
  On the left, neutrality now is uh is rejected when it obstructs the preferred outcomes that they're looking for.
• 53:48
  On the right, institutions are rejected when they produce unwanted results.
• 53:52
  Each side claims defend democracy while questioning the legitimacy of the other side, and that you know the trust is just draining out from whatever is left of the center.
• 54:03
  When trust erodes, of course, politics changes character.
• 54:07
  It stops functioning as a debate over policy details and becomes a struggle over control.
• 54:12
  Administrative authority expands to bypass legislative stalemate, executive orders replace negotiation, you know, I've got a pen and a phone.
• 54:20
  Courts become arenas for political objectives, and elections are framed not as routine transfers of power, but as existential battles for survival.
• 54:31
  Of course, in that environment, compromise feels like surrender.
• 54:34
  Now I was five when I switched my vote from Ford to Carter because I thought the wrong guy had hair.
• 54:40
  My dad lectured me about how easily voters are swayed by image.
• 54:43
  He believed he was teaching me about superficial judgment.
• 54:46
  What he was really teaching me, though, was that politics rests as much on perception as on principle.
• 54:52
  For decades, the principles beneath the perception were shared.
• 54:55
  Can't say Reagan and later Clinton, they fought fiercely, but they fought inside the same constitutional and economic frame.
• 55:03
  The dispute was over emphasis, scale, and implementation, not over the underlying architecture.
• 55:10
  That frame no longer governs our politics.
• 55:12
  The organs of the body politics still function.
• 55:15
  Elections occur and courts issue rulings, but the shared assumptions that once stabilize those institutions have fractured.
• 55:23
  Legitic legitimacy appears conditional to both sides.
• 55:29
  And where authority is contested, good faith is presumed absent.
• 55:33
  If a common foundation of truth and constitutional loyalty is not recovered, the tension will escalate.
• 55:38
  Polarization will not plateau, it will intensify, forcing institutional conflicts to harden, and street conflict will follow.
• 55:47
  Lincoln warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
• 55:51
  He did not mean it would wobble.
• 55:52
  He meant it would fall.
• 55:54
  Division is not new in American history, but what is new is the erosion of a shared framework within which division could be managed.
• 56:02
  If that framework is not rebuilt, the choice will not be between left and right.
• 56:06
  It will be between order and fracture.
• 56:08
  Order leads to conflict.
• 56:10
  Conflict can lead to war.
• 56:13
  And just like that, ladies and gentlemen, we are out of time, but that's okay.
• 56:17
  I got through all of the body politic.
• 56:19
  We got through everything I wanted to cover.
• 56:21
  As always, thank you for tuning in.
• 56:23
  Please tell others who might be interested in cutting through the chaos to listen in either on Saturday and Sunday at 9 a.m.
• 56:30
  Eastern Standard Time, on Sunday at 10 p.m.
• 56:33
  Eastern Standard Time, or on podcasts whenever they have time.
• 56:37
  And we'll see you next week at the same time and place where it'll once again be time to get involved and to get loud on America out loud.