The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Almost Live from Florence!

four wins. I was in Los Angeles for the second half of the week, mostly in my role as master of ceremonies for an old fashioned Dean Martin style roast of Charles Kessler, the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and several other notable things. And maybe there'll be a recording of that in the fullness of time. I think it was a great success, even though none of us are Don Rickles. John, you said he was off for a lightning fast trip to give a lecture in Zurich, Switzerland.

I think this is a cover story. He's really clandestinely traveling United States to all the locations at McDonald's that are serving up the McRib and stashing him away in his freezer for a long winter ahead. And Lucretia is also tied up with a whole lot of end of semester business at her university, where she takes on way too much work. However, I thought that it might be in lieu of a traditional get together to talk about

the week's news. Listeners who need their fix every week might enjoy the presentations that John and Lucretian I gave in Florence a few weeks ago, explaining to an Ataenian audience of students and professors exactly what happened in the election, and so what I'm going to share with you here is our opening commentance for me and John and Lucretia, and I'm going to begin toward the end of the introduction by our chief hosts, Professor of Veronica Federico of

the Department the Law faculty at the University of Lawrence, and then you'll hear me, and then you'll hear Lucretia, and it'll be a short episode. But we didn't want to leave you without anything to listen to this weekend, So without further ado, here we are almost live from Florence, Italy.

be shy. Also, I'll tell you in the United States, when students don't ask questions, the professors randomly call on people and say we will ask you questions. So better to volunteer and ask questions and we'll call on people. Raise your hand. So we'll start with Steve Hayward right to my left too, is at the University of California, Berkeley and also at Pepperdine University in California.

of a new competency, you know, a new ability. It's a euphemism for a new rule or regulation, a new program to deal with some problem. And most Americans, if they hear these announcements, will smile at this, if not laugh out loud. No American would use that phrase a new competency, because most Americans they have split personalities. We Americans, but we tend to think that the government is incompetent, and we laugh at the government. We'd laugh at someone

who'd say a new competency of our national government. You know. There's a famous American comedian one hundred years ago named Will Rogers, and he used to say, it's no trouble being a comedian when you have the whole government working for you, and most of his jokes are about the government and political parties and so forth. Now in America, our government gets ever larger and spends more and more money, and finds ways to rule over or try to affect

more and more things. But it's clearly failing at its basic tax tasks. Our government nowadays cannot deal with crime. We spend more and more on public education and get worse and worse results for our students. We spend the most of any country in the world on healthcare, and everybody hates it because you can't understand it or comprehend it. I can go on on the list. Our foreign policy. We are committed to defending the borders of Ukraine, but

somehow cannot defend our own borders. Why this is significant, I think not just for the US, but for all industrialized countries. Is a trend in public opinion in America that I is repeated in other countries where surveys are taken, and the trend is this Starting in the late nineteen fifties, are leading opinion poll companies would ask Americans do you have confidence in the national government to do the right thing?

Most of the time when they started in the nineteen fifties, eighty percent of Americans eight zero said they had confidence that our national government would do the right thing most of the time. Today that number is at fifteen percent. And if you look at the data series from the late fifties to today, it's a long downward slope with

one exception. The only sustained reversal, the only long term reversal in that trend for several years, was under President Reagan in the nineteen eighties, who promised less and accomplished a lot. He made government work again, ironically enough, and so as I say, I've looked at surveys for other nations, I don't remember numbers for Italy off the top of my head, but I suspect there's something similar, perhaps that

you'd observe here in the numbers. Now. The result, the response to this from around the world has been what is called populism. And in America, populism is always thought to be a bad thing. I like to define populism is when the wrong person wins an election. That's my

popular definition of it. It's always criticized, attacked by you might say, our establishment, our cultural elites, our universities, our media and by politicians in office, because populists are always a threat to whoever is ruling a country at a time, it doesn't matter which party, and so we see examples around the world of very unconventional people like Javier Malay and Argentina with his chainsaw, who is making dramatic changes

using executive authority alone. We see the president Bukeley is that his name in El Salvador, whose measures have made him very popular, even though they might might not stand up to our standards of due process. A lot more can be said about that. We're also seeing ruling parties around Europe, such as in France, in Holland and elsewhere Germany, trying very hard to suppress their rival candidates who are rising. I think you probably know these stories better than I do.

I will pass over saying anything about your prime minister because I don't know everyone here will know more than I do about that. It can make a judgment much more informed than my own. But that brings us to Trump against immense obstacles he achieved. I don't think this is news the greatest political comeback in American history and

maybe in global history. It's hard to think of someone who's made a more dramatic comeback against the odds, and his election in twenty sixteen was a shock because it was unexpected, thought to be a fluke, a chance event, something out of the ordinary. This time, it's not that, and this selection feels different. And rather than going through the numbers, I think some other panelist Ryan may talk

I'm about this. I'll just tell you that on American social media right now, you can find thousands of people, people whose opinions and politics tend toward the left, all saying the same thing. I hate Donald Trump. I can't stand him, and I voted for him. This has caused and by the way, you'll see this reported now in the regular media like the New York Times and the network news broadcasts. This has proved a great shock and is causing a crisis in our leading media organizations in

many of our universities. So I'll conclude with this, I said, the age of lukewarmness is over. I think a lot of voters across our political spectrum are tired of things, and they're now willing to embrace unconventional people. I'll put

it that mild way. And I was drawn back in my mind to the famous passage that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, at least in passing from Machiavelli's Chapter six, where he talks about the danger and difficulty of introducing new modes and orders, and he said, the people well enjoy the existing order will be your enemies. And the people who might benefit from it, well, they're kind of lukewarm. And I'll just one sentence from that

famous book. This lukewarmness arises partly from fear of adversaries who have the law on their side. Whenever those who are enemies have the opportunity to attack, they do so with partisan zeal. So there's no guarantee that any of these populist figures are going to succeed. I think if you want to see an example of a populas figure who failed miserably, you just mentioned Boris Johnson in England. But I will stop there and hand it over to whoever's next.

of massive and almost across the board imperceptible ways. What we saw in the election season was this feminist icon Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who was said by many many people to be sexist, of course, and racist, and he was going to take away women's rights. And you know, women are protesting even still today in the United States by feminists by shaving their heads. I guess the purpose for that is to make themselves unattractive to men for

some reason. So Donald Trump is this polarizing figure, and everyone warned that only men would be voting for Donald Trump, and women would all rally around Kamala Harris. One of her popular campaign slogans a little bit earlier on, especially among little girls, was to wear a T shirt that said, I'm speaking as if it was necessary for you know, of a woman to have to assert herself in order to be heard by men. And so we went into this election being told that women women are going to

vote for Kamala Harris because of abortion rights. Women are going to vote for Kamala Harris because she's a feminist icon. Look at all of the things she has accomplished. She was attorney general in California. She was a Senator from California before she was picked as a representative of the identity Groverum group that Biden had promised he would pick

for his vice president. She's it's a little funny in the United States, she's often called a black woman, but she's actually Indian, an East Indian, and anyway, so she was chosen for her identity as a woman and as a marginalized community person, and so she was going to be drawing all of these people to her. And Donald Trump, of course, was a sexist. He treated women terribly. He was going to make abortion a crime, and on and on.

And what we actually saw in the election is becoming more and more clear all of the time that it's true enough that among a certain demographic of feminist women, Kamala Harris did well. But Donald Trump had as his campaign manager the first female campaign manager in history, and he had a number of strong females around him in his campaign, and as it turns out, many many women with the exception perhaps of college educated, graduate level single

women actually preferred Donald Trump as well. He talked about the things they cared about, how to pay for their groceries and the gas in their car, and other kinds of economic issues, and of course safety crimes rose for a variety of different reasons under the last administration. Donald Trump focused on all of these things. And I do have to say that you can ask Professor U if this is true. He asked me a month ago, what did I predict? I said, I predict a landslide, and

I was right by any standards. You know, our country is,

as Steve talked about, fairly divided. But the interesting thing, and the thing that I want to leave you with is that not only was Donald Trump always very very inclusive of women in the past and in this past campaign especially, but he has chosen for his nominees, both those that need to be confirmed by the Senate and those that he can appoint and they don't have to be confirmed, a number of women, a number of women who will run major agencies at the in the Trump administration.

And there is every indication that women are coming around to the idea that the identity politics of feminism is no longer controlling in the United States in the way that not only it was, but that the media assured us was absolutely dominant. And so that I think is a really interesting aspect of the outcome of this election, is that perhaps the focus the obsession, even with men are going to vote for Trump, women are going to vote for Harris, and all that that implies, that has

been overcome. And let me add one last thing to that. The other thing that we've seen is that the Republican Party itself is no longer the party of rich white country club If you know that terment know, the exclusive clubs that rich white males belong to and get together and drink the whiskey and smoke their cigars and plot evil in the world. You know, that's the kind of the perception that's given of them. But it's no longer that party. It's the party of family women, it's the

party of Hispanic men. It's the party, more so than ever, of black men. And a really surprising outcome was that we were told that no black woman would ever vote for Donald Trump, and it turns out that a great

number of them did way more than anybody expected. So we saw Donald Trump who is in some ways, at least if you believe the media, the most hated guy that's ever been in politics winning over all of these different constituencies, and it has changed American politics in ways we don't even know yet how that's going to turn out. So that's where I'll leave it. Thank you to him. I just thank you.

what is our sign off these days? I don't know. I need a new one, and we'll have one by the next issue. But for now we can celebrate being unburdened by what has been. Bye bye for this week, everybody.