I'm guessing though, you're going to get a flood of gift packages containing Walmart time X watches from people who say you don't know what time it is or something like No. Of course, and I think too that I can say that in my years.
Of public life, that I welcome this.
Kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president's a crup.
Well, I'm not a crup. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. A. Cook and Steven Hayward and James Lellax. Today we're going to be talking about misery. We will have none of that here. Thank you. Let's episodes a podcast.
The objectives I've outlined to you again, I repeat them because I see these reports of like as the use of talk clear on what objectives are there.
We've been as us even bossy to be from the very first night of what the objectives of this mission on.
We're going to destroy their factories that make missiles and rockets and grown, We're going to destroy their navy.
We're going to destroy their air force, and we are going to significantly destroy their missile launchers so they.
Can never hide behind these things to get a nuclear weapon.
Well, welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number seven hundred and eighty two. Why don't you just mosing on over at rigochet dot com and be a member. You can be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. That place you've been looking for, that's Ricochet. I'm James Lilax in the place that I was looking for and found in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And it's a beautiful, cold,
crisp day out. There should be a little bit more spring like, but you know, we had seventy five degrees two days ago and today it's spring. All the flowers in because it's below freezing. And then Stephen Hayward in California, I presume in his bookline study with his skylight above him. If you're watching the video, it's kind of funny. It just looks like there's this sort of angelic beam of heaven coming down into an illuminatu your nogin and explain
your insights and the rest of it. Charles Seedle, your cook will be along in just a second. We'll have to upgrade him for his tardiness and make him. We'll be like the class. You know, when the when the you know, the bad kid comes in late and the teacher gives him the look and the rest of it, and he has to put a piece of paper down explaining his absence. But before he gets here, let's settle
the Iran war. So Stephen President says, going to unleash hell end quote on Iranian energy infrastructure maybe a good idea if we want the state to thrive post liberation. But it's a five day halt on strikes to open negotiations about the strait and the rest of it. Everyone's saying contradictory messages. Everybody is saying backing off, everybody's saying failure.
I just think that we ought not to believe anything that we hear, because it's entirely possible that people are saying things in public that actually don't comport with what's going on in private. There's smoking, misdirection and the rest of it. That would seem to be the canny thing to do in war.
No, I mean, there's several scenarios you can play out that are quite plausible. And yeah, I don't know anything either. I'll just say I have a general rule right now, which is, well, I'll put it this way, how can we tell that we are winning this war very strongly, as someone might say, because the media says it's a quagmire, right right, I mean really, I think you can't go too far wrong saying whatever the media says, the opposite is probably closer to the truth. Now, I do think
that this sort of day to day bouncing ball. Maybe it's Trump trying to call them the markets. Maybe he's playing for time until the eighty second airborne gets in position so they can do a serious landing to take carg Island. I think carg Island is again, I don't you know, I don't know anything about this, really, I don't have deep expertise.
But never stopped any of us before, of course.
Not that's right.
So I mean, look, I think it's, uh, it's game over for the Iranian economy and their leverage if we take their main oil terminal.
Uh.
And and now you know, we can force the straights open if we want. They're the risks, of course.
Uh.
And then I think maybe he's thinking, well, maybe we kill enough Iranians to destroy enough places where they're finally going to come to their senses and make a sensible deal,
which right now they seem to be resisting. So I don't know what's happening either, But you know, the track record so far is you never know with Trump, right, we now know before the war started that he was playing for time while they got everything in order and really forming a serious battle plan that they said would be four to six weeks of taking out the And so I don't know.
Maybe Iron surprised us by attacking.
So many of its neighbors as hard as they have. I'm not sure if we expected that or not. I again, I don't know, but I'm still reasonably confident. I know Charlie thinks the clock is running, and I'm starting to warm up to this point of view that the domestic politics are going to get increasingly difficult for Trump just because but right now, I'm just going to sit back and, as someone likes to say, we'll just have to see what happens.
Indeed, when you say they're going to strike a deal with the Iranians, who exactly? I think, well, right, that's the question. Who's left. Are we going to be negotiating
with mull as we are not? Are we going to have to probably hold our nose and talk to some people that we wouldn't like to because they may have had something to do, but they're you know, the whole argument about whether debathification was the necessary thing to do in a rock and you know, whether or not they should have left a structure in place and then just plug, you know, our strong man in as opposed to doing what they did. That's something for history to decide something.
Well, you know, something I've not heard anybody talk about that surprises me a little bit is recognizing a new government in other words, like we did in World War Two by recognizing the gaul as the legitimate government of France or you know, the Polish government in exile and so forth. I don't know why we aren't saying something like or thinking about saying, gosh, there's no more government in Iran.
All their leaders are gone. It's chaos. We don't even know who to negotiate with.
And there is a plan with the former shaw Son that I've seen, and supposedly he is ready to step up and organize a government, a transitional government.
Why why aren't we thinking about saying.
We now recognize this is the legitimate government of Iran And of course it's a you know, bold political move. And how does that actually work anymore. I don't know, but it's something that I think could be interesting to try. Maybe the fear is it just starts a civil war in Iran, but that may happen anyway.
Well, joy us with two cold buckets of water to tell us why if is sticking? It is? Charles W. Cook, Charlie, how are you doing good? How are you so you're saying the clock is ticking? That time is of the essence people are calling it a quagmire? Is if the definition from modern Quakemier isn't up in Ukraine, which would seem to be quagmarish. It's not a quagmire at all. It's just been and it's been going on curiously off stage,
it feels like for quite some time now. But you think that domestic political calculations are going to enter into it. Tell us why?
Well, partly because the war was never discussed or debated or explained.
Detail.
Partly because Trump does have a history of starting things capriciously and ending things capriciously. I don't mean by that this term you see thrown around taco. Trump always chickens out, but he is bothered by the stage of the bond markets that the stock market, oil and so on. And when you haven't laid out a clear plan and you don't have the public on your side, which he doesn't, then those things loom large.
I have gone, No, there should be more bully pulpiting going on. Don't you think there should be more explainers? There should be a speech from the Oval Office with flags behind. That's kind of what I want more of.
Well, I do in theory and in practice, I think he should have done it. Irrespective, but his ability to stick to a topic is, let's say, limited, so I slightly wonder whether it would have been as useful as say, I President Reagan had done it. But yeah, I do think he should have done that. And I must say, for those who think that I'm couching some hidden opposition to the war in these criticisms, I've become more hawkish as this gone on, not less. I was just saying
as much on the Editors podcast. I think that there is absolutely no doubt that the case against Iran is solid. If the big problem with Iraq was that many of the claims that were made weren't true, either at the time they were made or turned out to be untrue, that's not true of Iran. The Iranian regime is exactly as described. The Iranians were producing weapons that they were
not allowed to have. The Iranians did for years kill Americans, and I've had the last one really emphasized to me in the last few weeks when I've spoken to veterans about this. I live in an area full of veterans, jackson Ville's and Naval Base. Also veterans have come to some of the events that I've put on in the
last two or three weeks. And yeah, they're self selecting conservatives by definition at those events less so here, but all of them, all of them are pumped because they also the same thing.
Especially those who served in a rock in Afghanistan.
Those guys killed my friends. This isn't debatable. The question is whether we should go in sure, and how we should do it. But I've become more hawkish because I don't think that there is a strong case against hitting Iran on the basis that Iran is bad.
It is right, I agree it.
But the thing about James point about a you know, an Oval office speech with the flags behind you, I think that way too, because I remember, you know Reagan or you know Nixon, earlier presidents. Trump's not very good at those, you know, he's sort of stiff the few times he's tried it. I also think it does not get the audience that used to get right. It used to be when there were only three networks that did
the so called roadblock right. So the wherever you turn on your TV, you're going to get the president for half an hour or an hour, and that's not true anymore.
So I don't know what works anymore.
The crowded media landscape and are sort of customizing our tainment. Who watches TV. Everybody's on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. So I don't know. I think it's a harder communications environment. That's not to excuse Trump the administration, Charlie for what
you say of having a coherent message. I do worry that at the back of that is Trump's improvisational characteristics, that what he wants above all else is for Trump to win or be able to claim a win, and if that means leaving the current regime in place with what looked like acceptable terms, he would do that, even after saying, you know, in January, we are coming to help the Iranian people throw off this evil regime.
Well, you know which is it? We need to either see it through or something else. I don't know it. It is perplexing and troubling.
Yeah, to leave the regime in place at the end of all of this would be not a stab at the back. I hate that phrase. It would be a gross abrogation of duty. Now that you start this thing, I mean's one of those of you break it, you owned things, as Colin Paul used to say. Of course, nobody can quotes him that much anymore. Yeah, Supreme Court Scota is going to hear arguments on birthright citizenship. I
love the name of this. In this case it's Trump v. Barbara, which just somehow sums up our age more than anything else. Which one of you constitutional scholars would like to take a crack at this and tell and think, reading your tea leaves which way you think it's going to go.
I think you should start, Steve, all right, Well, I'll give it a try.
I haven't been keeping up with the briefs on this case. Yeah, it's going to be argued I think Thursday this week. I haven't been keeping up with the briefs. One thing that struck me though, is I should make pub explain for listeners. The clause of the fourteenth Amendment, what they call the citizenship clause, says, all persons born are naturalized in the United States comma and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Comma shall be for whatever the rest of it says.
That clause subject to the jurisdiction thereof has become very controversial in recent years. It's long been thought that that meant an exclusion, say of diplomats. Right, if you're a diplomat, you're subject to the jurisdiction of your home country. So if you have kids born, why you're posted in Washington or New York or something, they don't have birthright citizenship.
But there's active debate.
About whether that meant, for example, should include the modern phenomenon of birth tourism. Right, there's a thriving industry out here in California of your rich Chinese mothers come over here to have their babies born in Orange County or
Beverly Hills. Never mind, you know, poor Mexicans crossing the border and then they fly back home to China and now they have a child with entitlement to an American passport, and all that would come with that, including ways of getting assets out of the country later on and so forth.
Well, are these people who come here for a week to have a child born? Are they really subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in a meaningful sense? Now saying that they're not, and that the expansive understanding of birthright citizenship that we had for a long time is challengeable.
Had been a friend a very few, some of them friends of mine, like John Eastman's been arguing this for thirty years. But the view has been spreading amongst a lot of other serious constitutional scholars. Illin Worman, a young guy up there near you in Minnesota. James has written very strongly about this. Richard Epstein, I believe has come around to this point of view. I think he has. Charlie, you can't keep up with the copious flood of Richard's verbiage.
Richard wrote forty seven thousand words about that.
Yeah, right, right, So, And the point is is that the view that well, wait a minute, maybe we should And really there's only one case about it from the eighteen nineties that everyone says settled the matter. But I think if you look closer, it's not a complete slam dunk the Wong Kim r. Case, I think was called
been a while since I've read all these. So the last thing I'll say, and then Charlie can correct and fill in and add to it, is a lot of people are saying they might not reach the constitutional question of that clause in the fourteenth Amendment because there might be some statutory grounds where they might reject the challenge and thus leave the deeper challenge for another day, which I think would be unfortunate. But we are asking the Court to do an awful lot right now under President Trump.
I think there are a couple of things here that interests me. The first is I hear it said quite often that one of the big problems with the Trump administration is that it asks questions constitutionally that have been settled. I think that's wrong in the sense that there is a paradox within our constitutional order, and that is that we are, and the lower courts are, and the governments are obliged to follow the Constitution and to follow Supreme
Court President. But if you think that that Supreme Court president is grievously wrong, the only way that you can get it hurt is to do something that violates it, as we of course learned in the most famous case
of all Brown brought of education. And so if, for example, like the state of Florida, and I agree with him on this, even though I'm not fond of the policy, you think that basically every single Supreme Court pronouncement in the last seventy years on the death penalty is complete nonsense, then the only way that you can get it heard
again is to pass a law that contradicts it. Well, Trump thinks or hopes that our birthright citizenship presidents are wrong, and the only way you can really get around to determining whether or not he's right at the Court hasn't been heard for a long time is to do something. And in his case, he passed an executive order, which is not a law, but which has the effect of bringing up the matter. So I'm not angry with Trump for having done this in the way that some are.
That said, I do think that he's probably wrong. Certainly, I think he is wrong to think he can do it via executive order. So the maximalist case against Trump is that the Fourteenth Amendment mandates birthright citizenship and subject to the jurisdiction thereof just means diplomats and so forth, and therefore there's nothing anyone can do about it unless we amend the Constitution. We have birthright citizenship. Maybe it's a terrible policy. I actually think it is.
But that's the constitution. Deal with it.
And then it's this third way argument that I've become a little more sympathetic to having read the amicus briefs, which is that no, the fourteenth Amendment does not mandate birthright citizenship, but changes to the meaning of subject to the jurisdiction there are have to be made by Congress, and Congress can decide who is eligible for birthright citizenship and who is not. And that argument has been made with increasing frequency, and I think with increasing quality, and
I think there's some truth to that. If that's the case, the Supreme Court will have to say that though, because Trump didn't get a law pass and won't get a law passed unless the Republicans were to say, boris the filibuster and they get every single person on site to change this, which isn't going to happen, and not with fifty three vote, So he's not going to get his
own way. But I don't really resent him for trying, because Steve's right, the last time this was heard in ernest was one Kim Mark, which was in the late nineteenth century. So it's totally reasonable to put together a brief and say I think this is wrong. As long as you then respect the law when it's been adjudicated, I'd likely.
To be an executive order that banishes the income tax.
You go back, right, James. You and I grew up with that great cliche in the sixties. It began every New York Times editorial. Any country that can land a man on the.
Moon can solve x problem.
Yes, And my favorite version was any country that can land a man on the moon can abolish the income tax.
We never heard that one for some reason.
Unfortunately, No, because the thing that I was bothered me loving to put a man in the moon. Why I can't do this? Well, because putting a man in the moon is a very specific objective with a very specific set of technical requirements.
Uh.
And it's uh, it's it's it's something you sit down to do with slide rules and the rest of it. And so yes, but I mean it's, well, I guess what we can't do right now? What's that? Yeah?
Well, I'm on the moon.
Well, you know, man, my fingers are crossed about this next one. They really are, they really really, But we'll get to that in point. If I may change the subject for a second, gentlemen, I would like to discuss the fact that it's Friday and that means that I'm going to have pizza. And no, my friends, I am not going into an ad. The local grocery store is having a bogo for pizza. And there are two things about that. One, I hate the term bogo because it's wrong.
Buy one, get one. Well that's that's the nature of every commercial transaction, which you mean is buy one, get one free, which would be bog off. But you never hear bog off. You just hear bogo. But I was standing there yesterday and I was beholding the range of frozen pizzas that we have. It's extraordinary how many there are, and how good so many there are. I grew up in fargan nor At Dakota, where Pinky's pizza was the standard, and it was one of those saltine crusted pizzas with
little cups of Greece. You could, you could, you could, you could grease the tread of a Sherman tank with one of those pizzas. But it was good. But now I look with what we have and it's extraordinary, how blessed we are in the frozen pizza department. And I can look at all around life and find that meant you find manifestation of that Abundon's absolutely everywhere that I look, and it makes me happy. And that brings us to our guest. Our guest is an English American conservative journalist.
He's a luminary at National Review, don't you know. He's a graduate of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford and he's the author of the Conservatorian Manifesto. In addition to the National Review, of course, he's written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other places as well. It's been described by the Atlantics perhaps the most confident defender of conservatism younger than George will
We Welcome to the podcast, Charles C. W. Cook. Hello, Charles, thanks for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.
And you know how this went to my because I was late for this, So the moment you have me as a guest, then I stopped behaving like a diva.
We're having Charlie on because first of all, why not, and he's lots of fun to talk to, and he's written a spanking article for a cracking article for National Review about well before we had Trump v. Misery, this is Cook v. Or we had Trump v.
Barber.
This is Cook v. Misery. Well enough with the long faces, is the subhead of his piece at National Review. America is not, in fact a hellscape. And to some people, the bristle when you say this, because no, this is this, this is there's no reason for cheer. Look around, everything is horrible. That's the scent of fascists boot in the
face of Americans. But oddly enough, as you point out, eighty one percent of Americans are either very or somewhat satisfied with their lives, while just twenty percent are either very or somewhat satisfied with the way things are going for the US in general. Now, this disconnect is not unusual, but it seems to be really extreme. Now, so you make the case that, well, you make the case against misery. Tell us what prompted you to do this and what your insights were are will.
Be Well, I just think that it's a little bit absurd that we live in this extraordinary place, and really we shouldn't underestimate that it is an extraordinary place right now as it exists. This country, this people, this economy, this culture is extraordinary.
I know it could be better.
I know that there are people in government on left and right who make bad mistakes.
I know that if people listen to me and.
You James and you Steve, and they just adopted all of our ideas, it would be far better than it is now, of course, but I just find it somewhat absurd that everyone is so down and the tone of our politics is what you would expect from a country that was in terminal decline, that had nothing going for it.
If you listen to both parties, they are.
Sour.
The argument is an effect.
Well, yes, if we won all the time and the people who don't agree with us were vanquished, it would be a good place. But until then, and I just
don't agree. And this is not the same thing as saying that the politics doesn't matter, or I don't have strong opinions, or that you know we shouldn't fight to make the world a better blues but I think you have to remember your baseline and just for once I wanted to write a piece that said, guys, I know every month I say here's what's wrong or here's how this could be fixed.
But could we just recall this?
And when I found that Gallup data that said eighty one percent of Americans, as you say, we're happy with their circumstances, but twenty percent were happy with the country, that made me realize that most likely what's happening here is that people think that other people are unhappy or that they might be all right, but the problems that we face are so great as to render that irrelevant. But that doesn't make too much sense because we live
in America. So if America has produced eighty one percent of people who are happy with their situation, then surely it's going okay.
Yeah, so this is a cover story. Let's add that for listeners, this is what the young people they, I guess, would call a banger of an article. That's the phrase I hear a lot from them, right, And I like it because it attracks very closely with my disposition about things. It reminded me of actually a comedy sketch from back during the Great Recession around two thousand and two thousand and nine by Louis c k who was later disgraced
me too for some really borish behavior. But you had a little sketchy did called everything's amazing and nobody's happy, and it was very funny stuff about the people complain about progress. Right, you know if our phones have a you know, a five second delay getting connected, and he says, well, you just wait a minute. It's got to go to
a satellite first, and it doesn't cost you anything. Whereas you know, James and I will remember, if you wanted to call somebody three minutes a long distance, you had to wait till eleven oh one pm when rates went down.
Right, So we're spoiled.
And there's a certain decadence about all this that maybe is a theme that we should explore a bit.
There is a.
Couple of parts of the article that I don't disagree with, but I think need to be probe a little harder. So you point to the gallup data saying, my life's going great,
but the country's in terrible shape. I have for a long time, and I present to students and ask them sometimes the first day of class, to explain why what their theories are for the following data, which is if you go back to about nineteen fifty eight, when Gallup and Harris and others started asking Americans do you have high confidence or trust in the federal government to do the right thing most of the time or all the time?
When it started that time series, and then I've been asking that question or close to it ever since.
Then Pugh took it up.
Okay, back in nineteen fifty eight, the number of people who said yes to that question high trust, high confidence was almost eighty percent eight zero. Today it rarely gets above fifteen percent. And it's been all downhill ever since. A slight retreat during the Reagan years, but nowhere close to what it was under Eisenhower in the first few
years of Kennedy. Well why did that happen? And I mean, there's a bunch of explanations, but what I'm actually coming around to, Charlie is you're a fragment of one sentence where you say, certainly life is more than mere politics.
Strongly agree politics.
Is consuming more and more of life, and our political class is so evidently incompetent.
So you know, James Q.
Wilson once said thirty years ago, says, in nineteen fifty eight, when people looked at at their government.
What they see.
They'd see the federal government that had one World War two very quickly, relatively speaking, built the interstate highway system pretty fast, expanded schools in suburbia for making homes affordable people, the education system. The GI Bill sent hundreds of thousands of returning GI said, you saw a record of competence and achievement by our federal government. And what have we had since then? It's just increasing in competence. And so I think there are reasons why people sour on the
results were getting from our government. And then the other problem is we politicize more and more of life. So when you say, certainly life is more than mere politics, I'm remembering the sixties when the New Left started saying the personal is political. And these days more and more things are politicized that weren't when James and I were growing up.
And that's yeah, that second point of your Steve's I was just about to make it that that's why I'm stepping along. I'm gonna let I'm gonna let our guests do it. But we are a simpatico wavelength on that one, buddy. But the first thing that you were talking about I just wanted to say this before Charlie takes over, is that all the things that you mentioned are now in disfavor with the fringes and people. The fact that we world won World War two, well, we were siding with
the wrong guy, that Churchill maniac. The fact that we built the interstate system allowed to empty out the city so that you know, the fact that people could go to the suburbs meant that the core cities were destroyed, and that endless suburbia sprawled gave rays to a rise to a car culture. That's horrible and we should all
be taking the trolley. Everything that you mentioned. Either the left hates because it is given us the you know, the suburban America that we have today, or the right hates because why, I don't know whatever, their horse shoeing, their way of being as idiotic as the left. So yeah, I mean we did accomplish those things, but then we're all held up as being well, yeah, okay, so would
you be done for me lately? Or these are really bad and we should all be trotting along in horses and cobblestones and buildings that are you know, the big cities no longer not taller than six stories anyway, Charles, that's derailed things say something about.
Well, yes, I agree, I am a conservative. I think that that is a huge problem. Steve and James, I think that's a huge problem. But can I just counter it in that I think, obviously the government's too big, and it's incompetent, it spends too much, and we have people like Gavin us some in power, and trun doesn't help, And all of those criticisms are right, And that's why I engage in politics. If I thought that everything was perfect and the best of all worlds, I wouldn't do this.
I would do something else. But at the same time, later in the piece, I cite some statistics about the place the United States currently occupies in the world that maybe are at best despite the government, or could be in some cases the result of policy.
I mean, for example, yeah, we don't have much trust in government because government does all of the stub stuff. But we're also in a way that we were not in two thousand, for example, energy independent.
We're a net exporter of energy that is the product of a combination of public policy successes, and you can thank conservatives for those and mostly the private sector. We have an economy that is now one and a half times the size of the ears, where in two thousand and eight when Barack Obama was elected, they were the same size.
Oh yeah, it's a lot of private enterprise did that.
Ultimately, that's the only way of creating wealth and GDP. But it's also thanks to tax cuts and regulatory policies and us having a different set of rules in place than the rest of the world does, and it ought to be said, a different set of rules in place than we had in nineteen seventy when we had wage
and price controls and a ridiculous tax system. We have got much better federal tax policy and federal regulatory policy in many ways now than we have ever had, or at least that we've had since prior.
To the New Deal.
So I agree with pretty much all of your criticisms, of course I do. You and I agree on politics mostly, But the notion that everything's sliding backwards, you know, this is slightly outside of the room of the piece, and I may write something else on this, but this phrase I see all the time at the moment. This is what they took from you. Yeah, some of that's true, but you could have done that in any decade. In the nineteen nineties, this is what they took from you,
would have been peaceful streets. The crime was unbelievable. People who were born in the year two thousand and five cannot imagine what crime was like in the eighties and nineties. In the nineteen eighties, the abortion rate was downright disgusting, and people thought they were going to die in a nuclear war. In the nineteen sixties we had race riots, but the Vietnam War. So this is what they took from you. Instinct is a good one in some senses,
and it's one I share as a conservative. You do want to watch trends that are negative, and there are lots of them. But also it can't exist in a vacuum. We can't just say this is what they took from you and then imagine that whatever it is that you're looking at was surrounded by sunlit uplands and rabbits running around happily and frolicking in the evening, because that's just usually not true.
You know it's not. And when you when I see those things, they are inevitably attached to some picture of suburbs from the from the eighteen. You know, from the late nineteen eighties or early nineties. Everything is basked in this nostalgic golden glow. It's an old pizza hut that had the red glasses and the checkered plastic table closet, and all that is true. Nobody took it from us. In most of these cases, I would sell if it's gone, it's because we didn't want it and it went away.
But they didn't take it from us. There are alternatives and analogs to be found today. But you're right. The crime was horrible. When you walked outside of that pizza hut. There was a chance you're going to get shanked when you if you didn't and you were living in the suburbs and you would go in your bananas bike somewhere with the little streamers coming. You were worried about nuclear war in the back of your head. You're absolutely correct.
And when they say this is what they took from you, and they show you a grand Baroque cathedral which with its incredible rocal cod you know, fizzy decorations going into the heavens, you have to forget. There's probably a steaming pile of heap right order right outside of the steps because there wasn't any sanitation, and cholera then cholera right, and plague from time to time. So yes, all things being equal, But I think one of the reasons that
people do feel in miserated today is twofold one. As Steven said before, the personal is the political. We have not been given any safe space in which we can just simply exist. Everything has to be tied up into this bolus of intersectionality and everybody has to work. Well I don't, but people have to worry that they have the correct opinions about absolutely everything. Somebody put it on Twitter the other day. I thought it was just great.
Is that the problem today? Probably maybe it's been hours. The problem with modern progressives is that they have an idea and they keep themselves from considering second and third orders because it would require observations and solutions that would put them out of favor with their in group. I think that's absolutely it. So there's this constant performative nature
to make sure that your politics are correct. I was having a conversation of coffee with Cora with a former coworker the other day, and I really had to watch what I said because unless I had said certain words, condemnatory words about certain topics, I was going to be cast into the like of fire. And the second thing
I think that it doesn't help is social media. When people have a fire hose of people who are ratcheting up everything to make you angry, and it's blasting in your head and you're scrolling in an infinite way, there's no there's literally no bottom there, and I think that's a big part of it. And people who bedrot and just sit and look at that and see how everything's awful when they could be out there, you know, I don't know, look look Maxing and Singapore or something. It's
not helpful. And I don't see a way necessarily around that. So how Charles and your piece for the public here, do you deal with the pernisious effects of hold on? I got it, I got a notification on Twitter. I'll read that letter. How do you deal with the pernicious effects of social media when it comes to combating misery?
Well?
Do you write cover stories and national review that solves the problem? I mean, it's all I can do, right. I agree, it's a huge issue. And one of the issues, of course, is that it's impossible for anyone who did not live through those eras to know what's true and what's not, and the only things that survive are the good things.
It's like cars.
Now, there's so many beautiful cars from the fifties and sixties, but when you go to a car show, you end up thinking, wow, all the cars from.
The fifties and sixties were beautiful.
But actually almost all of them were terrible, and there was a handful of them that were stunning. And the ones that were stunning are the ones that we look at now at the car show.
And I'm not saying.
That I'll argue with that, but we can do that in the garments.
But do go on, well, right, choose whatever it is that you want. If you disagree on cars, Let's say, I mean pop music is a good example. I love a lot of music from the nineteen sixties, but ninety percent of it was garbage and the stuff that here and I was awesome. So you can apply that quite fairly. I think not to society, because I actually am off
the view that America has always been great. I hate this view that well, yeah, I mean fine, but in nineteen ten, women didn't have the vote like yeah, okay, and I agree that's not good for women, But that doesn't mean America was a hellscape. But I think that if you go back and you actually talk to people who were there, you get a much better conception of what life was like and what was good about it.
And they become nostalgia because they grow old as shure, but they also remember things and you find out things about them, and you see pictures of them and you think, oh, you're quite poor and had a really small house and your carlxis was about to fall apart. But on social media you could present, especially with Ai, this this paradise conception,
and it's so hard to fight against. Although I'm rambling a bit, what I will say is this one of the things that I personally find a little bit weird about some of those look what they took from you is on social media is that they actually.
Look a lot like my town. I mean, some of them are like a kid riding a.
Bike, yeah right, Or there's a whole bunch of people out in the park and there are American flags and they're having a picnic.
Or you know, it's like a.
Family around a Thanksgiving table having dinner. That's what they took from you. Don't you do that every in November. So there's probably something else going on here that actually is bad. But I don't know how you fight it other than to tell people that it's wrong. And also maybe remember that most people aren't on social media, and those that are on social media usually aren't engaged in politics.
Well, I just want to go ahead, Stephen, then last this with both of you.
Readers should know our listeners should know that you really, at the end call for we need a disposition of the happy warrior.
More about it. I mean, one sentence jumps out of me.
You say there is more to being a statesman than perpetually provoking a citizenry into disgruntlement. I like disgruntlement, and I keep thinking we need pg. Woodhouse to tell us how to gruntle ourselves, to see one of his great passages. And I agree with all that the substance is important. And I'll just add a little caveat to James. I heally agree with everything he said about progressives. But you know, Republicans have been complicit in the growing incompetence of government too.
Not as bad as Democrats, but still they share some part.
Of the blame.
I do wonder and I said this once before, and now I'll give you one example of why I think it. The question of what decadence is and how you measure it as a serious one, And you know, I'm kind of a social scientist, so I resist these broad generalizations.
On the other hand, up here.
In what used to be a backwater wine region of California is now a fancy wine region of California. Where it used to be all the wine was never more than five dollars a bottle for some pretty good stuff, and you walked in as a little family the operation. Now it's wineries that cost you forty dollars for a tasting.
And starting about twenty years ago, I would see people showing up with my hairline, which you know, I have no hairline, except the guys would have their beards, their hipster beards and a ponytail, and they would drive in in their Lexus that had a Bernie sandersticker on it. Yep, And I thought, something's gone really screwy here. That doesn't make sense. And that's just sort of a you know, sort of a microcosm of a broader decadence that I
think afflicts the Europe worse than us. And by the way, your point is that, boy, if we feel bad, the Europeans really ought to be down on the dumps.
Right, Yes, So anyway, I mean, I appreciate all that.
But I guess what I want to see from you, Charles, maybe is a whole book, because there's this is a profound problem you put your finger on, and a worthy remedy that we need to flush out.
Here's the chapter for it, and I'll give it to both of you, you say in the piece twas ever, Thus, yeah, American statement. There fire up the random date selector and consider a decade. You are tempted to romanticize, all right, Charles, what would that decade be for you?
Well, of course it will be the nineteen nineties, because I was a kid slash early teenager, and I do think objectively speaking, there was an awful lot to be said for the nineteen nineties. So I'm not pretending that we just always favor the time in which we were young. I have not, although I don't know too many people
of that age. I've not met too many people who say, you know, the nineteen thirties, that was where it was at I think the nineties were objectively good, but also there were lots of bad things about the nineties that I've forgotten, and that didn't matter to me because I
was nine, so that would be mine. Although there's a lot of crime, like I say, I mean when I was a kid, even in England, but you'd hear about this in America all the time, and unlike now where the British and the Europeans are obsessed with all these evils of America.
Most of which on it's true. It was true in the nineteen nineties.
Steven one decade for you, I'll be the eighties, right, I mean, so yeah, I started coming of age around nineteen sixty eight. I was only eleven, ten or eleven, but I was paying attention to things, and my parents were involved in the world in serious ways, and I thought the world was coming to an end, right, the assassinations.
The riots, the war that wouldn't end. I mean it really.
Then the seventies were just awful with inflation and you know, things going wrong, and then Reagan comes along and look really turns things around the country.
That decade went really well.
I do agree the nineties were a very fortunate decade for the reasons, Charles says, but I take either one of those, and I would not want to go back to nineteen sixty eight.
Yeah, I'm tempted to romanticize the fifties because I love the style, the vibe, and the rest of it. But two things. One, I know that it's probably a lot more annoying and banlan than I did to think it was. And two, I really fear that I would be one of those Mort Saul types who was just sneering at the ikes in the you know, the suits and the rest of it a little what I know. But then I go to the twenties. I really like the twenties.
The twenties are fascinating to me because it's one hundred years ago, one hundred years ago, but it's so recognizable to us today. They had papers, they had radio, they had magazines, they had newspapers, they had automobiles, they had skyscrapers.
The whole modern vocabulary of our lives is there, and I'm tempted to romanticize it a little bit, except the whole thing about trying to get some liquor and it's really tough, And also the sort of the I mean but if you read the newspapers, you will find that there's a lot. There's a lot of blue stockings, there are a lot of cotton mather types. There was a lot of wiggery and prairie and the rest of it
that I wouldn't have liked. But frankly, I mean, just looking from the newspapers, it's a smart, interesting, crackling era that I would love to look at, but I know better than to romanticize it.
Well, but remember James so Will Rogers great observation, and at least prohibition is better than no liquor at all.
Yes, do you know?
A few years ago I went to Atlanta with my dad as part of a Civil War trip that we took, and we went to this beautiful, big mansion house somewhere outside.
Atlanta, I don't know where, and.
The tour guide said to us that when prohibition was passed while the Volsted Act was being debated, the owners of this house bought two decades worth of alcohol, wine, beer, spirits and so forth, and so for them, prohibition never happened. Now, this is, of course, the cardinal sin of nostalgia, and the one I'm arguing against, because everyone thinks if they'd lived in the Roman era, that had been Julius Caesar rather than a guy who got tetanus at the age
of nineteen. But if you could have lived James in the twenties like that, then I think it would have been pretty swell.
But at the same time, there's an element to American life that perhaps runs through all of these decades that we talk about and seems particularly poignant. Given the art of your piece, it is a reconstruction or reevaluation, or you're re updating of the famous Nighthawks by Hopper, which has always been a haunting painting for several reasons. One the fact that there's no door. Usually those places the door,
there's the door in the corner, but there isn't. There's just that piece of curved glass which is inviting some yegg or who loligan to put a rock through it. And then two, there's the cross the street. There's this sort of empty, uninhabited will blankness that may or may not have people slumbering in small, little dark apartments, and those people who are sitting there are not having a
wonderful convivial conversation. There is in a partners there is a loneliness there's a three am in the morning of the American soul there, and that runs through from then to now except now, of course, as we say, it's people who are being alone together as they sit in bed and scroll one last thing before where we going. It's another piece that Charles did, and it had to do with the beach idiots. In defense of beach idiots.
I haven't read the piece. I assume you mean the people who when they put a microphone at him and ask what country are we currently at war at they say Iowa. And not the people who are rampaging on beaches and causing riots and shootings and the rest of it, but just the sort of genial, bubble headed person who goes down there to have a tan and drink and hook up. And you're defending them. You're defending these people, Charles, to defend yourself here.
How long have you got?
This is in a sense of a piece with the piece. But I had a few observations about this that I made some people deeply unhappy. And I got an email from a guy who said that I was out of touch because when he was a young man, he spent his late teens protesting Richard Nixon, and then he said I shall be watching you going forward, and I thought, well, qed, buddy, because you were exactly who I was writing about.
He spent his teens protesting Richard Nixon. I have that an image in my life or in my head of the Simpsons with the comic book, guys walking down the street and a missile is headed directly towards him and he says, oh, I've.
Wasted my life.
Well, look, The reason that I defended these guy's is fourfold. The first reason is that I have really, am genuinely not persuaded that the sort of person who is eighteen nineteen twenty years old and doesn't know anything about foreign policy or economics is materially different than the sort of person who is eighteen nineteen twenty years old and doesn't know anything about foreign policy or economics but talks about
them all the time. I see nothing in our young, indignant activist class that tells me that they are well read. They're prolific, they're annoyed, they're annoying.
But I don't think they're particularly well read.
Second, I looked at the video that Fox put out. I do think it's funny that the lack of intellectualism was being.
Argued by Jesse Waters.
But I looked at this video that Fox put out and everyone and it seemed happy. And I think that's really important, especially when you're nineteen. There's lots of time. And don't take this to mean that adulthood is unhappy.
It's not.
But there's lots of time to do the things that make you take an interest in politics, things like have children, get a mortgage, have a job, move, you know, these are things that make you wonder about that elections thing. But these kids are nineteen. They seemed really happy, and that's good. The third thing is that politics, and this is I think similar to a theme that both of you touched on earlier in our conversation. Politics is not
an end done to itself. When you politicize everything, you forget what.
Politics is for.
Politics exists and is important for this reason, so that we can create the right conditions within which civil society can flourish.
You get the politics right.
That means that people can have families and churches and businesses and sports leagues and associations and restaurants. And that's the point in it. And if you look at that beach That's one of the reasons we have civil society is to create the circumstances in which nineteen year old girls can say, the main thing I worry about every
morning is which bikini to wear. And the last point that I've made is that if you look at a nineteen year old who says the main question in my life is which bikini to wear, and you see that as a failure, then you've actually forgotten what most of human history was like, including relatively recent human history. I mean, my grandfathers were mining their own business in nineteen thirty
nine in England. My grandfather on my mom's side worked at an orchard in Devon, and my grandfather on my dad's side was an apprentice carpenter, and then the world blew up and they went and signed up. They weren't conscripted, but I don't think that either of them had thought on the apple orchard or in the apprentice carpenter program. You know what I wish I were doing right now?
I wish I were fighting in North Africa, or I think I were, in the case of my dad's dad, in North Atlantic convoys that were being sunk every day. They thought about other things. I mean, they presumably didn't wear bikinis, but they were thinking about other things that were probably quite fatuous, and that was good, you know.
I would imagine that much of the time they spent killing people and having all their friends killed, I imagine a lot of that time was spent thinking about how it would be nice to go back to having days where you didn't have to think about too many important things. And I just don't want us to lose sight of that, because we do. Sometimes we get so obsessed with politics and injected into things that it doesn't belong that we forget why it is that we have it in the first place.
I get your point, and I think that we all should be grateful. And look at that nineteen year old girl and you look male gaze thing, but consider her and the problems that she has about which bikini she's going to choose, and just say, I hope she gets one V two dropped on the motel, just one, just just to put things in perspective. Charles has been fun, Steven, it's been fun. Everybody, it's been fun. I invite you to give us a five star review at Apple to iTunes.
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