Speaker 1: Or period. Poor poor carrier pigeons. Ask not what.
Speaker 2: Your country can do for you, Ask what you can
Speaker 2: do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister garbashaw, tear down this wall.
Speaker 2: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long, John You and
Speaker 2: me James Lylyx. Today we talked to you of all
Speaker 2: eleven about his new book about the Constitution, how it
Speaker 2: unified America once and could do it again. So let's
Speaker 2: have herselves a podcast.
Speaker 4: I've known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much,
Speaker 4: and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was
Speaker 4: only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was black
Speaker 4: until a number of years ago when she happened to
Speaker 4: turn black, and now she wants to be known as black.
Speaker 3: Welcome everybody.
Speaker 2: This is the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and two.
Speaker 2: I'm James Lylyx in a beautiful summer day in Minneapolis,
Speaker 2: Rob Long in Gotham, presume, and John You is joining
Speaker 2: us from California. Of course, the crucible of sanity in
Speaker 2: the modern world.
Speaker 3: I'm sure he's going to tell us all about that, gentlemen.
Speaker 2: Welcome, Hello, well, hi, James, Johns is right, that's what
Speaker 2: you do sometimes sometimes in radio and broadcasting. We like
Speaker 2: to say the more dead air, the better, But oftentime
Speaker 2: if we like to just kind of jump in there
Speaker 2: with something that just gets the ball rolling. The ball
Speaker 2: now seems to be rolling uphill for Donald Trump, downhill
Speaker 2: for Kamala Harris as she's vaulted to the front of
Speaker 2: the race. She's America's sweetheart and without really anybody taking
Speaker 2: a look at the positions what not that she's had.
Speaker 2: But perhaps over the next couple of months we'll have
Speaker 2: the opportunity to revisit some old clips and see exactly
Speaker 2: whether or not those old positions are still being held.
Speaker 2: Do you think it's going to come back to buy?
Speaker 2: I mean, the New York Times is doing stories essentially saying,
Speaker 2: you know, she makes she made fudge on the stove.
Speaker 2: Here's her seven tricks to keep it from from caramelizing.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's my favorite headline was one of the
Speaker 2: La Times.
Speaker 5: Uh uh, Kamala Harris is a knowledge of l A
Speaker 5: restaurants is large? Will that help her win the presidency?
Speaker 5: So okay, you guys all need to just just take
Speaker 5: a deep breath here and relax.
Speaker 1: I uh it was. It still made me laugh.
Speaker 6: Uh yeah, well, I thought the Times recipe would be
Speaker 6: camealized onions by now.
Speaker 3: Very good, very good.
Speaker 6: I thought I would replace I'm sitting in for Steve Hayward.
Speaker 6: I mean, you know, Peter Robinson gets to sit in
Speaker 6: for Steve Hayward. But now I'm sitting in for Steve.
Speaker 3: That's right, all right.
Speaker 2: Well, now that you are sitting in, let's uh, let's
Speaker 2: let's put it to you. Do you think that? I mean,
Speaker 2: you were there in California. You saw exactly what she
Speaker 2: was able to do for that state. Tell us what
Speaker 2: her what her California record might be, how it might
Speaker 2: be introduced to the rest of the country, what it was.
Speaker 6: I have a piece up this week about her record
Speaker 6: as district attorney attorney general. First, I think people are
Speaker 6: going to see the bad campaigner she was in twenty twenty,
Speaker 6: wants all this you know, happiness, it starts to maybe
Speaker 6: it won't end, but all this happiness in the media
Speaker 6: starts to end. Because I think she's the typical of
Speaker 6: a California politician. We live in a one party state,
Speaker 6: so she's never had to run a tough race before,
Speaker 6: and so I think that's why. I think that explains
Speaker 6: all the malapropism, weird stame a is goofy character because
Speaker 6: if you're Kamala Harris, you've never had to run against
Speaker 6: a tough candidate.
Speaker 3: But the broader.
Speaker 6: Issue is when people start to look at her record.
Speaker 6: I think it's a mistake actually for Democrats to be
Speaker 6: praising her as a prosecutor, because once people see the
Speaker 6: decisions she'd made back here, they're not going to be happy.
Speaker 6: There are some very well known cases in California. For example,
Speaker 6: there was an early in her tenure there was a
Speaker 6: guy who killed a police officer, severely wounded a partner.
Speaker 6: His partner, she would seek the death penalty. Another example
Speaker 6: where there's an illegal alien who is an MS thirteen
Speaker 6: gang member, walked into a communie store, killed the owner,
Speaker 6: shot up the two sons, and she didn't seek the
Speaker 6: death penalty. She had a I think she had a
Speaker 6: very lax attitude towards crime. So all this talk about
Speaker 6: her saying, oh, I know Donald Trump, he's a felon,
Speaker 6: and I know felons, I think that it's inviting the
Speaker 6: wrong kind of scrutiny. Once America's who I worried about crime,
Speaker 6: particularly in California, see the kind of progressive attitude she had.
Speaker 6: Plus then you can get into stuff she dies as senator,
Speaker 6: where she's calling for donations to bond funk bail, fights
Speaker 6: for Black Lives Matter, and so on.
Speaker 3: So I think this is and where where might that
Speaker 3: have been? John, Do you remember?
Speaker 6: I think somewhere up there in the north somewhere I
Speaker 6: know there's like white stuff that's called somewhere where the
Speaker 6: people comes out of the air. It's like water falls
Speaker 6: from the air in solid form, things like.
Speaker 3: This, God's Dandre amazing. Yeah, that was here.
Speaker 2: That was the bailphone with the people who were who
Speaker 2: were burning down the streets and burning down the buildings,
Speaker 2: and she was telling that we need, you.
Speaker 3: Know, basically more of it.
Speaker 2: That the riots shall continue until we have equity spread
Speaker 2: and evil even laer across the land. So yeah, there's that.
Speaker 2: But again again, if all we get is happy warrior
Speaker 2: energy and smiles and no real particular investigation from the media,
Speaker 2: then I think a lot of you know, the vast
Speaker 2: middle that needs to be persuaded, may just say, well,
Speaker 2: she looks like more fun time for a wine on
Speaker 2: for for for a president.
Speaker 3: Why not? And I don't want that crazy old guy.
Speaker 2: So I mean yeah, Now, so Rob, where do you
Speaker 2: think the Trumps, the Trump campaign goes from here?
Speaker 1: Well, they better get it together.
Speaker 5: It should come as no shock that you're not going
Speaker 5: to find for a progressive Democrat, really incredibly aggressive need coverage.
Speaker 5: That should not be surprising to them. They didn't get
Speaker 5: it for under Biden. They're not going to get it
Speaker 5: under when Kamala Harris is running, uh, and they need
Speaker 5: to focus and she's giving them all sorts of openings
Speaker 5: and they just seem to be focusing on a lot
Speaker 5: of stupid stuff at this point. Look, he got on a
Speaker 5: hundred days, less than hundred days, so it's sprint. You
Speaker 5: don't have any time for throat clearing. Everyone in America
Speaker 5: should know about every single one of those cases that
Speaker 5: John just mentioned that they should.
Speaker 1: The nasty term is to Willy Horton.
Speaker 5: But people forget that Willy Horton story was true, that
Speaker 5: he did he was fur.
Speaker 1: Load from prison, and he did commit crimes, to commit murder.
Speaker 5: That the reason that that worked was because there was
Speaker 5: no response from the Democrats and for the candidate then,
Speaker 5: and the most governor of messages is Michael Lucaucus.
Speaker 1: To actually defend the the the process of furlough. He didn't.
Speaker 1: He just ran away from it.
Speaker 5: It is and crystallized the difference between liberal and conservative
Speaker 5: voters for liberal conservtive voters on law and order issues.
Speaker 5: So everyone every time that this sort of like clown
Speaker 5: car of a Trump campaign starts talking about anything other
Speaker 5: than her record, they are wasting time and they have
Speaker 5: very little time left.
Speaker 1: The problem with Trump.
Speaker 5: Is it's integral to the Trump campaign. A lot of
Speaker 5: people don't like him. That is a real problem for him,
Speaker 5: and they know him well, and what he needs to
Speaker 5: do is not remind them about all the reasons they
Speaker 5: have to not like him. They should be reminding them
Speaker 5: of all the reasons they can't in good conscience vote
Speaker 5: for this extremely liberal, extremely progressive alternative. And they see
Speaker 5: me failing at that now, which is surprising to me
Speaker 5: because you know, just go you go back to the debate.
Speaker 1: That debate, everybody focused on Biden.
Speaker 5: I said this at the time, and yeah, you're right,
Speaker 5: it's terrible for Biden, but they forgot that it was
Speaker 5: absolutely terrific for Trump, not just because Biden was a
Speaker 5: dottery old man, but because Trump was controlled. I mean,
Speaker 5: he had a little trumpy near the end, but you know,
Speaker 5: we take our wins and we can find him. But
Speaker 5: he basically held the line. He argued passionately for things
Speaker 5: that he believes in, and he connected with voters. And
Speaker 5: I'm starting to believe that that is the singular moment
Speaker 5: of campaign discipline we're going to get from this candidate
Speaker 5: in that campaign. And if that's the case, it's going
Speaker 5: to be a disappointing election night for him. I suspect,
Speaker 5: and again always the problem to think about it. It's
Speaker 5: a gift, Kamala. Harrison's got to run on a record
Speaker 5: which is not great if you're a moderate or a
Speaker 5: centrist or conservative, which is what most of the country is.
Speaker 5: All Donald Trump has to do is just to stop
Speaker 5: being a jerk and stop reminding us how what a
Speaker 5: jerk Donald Trump is and how tiresome me is. That
Speaker 5: shouldn't be that hard, and yet it seems to be
Speaker 5: a stumbling block for this candidate.
Speaker 2: Would you say that people don't like Trump, that's true,
Speaker 2: but they don't like him for his personality, not necessarily
Speaker 2: his politics, his policy preferences, which can.
Speaker 3: Be you know here there in the other place.
Speaker 2: So do we have a situation then where people say
Speaker 2: I don't like him, therefore I'm going to vote for
Speaker 2: the person who is completely opposed to just about everything
Speaker 2: I happen to believe in, from energy policy to gun
Speaker 2: policy to yeah, aliens getting to illegal aliens getting you know,
Speaker 2: free healthcare, all of these things I.
Speaker 3: Just don't like.
Speaker 2: I just don't like this guy. So I mean, and
Speaker 2: I know there is that element. I'm going to feel
Speaker 2: good about myself because I feel good voting for this
Speaker 2: person because it is a virtuous thing to do. But
Speaker 2: you do have a fairly stark policy difference.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but I would just say, right, there is the problem,
Speaker 5: and Drama was going to hear, right, there is the problem.
Speaker 5: It's the problem for the Trump campaign is that when
Speaker 5: you start to say that people are going to vote
Speaker 5: for Kama Harris so they don't like Trump our idiots
Speaker 5: or fools.
Speaker 1: Emotional, I know, but that's what they are.
Speaker 5: You start doing that, you stop listening to why people
Speaker 5: don't like you. And that is that is exactly how
Speaker 5: the liberals got in a position they're in now because
Speaker 5: everybody who said I don't really like those Liberals, they
Speaker 5: instead of listening to that, no Democratic party listening to America,
Speaker 5: they decided to steamroll over them.
Speaker 1: That is not a recipe for success at the ballot box.
Speaker 6: I operationalize what Rob is saying. I think it's pretty simple.
Speaker 6: They could make a quick fix, which is usually in
Speaker 6: campaigns the vice president is the attack dog and the
Speaker 6: president is the one who sits back and puts out
Speaker 6: the positive program for the future. Right, doesn't engage directly
Speaker 6: in all this identity stuff. You know, I watched that
Speaker 6: black journalist conference with the interview, and Trump likes paying
Speaker 6: the attack dog. They should be sending jd Vance out
Speaker 6: to do that kind of stuff, and Trump should turn
Speaker 6: to a more positive That's just traditionally what happens in
Speaker 6: presidential campaign. Strangely, it's the reverse, right. You hear people say, oh,
Speaker 6: they picked Dvance because he is the broad vision for
Speaker 6: what the party is going to be in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 6: the roles, it's very strange. And the Trump campaign could
Speaker 6: easily change that. And I think that would have that
Speaker 6: would actually take what Rob's talking about and put it
Speaker 6: into sort of real campaign practice. It'd be easy, excepting
Speaker 6: you'd have to have Trump to And this brings me
Speaker 6: to just one other point is the Trump campaign officials,
Speaker 6: they may sadly look back on the days when Trump
Speaker 6: Trump was a defendant with fondness and as the good
Speaker 6: old days, because then Trump couldn't speak all day. He
Speaker 6: was limited to this kind of two minute sound bites
Speaker 6: when he was walking into an out of court. And
Speaker 6: that's when Trump was doing the best because he couldn't
Speaker 6: talk that much. The court forced discipline on him. And
Speaker 6: that's the hard thing is that if they could switch
Speaker 6: the president and vice presidential roles and then Trump, I mean,
Speaker 6: this is wishing for a candidate that's not there could
Speaker 6: be more disciplined at it, then it would be a
Speaker 6: Then it would be a good campaign.
Speaker 3: Yes, we're always looking at the candidate. We don't have
Speaker 3: to go ahead run.
Speaker 5: No, that's absolutely true. The structural problems are sort of
Speaker 5: baked in obviously to the Trump campaign. But it's not
Speaker 5: as if there isn't past performance that you can use
Speaker 5: to you know, as they say, and they say they
Speaker 5: won't do in the finance, but they should do in campaigns.
Speaker 5: When did he lose in twenty twenty, And he did
Speaker 5: lose in twenty twenty. He lost after the first debate,
Speaker 5: and the campaign officials knew because they had focus groups
Speaker 5: and numbers of Republican men and Republican women in Wisconsin
Speaker 5: and Arizona and Georgia who turned off of Trump. That
Speaker 5: is what happened, and they were perfectly. They have trained
Speaker 5: the Republican voter to go into the ballot box and
Speaker 5: to vote for the down ballot candidates with that are
Speaker 5: by their name, and to leave the top slot blank.
Speaker 5: That is a dangerous thing. You don't want. You don't
Speaker 5: want your voters to be doing that. And there It
Speaker 5: isn't that hard. I mean, it's not like we've seen this,
Speaker 5: We've seen Trump do.
Speaker 1: It's not like he can't do it. It's just that
Speaker 1: he won't. And that is I don't know.
Speaker 5: If that was in the Trump campaign, that would worry
Speaker 5: me more than the JD. Van's stuff, More than anything else.
Speaker 5: It would worry me that the most disciplined days of
Speaker 5: the Trump campaign seemed to be over.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 6: One other thing about oh sorry, just one little small
Speaker 6: point is he suppose Harris does great, and she is
Speaker 6: doing great right now. We shouldn't like pretend it's not happening.
Speaker 6: But all she's doing, if she succeeds, she will just
Speaker 6: get the race back to what it was before Biden's
Speaker 6: disastrous debate performance. It's still going to come down to
Speaker 6: six or seven battleground states, and the country's close, and
Speaker 6: it's divided, and it's going to be decided by a
Speaker 6: pointer two. And so that's the other thing is Trump
Speaker 6: really should be focusing just on those Midwestern states. The
Speaker 6: polling I saw come out in the New York Times today,
Speaker 6: it just seems to show that Harris has just come
Speaker 6: back to even in all those battleground states. But I
Speaker 6: don't think Trump's going to be winning Minnesota now, Sorry, James.
Speaker 2: Is she doing great or is it just being announced
Speaker 2: that she is great? I mean, we get this flood
Speaker 2: of relief from the media that they have this wonderful, charismatic, smart, braddy,
Speaker 2: confident meme, goddess gout you know who can do it?
Speaker 2: So is she doing great because of anything other than
Speaker 2: she's a beaming alternative to the doddering old man that
Speaker 2: they had before? And I mean, yes, you're always going
Speaker 2: to get a bounce when you introduce somebody new who
Speaker 2: comes in who's younger, has got a little bit more,
Speaker 2: it has more vibrant energy in the rest of it.
Speaker 3: Before the honeymoon fades and people get tired of it.
Speaker 2: But I mean, doing great. I don't think right now
Speaker 2: has anything to do with what she's said or she's.
Speaker 6: Raised three hundred million dollars and the parties unified behind her,
Speaker 6: and she's starting to restore support in the Democrat for
Speaker 6: the Democrats amongst minorities women. I mean, this is I'm
Speaker 6: not saying she's doing better than they did in twenty twenty.
Speaker 6: She's just getting them back to the same start line
Speaker 6: is twenty twenty. But that's that's an achievement because Biden
Speaker 6: was going to get trounced.
Speaker 5: I mean, look, I mean four weeks ago, I mean,
Speaker 5: it's probably about eight weeks ago. It was a it
Speaker 5: was absolutely de facto truth that everybody knew projecting forward
Speaker 5: that either one of these parties replaced either one of
Speaker 5: their top candidates with almost anybody, they would get a
Speaker 5: bounce because the negatives were really high on all of
Speaker 5: these candidates. And one party did it kind of halfway,
Speaker 5: not really, but they kind of did it.
Speaker 1: And that's what you're seeing.
Speaker 5: I mean, we would have predicted this with person X
Speaker 5: at the top of the side on either side, so
Speaker 5: none of this is a surprise. All of the problem
Speaker 5: is it in a compressed timeline, which is what this is.
Speaker 5: You don't have that much time to define your candidate.
Speaker 5: And luckily for Kamala Harris, Trump defines himself in the
Speaker 5: negative constantly, and instead of defining her and I get
Speaker 5: you know that bill, that list of all of those
Speaker 5: people that she was ill served as Attorney General of California,
Speaker 5: instead of having those be household names, what about this person?
Speaker 1: What about that person?
Speaker 5: What about those two kids in a store? We're talking
Speaker 5: about whether her father is Jamaican or whether he's like
Speaker 5: half Indian. Like this nonsense, waste of time. And if
Speaker 5: they brought it up, they started it. They need to
Speaker 5: like get there, They need to get back into control.
Speaker 1: And they are not. They do not look to me
Speaker 1: like they're doing it.
Speaker 2: You know, I might have not have been the best
Speaker 2: way to spend the week, but at some point, since
Speaker 2: ethnicity and identification and all these things are of absolute
Speaker 2: critical importance. Right now, it is a fun conversation to
Speaker 2: be had, but not at the moment because our guest
Speaker 2: is here. You've all leven the director of Social, cultural
Speaker 2: and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Speaker 3: That's the AIE. Of course.
Speaker 2: He's the founder and editor of National Affairs and the
Speaker 2: author of seven books, The most recent, published earlier this summer,
Speaker 2: is American How the Constitution Unified our Nation and could
Speaker 2: again you've allved, thanks for joining.
Speaker 7: Us, Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2: Well, you know that the title of the book presumes
Speaker 2: that there is a period of unification behind us, in
Speaker 2: a period of constitutional unification that could be before us.
Speaker 2: So that would mean we are in an interregnum of
Speaker 2: constitutional disunity. How would you describe where we are right
Speaker 2: now Visa VI, that old piece of bellum.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 7: I mean we are in a moment when we are
Speaker 7: not unified about or by the Constitution in the ways
Speaker 7: that we ought to be. And I think a lot
Speaker 7: of Americans recognize that we're very divided, but tend to
Speaker 7: think that the Constitution is the reason and are frustrated
Speaker 7: by the various ways in which it holds them back
Speaker 7: when they win elections or when they have ambitions. And
Speaker 7: rather than see that the Constitution is a solution to
Speaker 7: the kind of division we have now, they tend to
Speaker 7: see it as the problem, Michaal in this book is
Speaker 7: to help people see that, in fact, the Constitution is
Speaker 7: much more like the solution than the problem that it
Speaker 7: exists to help address exactly the sort of problem we have,
Speaker 7: which is the challenge of holding together a diverse and
Speaker 7: divided society, and that to the extent we're living through
Speaker 7: a period of constitutional failure, which I think we are
Speaker 7: to an extent, it's a failure of constitutional practice and
Speaker 7: not of constitutional design, and therefore it calls on us
Speaker 7: to reacquaint ourselves with the structure of the system and
Speaker 7: what it might have to teach us. And that's what
Speaker 7: I hope this book might help to do.
Speaker 5: Hey, you boy, can I try a little theory on you?
Speaker 5: You can tell me if I'm bull of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, John already's rolling his eyes. I can see.
Speaker 5: In the strength of the Constitution, this strange document that
Speaker 5: we still argue and fight about.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think there's another document.
Speaker 5: Maybe since the Gospels, that people have been reading and
Speaker 5: rereading and fighting over. In software engineering, right, there's this
Speaker 5: two big categories of how you put together a giant
Speaker 5: software project. Right. One is called agile and one's called waterfall.
Speaker 5: Waterfall is you go step by step, you accomplish one component,
Speaker 5: and you move the next component, and you move to
Speaker 5: the next component.
Speaker 1: You just kind of chip away in it that way.
Speaker 5: An agile is you kind of you start before you've
Speaker 5: got everything taken care of, and you just get going,
Speaker 5: and you know that there are weaknesses.
Speaker 1: You can have to fix those later.
Speaker 5: But the idea is to keep going and you create
Speaker 5: a document that is both incredibly resilient, or you create
Speaker 5: a product incredibly resilient but also has problems that need
Speaker 5: to be fixed over time. But the point is you
Speaker 5: got it going and everybody kind of agreed on the
Speaker 5: big vision. It feels to me like in terms of
Speaker 5: the software, the code for the United States of America,
Speaker 5: which is the Constitution, that it's an incredibly brilliant piece
Speaker 5: of agile coding. And every argument we have about it,
Speaker 5: when people talk about how well this is, like, well,
Speaker 5: this is our problem. We're still fighting over this. We're
Speaker 5: still fighting over the Second Amendment. I think that is
Speaker 5: the great act, that great strength of the Constitution, right
Speaker 5: that we're still going to fight over it, and our
Speaker 5: grand channel will fight over it.
Speaker 7: I think it's absolutely right. It's a really good metaphor
Speaker 7: for how the system is meant to work, and it's
Speaker 7: intentional in a lot of ways. What you see when
Speaker 7: you look at the records of the Constitutional Convention is
Speaker 7: that the framers of the Constitution dealt with some very
Speaker 7: serious problems by containing them as tensions within the system. Right,
Speaker 7: were they going to empower the large states or the
Speaker 7: small states? That seems like a stark choice to make,
Speaker 7: but their answer was, yes, We're going to empower the
Speaker 7: large states and the small states, and the fights between
Speaker 7: them are going to be essential to the political life
Speaker 7: of our society. Right. Is the President of the United
Speaker 7: States an elevated head of state or is the president
Speaker 7: a kind of glorified clerk. Well, the answer is yes,
Speaker 7: the president is both those things, even though that's obviously contradictory,
Speaker 7: and the presidency is a contradictory office about which we
Speaker 7: fight constantly and unendingly, and a lot of the most
Speaker 7: significant and kinds of tensions that occupy us as Americans
Speaker 7: in our political life are contained within the structure of
Speaker 7: the Constitution. What that allows the system to do is
Speaker 7: to is to shift its weight as it needs to
Speaker 7: without losing its balance. It's extraordinarily precisely agile, because it
Speaker 7: allows us to emphasize different things at different times. There
Speaker 7: are moments when we need a strong president to respond
Speaker 7: on behalf of the country to dangerous problems. There are
Speaker 7: moments when we need Congress to be stronger. And a
Speaker 7: lot of the arguments we can have are about how
Speaker 7: to rebalance and shift the weight of the different parts
Speaker 7: of the system. I think those are a lot of
Speaker 7: our arguments now, and it's a sign of strength in
Speaker 7: our system. We underestimate the stability and strength of the
Speaker 7: American system. We've had the same institutions in America since
Speaker 7: seventeen ninety. There's no other country that can say that
Speaker 7: about its governing institutions.
Speaker 6: You've all. What strikes me, why it's John you, I'm
Speaker 6: sitting in for Steve Hayward. What strikes me is I
Speaker 6: could see a youngster reading this book and going, You've
Speaker 6: all you don't know what time it is, right, that's
Speaker 6: their big frame. It's so you know, the both the
Speaker 6: left and the right, young people on the left and
Speaker 6: the right all have you know, reject the constitution. Right,
Speaker 6: the left is so influenced by the sixteen nineteen project.
Speaker 6: This is the work of racist and sexist oppressors. But
Speaker 6: also on the conservative side, there's this big movement, you know, saying,
Speaker 6: you know, the Constitution is also holding us back. You know,
Speaker 6: we should be advancing conservative social values despite originalism and
Speaker 6: despite all these ideas that tried to create a neutral
Speaker 6: approach to the Constitution. These last week, it seems like
Speaker 6: everybody wants to go beyond the Constitution. Now, how do
Speaker 6: you respond to them?
Speaker 7: You know, the book very much speaks to exactly those
Speaker 7: younger people. And one thing I would say is, I'm
Speaker 7: a conservative, so I think it's always the same time.
Speaker 7: It's time to raise another generation of Americans to be
Speaker 7: decent human beings and good citizens. That's always our challenge.
Speaker 7: That was your grandparents' challenge, and it's going to be
Speaker 7: your grandkid's challenge, and it's your challenge.
Speaker 3: And I think a.
Speaker 7: Lot of what you don't know what time it is
Speaker 7: kind of arguments on the right now are a form
Speaker 7: of escapism from responsibility. They want to say, well, this
Speaker 7: was how we used to work, but now all the
Speaker 7: rules have been broken, so we don't need to worry
Speaker 7: about the rules either. Well, no, they're still here. We
Speaker 7: still need them. They still answer questions and challenges. They're
Speaker 7: always with us, and we have to recognize that the
Speaker 7: burden of sustaining this system is the privilege of being
Speaker 7: an American citizen. But more than that, I think the objections,
Speaker 7: in a sense, the objections that you find in the
Speaker 7: Constitution on the left are familiar, and the book treats
Speaker 7: those at great length. They're the same kinds of arguments
Speaker 7: that the progressives have been making for more than one
Speaker 7: hundred years about the Constitution, that it's not democratic enough,
Speaker 7: that it's not sophisticated enough to govern in the modern world.
Speaker 7: I disagree the Constitution is more sophisticated than these critics
Speaker 7: are about the nature of the liberal society. The conservative
Speaker 7: critiques are a little newer, and I think in some
Speaker 7: ways they're misguided about the character of democratic life and
Speaker 7: of our constitutional system. At the heart of a lot
Speaker 7: of them is this notion that the Constitution is empty proceduralism,
Speaker 7: that it doesn't have moral content, it's just about a
Speaker 7: set of procedures and rules. And I think the whole
Speaker 7: idea of empty proceduralism is completely confused. There's actually no
Speaker 7: such thing as empty proceduralism. What procedures do is create
Speaker 7: habits and virtues and facilitate moral formation. Just think about
Speaker 7: if you want to speak for the Western moral tradition,
Speaker 7: which they do, and if you want to say you're
Speaker 7: speaking for the tradition, the classical Christian tradition that reaches
Speaker 7: back to Aquinas and Aristotle. In that tradition, the way
Speaker 7: in which we become morally formed is by being habituated
Speaker 7: to practicing the virtues. And what is the mechanism for
Speaker 7: a bituation. It's precisely what they call procedure. It's the
Speaker 7: rules that govern how we engage with each other. And
Speaker 7: constitutional procedures make us into citizens that respect each other's equality,
Speaker 7: make us into people with some humility and some patience
Speaker 7: and ability to deal with difference and confront one another
Speaker 7: in a way that points to some constructive common action
Speaker 7: that is deeply morally formative. I think the arguments on
Speaker 7: the right about the nature of the Constitution are just
Speaker 7: very confused.
Speaker 6: You just put a practical point on it as abortion.
Speaker 6: So it sounds to me like you would support the
Speaker 6: idea of Dobs that abortion should be sent back to
Speaker 6: the States where we can all fight about it politically.
Speaker 6: Because both conservatives and liberals want Congress to pass an
Speaker 6: abortion bill, right, just in different points of the spectrum.
Speaker 6: Even conservatives now are talking about passing a federal nationwide
Speaker 6: pro life bill, just in the same way liberals want
Speaker 6: to pass a restoration of ro versus Wade in Congress.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and look, I think that that's the venue where
Speaker 7: we have to argue about questions like that. It's not
Speaker 7: up to the courts to decide what our laws should be.
Speaker 7: What our laws should be is the fundamental political question,
Speaker 7: and that means we have to decide it together in
Speaker 7: those arenas where we can actually engage with each other,
Speaker 7: compete with each other, negotiate with each other. And that
Speaker 7: has to happen in the legislature.
Speaker 1: Hey, I have maybe a political cultural question now.
Speaker 5: Obviously, the first ten amendments, a first ten amendments Constitution
Speaker 5: happened all kind of at once, right, and then there's
Speaker 5: a bunch more kind of in a cluster. And then
Speaker 5: there was a couple around the Civil War periods, the
Speaker 5: Civil War era kinds, and then there were there's a
Speaker 5: bunch of them around turn of the last century that
Speaker 5: were with suffrage and prohibion things like that. And then
Speaker 5: kind of a quiet period where it just seemed like
Speaker 5: whenever you say to people, well, you could have a
Speaker 5: constitutional amendment, they kind of rolled their eyes, like, well, man,
Speaker 5: that's just never going to happen.
Speaker 1: Two thirds of this two there's never going to happen.
Speaker 5: Are we going to Are we entering a phase when
Speaker 5: that is true, that this is the idea of like
Speaker 5: galvanizing a giant majority of Americans to do this thing
Speaker 5: and throughout all these different houses of government state houses
Speaker 5: and uh and and federal chambers.
Speaker 1: Or is it cyclical?
Speaker 5: I mean, could we look at another period in the
Speaker 5: next ten twenty thirty years where we reminds us of
Speaker 5: those turn of this turn of the twentieth century spate
Speaker 5: of some of them were really dumb, but we managed
Speaker 5: to get him through.
Speaker 1: I mean nobody.
Speaker 5: I don't think anybody's really arguing for prohibitions, certainly not
Speaker 5: John Hughes.
Speaker 1: Not sure to get you up in the morning.
Speaker 6: Are you add more stuff just telcohol?
Speaker 7: John wants to mandate drinking exactly.
Speaker 6: I mean, how it's easier would be for us to
Speaker 6: agree if we.
Speaker 5: All have the I mean, I guess that's what I'm saying,
Speaker 5: is like, is it I mean, is the idea that
Speaker 5: I always say to people when they complain of I'm like, hey, listen,
Speaker 5: constitutions a living document.
Speaker 1: You can amend it. You can amend it.
Speaker 5: And they'll call, you know, come on, that's not realistic.
Speaker 5: Is it not realistic? Or is it cyclical? Or is
Speaker 5: it something that happened in the past and it is
Speaker 5: possible to happen now.
Speaker 7: Well, I think the Constitution allows us for allow us
Speaker 7: for a lot of room for political decision making, for
Speaker 7: changing the rules that govern the workings of American government.
Speaker 7: Without a constitutional amendment, we've, as you say, the amendments
Speaker 7: of common bunches generally, and the last real bunch of
Speaker 7: amendments was the Progressive Amendments. We had a series afterwards
Speaker 7: in the middle of the twentieth century to sort of
Speaker 7: fix a couple of things, presidential succession and so on,
Speaker 7: lowering the voting age, and there was the final so far,
Speaker 7: the twenty seventh Amendments was almost symbolic really as part
Speaker 7: of celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution. The
Speaker 7: last real amendments fifty years ago, and that is a
Speaker 7: long time.
Speaker 3: I have to say.
Speaker 7: For one thing, I'm I'm a conservative, and therefore I
Speaker 7: don't really see a lot of problems to which a
Speaker 7: constitutional amount would be a solution. I don't think it's
Speaker 7: obvious now that there are some essential amendments. I think
Speaker 7: a lot of the problems of our political culture are
Speaker 7: functions of things we can change without constitutional amendments. The
Speaker 7: nature of the electoral process and especially the primary system,
Speaker 7: the way Congress works. We don't have broad majorities for
Speaker 7: anything in American public life right now, so the notion
Speaker 7: that we would have a broad majority for a constitutional
Speaker 7: amendment is a little hard to imagine.
Speaker 3: But these things do change.
Speaker 7: American party politics work in phases, and I can certainly
Speaker 7: imagine that twenty five years from now we're in a
Speaker 7: different enough place where there's public pressure for amendments. I
Speaker 7: shudder to think what those would be, frankly, but it's possible.
Speaker 7: I don't think that in this moment where we are now,
Speaker 7: those would be possible, And I think the pressures we
Speaker 7: do see actually reinforce the wisdom of the original structure
Speaker 7: of the Constitution. You know, the Biden administration wants to
Speaker 7: limit the terms of Supreme Court justices.
Speaker 5: To ask about to ask that that collection of quote
Speaker 5: reforms unquote Yeah.
Speaker 7: I mean, look, I think those ideas are exactly an
Speaker 7: example of why we have lifetime tenure for judges. When
Speaker 7: you tell people people as wise they're left time tendre
Speaker 7: you say, well, you want to protect them from pressure
Speaker 7: from the political branches that would try to kick out
Speaker 7: judges that make decisions they don't like. And people say, well,
Speaker 7: that wouldn't happen. Well, that's literally what's happening now. What
Speaker 7: the Democrats want to do here is exactly why there
Speaker 7: is lifetime tenure for judges, and exactly why we have
Speaker 7: to retain lifetime tenure for judges.
Speaker 6: I think isn't it fair to say that Donald Trump, Yes,
Speaker 6: he's accused of being a threat to the constitution or democracy,
Speaker 6: even though we live in a republic not a democracy.
Speaker 6: But when you read about what the Democrats want to do,
Speaker 6: aren't they the ones threatening longer term damage to the constitution,
Speaker 6: right term limits on the justices. Kamala Harris back in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty said she supported court packing these ideas about it.
Speaker 6: They also want to get rid of the electoral college.
Speaker 6: They talk about getting rid of the filibuster, adding Puerto
Speaker 6: Rico and Washington, DC as states. I mean, I mean,
Speaker 6: this is actually kind of like what Rob was talking
Speaker 6: about before the big burst of progressive constitutional amendments were
Speaker 6: designed to get rid of more guardrails pure democracy. Isn't
Speaker 6: that what progresses want to do again right now? And
Speaker 6: is it? Kamala Harris the right she is the phalank
Speaker 6: had phalanx in that movement to undo this constitutional order
Speaker 6: your favorite with It's just the Supreme Court termlament thing
Speaker 6: is just the first of what they have in mind.
Speaker 7: I think what's always been striking about the progressives is
Speaker 7: that they go at the Constitution head on. They openly
Speaker 7: dislike the system and want to change it in fundamental ways.
Speaker 7: When to undermine it fundamental ways, And I do think
Speaker 7: a lot of what they're talking about here are direct
Speaker 7: attacks on all of the countermajoritarian parts of the Constitution.
Speaker 7: The Constitution exists of balance majority rule and minority rights.
Speaker 7: All of the ways that restrain majority rule are under
Speaker 7: attach now the Bill of Rights, one by one who
Speaker 7: they're working their way through the first Amendment from religion
Speaker 7: to speech and on from there. They talk the same
Speaker 7: way about the Senate, now about the courts the electoral College.
Speaker 7: As you say, it's a strategy that seems rooted in
Speaker 7: this weird notion that they're the majority, which I actually
Speaker 7: don't think is correct. But in any case, that's always
Speaker 7: been how the progressives have thought about it. I think
Speaker 7: there is a danger to the Constitution from the kind
Speaker 7: of the approach that Donald Trump had to the presidency.
Speaker 7: He was just not cognizant of the boundaries on the
Speaker 7: president and didn't care much about them. I think that's
Speaker 7: bad too. But there is a kind of direct assault
Speaker 7: on the Constitution, a knowing assault on it, that is
Speaker 7: much more characteristic on the left. But as you said
Speaker 7: at the beginning, John, there are now threats to the
Speaker 7: Constitution from both left and right, and we all need
Speaker 7: a reminder of what the Constitution is, for why it
Speaker 7: works the way it does, Especially the parts of it
Speaker 7: that are most frustrating two narrow majorities, which are the
Speaker 7: only kind we have now, are the parts of it
Speaker 7: that we have got to sustain and remind people about,
Speaker 7: because those elements are what allow our system to keep
Speaker 7: its balance. The Constitution is meant to frustrate narrow majorities,
Speaker 7: to force them to grow, and to empower only broad majorities.
Speaker 7: That's the distinct feature of the American system. It's not
Speaker 7: like parliamentary systems in that way. I think that's had
Speaker 7: a lot to do with its durability.
Speaker 5: I always have a problem with my friends are like
Speaker 5: talk about I mean, I get a lot of crap
Speaker 5: on this podcast from people like John You about being
Speaker 5: a rhino. But you know, when I talk to my
Speaker 5: liberal friends, my very liberal Democrat friends, always say to them,
Speaker 5: your MVP of the Democratic parties, Joe Manchin, the MVP
Speaker 5: of the Republican Party, are all the rhinos like me?
Speaker 1: You need it, That's the way the system works. You
Speaker 1: don't like it.
Speaker 5: I guess we need a prime minister. We're not going
Speaker 5: to get one. This is the way the system is.
Speaker 5: And it always stolished to me how quickly we forget that.
Speaker 7: Absolutely. Our system does not trust narrow majorities. And the
Speaker 7: reason for that is very straightforward. Majorities can be dangerous.
Speaker 3: It's true.
Speaker 7: Majority rule is necessary to legitimate political power, but it's
Speaker 7: also dangerous, and the Constitution deals with that by standing
Speaker 7: in the way of narrow majorities so that they are
Speaker 7: forced to grow.
Speaker 1: And some.
Speaker 7: Of the institutions built up around it, like the filibuster,
Speaker 7: which I think is very important to protect and sustain,
Speaker 7: are also they work that way. All the bipartisan legislation
Speaker 7: of the twenty first century has basically been a function
Speaker 7: of the filibuster, and the idea that getting rid of
Speaker 7: it is what twenty first century American politics requires strikes
Speaker 7: me as just crazy. There's an assumption at the bottom
Speaker 7: of a lot of progressive arguments that there's this big
Speaker 7: majority out there and it's being held back by the system.
Speaker 7: But the problem we have is that there's not a
Speaker 7: majority for anything, and we need to form majorities. That's
Speaker 7: what the Constitution can help us to do.
Speaker 2: We were speaking before about the right not liking the
Speaker 2: Constitutions parts of it because it was just procedural, and
Speaker 2: you were right and correct to say that the entire
Speaker 2: document is suffused with the philosophy at the times like
Speaker 2: a building, the framework, the structure, the girders, or the
Speaker 2: spirit of Western civilization, and the procedural stuff is the
Speaker 2: cladding that goes up on top of that.
Speaker 3: We see.
Speaker 2: But I wonder if you had a constitutional convention, as
Speaker 2: so many people seem to want to, are talking about,
Speaker 2: some way of getting our arms around this thing and
Speaker 2: making sure that it's adaptable for its next century. I
Speaker 2: think that the right, I would fear less having a
Speaker 2: constitutional convention, because I think the instincts of the right
Speaker 2: would be still to constrain the power of the state
Speaker 2: and have rights be natural rights, and that the left
Speaker 2: would wish to enshrine in the Constitution any number of
Speaker 2: an innumerable number of little detailed rights which the state provided,
Speaker 2: guaranteed and was the source of. And maybe that's the
Speaker 2: difficulty that we're talking about here when you say that
Speaker 2: there's not a majority for these ideas.
Speaker 3: Well, they don't believe that.
Speaker 2: If the left may not believe that there is a
Speaker 2: majority for these things, but more importantly, they are correct,
Speaker 2: and therefore the things that stand in the way of
Speaker 2: all of these things being manifested in the country are
Speaker 2: illegitimate and immoral and possibly evil and the rest of it.
Speaker 2: And that's why they would shread nearly any single aspect
Speaker 2: of the Constitution that got in their way, whereas I
Speaker 2: don't fear that from the right.
Speaker 3: So I agree with that.
Speaker 7: I think that well, I would be worried about a
Speaker 7: constitutional convention from all directions. I think that opening up
Speaker 7: the document in a way that some people suggest, and
Speaker 7: just having a free for all about what it ought
Speaker 7: to be would not serve ce well in this moment.
Speaker 7: But I would certainly fear the left more than the
Speaker 7: right for just the reasons you're suggesting. I think the
Speaker 7: Constitution was written in a very peculiar moment in American history,
Speaker 7: where there had been five years of war in the Revolution,
Speaker 7: war against government that was seen as overly powerful and domineering.
Speaker 7: And then there were five years after the Revolution in
Speaker 7: which there was total pandemonium and government was too weak
Speaker 7: and ineffective. And the Constitutional Convention responded to both of
Speaker 7: those problems, and so was aware of the dangers of
Speaker 7: weak government and strong government at the same time, and
Speaker 7: sought for some kind of balance between the two. It's
Speaker 7: very hard to imagine that at any other moment in
Speaker 7: American history we would have produced quite that kind of balance,
Speaker 7: and so I think for that reason, it's a good
Speaker 7: thing that it's hard to amend the Constitution. Sometimes we
Speaker 7: need to, but we should be very wary about opening
Speaker 7: it up.
Speaker 2: I think it's great. I mean they say the center
Speaker 2: to the place where the passions go to be cooled.
Speaker 2: I mean the Constitutional Amendment brought is it process is
Speaker 2: the deep freeze in which things are packed in ice
Speaker 2: and the good luck getting out of that. Which is
Speaker 2: good because, as you noted, it came out of a
Speaker 2: very unique time. But at the same time we seem
Speaker 2: to have been blessed by not only a time that
Speaker 2: produced this unique document, but the temperaments the people who
Speaker 2: crafted it and to understood it. And that's what baffles
Speaker 2: me about the people who want to tear it up
Speaker 2: and start all over or just tinker it into oblivion.
Speaker 2: Is that human nature, what they discern, what they knew
Speaker 2: about human nature and human systems at the time is
Speaker 2: hardly irrelevant and outdated today.
Speaker 3: They haven't, they.
Speaker 2: Haven't changed, and they exist to this day. And there's
Speaker 2: a lesson in that that an ahistorical generation seems completely
Speaker 2: delighted to ignore.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think the notion that it's old and out
Speaker 7: of its time is the most wrong thing about the
Speaker 7: critiques that people offer about the Constitution. The Constitution is
Speaker 7: I think more sophisticated than its critics about the most
Speaker 7: difficult challenge that faces every modern democratic society, which is
Speaker 7: the challenge of cohesion amid diversity. The United States is
Speaker 7: you know, The most popular kind of critique among political
Speaker 7: scientists of the Constitution is a kind of comparative critique
Speaker 7: that looks at Norway or Denmark and says, well, these
Speaker 7: systems are more directly representative and more proportional. The very
Speaker 7: idea that we could even think to compare our government
Speaker 7: to Norway's is an example of how effective the Constitution is.
Speaker 7: The United States is not like Norway. It's like India.
Speaker 7: It's like it's like Brazil and Mexico, except it's much
Speaker 7: better governed than those places. It's a vast democracy that
Speaker 7: works so well that it could compare itself to Denmark.
Speaker 7: And the fact that we're able to do that is
Speaker 7: a function of the incredible sophistication.
Speaker 6: That's crazy. I don't ever want to compare anything we
Speaker 6: do to Denial. Yeah, well look than Denmark.
Speaker 1: This is a legit. What's a real question. I really
Speaker 1: I've always wanted this.
Speaker 5: I get that they were really smart guys. You know,
Speaker 5: I was forced to read the Federalist papers in college,
Speaker 5: and so I get that they were smart. But the
Speaker 5: idea that they were the architects of this system that
Speaker 5: works at this scale, like at the scale that the
Speaker 5: United I mean, the reason that we are not like
Speaker 5: Norway's because we have Norway here too.
Speaker 1: It's up there somewhere close.
Speaker 5: To where James lips and we have a little bit
Speaker 5: of Mexico down there.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have everything.
Speaker 5: And the idea that these Do you think these guys
Speaker 5: had an idea that this country was going to be
Speaker 5: loud and fractious and noisy, and that we needed a
Speaker 5: system that was going to be able to contain that
Speaker 5: and channel that. Or do you think they just thought, hey, listen,
Speaker 5: you put people in a room together, no matter what
Speaker 5: their background is, they're going to fight. Sometimes the most bitter,
Speaker 5: the bitterest arguments are between family members.
Speaker 1: So so this works at scale.
Speaker 5: It works when we have, you know, thirteen colonies, works
Speaker 5: when we have a population of one million, we have
Speaker 5: two big cities, and it works when we have twenty
Speaker 5: seven big cities.
Speaker 1: Is that did they know? Well?
Speaker 7: I certainly think they didn't know quite how the United
Speaker 7: States would grow. I think I think they didn't have
Speaker 7: a conception of what it could be in the twenty
Speaker 7: first century. But I do think a number of them
Speaker 7: had a very strong sense that the United States was
Speaker 7: destined to be a great world power had a real
Speaker 7: sense that it was going to grow geographically and demographically.
Speaker 7: You know, Alexander Hamilton talks about the future of the
Speaker 7: country in a way that is extraordinarily modern and far seeing.
Speaker 7: They didn't know exactly how, but I think they were
Speaker 7: building for durability and growth. And they had a sense
Speaker 7: that politics is always contentious, that it is about fighting,
Speaker 7: and therefore the system has to be built to contain
Speaker 7: tensions but also facilitate constructive fighting. And that is an
Speaker 7: insight that has served us very well. It's remained true.
Speaker 7: And you know the United States, I mean Americans, I
Speaker 7: think we always exaggerate our internal differences. We say, well,
Speaker 7: we used to be, you know, this one homogeneous society
Speaker 7: back then, but now we're so diverse and different. I
Speaker 7: think we're kind of wrong on both ends of that.
Speaker 7: The America of the late eighteenth century was quite divided
Speaker 7: and fractious and felt diverse to itself, and the America
Speaker 7: of the twenty first century. I mean, look, if you
Speaker 7: spend a few weeks abroad and then run into an
Speaker 7: American somewhere, you know that person's an American in five
Speaker 7: seconds from across the room. We have a lot in common,
Speaker 7: and it's not only when we agree with each other,
Speaker 7: when we're from the same place. There is absolutely such
Speaker 7: a thing in the world as the American character, and
Speaker 7: in a lot of ways it's a function of our
Speaker 7: constitutional system and of our political culture.
Speaker 6: Thank you all. What comes next. So there's an influential
Speaker 6: theory out there that says, you know, American history goes
Speaker 6: in these kind of cycles, and where you're at the end.
Speaker 6: I feel like we're in one of these, Like at
Speaker 6: the end of the ancient regime, the way things have
Speaker 6: run for a while decades comes to an end. They say,
Speaker 6: you get these years of closely divided elections where nothing happens,
Speaker 6: people get more and more frustrated. Then some kind of
Speaker 6: crisis occurs and we kind of break through that, and
Speaker 6: then a whole new system comes into existence. So they
Speaker 6: say Reagan was like that, FDR was like that, Lincoln
Speaker 6: and Jefferson going back. You know, those are the major points.
Speaker 6: Don you feel like we're in that now? And if
Speaker 6: that's true, what's going to be what's going to replace
Speaker 6: this kind of close elections, bitter divisions, polarization, which you know,
Speaker 6: what you see at the end of a cycle. What's
Speaker 6: the next one going to look like?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that's right. You know, Samuel Huntington wrote
Speaker 7: a book in the early eighties called The Promise of Disharmony,
Speaker 7: which is an amazing book what really underappreciated, and he
Speaker 7: describes this these kinds of cycles, and he even said
Speaker 7: that we would be in one in this period in
Speaker 7: the second deck of the twenty first century. And oftentimes
Speaker 7: what characterizes these moments, like you say, is that there's
Speaker 7: not an obvious majority party in American political life. So
Speaker 7: most of the time, if you look in on the
Speaker 7: United States, there's a majority party that's holding together a
Speaker 7: complicated coalition. There's a minority party that's trying to broaden
Speaker 7: its coalition. They're both engaged in coalition building, and those
Speaker 7: phases kind of run out, and you reach a point
Speaker 7: where neither party is engaged in coalition building, and our
Speaker 7: politics just feels totally dysfunctional. I think that's actually a
Speaker 7: great description of this moment. Neither party is engaged in
Speaker 7: coalition building. If you step back from them, they're not
Speaker 7: really trying to grow, They're trying to mobilize their existing
Speaker 7: base of voters, and this creates an enormous opportunity for
Speaker 7: political insight and political talent to build a real majority.
Speaker 7: I think a lot of politicians in this moment think
Speaker 7: that can't be a majority again, even though they live
Speaker 7: through a paer. Look, Ronald Reagan won forty nine states
Speaker 7: in nineteen eighty four. Nobody imagines that's imaginable, that's achievable now.
Speaker 7: But a majority is absolutely achievable now.
Speaker 3: I think it's.
Speaker 6: Something like a conservative populist working class party, Isn't that
Speaker 6: what it feels like is coming in.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think both parties have an opportunity. I think
Speaker 7: Republicans have a bigger opportunity. It's easier to imagine Republicans
Speaker 7: being that party, but yeah, it would be the popular party,
Speaker 7: the party that speaks for the people in a kind
Speaker 7: of up down politics as much as left right. You know,
Speaker 7: the traditional divide in democracy is the few and the many,
Speaker 7: and left right is a kind of modern addition onto that.
Speaker 7: But the few in the many is still the most
Speaker 7: powerful force in the life of a democracy, and our
Speaker 7: politics increasingly feels like a party of the elite and
Speaker 7: a party of the people. That obviously can be very unhealthy,
Speaker 7: and I think we're seeing it as unhealthy. Both the
Speaker 7: elitism and the populism we have now are unhealthy. But
Speaker 7: to fill a majority that somehow cuts across some of
Speaker 7: the familiar categories of the phase of our politics that's ending.
Speaker 7: And I'm not talking about eighty percent, but sixty percent.
Speaker 7: That's a big majority in American politics. I absolutely think
Speaker 7: that is achievable. And that's what the next phase looks like.
Speaker 6: I just want to say, I want to be with
Speaker 6: the elites because they all have the best stuff. But
Speaker 6: when the revolution comes, I'm switching. I'm going with Rob.
Speaker 6: Wherever Rob goes, I'm going with them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm a I'm a survivor, John. And to push
Speaker 5: you off my bandwagon. Oh yeah, not that everybody. I
Speaker 5: can get this guy.
Speaker 2: Well, we could get the entire country, forty nine states
Speaker 2: at least if we agreed with John Yu that the
Speaker 2: Mick rib should be available all year round in addition
Speaker 2: to the Shamrock Shake or some of the popular menu items,
Speaker 2: that being John's thing.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Barring that, It's hard to see what issue it'll be,
Speaker 2: but we may find out. In the meantime, we recommend
Speaker 2: that everybody, since we are in this period a TwixT
Speaker 2: constitutional adherents at a national and social personal level.
Speaker 3: Read his book.
Speaker 2: The book is called American Covenant, How the Constitution Unified
Speaker 2: our Nation? And good again, I've all even thanks so
Speaker 2: much for joining us today. Fascinating conversation. We can go
Speaker 2: on and on and on about it, and you know,
Speaker 2: we'll talk to you maybe before the next book.
Speaker 3: What is the next book? By the way, thank you
Speaker 3: very much.
Speaker 7: I appreciate it, though I have to said I don't
Speaker 7: appreciate that question because it's always a very hard question
Speaker 7: to answer right after writing this book. But time will tell.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I'll be in the newspaper business. Here.
Speaker 3: We're all about the list.
Speaker 2: So i'd say that, you know, the Bill of Rights,
Speaker 2: pick five and five favorite five hottest rights in the
Speaker 2: turnat Bill Rights.
Speaker 6: There you go, no quartering, no quartering.
Speaker 1: Good for collects.
Speaker 3: Thanks you, thanks you all, thank you so much, thank
Speaker 3: you all.
Speaker 2: You know, yes, top down pleabs versus the patricians, all
Speaker 2: the rest of it, you know. But thanks to Marks,
Speaker 2: we have a we have elites work collectivists. That that's
Speaker 2: the strange thing, right right, prefer the old days when
Speaker 2: the elites would just simply leave the peasants to be
Speaker 2: in their fields and do what they want die as
Speaker 2: long as they pay their access and give.
Speaker 3: Their farthings and leaves to the king.
Speaker 2: But no, we got to have this collective identity thanks
Speaker 2: to our betters and oh you know Dave os w
Speaker 2: EF all those places, all those crazy words.
Speaker 3: That we throw out there to say.
Speaker 2: And I don't believe that the WEF is actually anything
Speaker 2: more than just a sort of amusing collection of supervillains
Speaker 2: who just plot, who just tell you their stories out
Speaker 2: and the the thing is that they always tell their
Speaker 2: their plans about owning nothing in the fifteen minute city
Speaker 2: and you know, eating the bugs living in the pods.
Speaker 2: They always say these plans before they actually have James
Speaker 2: Bond strapped into the laser castration machine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right now.
Speaker 2: The thing about it, Yeah, you're supposed to reveal all
Speaker 2: that stuff when you got the guy where you want
Speaker 2: them and then you tell But no, they're out there
Speaker 2: in the in the open telling us everything. In rickchhet
Speaker 2: At the other day we were having a conversation about
Speaker 2: fifteen minut cities. I know Rob lives in one, I
Speaker 2: practically do. And the reason that I wanted to push
Speaker 2: back against people throwing fifteen minute cities out there.
Speaker 3: Maybe we talked about this before, I can't remember. It
Speaker 3: has to do with that. It's not a bad idea.
Speaker 2: It really isn't to design places where you can get
Speaker 2: around and you can walk, and you can get your
Speaker 2: groceries and you can go to a cafe in a
Speaker 2: bar drug store within fifteen minutes not having to get
Speaker 2: in your car. And the problem is a twofold one.
Speaker 2: They use it as a means to bash the paradigm
Speaker 2: that a lot of people have happily adapted to, which
Speaker 2: is the suburbs. People are completely content to live in
Speaker 2: the suburbs for a variety of reasons. And two, you
Speaker 2: have to be very very careful that it doesn't turn
Speaker 2: into a mechanism whereby this good idea, suffused with its
Speaker 2: moral purity, becomes a way of the state extracting more
Speaker 2: resources from you by putting, you know what, you can
Speaker 2: drive out of your fifteen minute city elsewhere if you want,
Speaker 2: but you're going to pay a congestion stuff like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it bothers me.
Speaker 2: How so many things that we that in your heart
Speaker 2: and in your head you agree with stewardship of the environment. Uh,
Speaker 2: you know a end of the you know, the blight,
Speaker 2: visual blight of billboards, etc.
Speaker 3: All of these things.
Speaker 2: They've got an aspect to it that, yeah, it's good
Speaker 2: for all of us if we do this, But it
Speaker 2: becomes a dogmatic it becomes be a stocking horse for
Speaker 2: another ideology. See, it inevitably leads to the diminution of
Speaker 2: your freedom. And that's one of those crazy words that
Speaker 2: when you start throwing around, the younger generation starts to
Speaker 2: roll the Riyes, do you know what word is now
Speaker 2: making the rounds as being sort of suss to the
Speaker 2: young You guys, you have any idea? I mean, free
Speaker 2: and liberty. We know that that's what crazy people with
Speaker 2: the red hat say. What's a word that also gets
Speaker 2: their hackles up?
Speaker 3: Abundance?
Speaker 5: Abundance? Yeah, that's right. I believe that. You know, there's
Speaker 5: no abundance. It's just shortages of everything.
Speaker 3: We shouldn't have. No, well, we shouldn't have it.
Speaker 2: But first of all, we don't have abundance because we're
Speaker 2: in a post capitalist hell.
Speaker 3: But we shouldn't have abundance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's a philosophical question that they have.
Speaker 1: It's a philosophical argument, but that's it is.
Speaker 5: I mean, it is absolutely the end product of everything
Speaker 5: that we've been teaching them, which is that there's shortages
Speaker 5: so and that there's less and that the future is
Speaker 5: going to be filled with challenges like the ocean's on fire.
Speaker 2: You know what abundance means. Abundance means we turn the
Speaker 2: light switch on, there's light. It means, and when you
Speaker 2: turn the hot water on, there's hot. Well, that's what
Speaker 2: abundance means. Actually we I mean, the things that we
Speaker 2: take for granted are symbols of tremendous abundance and we need.
Speaker 1: It also means that if.
Speaker 5: You do well right, then that isn't zero sum that
Speaker 5: I could do well too. We believe that the country
Speaker 5: grows and the economy grows, and rising tidle of salt
Speaker 5: boats and they roll their eyes at that, but it
Speaker 5: is in fact, demonstrably, unquestionably quantifiably the truth.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: Well, well, Rob, we agree that is not enough. It
Speaker 2: is not enough for you and I to do well, John,
Speaker 2: you must do poorly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the libraries.
Speaker 6: Where idea, neither one other idea, James, about just trying
Speaker 6: to draw from you know, what's going on in the academy. Stuff,
Speaker 6: crazy stuff, I read. But you know, there's one big
Speaker 6: stream of thought going into conservatives asking why do we
Speaker 6: have cities at all? You know, now that we're decentralizing,
Speaker 6: now they have worked from home, now that our economy
Speaker 6: is based on the production of information, why do we
Speaker 6: why do we need cities? Why do we all need
Speaker 6: to live together in these closely compacted, dense places with
Speaker 6: expensive housing prices. And so here's here's the alternate world.
Speaker 6: And I thought You've always going to mention this, but
Speaker 6: he didn't, which was the constitution actually is great for decentralization.
Speaker 6: It's a great government for what Rob was saying, a
Speaker 6: large country with people all spread out and diverse communities.
Speaker 6: And you think about the government we have now, you
Speaker 6: think about the cities we have now that you're talking about, James,
Speaker 6: that's mass production, factory style economics and society. That's not
Speaker 6: the way things organize anymore. No, maybe that's why that's
Speaker 6: what I think, that's behind what you're talking about, James
Speaker 6: about Well, these fifteen minute cities and suburbs, that's actually
Speaker 6: a way station to going back to something that might
Speaker 6: look an organization more like the eighteenth century again, which
Speaker 6: is where Rob really wants to live.
Speaker 5: Sure in a village. The villages are the most interesting places.
Speaker 5: But I mean they're twin parts of the American experience
Speaker 5: or just these are human nature.
Speaker 1: Right on the one hand, you want space. I want
Speaker 1: my space. That's one of the things that people said
Speaker 1: when they.
Speaker 5: Left the dirty, stinking city and they went out to
Speaker 5: the suburbs the first time. I mean after about like
Speaker 5: the thirties and forties and fifties, right, and like, look
Speaker 5: at it.
Speaker 1: I had a lawn, I got a front yard, I
Speaker 1: got all this stuff, and that is incredibly powerful. That's
Speaker 1: a great thing. That's why people live.
Speaker 6: In Europe too, right, Yeah, because in Europe, the source
Speaker 6: of wealth was just having land.
Speaker 5: And that's some people didn't want to Some people wanted
Speaker 5: to be in the city. Actually when they were young,
Speaker 5: and they want to be with other young people. They
Speaker 5: wanted to be in It's kind of crazy. They were
Speaker 5: willing to put up with it. And there's these two characters.
Speaker 5: There's this you know, there's the urban dweller and then
Speaker 5: there's the suburban choice. And then there's another human person
Speaker 5: that's always there and that's the hoa head, right, that's
Speaker 5: the hoa busybody, and that is more than more I
Speaker 5: think than any other image is what people think about
Speaker 5: when they think about the sort of the progressive left,
Speaker 5: like this, these are there. They're going to walk around
Speaker 5: the neighborhood and write your note because they don't like
Speaker 5: your curtains or they don't like this, whether you put
Speaker 5: up pum or you have a planter that's not the
Speaker 5: right color. And I think that is also very human
Speaker 5: like humans like to do that, we like to boss
Speaker 5: each other around. But that is also part of this
Speaker 5: kind of like small minded, limited mentality that if you
Speaker 5: have this thing, we're all going to suffer. You look
Speaker 5: like you're having fun.
Speaker 1: That's not good. And you know, unfortunately, culturally, I.
Speaker 5: Think think we're probably on the hope, we're on the
Speaker 5: down side of that cycle, and we're coming back up
Speaker 5: to the what I think the normal American view, which is,
Speaker 5: go do you do you but as quietly as you
Speaker 5: possibly can do it, because I'm trying to get you know,
Speaker 5: some sleeves.
Speaker 6: If you're happy if Kamala Harris's president, you just don't
Speaker 6: want it to be head of the city council of
Speaker 6: your town.
Speaker 5: Well, I actually think that when Americans vote. You know,
Speaker 5: if you look at the best of the probably the
Speaker 5: most interesting, and see change. Political changes in my lifetime
Speaker 5: happened when Bill Clinton was president and the Republicans took
Speaker 5: the House and they took the Senate. And that's when
Speaker 5: we got well for reform, and that's when we got
Speaker 5: actually institutional congressional reform in a major way. I mean,
Speaker 5: it now seems like a cliche, but the Newt Gingrich's
Speaker 5: Contract with America was a radically, radically influential and successful document.
Speaker 5: And you know, people kind of like this gridlock stuff,
Speaker 5: but they also they do like sticking it to the
Speaker 5: guy at the top. And I you know, if Kamala
Speaker 5: Harris wins, which would not be surprising.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 5: I don't think that the conservative movement's dead.
Speaker 1: I don't think the conservative reforms are dead. I think
Speaker 1: they might be even invigorated.
Speaker 3: I've never before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should lose this election because then people will
Speaker 2: get really good and they'll realize that.
Speaker 3: I know, I'm kidding, I'm kidding him.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying that that it's possible.
Speaker 5: The problem with both sides is they think it's inconceivable
Speaker 5: that they're going to lose either now or in the future,
Speaker 5: and they think that once you vote for your once
Speaker 5: you voted for my guy for president, whether it's Kamala
Speaker 5: Harris or Donald Trump, if forever you're just all the
Speaker 5: things are going to be fixed and you're never going
Speaker 5: to have any trouble at all. And that's the ultimately,
Speaker 5: just go back to the Constitution. That's the problem with
Speaker 5: our interpreting the Constitution, which people think of it, interpret
Speaker 5: it only as this document that keeps them from getting
Speaker 5: what they want, when in fact, it's a document that
Speaker 5: keeps you from getting what you want. And that's kind
Speaker 5: of how it's supposed to work, right. It restricts you
Speaker 5: and not me, that's primarily what it does. So you know,
Speaker 5: we should be prepared not maybe we'll win, maybe the
Speaker 5: Conservatives will win in twenty twenty four, maybe they'll lose, but.
Speaker 1: They are going to lose elections in the future. So
Speaker 1: how do you prepare for that?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I just do know that if we have a massive
Speaker 2: attack on Israel by Iran in the next week or so,
Speaker 2: I would really be keen to know.
Speaker 3: Who's calling the shots here.
Speaker 2: Something tells me I ought to be the guy who
Speaker 2: is called the president but I'm wondering if this is
Speaker 2: going to be an opportunity for them to show count
Speaker 2: Layers is foreign policy six dimensional chest shops and have
Speaker 2: her in charge.
Speaker 3: Of what the American reaction to this is going to be.
Speaker 2: Or Biden will just get on the wrong plane again
Speaker 2: and be whisked off to someplace and we'll never see
Speaker 2: him again.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'd like a little bit more clarity at the top. Ever,
Speaker 2: it is the top of the top of the hour,
Speaker 2: end of the show. Usually we tell you right now
Speaker 2: where they're going to be meet ups around the country.
Speaker 2: But you know what, you can go and read that
Speaker 2: att You should go and read that at Ricochet along
Speaker 2: with everything else, and you should join as well, because
Speaker 2: on the member feed, where all kinds of friendships are made,
Speaker 2: in every single discussion and object of controversy and art
Speaker 2: and music and the rest of it, you'll find it there.
Speaker 2: You can hear me in my podcast The Diner, which
Speaker 2: is available on Saturday. I think we're talking about dogs
Speaker 2: and renaming streets, two vital crackling topics.
Speaker 6: You want to stop the presses, it's the same same subject,
Speaker 6: stop the presses.
Speaker 3: Oh that's another whole issue. Maybe I'll get a shit
Speaker 3: name the streets after dogs.
Speaker 2: Why didn't that occur to me? Well, you know what,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna rip it up. I'm gonna go back. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna do it the you collar me as we call it,
Speaker 2: and read the show.
Speaker 6: I can totally see you living on Poodle Street.
Speaker 2: Come on one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, yeah, I'm off.
Speaker 3: I'm really really is.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well I think they have to have more here
Speaker 2: than I actually do, so well it's better than Pug Place.
Speaker 3: Uh, John, Rob, It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2: We'll see you both next week perhaps, and we'll see
Speaker 2: everybody in the comments at Ricochet four point zero next week.
Speaker 6: Bye, guys, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Thanks John excellent as always, absolutely so.
Speaker 3: Ricochet Pea join the conversation.