Politics： Tradition and Vision ｜ Newt Gingrich ｜ EP 301 (sdk-iGSdIxA)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sdk-iGSdIxA

Imagine that we have a hierarchy of conception, such that some things we perceive and conceive of are shallow and other things are deep. And the deep things are those upon which many ideas are dependent. The deeper down you go, the more it becomes religious in some real sense. And so there’s no getting away from the religious if you think about it technically in that manner. And then if you don’t have a religious story or a religious substrate, then it seems to me that what happens is the political starts to become the substitute for that depth. Dennis Prager has a very nice formula. He says, big God, small government, big government, small God. What you have in some ways is the ferocity of the Reformation. You have the kind of attitude which was captured in A Man for All Seasons, where the son-in-law is asked, you know, would you knock down a law to get to the devil? And he says, well, of course. And he said, and then would you knock down the next law? And then when you finally end up having driven the devil all the way to Wales and he turns, what is going to stand between you and him now that you’ve knocked down all the laws? All of this is a modern religion and I think has to be dealt with. You know, that’s why I’m working on this paper on the Democratic Party’s two wings as weird and insane. The weird wing is sort of in touch with reality, but weird. The insane wing is totally out of touch with the real world and is drifting off into a never-never land in which it is quite prepared to kill people like you and me, if that’s the cost of getting to Nirvana. Hello, everyone. I have the great privilege today of speaking with one of the most remarkable political figures in the US in the last four decades, five decades, perhaps, Dr. Newton Gingrich. Speaker Newt Gingrich is chairman of Gingrich 360, a multimedia production and consulting company based in Arlington, Virginia. As former speaker of the House of Representatives, Gingrich is well known as the architect of the contract with America that led the Republican Party to victory in 1994, creating the first conservative majority in the House in 40 years. He was also a Republican candidate for president in 2012. Gingrich is a Fox News contributor, podcast host, Newt’s world and syndicated columnist. He is the author of 41 books, including 18 fiction and nonfiction New York Times bestsellers. His latest books include Beyond Biden, Rebuilding the America We Love, and Trump and the American Future, Solving the Great Problems of Our Time. Gingrich and his wife, Ambassador Kalista Gingrich, host and produce historical and public policy documentaries. Recent films include The First American and Divine Mercy, the canonization of John Paul II. Recognized internationally as an expert on world history, military issues and international affairs, Newt Gingrich is the longest serving teacher of the Joint War Fighting Course for major generals. He also teaches officers from all six services as a distinguished visiting scholar and professor at the National Defense University. In addition, Dr. Gingrich served as member of the Defense Policy Board. He was a member of the Terrorism Task Force for the Council on Foreign Relations, and he co-chaired the Task Force on United Nations Reform, a bipartisan congressional effort to modernize and improve United Nations. The Gingriches reside in McLean, Virginia, and have two daughters and two grandchildren. I thought maybe we’d start by talking about your contract with America, which was a major political initiative back in the 1990s, mid 1990s. I think it originated in a speech that Ronald Reagan gave in, I believe, 1985. I’ve been working with a variety of people recently on formulating something approximating a manifesto of conservative values, and that was something that you did essentially at a more political level with the contract with America. And so could you tell me a bit about why you did that, what your motivation was, how that worked and what came, what occurred as a consequence? Well, sure. First of all, if you are trying to be the party of change, it’s very helpful, and I think almost essential, that you outline a formula for change. It’s something Margaret Thatcher did beginning in 1975, and which I have studied a great deal. And I worked with Reagan starting in 1974, and in 1980, we had the first capital steps event, the first contract, and Reagan outlined five big ideas. And it led to, and we had all of our candidates standing on the capital steps, and it led to a surprising series of victories in the US Senate. We took control when nobody thought we would. So I had that background of having already done that. I believed, and I still believe, and I think we’ll be through this year, that when you are the party seeking change, you have to nationalize the election. There has to be a common theme, a common argument, because you have to build a wave of support bigger than individual candidates can create. And so in 94, we really were working off of that framework. I mean, the two books I always recommend to people are Clara Berlinski’s There is No Alternative, Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, and Tom Evans’ book, The Education of Ronald Reagan, His Years as a General Electric. And if you read those two books, you can almost see how the contract emerged. It is true, as one of Reagan’s biographers said, that about 70% of the contract can be found in the 1985 Reagan State of the Union. But that’s because Reagan had begun articulating the need for profound change as early as his speech for Goldwater, his national televised speech in 1964, which is still available on YouTube called A Time for Choosing, and is a remarkable speech. And then when he ran for governor in 1965, he began running, and he ran with welfare reform as one of his first topics. So the concept of, for example, being for welfare reform had a long gestation and had been dramatically accelerated by a book that Charles Murray wrote called Losing Ground, which proved pretty conclusively that government-inspired dependency is very destructive, and particularly destructive for people who are poor. So that was the background. We had a couple of very simple principles. No issue was involved that wasn’t above 70% approval. And the reason there is, if you’re a conservative in virtually every country in the world, the media will be opposed to you. And so you have to have issues that are so powerful that after they get done lying about it, you’re still above 50%. So you can’t afford to wage a campaign on a 55% issue, because by the time the media is done lying about it, you’ll be down at 40%. But if you have a 70% or 80% issue, they can’t lie enough to make the issue unacceptable. So we consciously put those together. The other thing we did that was probably unusual and people, I think, didn’t fully appreciate at the time, we did not pick up two of the issues I personally believe in, right to life and school prayer, because we knew that the New York Times and the Washington Post and others would use those issues to demagogue about the contract and to make it impossible to ever get to the other issues. We then had to get all of our members to agree to it. And the one person, the one politician at least, who understood what I was doing, was Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader of the Senate, who wrote a book in 2007 and devoted a chapter to the contract and said correctly that the greatest purpose of the contract was not just to win the election, but it was to radically change the House Republican Party. That by getting them committed to these really big changes and to a timetable of voting on all of it in the first hundred days, I guaranteed that the first majority in 40 years would be, by Washington’s standards, a radical majority. And if we had simply won elections without the contract, the lobbyists and the interest groups would have absorbed most of our members and we would have been as useless as most Congresses are. So there was a lot of conscious thought about what we were going to do, both in terms of values and in terms of actually being able to implement it. And he also understood the Reagan principle, that if you could get a 70 or 80 percent issue and you had the nerve to stay with it, that ultimately the president would have to side with you. And that’s what happened. I mean, Bill Clinton signed bill after bill after bill that normally no Liberal Democrat would have signed. But because he wanted to get re-elected, he got in the habit of working with us, even though it infuriated Liberal Democrats. And the result was we got welfare reform, the largest capital gains tax cut in history, food and drug administration reform, telecommunications reform, Medicare reform in an election year, which was amazing. And ultimately we produced four consecutive balanced budgets, the only four balanced budgets consecutive in my lifetime. What were the main platforms that emerged out of the Contract for America? The idea that we wanted to move people from dependency to work. We wanted to change the nature of the welfare system so that when you went to a welfare office, instead of having a clerk who tried to maximize your dependency, we turned them into employment offices. We were deeply affected by a firm called America Works, which interestingly Mario Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, had helped create. And it was a very effective entrepreneurial work-oriented system, still exists, designed to take the hardcore unemployed and train them into being able to hold down a job. So I would say welfare reform is far and away our biggest success. The second one was, in a sense, ironically, we campaigned on a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget. We got 306 votes in the House, which was enough for a constitutional reform. We fell one vote short in the Senate, so it didn’t pass. But we realized if you had 306 votes in favor of a balanced budget, and if you had 66 votes in favor of a balanced budget in the Senate, you could pretend that you had passed it and just go ahead and pass a balanced budget. And so that decision, which was entirely an act of will on the part of the House Republican leadership, led to a project which within four years had balanced the federal budget, when almost no one thought it was possible. We also had very strong provisions about applying to the Congress every law which applies to small business. We had a provision for, you know, this is really ironic, the House in its entire history for over 200 years had never had an audit. They spent money every year, members spent money every year, and they had no capacity to be audited. And so part of what we committed to was creating an annual audit, which still exists to this day. The tax cut we campaigned on, which included eliminating any capital gains tax on your home, as long as you reinvested the money in another home. And which had the largest cut in the actual capital gains tax in American history, was just extraordinary in launching a generation of economic growth. And finally, we had very strong provisions on deregulation because we felt that the government bureaucracies were killing our economic growth. And the result was we had literally, I think, a decade of entrepreneurial and small business activity that would not have occurred without the contract and without the Republican majority. The midterms are upon us and it’s time for some real change. Inflation isn’t going away, and if the current administration keeps handing out free checks, Americans won’t just be hurting, they’ll be fighting to survive. The typical investment portfolio of 60-40 stocks and bonds is down by 34%. It’s worst drop of the century. Millions of Americans are taking a hit. What can we do to set things right? You could invest in assets that aren’t dragged down by the stock market, like fine art with Masterworks. Fine art is so disconnected from stocks that even as the 60-40 portfolio keeps losing, fine art is selling for 26% more than it was last year. Just recently, Masterworks sold a painting for a 21.5% net return to their investors. Go to Masterworks.com and use promo code JBP to sign up for Masterworks and skip their waitlist. That’s Masterworks.com promo code JBP or click the link in the description. See important disclosures at Masterworks.com slash CD. So what do you think the consequences were of the welfare reform provisions that you introduced? Well, I mean, we know from studies that getting people in the habit of going to work, getting them into their first job, having them learn that it’s okay to get up on Monday and go do something, having them begin to realize that if they worked hard, they could actually get a better job. So if you see it as a motion picture and not a snapshot, it isn’t just the first job, but the first job leads to a second job and a third job. And I think the net, there’s no question the net result was, because there have been lots of studies, the net result was millions of people who left dependency, got a job, the largest number of children taken out of poverty because the incomes of their families went up in American history, and it was wildly successful, but it went straight against the left, which hated the idea of having a work ethic and getting people out of dependency. I mean, there was just this almost rabid feeling. One of the Democratic leaders, and then we split the Democrats 50-50 because it was so popular that half of them voted with us to pass it and Bill Clinton signed it, but the ones who didn’t vote for it were from very liberal districts. And one of them basically said, this was like the Nazis, they’re coming for your children, they’re going to starve children. The language was unbelievably hostile and personal and vicious. And there’s something on the left that loves dependency and hates work. It’s a very strange phenomenon, and I think probably goes back to the 19th century rejection of industrialization. So your crew ran four balanced budgets as well, and so let everybody who’s listening know what the consequence of a balanced budget is, and then more importantly, what the consequence of an unbalanced budget is, and what the cumulative consequence is that, especially right now. Well, actually, I’ve been deeply shaped by studying British budget policy in the 19th century and the recovery from the scale of debt in the Napoleonic Wars and the way in which the British worked very hard to lower taxes, increase economic growth, and were very frugal. Gladstone as prime minister would reuse all the message boxes as a way of saving money, which is partly symbolic and partly real. And so I approached this whole issue of the budget from the standpoint, and I helped write our first budget of hope and opportunity when I was a freshman in 1979, as an alternative to Democrats, and we were making a couple of arguments. One is that a lower tax system creates a lot more jobs, that those extra jobs create a lot more revenue for the government, because you have more people at work earning more money, more people getting profits earning more money. Second, that the best social policy, as Ronald Reagan said, was a job, and therefore having a robust economy was a major goal. And that in the long run, you could have much lower interest rates and much greater capital available to be invested if you had a balanced budget. And that we were very anti-inflation and very much for lower interest rates, because we wanted to have a very robust private sector that was rapidly creating new technologies, new jobs, new opportunities. And if you think back to that period, it was at the very beginning of the explosion of the internet, of cell phones, of a whole range of technologies. So we were very interested in accelerating technological change, and that’s part of why we emphasized a dramatic lowering of the capital gains tax, because we wanted to make it easy to liberate capital to move to new companies and new opportunities and new ideas. Ironically, when we balanced the budget for four straight years, Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve and actually reported publicly in a congressional hearing that they had a working group trying to figure out that the projection was, in 2009, we would pay off the federal debt. And they weren’t sure how they were going to technically manage the money supply if they had no U.S. debt. It was a situation we had not seen since 1837. And nobody predicted, I mean, nobody predicted we’d be a majority in 94. Nobody predicted we could balance the budget in four years and then keep it balanced. And it was really interesting. But part of the key to the balanced budget was it forced you to make choices, and it forced you to modernize the system. So you couldn’t afford the, you know, when you’re willing to run deficits, everything sloppy becomes acceptable, because after all, it’s all just money, and nobody cares. And so you end up with huge levels of corruption. It’s an estimated $20 billion in theft in the California unemployment compensation last year just by itself. You end up with huge volumes of waste. The Pentagon is an embarrassment. It is so bureaucratic and so wasteful. You end up with all sorts of sloppy projects, because politicians say, look, since the budget’s going to be in deficit anyway, why can’t I have my half billion dollars? And you have no yardstick. There’s no way to control the system. And so we wanted to establish a genuinely controlled government that had to constantly improve itself. And I had been a student of both Edwards Deming, the father of the Quality Movement, and Peter Drucker, the best management writer of the 20th century. So I really brought a very management-intense approach to thinking about the federal government. And I wanted the pressure of the balanced budget to force us into the kind of reforms we needed. When were the projections being made that the debt would be paid off by 2009? 1999 and 2000? Right, right. So that was at the end of the internet boom. That was a remarkable decade in the 1990s of American economic expansion. Exactly what we had predicted. We said, you’re going to get dramatically more growth. That will produce revenue. And if you control spending, for example, welfare reform led to such a dramatic drop in the number of people taking money from the government and those people now working and paying money as taxpayers, that you take both sides of that equation. The government’s paying out less and it’s getting in more. So for almost every state, and almost every state, welfare reform was a huge advantage to their fiscal budget. So why did the balanced budget vote fail? I know it was only by one vote. Why were people opposed to it? You mentioned a little earlier about the Democrat objection to work. Look, first of all, there are people who like big government. I mean, look at the Biden administration. Look at Bernie Sanders. I mean, they genuinely sincerely like big government. Second, there were people who didn’t want to get in a straightjacket. They were thinking, oh my God, what if we get into a crisis and now we’re constrained? Well, my view, I mean, first of all, you always have an escape valve. So if you go to war or if there’s a gigantic emergency, you can respond to it. But as a general principle, in the absence of war and emergency, I think having a balanced budget requirements is good. But there were people who simply wanted to avoid that kind of control. OK, so now, given that things worked so well on the economic and the social front in the 1990s, I lived in the United States during the 1990s, and it was quite a remarkable boom period. Very, very optimistic and maybe a period unlike any that has been since, particularly now. Now, given the massive success of that program, why did Republicans and Democrats alike relapse in the aftermath? Because we went right back to huge deficits and a growing and a spiraling debt, even with that object lesson. So why did people fail to learn? And why more particularly was that also true of Republican administrations? Well, look, I don’t think either George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush had a clue about Reaganism and about modern conservatism. I think they were just managers, and they managed the system as it existed. I mean, when George W. Bush announced he was going to work with Teddy Kennedy on education reform, you knew it was an absurdity. I mean, Teddy Kennedy was the chief leader for the teachers unions. There wasn’t going to be any education reform. They were just going to spend a lot more money and accomplish nothing. And I think that there’s a wing of the Republican Party, which is a managerial wing. It likes things to be tidy. It doesn’t like fights. Well, if you’re going to actually control the government, it is a struggle because the government doesn’t want to be controlled. So if you’re going to actually, for example, examine how we managed to build the F-35 as a bad airplane at such enormous cost, you’re going to have every lobbyist who helped build the plane petitioning the Congress to avoid the investigation. And so you end up in a situation. I once said that the future has publicists, but the past has prison guards. And those prison guards are mostly lobbyists. And they do everything they can to stop the future. I’ll give you an example. I’ve done a lot of stuff. I founded the Center for Health Transformation. I’ve done a lot of work on health reform. So somebody built a computer model that could evaluate your eyes and could we currently have a system where every year you have to get your eyes checked if you need, for example, a prescription for contact lenses. Well, the recommendation actually, technically, is you ought to get your eyes examined every other year. But of course, if you’re an optometrist or an ophthalmologist, you like a provision that requires annually because that doubles the income. So this company comes along and actually has figured out you can have a home application using your laptop or your iPad. And it is literally technically as good as going in. So one year you’d go in and the other year you’d give it to yourself. In state after state, the optometrist and the ophthalmologist lobbied to get the state to outlaw the new technology in order to protect their ability. Now, this is something that Adam Smith wrote about in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, that any gathering of businessmen is a conspiracy against the consumer. And so all of these interest groups like a sloppy, influence-ridden, bureaucratic and political structure, and they don’t particularly want a lean, aggressive, competitive environment. Yeah, you said that, okay, so you talked about this managerial tendency, but also the proclivity, let’s say, to shy away from a fight. The other thing that I see happening on the conservative front, I would say, is that the left is capable of offering young people something approximating. You might call it a utopian vision. And so there’s a psychologist, Jean Piaget, talked about a late stage in cognitive development among young people, was the latest in his stages, in the stages that he laid out in his stage theory developmental account of human, let’s say, cognitive progress. He called the late adolescent stage messianic. He believed that that was a time, and it wasn’t the case for all young people, but for many, where moving from their group affiliation, say their peer group, to full independence required something like the abiding by a set of universal principles. And so there’s a search for universal principles that can be a guideline for life, and that would be part of high-end enculturation. And I think the left has been particularly good in capitalizing on that by making the case, for example, that if you’re concerned about climate change, then you’re serving the best long-term interests of the planet, that you’re engaged in some noble goal that’s outside of yourself. And conservatives have been, I would say, spectacularly bad at offering that sort of alternative to young people, a vision. And I think if you look at what predicts conservative political belief temperamentally compared to liberal or left political belief, the biggest predictor is creativity, is the trait openness. And so open people tend to be more liberal in their political preoccupations, and open people are actually more visionary in the technical sense. They’re more imaginative. And then you might combine that with the fact that conservatives tend to stand for traditional values. And it’s not that easy to articulate a vision that’s based on traditional values, because a vision tends to be future-oriented. And so one of the things that strikes me about your contract with America, and the work Reagan did, and the work that Thatcher did, was that it was visionary in some real sense. And then that seemed to evaporate in the aftermath of that era, and hasn’t been replaced by anything on the conservative side since. And I’ve spoken to conservatives all over the world, and to centrist liberals as well, and the degree to which they’re starving for a forward-looking vision can hardly be overestimated. So you managed this, and what made your era different, and the people that you worked with, and why were you able to communicate it in a manner that was effective enough to have it adopted by such a wide swath of people? You know, without being presumptuous, you could make an argument that the three most disruptive Republicans of modern times were Reagan, Trump, and me. And that all three of us are outside the norm for the Republican Party. The Republican Party norm is to raise a lot of money, hire really good staff, hope somebody near you is thinking, and actually to almost deride the idea of visionary language and all that fancified stuff. This is, by the way, an enormous problem in the American military. There was a point around 2004 or 2005 where John Petraeus called me from Iraq, and he said I really had to get to know a guy named Nagel, N-A-G-L, who was at that time an Army Major, and who had written a brilliant book called Eating Soup with a Knife, which is actually a phrase from Lawrence of Arabia, who said that fighting a guerrilla war is like eating soup with a knife. It’s very, very difficult. So I read Nagel’s book, I called Nagel and talked to him, and the book is a scathing, unending example of the Army’s absolute inability to think in Vietnam. I mean, it’s just astonishing how bad the US Army’s thought processes were in Vietnam. And I called Nagel and I said, hasn’t this really hurt your career? And he said, no, nobody in the Army reads. Well, you know, I did some work with the US Naval Academy in Maryland, and we were looking at personality factors that predict military ranking and to some degree academic success, and it was pretty clear from that investigation that general cognitive ability was a predictor, like it is for most activities that are complex, but the next most powerful predictor, and this isn’t that surprising, was trait conscientiousness, and that’s basically orderliness and industriousness. Certainly openness, which is the creativity dimension, predicted not at all. Now, it also doesn’t predict standard university grades, by the way. You were talking a little bit earlier about the managerial proclivity of the run of the mill Republican and also about the fact that you and Trump and Reagan were all outsiders. It seems to me that in managed bureaucracies, that openness is a detriment to progress from the bottom up. When you’re in the bottom ranks, what really predicts your success is conscientiousness, dutifulness, the ability to run out an algorithm that’s already pre-established. And if you’re open and creative at the bottom rungs of an organization like that, all you’re going to do is cause trouble. Now, the problem with that is that as people progress through the ranks, all the people who are creative get winnowed out. They might be absolutely vital at the highest levels of organizations, but there are a tremendous amount of trouble at the bottom. And that, combined with that intrinsic skepticism that you described among the, let’s say, run of the mill Republican acolytes, means that vision and ideas are in very short supply. It’s a very difficult thing to overcome because, as I said, the visionary types are going to… There’s this great moment in the 19th century where the Peel decides that he cannot refute the argument of the people who want to change the corn laws and allow the price of corn to drop dramatically to feed the industrial working class. And in the middle of the debate, he turns to his deputy and says, you have to answer this, I can’t, I think they’re right. Peel then splits the Conservative Party because the Conservative Party base is farmers who are growing wheat, which was what they meant by corn, who really wanted these tariffs to protect their price. So Peel takes with him all of the great, bright members of the conservative government. And this is why Gladstone ends up as a liberal. The only person left who is articulate is a half Jew who had been considered a fop, which was a term of derision, who had worn velvet coats, had toured Europe with his mistress and her husband, and had written novels. Now, in the absence of Peel splitting the Conservative Party, Disraeli would never have emerged. And yet, he was the only articulate person on the floor of the House of Commons who could defend the Conservatives. And as a result, all of these wheat farmers, who would normally have disdained him, decided he was their leader. Now, you only need a handful of visionaries. We didn’t need seven Reagans. You know, one Reagan was enough. The tragedy was, Reagan picked a managerial personality from the anti-Reagan wing of the party to be vice president. And that’s how you end up with George H.W. Bush, who never understood Reaganism, promptly broke his word about raising taxes, and had no notion of the degree to which Reagan had fused together social conservatives and economic conservatives and nationalist anti-Soviet conservatives. Then, when Bush leaves, and frankly, my standing up to Bush on tax increases was a key moment in creating the credibility that led to the success of 94, because I proved to the average Republican grassroots person there was somebody there who actually cared enough to fight. And we actually had more votes in the House Republican Conference than Bush did. And at that point, the die was cast for the future. But in the process, I ultimately infuriated the Bush wing of the party. And as soon as they could get away from what I had, and basically what I was doing was Reaganism. So as soon as they could get away from what I was doing, they reverted to the norm. And the norm is frankly a pretty dull managerial party. This doesn’t have any sense of what, you know. H.L. Mencken once wrote of the Harding administration that it was like an army of ants crossing the desert, which when it came upon an idea, wondered what it was, and trampled it to death trying to study it, and then resumed its march across the desert. Well, that described a large wing of the Republican party. Now, the difference is, on the left you have lots of vision and fanaticism, but they tend to be out of touch with reality. I tell people the reason the left can’t deal with violence, whether it’s criminals, terrorists, or Russia, is that they saw the Lion King movie and thought it was a documentary, and they think that lions and zebras actually sing and dance together. And we cannot convince them that lions eat zebras. So while they have a vision, it’s insane. I’m actually working on a paper that there are two wings of the modern Democratic party, a weird wing and an insane wing. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, that does seem to be that paradox that you just described with the visionary Democrats who are out of touch with reality and the managerial Republicans who are out of touch with vision does seem to be a logical consequence of the, what would you say, the excessive control that people at different temperamental extremes might have of both parties because the stereotypical personality who’s going to lean to the left on the pathological side is someone who’s extraordinarily visionary but completely impractical. And then on the right, you’re going to have someone who’s so practical that they can’t shift direction when it’s necessary. And I would say those are stable states in some sense on both sides. You talked about outsiders like Reagan and yourself, and you put Trump in that category too. Those are people who come along, I suppose, now and then and shake up the Republican party. Why would you put Trump in the same categorical domain in that sense as Reagan and yourself? Well, because he had actually a pretty coherent vision. He really did want to make America great again. He really did believe in a pretty sophisticated America first foreign policy. He was really prepared to take on the bureaucracies and shake them up. I mean, part of what defines the entire process with Donald Trump is that the establishment, whether it’s the bureaucracy or it’s the news media or it’s the FBI or it’s the billionaire elites in New York, they all understood that he was their mortal enemy, that if they didn’t go after him every single day and every single way, that he would destroy their world. And that’s what he was doing. I mean, there’s no question in my mind he was waging war on a corrupt establishment, and the establishment was fighting back. I mean, I think he was the most disruptive person since Andrew Jackson in terms of actually taking the establishment head on and being prepared to violate all of its norms. And I guess I’m curious too. I haven’t been able to figure out for a very long time why conservatives have been unable to be attractive to minorities, especially immigrants, because by and large immigrants to Canada and the US are much more conservative than the population itself. And so why do you think the Republicans have been historically unable to make the connection with minority voters? Is it the policy on immigration, do you think, or the notion that they’re a status quo party? Well, I think first of all that historically they were the status quo party, and I think that immigrants are basically told you’re supposed to be a liberal Democrat. What’s happened is as liberal Democrat has turned into radical Democrat, they’ve said, that’s not me. And I think that you’re seeing, this has been a gradual steady drift in the right direction, and I think you’re seeing, I think Bush actually got up to 44% of the Latino vote in 2004. And then we backslid for a little while, and now we’re back again. And I suspect that this year and in 2024, we’ll actually carry a majority of Latinos. And from the standpoint of the Democrats, that’s the beginning of the end. If they lose working class whites and they lose Latinos, they can’t be competitive. It’s so interesting to see too, isn’t it, that as the Democrats beat the oppression drum and claim to be standing up for the victimized in this remarkably moral manner, that they’re in fact alienating exactly the people that they claim to support. First of all, the working class, because they did a cataclysmic job of alienating the working class, especially in the Clinton campaign, it was something stunning to watch. And now exactly the same thing is happening on the minority front. And so the very people whose tender mercies are supposed to be being targeted by this victimization narrative are the people who, as soon as they understand it, do everything they possibly can to reject it. But I think that’s happening in part because among the graduate school educated elites, you’re really dealing with a secular religion rather than a political movement. And therefore you have all of the fervor and intensity and blindness of a religious movement. So they have to assume that these other people are just wrong. They can’t hear them because the messages being sent to them by minorities and by working class whites are messages which are heresy given their secular religion. And I think that that’s at the heart of this. That’s why somebody like Bill Gates say recently that it’s really good we have these really high prices for fossil fuels because that’s really going to lead people to understand how important greenism is. Well, if you’re a family that’s going to have an electric blackout this winter or you’re somebody who can’t afford to buy heating oil, you somehow think a billionaire telling you how good it is for you to be in pain is probably pretty stupid. Yeah, well, you know, the Deputy Prime Minister in Canada, Christia Freeland, said exactly the same thing about high gas prices in Canada at the pump. It’s like it’s good for people to pay a little bit more when they’re filling up their car because it helps them understand just how serious the climate crisis is. You describe this as a secular religious movement on the left. What do you think the elements of that secular religious movement are? And I’m going to put another codicil on that question too. So there’s a famous gospel dictum, obviously, that you render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. And one question that arises as a consequence of that is what happens if you don’t render unto God what is God’s? And it looks to me like what happens is that the sacred collapses into the political such that the political becomes sacred for those who are a-religious. It’s inevitable. And I’ve been thinking about this from a psychological perspective. So if you think about, if you imagine that we have a hierarchy of conception such that some things we perceive and conceive of are shallow and other things are deep, and the deep things are those upon which many ideas are dependent. So constitutional axioms, for example, in that manner would be deep. And the self-evident presuppositions upon which the constitutional axioms are predicated would even be deeper. The deeper down you go, the more it becomes religious in some real sense. And there’s no getting away from depth in that manner, because without that hierarchy of depth, you have a kind of incoherence at best. And so there’s no getting away from the religious if you think about it technically in that manner. And then if you don’t have a religious story or a religious substrate, then it seems to me that what happens is the political starts to become the substitute for that depth. And then we get into a situation where we can’t even talk about political things anymore because it becomes taboo. And that seems to be part of this secularized religion that’s part of what? It’s part of woke activism. It’s part of the insistence that human beings are a cancer on the planet and destroying it. It’s part of this insane insistence on climate remediation before everything else, including providing food and shelter and energy to the poor. And that seems to be what’s being rejected en masse by the working class and also now increasingly by minority voters. Well, I mean, Dennis Prager has a very nice formula. He says, big God, small government, big government, small God. In a way, when I described… Oh, yes, I haven’t heard him say that. When I described big government socialism in my most recent book, I was trying to get at this notion. What you have in some ways is the ferocity of the Reformation. You have the kind of attitude which was captured in A Man for All Seasons where the son-in-law is asked, you know, would you knock down a law to get to the devil? And he says, well, of course. And he said, and then would you knock down the next law? And then when you finally end up having driven the devil all the way to Wales and he turns, what is going to stand between you and him now that you’ve knocked down all the laws? And I think what you have on the left is the ferocity of the Reformation, the ferocity of the French Revolution at its peak. Clifton and I visited the cemetery in Paris where the Marquis de Lafayette is buried. And it was a cemetery. He personally was not harmed by the revolution, but his wife’s relatives were all aristocrats and they were all guillotined. And they were buried in that cemetery. And so she asked that he and she be buried there. It’s also the cemetery in which the Catholic nuns were buried who had gone singing to the guillotine because they refused to give up Christ and they were therefore had to be guillotined. It’s the ferocity of Leninism, which annihilated much of the social structure of Tsarist Russia. It’s the ferocity of Maoism, which annihilated much of the structure, the Confucian structure of China. Well, that ferocity is what leads people to say that we ought to have transgenderism for three-year-olds. We ought to make sure that we have black dormitories in the name of anti-racism, that we ought to make sure that white males don’t get hired for anything because they’re clearly the source of all of our problems, that we ought to condemn Christopher Columbus for having discovered the New World because somehow he eliminated the purity of Native Americans, which requires a stunningly ahistorical understanding of Native Americans. All of this is a modern religion and I think has to be dealt with. That’s why I’m working on this paper on the Democratic Party’s two wings as weird and insane. The weird wing is sort of in touch with reality, but weird. The insane wing is totally out of touch with the real world and is drifting off into a never-never land in which it is quite prepared to kill people like you and me, if that’s the cost, of getting to Nirvana. Yeah, well this is the thing that strikes me. I was just in Europe for several months touring through the UK and through Holland and Finland and Germany and Jerusalem, all sorts of places. It was very interesting to be in Berlin because of course the Germans as well as the people in the UK, it looks like they’re going to be in for an unbelievably harsh winter. I mean there are estimates in the UK that up to 40% of small businesses now face the risk of bankruptcy. And even The Guardian, that horrible left-wing rag, published an article about two weeks ago, which was actually a pretty good article all things considered, pointing out that because of the climate of the UK, that if people aren’t able to heat their houses up to a reasonable temperature, which might be the temperature that drives out damp, that the houses start to develop black mold. Of course black mold destroys houses structurally, but worse than that it produces airborne toxins that damage the respiratory systems, particularly of children. And so The Guardian pointed out that one of the unintended consequences, let’s say, of the energy crisis is that perhaps millions of British children are going to develop permanent respiratory problems, as well as compromising the structural integrity of a good chunk of the US or of the UK real estate market. And all of that insanity on the energy front appears to me to be driven, and the Conservatives are responsible for this in large part, by these appallingly moralistic, say, net-zero policies that have as one of their immediate consequences the impoverishment of those who are already struggling. And so it looks to me that the left is perfectly willing to sacrifice the poor, which are hypothetically the people that they are standing for, in order to, well, let’s say, to not save the planet. We’re going to get the worst of both worlds. Say, we’re going to throw a couple of billion people into poverty, including a bunch of people in Europe. We’re going to make the environmental crisis such as it is much, much worse. And we’re going to make the environmental crisis much, much worse by doing so. And so this is a stunning set of affairs as far as I’m concerned. And I can’t understand, for example, why people like Boris Johnson in the UK marched so forthrightly into the Maw with these idiot net-zero policies, with no evidence whatsoever that the crisis that they were designed to prohibit or to forestall actually existed, and at the expense of Conservative principles, and at the expense of the poor. It’s like, what’s going on in the Conservative side there? I mean, you know the UK government at the moment is imploding mostly under the weight of the aftermath of these crazy net-zero policies and the economic havoc they’re wreaking. So why do you think the Conservatives there have abandoned their principles to such a stunning degree and are following this crazy left-wing utopian scheme? I think the combination of the applause of the media and the applause of the elites going to the right cocktail party, to be surrounded by people who pack you in the back and tell you what a heroic figure you are. I always, you know, I try to tell people that you can put eggs in a freezer and they will get hard. But that doesn’t mean they’re boiled eggs. And if I can’t get you to understand that to get a boiled egg you have to put it in hot water, then I can’t deal with you because you’re crazy. And it’s not an ideological problem. It’s an insanity. It’s a mental health problem. And what you have is a worldwide elite, sort of the Davos generation, of people who are suffering mental illness. And if you just understand, this is an extraordinary, it’s like the flagellante in the Middle Ages who went around from city to city beating themselves on their back with whips in order to atone for their sins. You know, it was a very widespread movement for a very brief period and then people realized it was really stupid. What you have now is the ultimate catharsis of the insanity, for example, of thinking that a teenager from Sweden is somehow with no real knowledge of science, no real understanding of history, and no real thoughts to consequence, somehow going to be the fact that she’s now blessed keeping open the German nuclear power plants. And that that somehow has meaning, tells you how truly sick the system is. Yeah, well, I’ve thought for 15 years that we were living in the fantasy of a delusional 13-year-old girl. And that was long before Greta Thunberg hit the press. And to see world leaders kowtow to her as if she’s an oracle is something quite stunning to behold. There’s something truly archetypal about that, that worship of something like irracular feminine innocence. It’s something like that. And it really is a form of delusional insanity. So it’s always been fascinating to me, you know, when Churchill goes on the Omderman campaign in 1898, he writes a book about the River War, which is, my wife actually got me an original copy, which is one of my real treasures. And he praises Kitchener, thinking that this will lead General Kitchener to be pleased with Churchill. Well, Kitchener’s reaction was, who in the hell is some young lieutenant to render any judgment on my generalship? He doesn’t know enough to render judgment. And even if it’s positive judgment, it is stupid for him to have rendered it. Now, this was a great shock to Churchill, who thought that somehow writing well of Kitchener would improve his standing, only to discover that in fact, Kitchener did not think it was appropriate for him to render judgment because he didn’t have any judgment as a lieutenant. And that’s my reaction. We’ve been through two generations in which parents have thought that teenagers should like them and have reshaped their policies. There’s a great line that Dr. Ben Carson, the first time I heard him speak, and he spoke at a prayer breakfast, he was marvelous. He got up, as you know, he’s African American, and he got up and he started by describing a series of things about your brain. And he stopped and he said, no, nobody in this audience understands anything I just said, because you have not studied to be a neurosurgeon. And it’s a function of learned knowledge. And then he started talking about how he got there. And he said his mother was a single mother, and she was raising he and his brother. And she said to them, if you don’t both get A’s, straight A’s, the television goes up in the closet until the next grading period. And he says, people will say to him, how could your mother have done that? And he said, well, you know, she thought she was the parent. And we went through two generations now where the parents thought that they needed the approval of their children. It’s led us to fentanyl. It’s led us to a we have an intern at Game of 360 who’s working on a really interesting question. Given that we lost fifty five thousand people in the Vietnam War over eight years and we have a wall that’s a little over five hundred feet long. If you had a wall for the last decade of drug overdoses next to the wall for Vietnam, how long would it be? It turns out it’s about one point one miles. That’s how many that’s how many Americans we’ve lost to drugs in a decade without anybody having gotten enraged. Anybody having said enough of this, anybody having come down for a ruthless, intense anti-drug policy. We’ve lost over a million people in a decade. So on on the elite side, let’s say on the left, you’re you’re characterizing the typical adherent of the woke enterprise on the left as highly educated in the in the technical sense. Products of higher education on the liberal arts front or what passes for it now. And so that is a form of intellectual privilege. And you might say that along with that privileged position comes a fair bit of existential guilt, which is something like I have all this privilege, but I really haven’t earned it, which is, of course, the accusation that the radical left doles out in no small amount continually with regard to Western culture as a whole. But you could say it really does typify the typical liberal art elite type, who’s then guilty for that underprivileged and is driven to atone in some real sense. And maybe that’s because as far as I can tell, that all that privilege that is acquired through what passes for education isn’t being put to the proper higher order purpose. And so is accompanied by a tremendous amount of guilt. And that’s part of the religious issue here. So that the guilt is looking for expiation constantly. Thomas Wolff’s essay on radical chic taking apart a cocktail party at Leonard Bernstein’s penthouse, which was raising money for the poor in which wolf focuses in on the Filipina maids who are serving the champagne to the rich people who are there out of no blessing. And so that’s part of the religious issue here. And I think that’s where the book of St. Oblige is one of the most devastating insights. And this, of course, is written in the 70s. But what you’ve had is the emergence of the world’s first mass aristocracy, people so well off, they don’t have to do anything. They don’t have to know anything. So what they know is trivial, shallow and has no relationship to wisdom. It’s a world in which no fact matters, no taste matters. There is no standard. And you can pretend to be something by having read three totally irrelevant books and seen five totally irrelevant movies. And therefore, you’re clever and cleverness has replaced wisdom. And you, of course, are superior to all of these people. One of the reasons that the elites dislike Trump so much is that Trump talks like a blue collar worker. I always tell people there’s a movie that Mark Wahlberg is in about the guy in Philadelphia who tried out for the Eagles and ended up being accepted, actually played for three or four years with the Eagles. And if you see the movie, the opening scenes are in a South Philadelphia bar. And they talk exactly like Donald Trump. And if you are a Yale, Princeton, Harvard elitist, and there’s a terrific book by Charlie Murray called Coming Apart, in which he goes through and analyzes by zip code and says that people from elite universities marry people from elite universities and live in zip codes with people from elite universities. And I used to tell reporters in 2016, the reason you don’t understand Trump is that The Apprentice was not on PBS shortly after Downton Abbey. And therefore, you never saw it. And you had no idea that this guy had done television for 13 years. And of course, to have actually watched The Apprentice, if you were working for the Post or the Times, would have been to risk your status. Because as a snob, you couldn’t watch that kind of so-called reality TV. And I think that’s a significant part of where we are. The intellectual left, the dominant wing of the Democratic Party, has to believe in nonsense because it’s what it believes in. And so it goes around prattling nonsense. You know, releasing murderers is a good policy. Having no bail is really clever. And then you’re shocked to discover that when you release murderers, you send a signal that being violent is okay. And then you find out that the average person doesn’t think it’s very clever to be mugged, raped, or attacked or carjacked by people you let back out on the street. And that’s part of the great crisis of American society today. To say that the entire historic tradition of male and female, the entire story coming out of Genesis of God creating man and then creating woman, the entire process biologically, which seems to be relatively common as it relates to human beings for several hundred thousand or million years, is actually phony. And you get to reinvent yourself. So you have replaced God. And instead of trying to accommodate God’s will, you will now reshape yourself and be who you want to be. And that will somehow make you happy, even if it makes you miserable. Yeah, well, God’s self-active self-naming to Moses in the desert is something approximating. I am that I am, or I will be what I will be. And it’s very difficult for me not to see a direct analogy between that and the claim that identity is subjectively defined. I am that I am. And that’s something like the attribution of omniscience and omnipresence and omnipotence to the subjective self. It’s even worse than that in some sense, because the subjective self there that’s being elevated, which is something like what I feel I am, seems to me to be technically indistinguishable from whim. So because you could imagine that you could regard yourself properly in a selfish sense. And by properly, I mean you would regard yourself as an entity that actually propagates itself across time. And so you’re bound by fealty to yourself not to do spectacularly stupid things in the present, even though they might feel good if they would compromise you tomorrow or next week or next month or next year. Right. You have to view yourself as an iterating game. And this notion that identity is somehow subjectively defined and that that subjectivity can be pinned down to the moment couldn’t possibly be a claim that’s more preposterous and immature. Now, I told the Senate in Canada when Canada passed Bill C-16, which was the pronoun law that every idiot country in the world seems to be jumping on now and passing, that the consequence of confusing people about the difference between men and women would be the production of a psychogenic epidemic. Because I knew I knew that young adolescent girls in particular are prone to, well, we’ve seen like three epidemics in my lifetime, bulimia, anorexia and cutting. And it was always adolescent girls. And I think there’s psychological reason for assuming that the distinction between male and female is the most basic cognitive category. It’s the deepest cognitive category. It’s the most profound. Might be the most sacred in that sense. And then if you throw uncertainty into that, you imagine that there’s a hierarchy of psychological instability. And there are people who are barely clinging to the edge. And there’s lots of them, just like they cling economically. If you add uncertainty into the conceptual hierarchy, you make marginal people, you drop marginal people into the realm of insanity. And so I felt that for every one trans child that we hypothetically saved, we’d probably doom a thousand. And that seems to have played itself out with near perfect accuracy over the last six years. And there is some unbelievable narcissism and self aggrandizement in that proposition that you can define your identity subjectively by whim at any moment. And that everyone else has to abide by that as if it’s incontrovertible fact. Well, you know, I mean, first of all, you get to shift who you are. And that’s that whole process of your definition at three may be different than your definition at five, which may be different than your definition at seven. But we’re supposed to take you seriously at this instant if that’s who you have defined yourself as this evening or today. Secondly, I think it is it is at the heart of the Ten Commandments that you shall have no other God before me. And what we’ve now said is, oh, no, you are your own God. You are therefore you are therefore by definition in front of God because you get to redefine whatever you want to redefine. Well, once you get into that kind of relativism, you have everything begin to disintegrate. Because there is there is no framework of reference. You can cling to it. Ironically, there are 34 languages that have different declensions based on sex. So you have to ask yourself how in Spanish or French, for example, are you going to deal with a relativistic multi sex, multigender environment when the language in fact assumes to. Yeah, well, it seems to have something to do with this disintegration of the intermediary hierarchy. So one of the things Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, said back near the end of the Second World War was that while he said two things that were quite striking, one was that the biggest threat that was going to confront us in the future would be something like mass psychological instability rather than, let’s say, material want and privation per se. And he also pointed out that the logical conclusion of the Protestant Revolution would be that everyone would become their own church. That was the degenerative tendency because of the destruction of intermediary, intermediary hierarchical systems. One of the things conservatives can offer, and I think this works out well on the front of sanity itself, a front bolstering sanity is there is a concept among humanistic psychosis. And I think that’s what psychologists in particular that the atomized self is the center of the world and that self actualization is the is the essence of sanity. But there’s a more sophisticated version of that. I would say stemming mostly from Piagetian thought that there isn’t any difference between sanity and proper nesting inside a hierarchical community. You can imagine that, well, if your marriage is really unhappy, you’re not going to be very sane. And if your children are miserable and misbehaving and your marriage is unhappy, you’re even going to be less sane. And that will also be true if your friends have turned against you and you have no position in the community with regard to a job or a career. So it’s better to conceptualize identity and sanity as the consequence of proper nesting in a hierarchical social structure so that you’re saying if you have a marital partner who provides you with corrective feedback, the two of you have a good marriage and are saying if you are together jointly back to back in relationship to your children who are then stabilized because of your stability. Now you’re nested inside a stable family. You can walk outside of that family into the community and you can orient yourself properly in relationship to a job or career. And that also provides you with corrective feedback from all your compatriots and your peers. And that scales politically at the level of the city and the state and the country. And so sanity and identity then becomes the entire hierarchy of hierarchical relationships. And that’s another thing that conservatives can offer as a vision, as an antidote to this atomized liberalism that results in the final analysis in self-aggrandizement to the point of claiming divine attributes. That’s how it looks to me anyways. Well, I think at times you are probably a deeper thinker than I am. I’m only a politician. So let’s talk about vision a bit on the conservative front. So we have the midterms coming up and hypothetically the House and the Senate are going to split, are going to flip. Now it isn’t obvious to me that there are visionaries working effectively on the conservative front, the Republican front in the U.S. And so what do you see as the way forward for the Republican Party if it was, if it got its act together, let’s say, and developed something approximating a vision? And do you see any sources of that vision emerging? Yeah, I think there are a lot of entrepreneurial personalities who are each developing different approaches on different topics, different solutions. And I think what you’ll see is both in the House and Senate and among governorships, we have a number of governors who are actually solving problems and developing a general sense of a productive system. But part of the challenge is, I think if you’re a conservative, you’re trying to create a frame of reference or a framework within which people are able to improve their own lives. So we’re not trying to set up the government which then decides for you what your vision is. We’re trying to set up a system or structure in which you get to pursue the vision you believe in. And we believe that that kind of freedom is in fact really, really important. And I think it’s interesting. I think Lincoln in that sense may have been the greatest visionary of American conservatives because when he described government of the people, by the people and for the people, he’s really describing a very open-ended concept. He’s not describing any one specific thing. He’s describing freedom. He really believed that people had the right to pursue happiness as explained in our Declaration of Independence. He had done it in his own life and come out of relatively real poverty and risen by his own efforts and his own studies. And I think he thought that the job of government was to create a framework within which people would go and work. Lincoln would be appalled at today’s massive number of people living in dependency. So I think the vision that we have to offer is one that says, you know, we want everybody to have an opportunity to get a good education. And that’s a good example. Betsy DeVos, the former secretary of education under Trump, has come up with this idea of education freedom. That it’s not just school choice, but it’s also homeschooling. It’s also apprenticeship. It’s also online learning. That there are many, many different ways that people can learn. And that it’s not just a 19th century bureaucracy dominated by a teacher’s union with various credentialing requirements that are now totally obsolete. And I think that that kind of that sense that you’re going to see a number of different people in different areas who are offering specific breakthroughs towards a more dynamic, a more open, a more entrepreneurial American society and, frankly, a much more work oriented American society, which is historically was a key. That emphasis that you lay on work. Well, in the lectures that I’ve been doing publicly around the world, I have placed a fair amount of emphasis on responsibility. And I think that your emphasis on work and and my emphasis on responsibility are likely the same thing. I’ve been trying to point out to the people who are listening to my lectures that most of the meaning that sustains people through crises in life is accrued as a consequence of adoption of responsibility. So if you have good social relations, if you have a good marriage, if you have good relations with your children and your friends and your and your colleagues at work, you have a good social community. That’s all a consequence of the sacrifices you make in relationship to those social interactions, the amount you give, the amount you put forward, the responsibility that you take for the integrity of those relationships. And then when the crisis comes, as it will in your life, you’ll have that to sustain you when the going gets hard. When the crisis gets hard, hedonism isn’t going to sustain you and your whim isn’t going to sustain you. But the meaning you can derive through the voluntary shouldering of responsibility, that’s always there for you. And it seems to me that that’s akin in some sense to the emphasis that you lay on on on the necessity of work. Does that seem reasonable to you? Actually, I think your formula is pretty close. I would say that the center of my life has been citizenship, at least since August of 1958. And that citizenship involves a sense of responsibility and that responsibility inherently involves work. If you’re responsible for getting educated, as you know, real education requires work. If you are trying to sustain economically what you’re doing, that requires work. I found in my own life, through several failures, that to have a really sustainable relationship requires work. Being close to my two daughters requires work. So it’s a sense that there’s sort of a two sides of the same coin, if you will. It’s not just work for work’s sake, but it’s work in order to achieve something that fits your value system. And I like the relationship back to responsibility, whether it’s responsibility to the society or to your family or to yourself. Well, yeah, so, you know, I don’t think that there’s any real difference between the concept of work and the concept of sacrifice. You know, I used to ask my students, many of whom were children of first generation immigrants, trying to elucidate the concept of sacrifice, I’d say to them, what sacrifices did your parents make so that you could attend university in Canada? Of course, they had an instant answer to that because they knew perfectly well what their parents had sacrificed. And I don’t think there is any difference between sacrifice and work. And in some sense, speaking in relationship to the biblical tradition here, is that you have to offer up something that you value in the present to make peace with the future. That really is the core element of work. And it’s the core element of sacrifice, right? If you’re just doing what you want, if you’re just gratifying every whim, it’s not work. But it doesn’t work out very well for the future. What work seems to be is something like the continual sacrifice of at least some element of the present to ensure iterable stability across the long term. And so because human beings are self-conscious creatures and because we can see the future, we have to work. We have to integrate the present with the future. And that does seem to involve work. And that does seem to be the core element of responsibility. And I don’t see how that responsibility can be shirked without catastrophe if it is precisely that which defines our iterable stability, both individually and socially. This is something that conservatives really have to offer young people, you know. And I don’t think that the conservatives, generally speaking, have caught on to this, is to point out to young people that the sustaining meaning in your life will not be found in hedonistic self-gratification. It’s a counterproductive strategy. The sustaining meaning in your life will be found in the voluntary shouldering of as much responsibility as possible. You know, young people, they get that. As soon as you explain it to them, they understand. They understand immediately and are vastly relieved to hear it. Well, it also takes you back to a point you’d made earlier, which is that people get to a point where they want a meaning larger than themselves. And that that’s part of this, that ultimately you find a better life by focusing beyond yourself, not by focusing inside yourself. Well, and that inside yourself is such a peculiar formulation, which I think is why the radicals insist so much on feeling. Because when I hear that as a psychologist, I think, well, what self do you mean? And the rejoinder is usually, well, that’s self-evidence. Like, well, no, actually, it’s not. Because if you’re asking acting in your own best interest, all things considered, you’re not giving way to every momentary whim. All that does is put you in the position of a dependent two year old or a psychopath. And none of that’s productive. Even if you’re abiding by your own true self in the higher sense, then you’re going to make sacrifices of your momentary whims to your medium to long term stability and thriving. And that’s exactly what happens when you mature, because two year olds have that proclivity to be governed by whim. But nobody thinks that two year olds should rule the world. Well, except maybe two year olds. Well, again, you get back to some of the current fads, which would suggest to you that two and three year olds can actually make real decisions, which I think is an example of what I meant about being insane. And anybody who thinks that a three year old or a five year old is prepared to make adult decisions is just literally living in a world that I have no relationship to and I can’t understand. But I think there’s also, you know, part of the challenge is that historically, almost every society I know of that’s successful has rites of passage, which takes you through adolescence into adulthood, sometimes at a pretty early age, sometimes at 12 or 13. But it’s made very clear to you that you have been a child and that children are allowed to do a whole range of things, but that we don’t take what they did as children seriously. It’s not like you’re a small adult, you’re a child. And then you go through a rite, whether you are, in almost every culture I’m aware of, if it’s a healthy culture, it has some provision for you to emerge as an adult. And to now be self aware that, you know, that the things you once did as a child are no longer appropriate. One of the problems of the current system is that we treat the children as though they’re adults, there’s no rite of passage. And so they end up as 35 year old members of Congress who are, in fact, just big, they’re just large adolescents. They don’t have any kind of sense of maturity or responsibility or any sense of the hierarchy of development. And they live in a world of now. I mean, it’s a in a funny kind of way. It’s a remarkably existential moment where everything is now. So what are you hoping for on the leadership front on the Republican side over the next couple of years? Or what do you think is going to happen? Are there going to be contenders in relationship to Trump or is he the presumptive nominee? And should he be? What would you hope for as we move towards 2024? Well, I think that he is the probable nominee, but not the presumptive nominee. I think that Governor DeSantis, if he wants to, can challenge him. Whether DeSantis could beat him, I don’t know. But I think certainly Governor DeSantis has the capacity and is doing an astonishing job as governor of our third largest state. I think that there are other candidates who would like to be in that mix. And I always try to remind people, if you went back to this exact point in 2014, two weeks before the off year election, nobody would even have said Trump’s name. I mean, and I think people would have had a sense that Jeb Bush was probably the front runner. So to try to look forward, and I don’t know at this point in 2018 that people would have picked Joe Biden. I mean, so in my mind, an amazing number of things can happen between now and the time we actually pick a nominee. I mean, certainly Glenn Youngkin, the new governor of Virginia, has shown himself to be a future star of the party. I think there are other people around who are serious potential contenders. We’re about to see Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia win a surprisingly big victory. I also think that there’s a whole new generation coming up of people who are running around the country. And there are a whole bunch of senators. One of the ground rules of the U.S. Senate is that every senator combs the hair of a future president every morning and looks in the mirror and thinks why not. So you could easily have six or seven or eight candidates from the Senate, at least starting down the road. So I would say that Trump is formidable and probably would be nominated, but he’s not certain. I think on the Democratic side, if this election goes as badly as I suspect it will, and if Biden continues to decay, and if Kamala continues to be as utterly, totally incompetent as she is, I think you’ll clearly see a whole new field of Democrats. And part of the question will be if they get beaten badly this year, what lesson do they think they learn? I think the governor of California is likely to run, having learned nothing. And we’ll try to convince the rest of us that California, in which San Francisco has become a disaster, and Los Angeles has the largest population of homeless in the country, that somehow California is a model for the future, even as it loses businesses and people who are leaving the state because they can’t stand it anymore. But he has so many resources that he almost has to run. So what do you think would be most appropriate for conservatives on the visionary side, let’s say, to be offering to young people as we move forward with the new House and the new Senate? Freedom. You talked about work. Freedom. Freedom. I think, well, because freedom leads to responsibility and work. I just did a seminar with a bunch of people, including Dennis Prager, on the first half of Exodus in Miami. We’re going to release that November 26. And you mentioned freedom, and that’s what made it spring to mind. So when God tells Moses to address the Pharaoh, he tells him to let my people go. And that’s a famous line, a let my people go. But that’s not the line, actually, interestingly enough. And it’s repeated. I believe it’s repeated nine times, might be ten times, just to make sure that the listener gets it. The line is, let my people go so that they may serve me in the wilderness. And what’s fascinating about that is that the vision of freedom that’s put forward, which is the spirit, let’s say, that’s calling to the Israelites to emerge from their slavery and to the tyrannical Pharaoh to release his tyrannical grip on them, isn’t the freedom of whim. It’s the freedom to pursue the proper goals, to pursue the highest goals. And so it’s the freedom that comes with the voluntary adoption of responsibility and not the freedom that leads to a nihilistic hedonism. Right. But there’s a difference between liberty and libertine. And I think that the challenge is, and this is, I think, very difficult to have a serious public conversation about it, although Dennis Prager does as good a job as anybody. Ultimately, the health of the West requires a profound revival. I mean, ultimately, God has to be at the center of our freedom. When we say in our Declaration of Independence that you are endowed by your creator with certain unalienable rights, if you don’t think there’s a creator, then the whole rest of it makes no sense. On the other hand, if you believe that your rights come from God and your right includes the right to pursue happiness, which in the sense of the 18th century enlightenment actually meant virtue and wisdom, happiness did not mean hedonism, then the pursuit, I always try to make two points to people. The pursuit of happiness, first of all, is an active phrase. This gets us back to the work ethic. It doesn’t say you’re going to, you know, it doesn’t say we’ll have happiness stamps or we need a federal Department of Happiness. It says you have been endowed by God with the right to pursue happiness. And second, by that grant, God has also imposed upon you the obligation that you should pursue happiness, again, happiness in the sense of wisdom and virtue. And all of that only makes sense if you understand that you are subordinate to a supreme being. It’s a little bit like alcoholics anonymous. I had a good friend who had been very high up in the Reagan administration and who was an alcoholic. And ultimately went to alcoholics anonymous, found it to be enormously helpful. And ultimately you get to a key step. You have to start by recognizing you have a problem and recognizing that you can’t solve the problem yourself. But then you get to the key step. You have to recognize that there is a supreme being, a higher power. And so he found himself talking one day to a federal official and he was explaining the impact of alcoholics anonymous. And this federal official said, you know, if we could skip that one step, we could fund it. And he said, I don’t think you understand. That’s the step that makes the rest of it work. And I think in that sense, all of us are caught in an alcoholics anonymous moment. All of us are weakened by the fact that we don’t live in a culture which makes it normal and obvious that your freedom is a freedom within God’s belief and God’s control. It’s not a freedom against God or a freedom in an atheistic world, because those are in fact impossible. We might conceptualize freedom the way we conceptualize playing a sophisticated game. Every game is ordered according to the principles of the game, the rules of the game, let’s say. And the rules aren’t exactly walls and they’re not, they’re not thou shalt not in some sense. They’re enabling principles. And I don’t see that there is any freedom without the rules of a game. I think there’s just chaos. And chaos, that’s libertine freedom, let’s say. That’s the chaos of whim. There’s nothing about that that’s salutary. There’s nothing about that that allows you to maintain anything approximating sanity. It has to be ordered freedom. And maybe that’s something that visionary conservatives can offer to young people is the, what would you call it, the attraction of ordered freedom. And maybe we’ll see some more of that happen in the upcoming years. That would be a lovely thing. If the proper vision can be established. And so I’d like to thank you very much, sir, for spending the time talking to you. It’s quite an honor. You know, you’ve been a name I’ve known for a very long time. I must say that when I was young, you were definitely not my most favorite person. I was under the sway of socialist ideas when I was a kid. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that during the Reagan years, let’s say. But it’s and it’s quite it’s quite a circumstance to be sitting here talking to you today. And I appreciated it very much. As I mentioned earlier that I really like your work. I admire it. We have a number of people in our team at Gingrich 360 who were huge fans who were thrilled that we were going to have this conversation. And also, I did want to mention for our viewers that at Gingrich 360, we do have an internship for people who are bright and who are willing to work hard. And so I appreciate your your I really like what you’re doing. And I really think it’s important and a significant contribution. Thank you. Thank you very much. If people out there, young people who are listening are looking for a signal opportunity, then this internship program looks like that to me. Where are you located now? We are in Arlington, Virginia, and in Naples, Florida. So we have opportunities in both places. OK. And are you personally in the Arlington area? I’m in both places. I’m actually talking to you today from Arlington. I see. I see. Well, I would love to meet you the next time I come down to Washington. That would be it would be good to meet in person. Good. Well, I agree. I think I think you are a remarkable contributor to our time. Well, thank you, sir. I want to go behind the scenes with Dr. Gingrich for half an hour. And so any of you who are inclined to join up with the DailyWire Plus platform will get access to that. And I’d like to thank you again, Dr. Gingrich, for taking the time. And we’ll get this up real soon and and hopefully we’ll be in further touch.