Trump is running what political scientists sometimes call a personalist regime where the distinction between his personal aims and desires and the demands of state are completely blurred. Once you violate these kinds of norms and these institutional rules, you can't recreate it overnight. I see Vance as basically the titular leader of the anti-anti-Nazi crowd. If you want neo-Nazis in the tent, it is a reasonable conclusion looking from outside the tent that you're okay with neo-Nazis.
I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for joining me again. So, I think it's been about six months since you were on the podcast and a few things have happened. I think I looked at it, it was somewhere around August of last year. I have a list of things that I think we could profitably discuss, but what's most concerning you these days? Where's your head been on our political landscape?
If we're talking politically, right? I mean, there's all sorts of — the AI thing is interesting in all sorts of ways. We could talk about that, but if you're just talking about politics stuff, I think the continued erosion of and politicization of our institutions in distressing ways is probably the main thing I'm concerned about. I mean, we're talking on February 19th or whatever, like by the time that people listen to this, we could be invading Iran. So that could make anything I say kind of outdated.
Just a potpourri, you know, like just a couple days ago or yesterday, Kevin Hassett, chief economic adviser of the president, you know, he said that some staff economist who did a paper verifying what economists have been saying for 30 years, 50 years, 70 years about tariffs, that consumers pay them and that Americans pay them and that the foreigners don't. Kevin Hassett, who I knew personally and I know he agreed with that when I knew him, now says that those staffers should be punished, not penalized, for releasing such a finding. And you look at the chicanery that's going on with Stephen Colbert and the FCC.
Trump is running what political scientists sometimes call a personalist regime where the distinction between his personal aims and desires and the demands of state are completely blurred. And I don't think that's going to last forever. You know, the guy's 80 or whatever. And I don't think Vance can pull off that act or anything like that. But the problem is that it's like with trust. Once you violate these kinds of norms and these institutional rules, the sort of Hayekian hidden law stuff, you can't recreate it overnight.
We have — what should have been a headline story all across the country is a number of federal judges have basically abolished or rescinded what they call, I think it's the presumption of regularity, which is basically a fancy term for saying that when lawyers for the government come to court, judges are going to assume they're not lying, right? That the facts they're presenting are true to the best of their knowledge. And a bunch of judges, including conservative judges, are saying we can't give you that benefit of the doubt anymore because you guys are lying.
And I'm a both-sides guy. I think these kinds of norm violations invite future norm violations, and so that stuff really worries me. And what Trump does with the midterm elections, or tries to do or imply, could just really mess things up too. So that's sort of where I'm at, if you're looking for reasons for things I'm worrying about.
Well, I want to talk about a few things you mentioned there. The midterms and even a possible invasion or otherwise attack on Iran. But this point you're raising now — just how the degree to which our institutions have been eviscerated by Trump loyalists and people who we know more or less to a man and woman now are not disposed to follow the norms that we really have every right to expect our institutions would enshrine. This raises the question which several people have asked of late. In a perfect world, we'll say we get a completely sane president in 2028. How do we reboot the system? Because it seems that any wholesale change in staffing is going to be perceived at least by a large minority on the right as just yet more partisan tribalism. It can be viewed in the most cynical way as exactly analogous to what Trump did when he came into office and staffed it all with his loyalists in the first place. How do we, with the best of intentions, perform a reset back to something like normal that gets perceived for what it is rather than just this pendulum swing into the antithetical pole of hyper-partisanship?
It's very hard, right? It is just very, very hard to see how you do that. Look, I'm still a sort of right-center guy. I've been conservative. I was at National Review for 20 years. I've lost all of my rooting interest in the Republican Party, but I haven't gained a lot of rooting interest in the Democratic Party except as a way to sort of right the ship of the American political system. And I've come to the conclusion that the only way you can have a sane Republican Party is — or a sane Democratic Party — is if both parties are sane. You can't just have one sane party because in part this has to do with structural reasons having to do with primaries. Part of it has to do with social media and the balkanizing of the landscape. But the simple fact is that we live in a climate now where if one party is crazy, it gives permission to the other party to be crazy as well. And that's a vicious cycle.
Do you think the virtuous cycle is just as strong — that once you have some sanity come over one party, it's going to drag the other party back to normal?
I do think it encourages it, but the way you need to do that, right, the only way I know of how to do that is to get back to the system that you and I kind of grew up under, right? You remember, I probably talked about this last time I was here, is like, you know, when we were growing up, Republicans ran a little bit to the right in the primaries to get a little bit of the base, right? And then they ran back to the center once they got the nomination and focused on the median voter, the swing voter, the independent, whatever. Same thing with the Democrats. They ran a little bit to the left of the base in the primaries and then once they got the nomination they ran to the center.
The problem is that structurally the threat to incumbency or re-election in our system now is in the primaries. It is not in general elections. Something like 80% of districts and states — if you get the nomination in a very blue state, you're going to win. And if you get the nomination in a very red state, you're going to win. And so this has created a sociology within both parties where they think they are there to represent the base of their own party rather than try to be a majority party.
Is this truly a symmetrical problem on both sides? Are the rules the same for Democrats and Republicans such that there's really no difference here?
Well, I want to be really clear. I think the problems with the Republican Party are much worse for the country than the problems with the Democratic Party.
Just as a fact now, or just actually systemically in any decade?
Well, I mean, so to answer the first part of your question, yeah, they're basically symmetrical. The two big mistakes we made as a country politically was one, moving to primaries in the first place. I don't want to get — we can get in the weeds on it, but basically we're the only advanced industrialized democracy in the world whose parties have given up the ability to pick their own candidates. Instead, we farm it out to the angriest people on the left and the right who, you know, if you're running in a very blue district and you say, 'If you send me to Washington, the first thing I'm going to do is work with anybody, including people across the aisle, to do what is best for my district and my state,' you will not win a primary. If you say in Texas, 'I'm gonna go, I don't care what party you are, I want to do what's best for Texas,' you will not win. If you say, 'If you send me to Washington, I will tear the skull off of our enemies and use their heads as a victory goblet,' you will get the nomination. Right?
So the incentive structures internally, which are backed up by Fox News and MSNBC and all of that, is to pander to a non-representative voter. And the other mistake we made was having to do with the campaign finance stuff, which basically, you know, Bernie Sanders and that crowd thought we were going to have mass participatory democracy with lots of small donors. And it turns out what we had was mass participatory populism with very small donors. The biggest fundraisers in the Democratic and Republican parties in the House for a long time were AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Yeah. They didn't do any legislating, but they were really good at getting people to give them 10 bucks, give them 15 bucks a month on their credit cards.
