George Will: Democracy Rests on Persuasion

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Speaker 9 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 8 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

Speaker 5 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

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Speaker 12 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Stick around at the end. We've got a mailbag for dealing with Thanksgiving family members coming your way.

Speaker 12 But first, I'm so thrilled to have George Will, columnist for the Washington Post.

Speaker 12 The Post is honoring his writing and his legacy this week on the 50th anniversary of his tenure at the paper with a series of tributes, including by our own Mona Sharon.

Speaker 12 And there was also a delightful quiz with George Will quotes that I'd recommend that you take. I did just so-so on it.

Speaker 12 His books include American Happiness and Discontents and the Conservative Sensibility. Welcome back to the Bulwark podcast.
George Will, how you doing?

Speaker 10 I'm doing very well. How about you?

Speaker 12 I'm okay. I'm okay.
My puckish impulse required that I wear this denim shirt, so I apologize for that in advance, but I just couldn't help myself this morning.

Speaker 10 I've written, I don't know, somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 columns, and that's the one people remember most is my

Speaker 10 harangue against the ubiquity of denim.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that's maybe not the one I remember most, but it does stick with you. It does stick with you for sure.

Speaker 12 I want to spend a bunch of time on your columns and your career, but alas, we are tormented to live in interesting times, and I need to start with a little bit of news, if that's okay, to get your response to.

Speaker 12 We have the latest decree from our new president-elect on his social media feed. I'm going to read it to you.
On January 20th, as one of my many first executive orders,

Speaker 12 so so on the grammar there, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% tariff on all products coming into the United States and its ridiculous open borders.

Speaker 12 The tariff will remain in effect until such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl and all illegal aliens, stop this invasion of our country.

Speaker 12 Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long-simmering problem.

Speaker 12 We hereby demand that they use this power, and until such time that they do, it's time for them to pay a very big price. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that.

Speaker 10 Well, first thought is

Speaker 10 so much for those who said his threats were just negotiating employs.

Speaker 10 Second,

Speaker 10 the country is going to be rudely awakened to the fact that Congress has, through its lassitude, conferred upon presidents enormous powers that are actually vested by the Constitution in Congress, that Congress has the power to regulate trade with foreign nations.

Speaker 10 Third, he hasn't even begun to get to the bottom of the bag of tricks the modern president can have because of excessive delegations of power from Congress.

Speaker 10 That is, I don't know, I think we're operating as a nation under something like 41 emergencies right now.

Speaker 10 Congress allows presidents to declare emergencies, at which point they acquire an enormous discretion.

Speaker 10 My hope for the next four years is that they revive Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Speaker 10 It's been a bipartisan failure, this encrusting, like so many barnacles, the presidency with all kinds of discretions and powers they should not have.

Speaker 10 So my hope is that we're going to have a rethinking of the presidency itself.

Speaker 10 And the Democrats particularly who, being progressives and progressives, celebrate executive power, untremeled executive power and the administrative state and all that, that Republicans and Democrats are going to rethink how we might reestablish the Madisonian equilibrium between the branches.

Speaker 12 Is that a wish or an expectation?

Speaker 12 I guess, because it feels more like a wish to me, but I would love to be convinced otherwise.

Speaker 10 It is a wish, but what Madison said was that the branches should be rivalrous. He didn't anticipate the coming of the party system and the coming of a presidential-centric politics

Speaker 10 under which the president's party in Congress is considered mere appendages to salute sharply and tug their forelocks and implement his agenda. My

Speaker 10 19th century Whiggish belief builds upon Madison's belief in the primacy of the legislature. The Congress is the first branch of government.
It's Article I for a reason in the Constitution.

Speaker 10 The President's powers are basically,

Speaker 10 at least in domestic affairs, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. That makes him secondary and responsive to the first branch of government, the Congress.

Speaker 10 So you ask, is this the wish being fathered of the thought? Yes.

Speaker 10 But it's

Speaker 10 a wish that I think Mr. Trump, by the curious laws of political physics, physics, is apt to provoke every action having an equal and opposite reaction.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I hope that's right. And I do appreciate your sunny disposition.
It provides a nice balance to the more negative thoughts that usually pervade here at the bulwark.

Speaker 12 So I do just kind of want to get underneath the potential negatives. I mean, you implied there in the first answer that this is just the beginning of the potential bag of tricks.

Speaker 12 If Congress were not to act on the Madisonian impulse and were to decide not to check him,

Speaker 12 what do you worry about most from the executive branch in a second Trump term?

Speaker 10 A recession that will cause the grass to grow in the streets of American cities. That is, if he were to implement across-the-board tariffs, 10%, 20%,

Speaker 10 the numbers he's thrown out during the campaign were simply whims and reflexes on his part. But were he to do this,

Speaker 10 he would wreck the trading system. He would wreck the supply chains.
He would cause enormous disruptions and be a, I was going to say, be a one-term president. He's going to be that anyway.

Speaker 10 But he could on day one, as you've just read his first threat or promise or fulfillment of his mandate, call it what you will, on day one, he's going to begin to revive the Democratic Party.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I should add that in addition to that long post bleat that he sent about Mexico and Canada, he also said that he plans to do an additional 10% tariff on China across the board.

Speaker 12 So that is our new conservative governance. We're going to get to that in a second.
I'm curious your thoughts also just on the cabinet from a big picture standpoint.

Speaker 12 You wrote about the need for the Senate to reject Gates, Hegseth, Gabbard, and Kennedy in a recent column.

Speaker 12 I liked how you called Gates an arrested development adolescence with the swagger of a sequin guitarist in a low-rent casino. It was nice that you got that one off before he left exited stage right.

Speaker 12 But I'm wondering, since you've written that column, there's been a spate of other picks. I'm kind of wondering your big picture thoughts on

Speaker 12 what the cabinet choices tell us.

Speaker 10 Well, it's a sharply divided cabinet.

Speaker 10 There are the four there who simply should not be confirmed or not qualified by experience or thought.

Speaker 10 The new Treasury Secretary,

Speaker 10 from a little I read about him, is a skeptic about protectionism, which should make for some interesting dialogues between the White House and the Treasury building right next door.

Speaker 10 The new energy secretary, I've forgotten his name, but he gets very good reviews. Agriculture Secretary, if we're going to have one, she seems perfectly adequate.

Speaker 10 I tend to think that Lincoln's biggest mistake was not sticking with General McClellan too long, but in creating the Agriculture Department.

Speaker 10 There it is. It's like the Education Department.
What can you do about it?

Speaker 12 Was Lincoln's biggest mistake not keeping his first vice president? I believe that was maybe his his biggest mistake. Sticking with Hannibal Hamlin.

Speaker 10 That was a big one.

Speaker 10 We'll take Andrew Johnson, the Agriculture Department, and McClellan. You can pick the big three of his mistakes.
Okay. I'm from central Illinois, Lincoln country, and we don't admit to a fourth.

Speaker 12 There, there. Chris Wright is the energy secretary.
I was blank on his name, too. I worry about the foreign policy picks the most.

Speaker 12 And I'd throw in there the NATO ambassador, Matt Whitaker, who is an absurd selection for NATO ambassador, I'm confident, cannot name the NATO member countries or couldn't, at least before his nomination.

Speaker 12 And I just, I'm interested in your view on no matter how this kind of shakes out, do you think that the American-led international order is now permanently broken, I guess, would be this is simplest way to put it?

Speaker 10 Not yet.

Speaker 10 Not yet. And it could be, again, letting it go back to the physics of politics.
It could be that Mr.

Speaker 10 Trump is going to, through sheer terror, galvanize a more responsible defense commitment to Europe's self-defense. We shall see, getting all those nations above the 2% of GDP spent on defense.

Speaker 10 I share entirely your belief that everything else pales next to. the Axis we're now confronting, Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia.

Speaker 10 I believe it is not too much to say that historians looking back on this MASIT might say that we're already in the early stages of a Third World War.

Speaker 10 A lot of Americans, I think, tend to think the Second World War started at Pearl Harbor.

Speaker 10 Some others, with a more spacious view of history, say, no, it was when the Germans invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939.

Speaker 10 Others would say, well, it was the great rehearsal in the Spanish Civil War when Germany and Italy intervened there. Or when Italy invaded Abyssinia as Ethiopia then was in 1935.

Speaker 10 Actually, it seems to me a number of historians say

Speaker 10 the coming together, the clustering of crises that became World War II began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. We can imagine historians several generations from now saying

Speaker 10 that a serious world conflagration began five or six years ago.

Speaker 12 began perhaps they would say with the russia's annexation of crimea what has been made clear i guess at this point is that you know maybe the american-led world order can maintain maybe our alliances can maintain but if you're if you're taking the view from europe and watching us looking back at us you cannot look at us and think of us as a reliable partner, I guess, at this point anymore.

Speaker 12 And it's very clear that the American public does not care that much about its its international commitments, at least a plurality of them. And so does that not change their actions?

Speaker 12 And I guess you kind of implied it also is potentially influencing the actions of the Axis powers. I just wonder what you think about that.

Speaker 10 I don't want to say that isolationism is the default position of the American people. That would be too strong.

Speaker 10 But against the sweep of American history, if you go back to 1938 and 1939, when Franklin Roosevelt carefully, not to say guilefully, maneuvered the United States into engagement in the Second World War.

Speaker 10 The American people, what they generally want from foreign policy is as little of it as possible. And you can understand this.

Speaker 10 It goes way back to the broad oceans and the two placid neighbors that we have and the general sense that predates intercontinental flight and ICBMs and all the rest, that we are somehow safe.

Speaker 10 The period between 1940-41 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 does look like an aberrant period.

Speaker 10 However, I think it is possible for political leadership to convince the American people that what they do care about constantly, which is prosperity, full employment, rapid economic growth, rapid enough to throw off the revenues to pay the bills for the entitlement system.

Speaker 10 That depends, absolutely depends, on free trade.

Speaker 10 We're going to have to have an enormous argument now about protectionism, which is, as I and others have said, equivalent to a nation blockading its own ports.

Speaker 10 The president-elect really seems to believe that if he imposes tariffs on Chinese goods, China pays the tariffs, which is, of course, preposterous.

Speaker 10 The point of protectionism is to raise domestic prices. That is what they're for.

Speaker 10 And the American people, it seems to me, if they get a good jolt of protectionism, might swing back to understanding that the great burst of American prosperity at the end of the Depression, right through 2024, had to do with, was absolutely dependent upon international trade.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I mean, I believe that to be true. I hope it's true that it gives the jolt people need.
My friend Stephen Richer, who acted very admirably as

Speaker 12 a recorder in Maricopa County amidst all the Carrie Lake and Donald Trump nonsense, he sent a tweet a couple months ago that stuck with me that I went back and found.

Speaker 12 It said, we've gone from the party of George Will to the party of Cat Turd.

Speaker 12 I want to

Speaker 12 upgrade that in kind of a sad way, which is, And the party of Cat Turd was successful, you know, and I do wonder like how you process that, right?

Speaker 12 That like like that this party that you're so central to kind of left you at least ideologically you know principally in what you're just discussing with free trade but across a number of issues and dumbed itself down and that worked that's got to be a little bit of a depressing realization i would destroy my reputation if i became a little ray of sunshine but let me still look on the on the bright side which i'm not accustomed to doing.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 10 There is a an equipoise in our politics that is going to take hold here. The Democratic Party is capable of learning.
It has done in the past. The Republican Party is capable of learning.

Speaker 10 It has done in the past.

Speaker 10 And the good news about the bad news about Mr. Trump is this.
The bad news is he showed how one feral candidate can change the tone of the country.

Speaker 10 I think it is possible that a non-feral candidate, someone with the opposite of his approach to public rhetoric, could change it back.

Speaker 10 I do think that the country is ripe for, and four years from now will really be ripe for,

Speaker 10 what I would call a deep-breath candidate. Someone who comes to the country and says, deep breath, everybody, relax, been through worse before.

Speaker 10 who says, as Lincoln did at the end of his first inaugural, we are not enemies, we are friends, we must not be enemies.

Speaker 10 See, I just don't believe the American people are angry. There are 334 million of us.
At any point, 324 million are not watching cable television, not listening to talk radio.

Speaker 10 They're getting on with life. They're exhausted and embarrassed by our public life.
And someone needs to come along who says, as Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, said,

Speaker 10 I'm a conservative. I'm just not angry about it.

Speaker 10 And I think you're going to find that there's a market out there, that our political parties are exquisitely sensitive market mechanisms, and they adjust quickly.

Speaker 10 The Democratic Party, they're going to learn, their vocabulary is going to get cleaned up. As I say, we've been through worse before.

Speaker 10 I've just been reading a whole bunch of books about the 1850s, and I recommend that as an anecdote to exaggerating the dangers that we're currently in.

Speaker 12 I don't know that I'm exaggerating the dangers, but I think I pretty clearly see the

Speaker 12 sins, the flaws, the darkness that allowed us to get here. I wonder how you think about that.
I'm doing my best to just bring you down from the sunniness into the night here a little bit.

Speaker 12 And you may be right. Maybe a sunny optimist can take us out of this in 2028.

Speaker 12 But it still says something about, I think, us as a country and the conservative movement in particular that we got here.

Speaker 12 And so I wonder if you look back on that 50 years and think, is there anything you look back on and think, ugh, I should have seen that this was heading to this place.

Speaker 10 I became a columnist in January 1973, actually, with the National Review and beginning to submit columns to the Post.

Speaker 10 January 1973 was when Judge Surica in Washington began to impose draconian sentences on the Watergate burglars in an attempt, a successful attempt, to crack the cover-up.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 10 I dipped my toe into punditry just as the Watergate waves were rising. So

Speaker 10 maybe I'm inured to the fact that there is much ruin in a nation and we have our fair share of it. But again,

Speaker 10 protectionism doesn't work.

Speaker 10 It's morally wrong to interfere with free transactions of free people, but leave that aside. It doesn't work.

Speaker 10 The Democrats have found out what doesn't work. Hectoring people, a kind of hectoring progressivism doesn't work.
They will adjust.

Speaker 10 And we learn as a nation, as individuals, by our mistakes, our blunders. And the Democrats have made whopping one, and we're still making one on the Republican side.

Speaker 10 But we are creatures who learn. That's the foundation, such as it is, of my sunniness.
We learn by trial and hard error, but we learn.

Speaker 12 One thing I learned about you reading the anniversary columns in the post that I didn't know, I'm from Colorado, was that you were working for a Colorado senator, actually, around the time that you just referenced, I guess a little bit before 73, who ends up losing in part maybe because

Speaker 12 Nixon's coattails weren't as long as they could have been.

Speaker 12 And you end up in this early period around Watergate and around impeachment, being a young conservative columnist who is harshly critical of Nixon from the right.

Speaker 12 So there is sort of a bookend element to this that you are now critical of Trump. Talk to me just about that moment and like what gave you the chutzpah to do that.

Speaker 12 We see now that's a lot harder than it seems.

Speaker 10 Well, it's funny because with National Review, National Review, which I was writing for at the time,

Speaker 10 beginning in January 1973, was then, even more than now, I think, supported in part part by contributions. And some of the contributors didn't really warm to Nixon until he got into trouble.

Speaker 10 And National Review would do, as I recall, it's been a long time. They would do an analysis of the mail they got, and they had a category called subscription cancellations in George Will.

Speaker 10 They were the same thing, because I was annoying people. Bill, to his enormous credit, with this financially shaky enterprise, this magazine that he'd started in 1955, 1955.

Speaker 10 Bill never once tried to restrain what I was writing about Mr. Nixon.
I'm deeply indebted to him for that, and

Speaker 10 it's a sign of what a large person Bill was.

Speaker 12 I appreciate your compliments of him, but this is maybe one moment to give some self-congratulation.

Speaker 12 We'll allow it for just the next one minute. Like, what do you think it was about George Will that gave you the spine to twice

Speaker 12 speak out in ways that went against the grain of the party?

Speaker 12 We've seen many of your peers from, just speaking to the Trump era, the Nixon errors before my time, but many of your peers, the columnists, the commentators who agree with you, who are classically liberal, who believe in Enlightenment values, and who succumbed to Trump.

Speaker 12 I don't need to name them all. We all know them.
What do you think it was that made you differentiate from that?

Speaker 10 Well, let's go backward to start with Trump. Trump was a not a close call.
Amen.

Speaker 10 As I wrote at the time, with every sulfuric belch from his campaign in 2015, it was obvious that this man was unsuited for what he was trying to be.

Speaker 10 And at that point, I was an established columnist, and I didn't need to worry very much. Maybe back in 1973, I was too naive to understand I was taking a risk.
But

Speaker 10 what's the point of doing this if you don't say what you think?

Speaker 10 If I wanted to be in politics, I know how to do that. I could have stayed in politics.

Speaker 10 I was a Senate staff member, and I had a chance to continue being a political staffer, but I chose to be a writer. And what's the point of writing if you're not free to express yourself?

Speaker 10 I just, I wouldn't do it otherwise. Just makes no sense.

Speaker 12 Maybe you've hit the sweet spot, right?

Speaker 12 You're young and brash for Nixon and seasoned for Trump. So I guess that does let there are plenty of seasoned people who went along with Trump.
So I guess

Speaker 12 that would let some people off the hook.

Speaker 10 The most important virtue you can have as a political writer is a certain indifference to public opinion.

Speaker 10 Jefferson wrote in the Declaration about a decent respect for the opinion of mankind, implying that there's such a thing as an indecent respect for public opinion. Just try to avoid that.

Speaker 12 Bill Clinton had famously said in a state of the union while trying to recover his political fortunes that the era of big government is over.

Speaker 12 It's hard not to sit here right now and think that the era of small government is over. Do you disagree with that?

Speaker 10 The era of small government was over in 1965 with the passage of Medicare and Medicaid.

Speaker 10 The two most popular programs in America are Medicare and Social Security, and they, combined with Medicaid, are, what, 70% of the budget.

Speaker 10 We have made a decision as a people that we're going to have a large ethic of common provision.

Speaker 10 There's going to be a safety net of increasing thickness. That argument's over.
I've backed enough lost causes that I know a lost cause when I see one. And the idea that we're going to undo the

Speaker 10 welfare state is preposterous. Still,

Speaker 10 there are intelligent ways of having a big government. There are unintelligent ways.

Speaker 10 We're still living with the echo of the Great Society of the 1960s in, it seems to me, family disintegration and chaotic neighborhoods. The conservative mission now

Speaker 10 is to make a government that does embody an ethic of common provision compatible with vigorous local communities, compatible with federalism, compatible with experiments at the state level.

Speaker 10 That's still a great and stately mission for conservatism.

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Speaker 9 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 8 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

Speaker 5 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

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Speaker 12 I was reading one of your Anti-Jones Act polemics about

Speaker 12 the ports and the over-regulation of the ports. This is in maybe an area where smart small government conservatism can still exist.

Speaker 12 And as I was reading the article, I'm happy to hear you riff about that if you want.

Speaker 12 But it also made me wonder if Trump called you up tomorrow and said, okay, or Elon Musk called you and said, I want to get rid of the stupidest things that we have in our government, a couple of really particularly pernicious rules or regulations.

Speaker 12 I was wondering what you would have picked.

Speaker 10 Well,

Speaker 10 the Jones Act, which I won't bore your listeners with, which restricts to certain kinds of ships, what we can, goods that can be carried between American ports. That would start.

Speaker 10 The Buy American provisions would be part of them. A radical simplification of the tax code.
I mean,

Speaker 10 if these guys were really radical, they could try and say, let's get rid of the income tax and have a consumption tax. That would be worth considering.

Speaker 12 I mean, that would be regressive. No,

Speaker 12 that doesn't give you any doubt.

Speaker 10 You can fiddle it in lots of ways to make it less regressive, but I don't particularly mind regressive taxes.

Speaker 10 The title of a very famous book about 60 years ago is called The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation.

Speaker 12 I know, this is where I might have gone fully native now, that Trump might have caused a reaction in me. But here in Louisiana,

Speaker 12 we've increased the sales tax and cut the income tax by another percent.

Speaker 12 And I'm thinking, I don't know, I'd rather not have that extra couple grand and not make people pay extra few cents on their Coke or on their orange juice or whatever. Is that right?

Speaker 12 Am I a hopeless progressive now?

Speaker 10 No, no, no. That's well, the conservative catechism is more elastic than that.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 10 So you won't be excommunicated for that. But the one thing

Speaker 10 that the Trump administration might do, which is take on the most wicked, I use such language, sparing, and most wicked force in American life are the teachers' unions.

Speaker 10 And the best thing that can be done, and enormous progress has been made in the last five, ten years to spread school choice everywhere.

Speaker 10 Arizona under Governor Doug Ducey, good Republican, has really shown the way, but other states are not far behind. Universal school choice is the best thing we could do for the United States.

Speaker 12 I do think,

Speaker 12 sir, that the Trump administration is going to challenge that notion. And I think that they will find some more wicked forces within us.

Speaker 12 Though I don't necessarily disagree with the policy recommendation. I'm concerned about the wickedness ahead.
I want to end a little happier note, though. You wrote this in 1991 about happiness.

Speaker 12 Politics is not crucial to the principal ingredients of happiness. Cheerful children, feisty friends, fulfilling work, and a strong bullpen with the things that you said were crucial.

Speaker 12 Many of our listeners, I think, are struggling on this point right now, not letting politics impact their happiness.

Speaker 12 So I'm just wondering if you'd like to revise and extend those remarks with 33 more years of wisdom.

Speaker 10 Not really. Look, a good citizen worries about the country.

Speaker 10 And there's much to worry about here.

Speaker 10 But as I say, Protectionism and all the rest is going to refute itself. The Democrats have learned just the high risk of crossing crossing certain red lines and the sensibility of the American people.

Speaker 10 Donald Trump worries about trade deficits. I have a chronic and incurable trade deficit with my barber.

Speaker 10 Every four weeks, I buy a haircut from her, and she never buys anything from me. Somehow it works out.

Speaker 10 And we need to have a little more faith in the somehow it works out of life.

Speaker 10 Because this extraordinarily complicated world we live in, this enormously complicated economy that requires of us what Hayek called epistemic humility.

Speaker 10 Don't mess with this complicated thing, or you're going to get burned. So, the great hope for conservatism is, and it's a huge one, conservatism is true.
It works, and the alternatives don't work.

Speaker 10 So, we're going to come out of this. But for

Speaker 10 the minority of people who read op-ed pieces, what I do,

Speaker 10 it's a self-selected minority. Most Americans don't read newspapers.
Most newspaper readers don't read the op-ed pages, but what that means is we have a small,

Speaker 10 self-selected, intellectually upscale audience of people whose mental pantry shelves are stocked with opinions and facts and worries and judgments.

Speaker 10 It's a minority conversation, but worth having because minorities, salient minorities, propel history.

Speaker 10 So for those who you were talking about, who are depressed and whose life is under a gray cloud because of what the American electorate has done, get out and go to work.

Speaker 10 Democracy rests on persuasion, but persuasion means

Speaker 10 on opinion. It's shiftable sand.
Go out and shift the sand. Change the opinions.

Speaker 10 I've been doing it for 50 years, and I'd be hard put to name a column of my five or six thousand that's made a big difference.

Speaker 10 But what you do is you keep hoping that the cumulative effect somehow matters.

Speaker 12 You said your great hero is Madison. You've referenced him several times in our half hour.
Might you leave us with a favorite Madison quote or passage?

Speaker 10 We see throughout our system the process of supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives.

Speaker 10 Federalist 51.

Speaker 10 And in Federalist 10,

Speaker 10 he brought off a revolution in democratic theory. Before Madison,

Speaker 10 the few people who had believed that democracy was possible anywhere at any time believed that it had to be in a small face-to-face society like Pericles' Athens or Rousseau's Geneva, because the enemy of democracy was factions, the plurality of interests and warring factions.

Speaker 10 Madison said, that's exactly wrong.

Speaker 10 He said in Federalist 10 that you want to have an extensive republic because there the government can perform its first duty, which is to protect the different and unequal capacities of acquiring property.

Speaker 10 So you have a saving multiplicity of factions because.

Speaker 10 What is the great danger in politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny is a democracy prey? Tyranny of the majority.
Solution, don't have stable tyrannical majorities.

Speaker 10 Have majorities that consist of unstable coalitions of factions that don't last very long and therefore can't be a big danger. There's your short seminar on medicine in

Speaker 10 a minute and a half.

Speaker 12 And well, that's actually a good reason for optimism, if you think about it, that hopefully the potential tyranny or the wannabe tyrant that we're dealing with now won't be long-lasting from that Madisonian framework.

Speaker 12 George Will, what an honor. What a treat.
Thank you so much for coming onto the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 10 I enjoyed it. We'll do it again.

Speaker 12 All right. We'll see you soon.
Everybody else, stick around. We got a mailback.

Speaker 1 California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Speaker 5 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage.

Speaker 3 The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

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Speaker 8 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

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Speaker 12 All right, we are back with the mailbag. I cannot say that my answers to the mailbag will be as sanguine and

Speaker 12 calm as George Will's, but it's nice to have somebody bring that demeanor to this podcast from time to time. I received several emails.

Speaker 12 Not to the actual mailbag account, but from people reaching out wanting to know my genuine thoughts about this. I thought it'd be best to do it on the podcast.

Speaker 12 I am going to get back to doing podcast mailbags, though. So, if you just email us, bulwarkpodcast at thebulwark.com, we'll start to do this more often.

Speaker 12 Obviously, things got kind of busy with the campaign, you might have noticed. So, we cut back on mailbag time.
So, here we go. Thanksgiving mailbag.
Buckle up.

Speaker 12 I'm a 30-year-old guy, an Obama millennial lib. Dad voted for Obama, mom for Romney.
My parents and I are devastated by the Trump win. My two brothers are not devastated.

Speaker 12 Older Older brothers at Thanksgiving. He's your classic Ivy League educated Ben Shapiro listening anti-woke, anti-anti-Trump conservative who made the transition to solid Trump supporter.

Speaker 12 The policies, not the personality. He brings in real money, bought a great seven-figure house, no economic anxiety.
I have trouble talking to him about politics and anything politics adjacent.

Speaker 12 We used to mix it up, but 2020 got too intense. He said he thinks Biden won, does not believe the election lies, but he told my mom he voted for Trump again this year, and he votes in a swing state.

Speaker 12 We've lost touch a bit, no outward animosity, but the weirdness is below the surface when we get together, etc., etc. Makes me sad.
Yeah, I hear that.

Speaker 12 The question, how do you suggest I handle Thanksgiving? I'll be with him in a few days, and the election will come up. My boomer dad will say something.
Do I say little, nothing, change the topic?

Speaker 12 Happy warrior. Do I get pretty real?

Speaker 12 Not sure how to balance the disrespectful devil on one shoulder and the Obama pluralism angel on the other shoulder. I had a similar question from another reader.

Speaker 12 Do you have tips for engaging with people like my brother, who watches fake news or non-news, Patrick Beth David, Joe Rogan, etc.?

Speaker 12 He knows literally nothing about what is actually happening, but loves to instigate discussions. He then shuts down and goes into denial anger mode when confronted with counterpoints.

Speaker 12 I'm actually skipping Thanksgiving with him this year for that reason, but have many other meals ahead.

Speaker 12 All right. I just want to start here.
This is hard. And it's hard.
Everybody's dealing with it at some level. It's different than it was in the past.
For younger listeners, it wasn't always like this.

Speaker 12 And here's why I think that is. Because in the Trump era, I think that there really is a moral dimension to how we view politics has really developed.

Speaker 12 And there were some people who had very strong, deeply held views about politics throughout all of history, and there were moral elements to it.

Speaker 12 But kind of in the modern era, you know, there was a period of time where you felt like your family or your friends, some of you might have bad ideas or mistaken views and that that was okay.

Speaker 12 You know, it didn't necessarily mean that there was, they were a bad person. You just disagreed.
And that's gotten hard in the Trump years.

Speaker 12 And whether or not we want to admit it or say it, a lot of us have kind of concluded that at some deep level, the people that we disagree with, the one for Trump,

Speaker 12 don't just have bad views. Like, they are bad at some level.

Speaker 12 You know, to get to a little therapy talk here, one of the things you go through when you're dealing with your own issues, as I have, is there's this difference in definition between guilt and shame, right?

Speaker 12 Guilt is this feeling that you have done something bad. Well, shame is this kind of sense that you are bad at some deep level.
And this is kind of like the external version of that, right?

Speaker 12 Like, rather than feeling like somebody made a bad choice, you're feeling like that they have that there's something deeper there.

Speaker 12 That kind of changes the relationship naturally like it changes how you view people I don't know that there's anything that I can say that will like fix that right like you can't trick yourself into not thinking that and so what I can say is this is that

Speaker 12 fundamentally

Speaker 12 we all are sinners we just are like we all have bad impulses bad thoughts we've all made bad actions writing off somebody you love

Speaker 12 over this fucking asshole that's going to be the president, like, doesn't really serve you. Like, and it doesn't serve them, and it doesn't really serve anybody.
It doesn't do anything of value.

Speaker 12 And it doesn't mean you have to let them off the hook or change your views about them, but it does mean that

Speaker 12 kind of reframing it in your head in the context of

Speaker 12 there are certain flaws that you look past in friends in your life, you know, and other family members.

Speaker 12 It's not like everybody that voted for Kamala Harris is a fucking angel, you know, but you rationalize it, right? You look past it, you look at the good traits.

Speaker 12 I went through this when I was coming out with family that didn't react well to it. You know, I was resentful and bitter, and like thought bad thoughts about them, and

Speaker 12 that didn't serve me. And I don't, I got past that, and it's been a lot healthier to get past it.
I have close family right now that are going through the same Thanksgiving thing as these questioners.

Speaker 12 How much or whether at all they see their close loved ones is being affected by their political support

Speaker 12 and um

Speaker 12 I just it makes me sad and it is not the right approach even though it might feel right because cutting people off over this

Speaker 12 or blocking yourself off from them emotionally is just the worst of bad options I want to caveat something here. I'm talking about actual loved ones.

Speaker 12 You know, if you have an uncle Rufus who's an asshole that you're never that close to, you can feel free to let Rufus go. But for brothers, for friends, for people that you're close to, my advice is

Speaker 12 not going to be that satisfying, but here it goes. Try to find other things to talk about.
Reminisce. Talk about sports.
Watch football. Ask them about some other part of their life.
Get them talking.

Speaker 12 They've got to have other interests. Ask them about work.
Ask them about their dating life. Ask them about whatever.
Pick their brain.

Speaker 12 You know, they have to have other things that they like to talk about.

Speaker 12 If, you know, your boomer dad or whoever it was and the questioner forces the conversation, having a little argument and then cooling off after, that's not the worst thing. Okay.
That's fine.

Speaker 12 That all happens.

Speaker 12 I've been there.

Speaker 12 As long as you're not saying things that you're going to regret, having a little argument's okay.

Speaker 12 It's better than not engaging. You know what else is better than not engaging? Just sitting together and being together and eating

Speaker 12 and being a little bit more distant than you'd wish. That is melancholy, for sure.

Speaker 12 That is not probably what you hoped for that relationship. And that is, there's a disappointment there.
There's a loss there.

Speaker 12 But still, you're together. And the alternative

Speaker 12 is going to lead to regret. You don't need to compound

Speaker 12 your

Speaker 12 torment

Speaker 12 by

Speaker 12 adding something you'll regret on top of it. One last thing, speaking from experience, less might be more when it comes to alcohol, if things are really fraught.

Speaker 12 I know that

Speaker 12 there's a gag about how you're going to be home, you're going to be drinking, you're going to be having wine, going to deal with your family members.

Speaker 12 That might be right if it's like a low-level disagreement and frustration, but if it's deep-seated disagreement and anger, less is more when it comes to alcohol. So

Speaker 12 happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Enjoy that.
For all of you that are blessed to not have to deal with this, appreciate that blessing and savor it because, you know, this stuff comes for all of us.

Speaker 12 My other question that I want to get to, which is very relevant for everybody right now. Do you have advice on how to develop a healthy media diet?

Speaker 12 I appreciated your conversation with Sam Harris and your reflection on your own Twitter obsession. I'm a fellow political obsessive with TDS, but I had to take a break after the election.

Speaker 12 I went cold turkey for a week and then I jumped back in. I wish I didn't have to, but as a concerned citizen, I have to devote some brain space to Donald Trump for the next four years.

Speaker 12 How do you recommend staying informed without going insane? Okay, for starters, you're listening to this podcast. That's great.
I appreciate it. You don't have to.

Speaker 12 If you need a break from it, I get it.

Speaker 12 But by listening to a daily politics podcast, you're pretty up to speed on what's happening in politics already okay i don't i don't there's not a whole lot you need to absolutely add on top of it i would recommend newspapers and actual news as a supplement you know there's certain things i'm not covering policy stuff local stuff that's happening in your community i'll look to my husband as a model he's totally cut off social media political social media and replaced it only with apple news I don't really love the Apple News interface myself, but it works for him.

Speaker 12 Another option is picking a couple of newspapers supporting actual journalists that you like and reading their hard news outlet and not just reading opinion. I think that is useful.

Speaker 12 A newsletter might be right for you. And I think that is a perfectly healthy balance.
You know, there is not necessarily a need to do that much more than that.

Speaker 12 I'm going to say this next thing with the caveat that I am an MSNBC political analyst. I appreciate the folks at MSNBC for supporting me.

Speaker 12 And as far as cable, TV is concerned, if you like a show, great. I'm going to still go on Nicole Wallace twice a week.

Speaker 12 If you like Nicole Wallace and you feel like that's a good vessel for you to get info, watch Nicole Wallace. If you like Alex Wagner or Chris Hayes or watch them.
If you like Jake Tapper, he's great.

Speaker 12 Caitlin Collins, whatever.

Speaker 12 I don't know about that show on CNN where they do the panel where they're all yelling at each other. I only see the clips of like Scott Jennings yelling at random libs.

Speaker 12 I'm not sure that that's that nourishing to you. So I don't know if that would be the one that I would pick.
The host of that, Abby Phillips, seems great, but the show format, not for me.

Speaker 12 But I'd say this about TV consumption. And it's related to the social media consumption.
Passive consumption of this,

Speaker 12 having whatever the most recent horror is of Donald Trump just thrust upon your face

Speaker 12 kind of unwillingly.

Speaker 12 or you know as a second order thing while you're doing other stuff

Speaker 12 that doesn't seem that healthy to me. I mean, it seems like a lot of people do that.
You know, I like to have sound on in the house. I don't know.
I don't like silence.

Speaker 12 So I have records and music I play or sports. Some people that have news, just like kind of on in the background.
I think that's probably unhealthy for the next little bit.

Speaker 12 And part of it is JVL wrote about this in the triad, just about a way to process Donald Trump that I'm trying to work on here on this podcast is to get upset about things that happen, to cover things that happen,

Speaker 12 not to wrap wrap yourself around things that may happen, or that he's threatening, or that he's sad, or that he, whatever.

Speaker 12 That might be a good rubric as well for focusing on things that are actually happening. That's what I'm going to try to do on this show.

Speaker 12 So, unfortunately, I don't actually have the benefit of being able to take this advice that I'm giving everybody. So, maybe I'm a little bit of a hypocrite, but in order to do this show, do it well,

Speaker 12 I need to consume things. It's my job, but put that burden on me, right?

Speaker 12 Let me listen to Steve Bannon and watch Fox when I'm in hotel rooms and suffer through social media to know what's happening out there. And I will filter it for you.

Speaker 12 And you'll get the stuff that you need to know or that's funny.

Speaker 12 We can get a laugh out of them or that's scary. And in the meantime, read things that are reported and

Speaker 12 find other,

Speaker 12 if there's somebody else, like I said, if there's another show, if there's a show that you like, consume that. And I think that's probably a good starting place for all this.
So,

Speaker 12 you know, trusted sources, things that aren't inflaming you. This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint.
And there's a big world out there. So go and enjoy it.

Speaker 12 Everybody, I've got one more podcast tomorrow before the Thanksgiving break. Very excited about that.
There'll be much Pete Hegseth chat on tomorrow's podcast.

Speaker 12 You guys know how much I love talking about Pete Hegseth. So please come and hang out with me, especially if you're worried about hanging out with your family.

Speaker 12 I'll be here and we'll see y'all back here tomorrow. Peace.

Speaker 10 Shit, getting crazy, scary, it's folky, hilarious, crazy, scary, it's falky, hilarious, crazy, scariest, fulky, hilarious, crazy, scariest, fulky, hilarious, crazy, scariest, falky, hilarious, crazy, scariest, fulky, hilarious, crazy, scariest, falky, hilarious, crazy, scariest, fulky, hilarious.

Speaker 12 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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