Why We Changed Our Minds About Politics

26:39Can't do it. And say tariffs are bad. They say, well, I'm against dumb tariffs. Dumb tariffs, yeah. As opposed to smart tariffs. There are smart tariffs. And for ideological reasons, for interest group reasons, it's very hard. And there's a lot of this, if we do move beyond Trump, I worry how much the next president, if there is a free and fair election in 28, how much will the next president unravel considering how little of Trump won Biden unraveled? That's right. The tariffs of Trump won Biden unraveled. Yeah, agreed. So that's one. Similarly, I continue to believe in market-oriented solutions to climate change.

27:21I think that the idea of creating prizes for new technology or all these kinds of things that economists have taught us are effective. That's the direction that I would go. I'm afraid, again, there's no constituency for that. Let's see. Fiscal discipline, worry about the debt. Again, no party. But more deeply, I am a believer in tradition and procedure and law and respect for tradition. So that's one of the things that I find most horrifying about this populist era that we're in is that going back to our earlier conversation about why I became a conservative, you know, it's the institutions, the procedures, the protections in law that it took hundreds and hundreds of years to enshrine in our system are critical.

28:29And so the idea that President Trump is now running roughshod over law and has allies aplenty in the MAGA movement who already, you know, in his first term, he was trying to do it pretty much by himself. Now he has eager allies. They're destroying our system of justice and civil liberties in this country, and they're destroying our international posture. And maybe I should mention, that's another thing I still believe in. I still believe the United States should be the leader of the free world, should have alliances, should stand up for countries that are invaded by aggressive neighbors rather than finding common cause with their oppressors.

29:15You put your finger there on something that I've really been wrestling with a lot. And I recently had this conversation with David Brooks. So let me raise it again with you. And I don't have yet a developed view on this. I think about it all the time. So I don't want to be glib and pretend this is an easy question. And at the end of it, if you want to turn the tables, I wouldn't know what to answer. So that said, there is a big part of me that wishes that Merrick Garland were right. And Merrick Garland and Joe Biden were right in their first term approach, which is Donald Trump was this unfortunate error that the American people made.

29:48They'd had a pretty good track record of picking presidents to that point. They got one wrong. The Electoral College was maybe to blame. And the thing to do was just to tidy up the mess and move on with this little recrimination and backward looking as possible. There's another view, which is that failed, that Trump came back, the people around him became, as he often said of himself, I became worse. He did. The people around him became even worse than that. And we have now a full-throated attack on every American institution, the abuse of law. And it's not clear to me you can just dust this off and tidy up and move forward without serious backward looking and accountability.

30:28I wrestle with that question. Do you have any guidance to offer? Are you as stuck in the predicament as I am? So I guess what you're describing is lustration. And I think in order to get to that point, you have to be more advanced than we are. We are still too divided and polarized. And to even begin to grapple with how do we fix and put back together what's been destroyed. So part of the problem with the Merrick Garland thing was, and the whole approach, I mean, the people who said Trump is a criminal and we have to prosecute him, they believed very firmly in the justice of that. and I understand it.

31:15But at the same time, it was done badly because that New York case really was politically motivated. And it's the one case that they got. But it allowed the MAGA forces to say, you see, both sides abuse the judicial system for political ends. And therefore, when we do it, it's just what was done to us. This is just payback. And so that's a risk when you decide to use the justice system that way. I hope that there will come a time when there's enough recognition across party lines that we've gone off the rails, that there will be an openness to a true accounting. There are people who are committing real crimes, including the President of the United States right now, the blowing up people in boats who you just suspect may be drug traffickers is a prime example, but it's going to take time and a huge amount of persuasion.

32:21And more than persuasion, it's going to take more experience of the awfulness for the American people to get to the point where they're ready for an accounting. Let me go back to the very beginning and raise something. And this is something I think we share. I think we both came to conservatism in great part because of our Jewish identity, because of our inheritance of mass murder of the Jewish people in Europe. In my case, it was almost all of my father's. My father's family came out and they lived. And the vast majority of his family were left behind. They died. And had my father's parents made a slightly different decision, in 1930, my father would have been murdered about the time of his 9th, 10th, or 11th birthday.

33:03So that's the starting point, I think, of both of our politics. And when we come to conservatism by our Jewishness, the Trump presidency has raised some very special questions, very haunting questions for American Jews. On the one hand, as you say, it's a highly bigoted presidency, a highly chauvinist presidency. And Trump certainly has won the support of people who are increasingly, not only outspoken, but flamboyantly anti-Semitic. At the same time, Donald Trump acted to support Israel to win a much more decisive outcome in the Gaza War than the Biden presidency or a Kamala Harris presidency.

33:38And he's acted against the Iranian nuclear program, which is an existential genocidal threat to half the Jewish people who live in Israel. Most American Jews are opposed to the Trump presidency. but many of the most active and prominent American Jews are quite passionately in support of his presidency for the reasons I mentioned and for others as well. How do you, as someone who's, as you said, began your political journey because of this Jewish inheritance, how do you make sense of Trump as a Jewish woman? My feeling about this is, there are a couple. One is that there is a tendency all too common to say, well, whatever else he may be, at least He's good for my group, you know, and that is not a principal position to take, in my opinion.

34:24But also, I think it misses the bigger importance of what his destructiveness means, not just, well, for the Jewish people, among many others. because he is destroying the United States as a bulwark of free nations and a strong alliance. And so even though for now he has taken positions that seem to please the Netanyahu government and supporters of Israel, first of all, he's for sale. So who knows if that will last? I mean, it's never about his true beliefs. It's always about what's good for him. And certainly there are many people on the planet who have a lot more to offer him in that regard than the Jews do.

35:17So who knows how long that would last. But also a secure Israel and a secure Jewish people depend on moral and principled leadership of the United States. So let's leave Israel aside for just a second. What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to allow in these voices to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That's where we live. and it is opening the door to the kind of, yeah, there's a lot of left-wing anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews.

36:14Let me push back on that just a little. And again, I say this in a spirit of uncertainty, not in the spirit of argument. The polls look pretty bad for Trump and his party at the moment that we speak. Who knows whether that will continue? Who knows whether Trump will try to find some way by fraud or by force to seek a third term? He says so. And I think by now we should take those warnings seriously, although the body does fail us all in the end. Trump's running mate and the presumptive frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination, assuming there's still a constitution in 2028, is J.D. Vance, who's very close to Tucker Carlson.

36:48And I will argue this with some of my more, again, Israel-oriented Republican friends, but I think is clearly not a friend to either the Jewish state or the Jewish people. On the other hand, assuming there is an election and J.D. Vance is a Republican nominee, he will be running against a nominee from a party that just vetoed the most plausible-looking running mate for Kamala Harris because he was Jewish and because he wouldn't renounce his support for Israel and wouldn't hedge his condemnation of anti-Semitic outbursts on American college campuses. and where important voices in that party are saying that the test, their most important test for their support in 2028 is Holocaust inversion, that they are looking for a nominee.

37:26We'll say that the perpetrators of the attempted annihilation of Israel on October 7th, 2023, that those attempted perpetrators were the victims of a Nazi-like genocide and the victims who fought back in self-defense, they were the Nazis who committed a genocide. And that's, for important parts of the Democratic Party going to be the litmus test for their candidate in 2028. It's great that everyone's so interested in the Jews. I sometimes wonder, why did we have to be so fascinating? You know that that old saying, there are only two kinds of people in the world who are fascinated by Jews, Jews and anti-Semites.

38:05Well, yeah, but it turns out that there may, well, a lot of people are fascinated by Jews. So how do you make sense of this? Is that you may, given life and health and the continued existence of the United States Constitution, may be called upon next time to make a choice between someone who is backed by domestic anti-Semitism and someone who won their nomination by making some kind of deal or arrangement or truce with those who do Holocaust inversion against the Jewish state and the Jewish people? Yeah. It's a very, very difficult time for the Jewish people, honestly. I think we were born at a time after the Holocaust when anti-Semitism was at epic low rates because of the Holocaust, and that is over.

38:50Our children and grandchildren will not be living in that world. They'll be living in a world where it's come roaring back. And you're right. I mean, the problem on the left is considerable, but it's untested as of now. So we know that the anti-Semites are very close to power on the Republican side, as you say. with J.D. Vance is very close to Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens is a huge influencer, and all of that. On the left, it is, for now, the precinct of the hard left progressives. It's untested as to whether that will become the dominant strain in the Democratic Party. We'll see. That would be very, very worrisome.

39:42Let me, as we wind up, take you back to the beginning and ask you, as you look back on the political views that you had in the earlier part of your life, do you now feel regret or do you feel like I got benefit from it even if I don't hold to all of it these days? Got benefit from what? From the views? The things I believe between age 20 and age 40. I regret those things or I don't regret them because they're part of, I couldn't be where I am. And in fact, there's some value to them. No, there are certain things that I am proud of from that period. I was a firm anti-communist. I think it's a great boon to humanity that communism is largely a thing of history now.

40:33And there are many other issues that I think conservatives were right about. But the world has changed. The conservatism that I signed up for is completely gone. There's no coherent set of ideas that is held by a movement or far less a party now that is recognizable. Yeah. Again, this is something I may be projecting my own thoughts onto you. This is a question I've been wrestling with a lot. I've been thinking about it. I've been working on a memoir for a long time, and I've been wrestling with these questions. that there are things that, when I look back on the world of my early political views, things that I thought were important, that were the defining thing of, as you say, anti-communism, free markets, free trade.

41:20And that turned out to be something I cared about, but most of the people I was associated with, you know, they never cared about very much at all. And then other things that I dismissed as irritating or not awkward or embarrassing or marginal paranoias and bigotries and conspiracism. And that turned out to be really important to a lot of the people I was formerly associated with. On the other hand, I do sometimes think there's something that the reason for the prominence of the never Trump Republicans in the anti-Trump coalition is not just their novelty value. I mean, everyone likes a conversion story.

41:55But also, I think there's something important that we bring. And that is a sense of that this is a group that has a unique sense of the uniqueness of what is happening now. And I'm sure you've seen often in the comments you get from readers or viewers or listeners, they'll say something, aha, you know, we warned you that this was all when Dwight, the moment Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson, Trump was the inevitable outcome. Absolutely. All the time. No, he's not the inevitable outcome of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. He's different. And we're here to tell you that as people who liked all those people, he's different.

42:35And because we liked all those people, we can tell you how and why he's different in a way that the typical commenter who's blaming Dwight Eisenhower for being the start of Donald Trump can't tell you. Well, yeah, the people who are kind of, and I'll say this, I think they're kind of smug and they say, you know, this was always conservatism and this is just the full flowering of all the things that conservatism always was. I say that is absolutely not the case. I can cite for, you know, one thing that pops right into my head, for example, David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana. The president of the United States at the time was George H.W.

43:20Bush. He said, we want no part of him, even if he's a Republican, even if he gets the Republican, that's not who we are, et cetera. That was just normal that the party and the movement would reject that kind of thing. Today, they'd say, you know, he's anti-Walk. Make him the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Exactly. He's got the mission. And he's got a lot of guys who make perfect recruits for our new paramilitary force. Exactly. He can start making those videos for ICE. Yeah, no, it's really sad and pathetic. But anyway, but that is different. And, you know, we're here to report that we lived through it.

44:02and we would not have tolerated that kind of thing. We left when this became the party. So it obviously wasn't the party in 2000. Yeah. Are there realistic circumstances where you can see yourself reimagining yourself as a Republican and a conservative again? I mean, obviously there are fantastical circumstances, but realistic circumstances where you can imagine yourself feeling at home again. not until this whole generation dies off and since I'm going to die off before they do no

44:39because the party has been the the Republican party and the conservative movement have both been so deeply corrupted yeah and so no I cannot imagine but I do hope that the Democratic party You know, there is an argument that in the 1970s and 1980s, when the neoconservatives who had all been Democrats, some of them remain Democrats, but when they moved toward the Republican Party, they brought with them a way of thinking and ideas that were incredibly rejuvenating for conservatism. and possibly the migration of some former conservatives into the democratic party can do the same thing that's maybe a little bit fanciful but i hope so and and if you were to say what what are the gifts what are the things that they might bring with them like the magi um the appreciation so i'll tell you one quick story if i can i was at a meeting with a bunch of people who span the spectrum but have leaned heavily to the left.

45:48And we were talking about how elections are run in this country. And before the advent of Trump, there were a lot of liberal reform bills and things that wanted to centralize the way we run elections in this country and limit the power of states to control it. And so I remember chatting with this person who actually, anyway. And he said, you know, I said, the fact that the Constitution gives this power to the states looks pretty good right now, doesn't it? And he said, yeah. So, you know, some of those limitations on what government power can do, which are sort of our birthright As conservatives, we're suspicious of government power, unlike liberals who always think only of what good it can do.

46:42We're very imbued with, no, it can also be really, really dangerous. So maybe we bring a little bit of that perspective to policymaking. Tell us at the end, finally, about the work you're doing now. What are the things that in your personal work you think are important that get you up in the morning? Well, sometimes it's hard to get up in the morning because the news is really difficult. I'm not saying.

47:08So, okay. So while you're there in bed, the comfort is over your head and thinking maybe this was all a terrible dream. The voice of conscience that says, no, you have to get out and do it. What is that voice reminding you of? It is remembering how important just Orwell's line about duty of intelligent men to state the obvious. keep saying it, being unafraid to say the things that a lot of people in mainstream media and around, certainly in the business world and in many of our institutions, people are afraid to be honest and tell the truth. And so those of us who have been foolish enough to lose all our friends by telling the truth in the past can continue to tell the truth and maybe as we see it And maybe that still has value.

48:07Mona Charan, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. My pleasure.

48:19A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

48:57It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

49:31One another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Mona Charan for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top, my book this week is actually an essay, My Early Beliefs, by the great English economist John Maynard Keynes. Since Mona and I spent so much time discussing our own political evolution, I thought it might be interesting to turn to what is maybe the most famous such discussion ever written, and that is Keynes' essay, which he delivered as an after-dinner speech in 1938. Keynes graduated from Cambridge in the early part of the 20th century, and in 1938, he and a group of his Cambridge friends gathered together for dinner to look back on the changes in their lives over the past third of a century.

50:22Keynes delivered this paper talking about the way that he and his friends had changed their minds about important issues. In the last bit of this essay, which is only 13 pages long, Keynes reflects on one of the important shocks that came to him and came to his friends since their undergraduate days. Now, the early part of the 20th century was, if you were an Englishman of bourgeois background, as Keynes was and as his friends were, a time of extraordinary security. Those of you who have recently watched On Your Own or With Children the Mary Poppins movie We remember George Banks, the patriarch banker, singing, it's good to be an Englishman in 1910.

51:00And so if you came from John Maynard Keynes' background, so it was. It was good to be an Englishman in 1910 or 1904 or 1905 when Keynes was at Cambridge. But in the interval between their undergraduate days and 1938 when the essay was delivered as an after-dinner speech, in that interval, the world had passed through the First World War, the Communist Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of fascism, inflations, depressions, and that was now in 1938 on the edge, very visibly, of a second and even more terrible world war. The age of security that Keynes had grown up in was gone forever.

51:37And a lot of Keynes' thinking and work in his later years dealt with the shock to the sensibility of someone raised in that secure world of Edwardian England, dealing with the new world of communism, fascism, wars, inflations, depressions. And so I want to quote from the later part of the essay, a passage that I think resonates through the ages to our time now. He's talking about this group of friends and their influence, and he says of them, in short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved.

52:29We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence for everyone and everything. It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishments of our predecessors on the ordering of life, as it now seems to me to have been, or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order. As I look back on my early beliefs and the beliefs Mona and I discussed, I realized that we came, Mona and I, our political evolution can be described by exactly the opposite direction. We began as young conservatives, in my case, as early as the 1970s, very aware of, as Keynes put it, of that civilization was a thin and precarious crust.

53:12What we were not enough aware of was the flip side of that. Just as Keynes had to discover the power of order, I think Mona and I, I won't speak for her, I'll speak only for myself, that those of us who were conservatives then and are less conservative now, I don't think we were aware enough that it wasn't just order that was needed, but also the justice and fairness that caused that order to be something a little bit more than, to quote Keynes again, something a little bit more than the personality and the will of a very few. That the order that we valued so much gained its power because of a broad consensus based on the personality and the will of a great many.

53:48And the way to get that great many to back the order was through a sense in most people, of many people, that the order was just. And that if the order was ever felt to be unjust, unfair, to favor only that very few whom Keynes described, then it would have to be maintained in ways that were harsher and more tyrannical than the order that we valued and that we remembered. I think we all go through evolutions in life, and that's one of the tragic blessings or one of the blessed tragedies of growing old, is that you get this critical distance on what you thought before and what you think now. And maybe the outcome that we're all groping to is to say, how do we hold on to things that we thought were true that we were young, that were correct intuitions when we were young, and how do we enrich them as we get older?

54:38That is the topic that Mona and I have spent our time together discussing. We've spent so many years of our lives working together on. I'm very glad to have had her today to discuss this working out with me on The David Fromm Show. Thanks so much to you for listening and watching to The David Fromm Program. I hope you will subscribe and share this program widely, that the success and continuation of the program depends on your subscriptions and your sharing. As always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you're minded to do that, is by subscribing to The Atlantic, and then you can support the work not only of me, but of all of my Atlantic colleagues.

55:11Thanks so much to joining me today on The David Fromm Show. See you next week for another episode of The David Fromm Show. Bye-bye.

55:40This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. at farmers our honesty is contagious wait am i gonna catch honesty well when you're with farmers it's kind of inevitable well how long does it take to i lied to you when you asked if i knew what a deductible was i don't know my dad's birthday and i thought umbrella policies were for rainstorms actual rainstorms i have it don't i you don't just have honesty you have farmers learn more at farmers.com underwritten by farmers truck or fire insurance exchanges or affiliate Products not available in every state.