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The real State of the Union, with Charles C.W. Cooke
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Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
There are two ways to look at American politics in 2024. There’s the prevailing pessimistic view. Many people think democracy is under threat, the economy is structurally vulnerable, the military is stretched, and for many, the looming election represents a choice between two geriatric evils.
There is another perspective. What incredible fun! American politics has never been so entertaining. And as we look forward to the election, no one knows what will happen.
If anyone can make sense of it all, it’s Charles C.W. Cooke. Charles is a senior writer at National Review, the host of the Charles C.W. Cooke Podcast, and the author of The Conservatarian Manifesto.
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Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. There are a couple of ways that you can look at American politics in 2024. There's the prevailing pessimistic view, of course. Most people think democracy is under threat, although they are divided on whether that threat is a would-be dictator or a tyrannical establishment weaponising the judiciary.
Threats and Challenges in American Politics
00:00:36
Speaker
The economy is structurally, well, buggered and few politicians have any appetite to fix it.
00:00:43
Speaker
The country is militarily stretched across two fronts, with the very real threat of a third opening up in the Pacific. And for many, the looming election represents a choice between two geriatric evils. There is another perspective. What incredible fun. American politics has never been so entertaining.
00:01:05
Speaker
Trump is hilarious. The Will Biden kill over game makes any presidential address essential viewing. Rogues and misfits roam the halls of the Capitol building. And as we look forward to an election campaign.
00:01:19
Speaker
No one knows what will happen.
Introduction to Charles C.W. Cook
00:01:21
Speaker
If anyone can make sense of it all, it's Charles C.W. Cook. Charles is a senior writer at the August National Review magazine, the host of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast, author of the Conservatarian Manifesto, and my favorite pundit on US politics. Charles, welcome to Australia. Thank you very much for having me.
Charles’s Optimistic Perspective
00:01:42
Speaker
We are chatting about a week after Joe Biden's State of the Union address. We were both unimpressed. What is your alternative State of the Union for the United States in 2024? Well, I don't think the State of the Union is fun, which was your second option. But I do think that the State of the Union is better than many people think. And that isn't to say that the problems you identify don't exist.
00:02:09
Speaker
But it is to say that I think I would rather be in America than in any other country right now, despite the problems that it faces and despite the choice we're headed towards or can opt out of, as I probably will, between two geriatric weirdos. The long-term problems are real and ought to have taken up more of that state of the union.
00:02:38
Speaker
and ought to take up more of our politics in America.
Fiscal Issues and Criticisms
00:02:43
Speaker
And we have $34 trillion worth of debt. We have budget deficits that make that worse every year, and we have absolutely no plan to do anything about it. And the only reason that it's come up
00:03:04
Speaker
outside of a few budget hawks who've been talking about it for years is that the bipartisan consensus seemed to be that it didn't matter while interest rates were low, and now interest rates are not low. So people are talking about it, but no one wants to do anything about it. That is a problem.
00:03:27
Speaker
And that's just as much of a problem on the Republican side. The Republicans are slightly better than the Democrats on this only in that they don't want to add a whole bunch of new entitlements to the existing tranche. I think Joe Biden's budget is $7.3 trillion. What universe does he live in? But the Republicans have abandoned any sort of fiscal restrain. Their standard bearer, Donald Trump, doesn't want to do anything about entitlements. He doesn't want to cut the thing. He can't say what he would cut even when he's directly asked. So that side of things is bad.
00:03:57
Speaker
The rest though, I actually think life's pretty good in America. I think Joe Biden in many ways has made it worse, but I don't think that that makes it bad. And if I were Biden, I would instead of eschatology and attacking everyone who disagrees with me as if they're some sort of traitor, I think I would have been sunnier and tried to point to
00:04:27
Speaker
the fact that American incomes and lifestyles and standard of living are better than elsewhere, that America is a rich country, that the unemployment rate is very low, and that as the world's reserve currency, we still have a lot of flexibility, but of course he didn't.
Economic Policies and Public Sentiment
00:04:50
Speaker
Despite those positives, there is a real sense of anger amongst the American population. What do you put that down to if there are, as you said, many good things that Americans can point to about their country? Well, I think there's a lot of reasons for it. Some of them are real, some are not. Where I will very strongly criticize Joe Biden is.
00:05:15
Speaker
He came into office and he didn't act as if the United States and the world had just been through a catastrophe, which the pandemic was, not just in its death toll, but in its effect on the economy.
00:05:30
Speaker
What he should have done, and I understand this is disappointing for anyone who's wanted to be president his whole life, but this is the hand he was dealt. What he should have done is come in and say, I'm sorry. But as the adult in the room, it is not going to be my lot in life to preside over big increases in spending and grand plans. I have to be responsible. And we, and we as fair, Donald Trump signed off on it, just spent $5 trillion fighting COVID.
00:06:01
Speaker
We don't have any money left. I don't have to reiterate the numbers I just gave you. And we're going to act like that. But he didn't. Instead he came in. He allowed a bunch of historians
00:06:15
Speaker
very partisan people to convince him that he was Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt. I'd invite your listeners, go look up in the January, February, March of 2021, what Joe Biden was being told by people like John Meacham. You could be Lyndon Johnson. You could be a great transformational president.
00:06:36
Speaker
He believed it and he and his party pushed through $2 trillion in spending in an already very hot economy and pushed inflation through the roof. Now, they weren't solely responsible for that. We were going to get some inflation in the economy given the lockdowns. But Morgan Stanley says that that particular bill turbocharged it. That's their word. And it's really hurt people.
Immigration Policies Comparison
00:07:00
Speaker
I think people are absolutely right to be angry about that. And the way you fight inflation is you raise interest rates, which also hurts people. If you're trying to buy a car right now or having for fender home, then that is out of reach for you.
00:07:16
Speaker
in a way that it wasn't four or five years ago. That's one thing. I think people are rightly angry about the border because that seems deliberate. Biden came in, he reversed a lot of Trump's policies, policies that were working. I will not in any way defend the way Donald Trump talks about that issue. I think it's grotesque, but he did actually help stem the tide of illegal immigration and Joe Biden very deliberately reversed that. And now we have the biggest illegal immigration crisis in recent memory.
00:07:42
Speaker
And I think on the other side, people are rightly angry because the Republican Party's gone crazy. And so what would normally happen in a country at this point is the other people would run away with the next election and everyone would sort of rejigger their views and they'd come to some semblance of appeal to the middle.
00:08:03
Speaker
But Donald Trump is going to be the nominee again. This is the ninth year in which he's going to dominate American politics. He is also very old. He is crazy. And that leaves people, I think, with that sense of dread that they have to go into November, either electing a guy who 65% think is going to die or at least have to leave office.
00:08:23
Speaker
through infirmity or Donald Trump. And that's made people very cross. But I would remind everyone, as I said, again, that that is real and it shouldn't be ignored and it matters. But relative to how most people in human history have ever lived, Americans have it very good. And some of that anger actually does feel to me a little bit self-indulgent. We will deep dive on the issues of the economy and immigration.
00:08:52
Speaker
Before we do, I had a question jotted down, which was, what issues will this election be won or lost on? And then I paused because I thought of the economy, I thought of immigration, I thought of abortion. And then I thought, it's probably a question before that, which is, will this election be won or lost on issues at all? Or is this just a character assessment of the two presidential candidates?
Public Perception and Leadership Concerns
00:09:19
Speaker
Well, I think it is both. I mean, the press is really annoyed by this, but the public thinks that the economy was much better under Trump. And it was until COVID, which wasn't Trump's fault. And for the first time in a long time, Republicans have a big advantage on the question of who would you be better off under, who do you think would be a better steward of the economy?
00:09:48
Speaker
And that's going to matter. You know, I think the unemployment rate is admirably low, but there are lots of other parts of the economy too. People really do feel that this isn't invented. So I do think that's going to be a big contributing factor. The border is a big one. And then there is a lot of personality stuff. Joe Biden's age is not a mere abstraction. The presidency has been inflated over the last a hundred years.
00:10:17
Speaker
to a remarkable level, and there is an enormous amount of power vested in it now, such that it really does matter who is at the helm. And whatever anyone who wishes to avoid this might say, Joe Biden is visibly too old to be president. He doesn't remember things.
00:10:44
Speaker
He can barely get through a speech. He looks odd when he's walking. I take no pleasure in that, but I also have eyes and I can see it. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is not someone you would in a million years considered to be fit to be president, even before what he tried to do after the last election, which in my view was not
00:11:09
Speaker
best manifested by January 6th, as gross as that was, but by his attempt to rewrite the constitution to stay in office. That's what he did. He tried to rewrite the 12th amendment, get Mike Pence to deem him president and use the 1876 electoral count act to ratify that in Congress.
00:11:25
Speaker
You've disqualified yourself and people are angry about it and they should be angry about it. So a lot of it's going to be on that. But the issues do seem to favor Republicans with the one exception of abortion, which is going to help the Democrats. I don't know how much is going to help the Democrats, but it's certainly going to help the Democrats. The question is, will it help enough because the most high salience issues in any American elections are always the economy first, followed by crime and immigration.
Republican Party Dynamics and Trump's Influence
00:11:53
Speaker
And those three.
00:11:55
Speaker
Help republicans they play into donald trump's strength whether they can be offset by abortion i don't know. On trump the casual political observer.
00:12:06
Speaker
would have seen what you just mentioned. It would have seen January 6th. They would have seen the fallout from that. And then I think most people assumed that's the end of the Trump story. If you've been watching, as I said, very casually to now see that Trump has once again got a stranglehold on the Republican party is an incredible political comeback. It's an incredible political story. Paint a picture of how that comeback has happened. What are the forces at play that have led to that?
00:12:35
Speaker
Well, I don't know. This is the problem. I keep being asked to explain this by people outside of the country and I myself find it somewhat baffling. He lost the last election. His king making abilities in 2022 left a lot to be desired. He is loathed by a majority, often a super majority of voters. I don't understand the stranglehold. I also think.
00:13:03
Speaker
that while he did some good things as president and some bad things, the premise on which Trump's initial ascent was built is wrong. Back in 2015 and then 16, the argument was Republicans can't win. They're losers. And we need someone else to come in and clean up.
00:13:29
Speaker
But at that point, Republicans had the strongest showing in the states, state legislatures and governorships, and in Congress since the 1920s. They'd just come off a 2014 election that redefined the word landslide, almost New Deal style landslide.
00:13:51
Speaker
And at that point, at that exact moment, the Republican electorate decided that Republicans were useless and couldn't win. And I find it inexplicable. I think the feeling was that Republicans have lost two elections. They'd lost in 2008 and 2012 to Barack Obama, but that's not unusual in American history. In fact, if you go back before that, what had happened? Well, the Democrats had lost two elections to George W. Bush. And before that, the Republicans had lost two elections to Bill Clinton.
00:14:19
Speaker
Now this is fairly normal. Barack Obama also happened to be a generational talent and the first black president, which understandably, perhaps even rightly created a degree of excitement around him. So I am baffled that nine years in, Trump retains his hold on the party, especially having lost twice in a row. I am aware though, that I am not indicative here.
00:14:48
Speaker
I mean, one of the most important things I think about being a writer about politics is to understand your own limitations. And my limitations include being baffled by Trump. Clearly though, he is still seen by
00:15:03
Speaker
the base of the Republican party, if not the country, which doesn't like him as the best option. And they, they chose him as a result. Some people will tell you it's because the Democrats went after him in the courts and that that changed everything. I'm just not convinced by this. I think he has a Steve Jobs style reality distortion field that affects all politics and inoculates him against the usual slings and arrows that would take down a
00:15:31
Speaker
a presidential candidate. And I think until he voluntarily leaves the scene or dies, he's going to continue to have it.
00:15:38
Speaker
way that you explained his rise 2014 onwards, it was almost, it was very pragmatic. It was a matter of you framed it as electoral math says this is a pragmatic decision by Republicans around who can win and who can lose. There's an emotional element here. Like I'm not convinced that this was so much a practical decision as much as a very much an emotional one. And I want to understand this better. So the old school country club, neocon, conservative Republicans.
00:16:08
Speaker
of which the national review may not be entirely aligned with, but I'd say relatively in the same ballpark, have now very much been subsumed by the Margo Republicans led by Trump. My question is, has that transformation of the right of American politics been caused by Trump, or was Trump merely a symptom of broader forces at play? And this transformation would have occurred regardless.
00:16:33
Speaker
Well, I'm actually not convinced that it's occurred, except in small measures and you use the word pragmatic. I suppose in a sense, it was a pragmatic view, but as I say, I think it was a completely wrong view. I think the Republican primary electorate that decided that they needed Donald Trump were wrong to conclude that. I think it was a mistake.
00:16:54
Speaker
It was a mistake because the Republicans had not lost particularly badly in the two presidential elections that they had lost and they had absolutely crushed it in congressional elections in the interim. And they had moved quite dramatically on the one issue where the Republican base had a point about the preferences of the elite, that being immigration. If you go back to Mitt Romney's campaign.
00:17:21
Speaker
Romney was considerably to the right on immigration relative to John McCain and George W. Burch. And then the 2014 Senate elections were fought in part over immigration and the border. So this distinction that is drawn by the MAGA types between what they regard as the establishment and themselves, I think from the beginning,
00:17:49
Speaker
was something of a myth. I'd also point out that it doesn't really seem to exist in practice. So there are and always have been these various factions within the GOP and they rise and fall. You go back to the 1950s, Senator Taft was an isolationist.
00:18:08
Speaker
That was at odds with Eisenhower, who was president, but Taft still had a following. Likewise, in the 1990s, Pat Buchanan, who was in a sense a proto Trump, challenged George H. W. Bush in 1992 for the Republican presidential nomination may have cost him
00:18:29
Speaker
The election certainly gave soccer to Ross Perot, who ran as a third party candidate against trade deals and foreign entanglements and so forth. It's always been there in the party and it's in there now and Trump to some extent represents that. But if you look at what Trump did when he was in office, it's really not particularly different to what establishment Republicans do. He came in, he cut taxes. That's the Republican.
00:18:54
Speaker
habit. The old joke is the Republican Party exists to free slaves and cut taxes. They've done one. They keep doing the second. He appointed Federalist Society originalist judges to the Supreme Court and other levels of the judiciary.
00:19:11
Speaker
And he cut regulations and that was basically it. The one thing that he did that was unusual for Republicans is he imposed tariffs. Although you will find many people who are scholars of the American right, who will tell you that it's not as unusual as the press will say that Ronald Reagan imposed tariffs, George Bush imposed tariffs on steel and so on. Look at the Republican party in the States, the most obvious
00:19:39
Speaker
paradigms of Republican governance of Florida and Texas. Texas and Florida, again, with a few exceptions at the margins, are pretty standard establishment conservative states that have good business environments, low taxes, some social conservative policies, but not extreme. What is it?
00:20:02
Speaker
that Trump is supposed to have swept away. I just don't see it. And I think that while he is personally popular and he's charismatic and he's funny, the idea that he has fundamentally shifted where the GOP is and where conservatism is does not seem to me to be borne out by the evidence. One quick caveat, that could change if he gets a second term. I don't know what that would look like. But at the moment,
00:20:32
Speaker
I'm just not sure there's that much space between them. It was an interesting insight there, which was that there have always been different ideological strands on the right of politics.
Future of Conservatism in America
00:20:44
Speaker
In America and abroad, I would suggest in Australia, people would be aware of John Howard's broad church, which says that the Liberal Party in Australia has always been an alliance between social conservatives and classical liberals. And that sort of balancing act, I think, reflects a lot of centre-right political parties.
00:21:02
Speaker
around the world. You've looked at this sort of balancing act in the Conservatorian manifesto, and my question would be, after this, potentially, depending on your point of view, seismic phenomena of the rise of Trump, the rise of populism on the American right, what does the future of right-wing politics in America look like, and what does the right course look like for a conservative in America as we eventually, say, move beyond the Trump era?
00:21:29
Speaker
Well, in a sense, this question is a tributary off of the river that we were just waiting in because the idea that politics has fundamentally shifted, I don't think is substantiated. And because of that, I don't think that the right in America is going to look profoundly different than it does now. I mean, there's two reasons for that. One of them is philosophical. The other one's practical. Philosophically, the alliance you just described, which also obtains in Australia,
00:21:59
Speaker
or did is, in my view, the product of the difference between people who believe that you can perfect man and society and people who believe that you can't. I think that classical liberals and social conservatives both believe, for whatever reason and in whatever way, that man is fallen. It doesn't have to be religious, but we just don't think you can do what the French revolutionaries tried to do, and so we pull away from it, and I still see
00:22:28
Speaker
a common thread on the American right that reflects that. The practical is that the realities on the ground that a Trump administration would face are going to box him in to small C conservative positions. And he's going to, if he wins, inherit a border that is open and needs to be closed.
00:22:59
Speaker
a world situation that is precarious, an economy that needs to be unleashed and that needs some semblance of fiscal discipline applied to it, a base that is socially conservative and is going to want
00:23:26
Speaker
abortion restrictions and the maintenance of religious freedom and a judiciary that he largely appointed that is going to be asked to address all of those issues. And I don't know what will happen. Perhaps it'll be chaos and I'll be totally wrong, but I just can't imagine that
00:23:52
Speaker
he is going to find enough support in America outside of the preexisting coalition you described. Now he can't run for president again, so I suppose he could be suicidal and not care at all about his approval ratings. But, you know, Trump is running this year by pointing to the things that he did in office that pleased the traditional Republican coalition.
00:24:22
Speaker
If you look at what he and his allies say when they demand that Republicans vote for him, it's, hey, Neil Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court. It's, hey, I cut your taxes. It's, hey, I created global stability through a projection of force and strength. I don't think politics changes that much. I think, you know, the way I would maybe put it is
00:24:47
Speaker
The reason we have two political parties and two political coalitions in America is because we have two political world views and they're going to stay there. However, Donald Trump triangulates around them. So I'm just not convinced that we are seeing a fundamental shift. We are seeing a demographic shift. That is to say we are seeing a shift in who is in the coalition, but not what those people believe. So one thing that's happening is minorities.
00:25:18
Speaker
mostly hispanics but to some extent african-americans who have always been more conservative than the democratic party are starting to vote republic. Because whatever it was about the democratic party that they preferred is no longer there or they hit the tipping point and then we have people nominally middle and upper middle class white people.
00:25:39
Speaker
who have moved toward the Democrats because whatever it was about the Republican party, they liked, they no longer do. And the Democratic party seems like a more natural home. Some of those people really were only in the Republican party for say foreign policy reasons and actually don't agree with Republicans on social issues. They're not constitutional originalists. They're not second amendment advocates or what you will. But
00:26:08
Speaker
The ideology has stayed broadly the same, it's just who is willing to vote for whom has shifted. Let's look at the Democrats then, because they have their own ideological struggle to contend with.
Democratic Party's Strategic Shifts
00:26:22
Speaker
Once the party of Social Democrats, the working class, the worker, which again broadly reflects what centre-left parties around the world used to be, they are again going through the same transformation, that is we are seeing globally, moving to more of the inner-city, liberal, progressive, work elites,
00:26:41
Speaker
That shift, is that permanent or at least for the foreseeable future, permanent on the left of politics, or is there any way that the Democrats could reconnect with that working class base that they once owned? I can't see how it can be permanent because if it is permanent, they're going to be in real trouble. They have survived because the Republicans have gone mad, but the Republicans won't always, I assume, be mad. The Democrats
00:27:12
Speaker
have a coalition at the moment that is completely incoherent. Republicans do as well, but the Democrats' coalition is more so. Present, it's made up of upper-middle-class white woke people who believe absurd things, ethnic minorities who don't, union members, especially public sector union members, and
00:27:38
Speaker
a lot of people who historically were in the old farm labor coalition and people who live in cities. And the problem they have is that the offering is increasingly alienating everyone except the upper middle class white people.
00:27:58
Speaker
They can get away with it because Republicans are also crazy. But in the long run, you can't build a coalition based on that. What you need to do to build a winning coalition on the left is run broadly in the way Barack Obama did. Perhaps one or two ticks to the right. And again, not sound like a broken record with my mantra that nothing really ever changes, but
00:28:25
Speaker
That is still there. I mean, the old New Deal, great society coalition is still there for the taking if it can be articulated. But instead of honing in on its central theme, which is class, or at least income disparities, they have become obsessed with identity and
00:28:54
Speaker
They have started to explain the whole world through the color of people's skin or their sexual orientation. They've become hectoring. They have become confusing and they've downplayed what it is that has historically allowed them to win. And in fact, they've put themselves in a position where they're less able to make that case because the people who are the most influential and important
00:29:24
Speaker
and loudest in their political coalition, which is the upper middle class white woke people are quite rich. I mean, one thing I would say that has fascinated me in the last 10 years is that the democratic party went from saying we need to raise taxes to pay for social services.
00:29:40
Speaker
in the way that a left of center party in Britain or Australia or Canada would say. In other words, we need to tax the middle class, but you'll get a lot for it. To saying we will only increase taxes on the rich and then redefining what rich means dramatically. When Hillary Clinton ran for president 2016,
00:29:57
Speaker
Her definition of rich was anyone who earned above $250,000 a year. And when Joe Biden ran for president just four years later, his definition of rich was anyone who earns $400,000 or more. Well,
00:30:16
Speaker
That is a reflection of the people who are moving into the democratic party, but it actually makes the rest of the stuff that the democratic party wants to do basically impossible. All of the money in social democracies is in the middle. Obviously, I'm from England originally. In England, we have very high taxes on everyone, plus a 20% value added tax. That's why the British government can spend so much money, spending more than it has, of course, but
00:30:46
Speaker
The same is true in Canada. The same is true in Australia. The same is true in France and Germany and Spain and Italy and all those social democracies in the United States. We actually don't tax the middle class much at all. And the democratic party has arrived at the point at which it, even though it wants to increase spending is saying, and we won't. And that just makes their coalition really irrational. So I think they're going to have to change.
00:31:13
Speaker
at some point and go back to where they were, which is as a broadly socially democratic party that wants to raise taxes on the middle class, that is interested in income levels and not identity, and that can appeal to white working class people without whom you cannot win durable majorities.
00:31:39
Speaker
use that as a segue into the economy at a more granular level.
Economic Concerns and Political Denial
00:31:45
Speaker
You mentioned some numbers at the outset of this interview. I'll add a few more into the mix. 63% of all personal income tax revenue in February went towards paying interest on the national debt.
00:31:59
Speaker
We are moving to a day and it's not that far away where 100% of all personal income revenue, which is about 50% of all total revenue that the US government gets will just go towards paying interest on the debt. I saw that chart only last night. It may be one of the scariest things I've ever seen. Next to no one is seriously talking about it, which blows my mind. So I guess the question is, does the US now just have to have
00:32:29
Speaker
an economic catastrophe in order for this problem to be addressed? That's a great question. I think the answer is perhaps. Historically, that's what's happened. And there are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, the United States government will not be able to avoid this indefinitely because the bond holders won't let them.
00:32:54
Speaker
This isn't after a point a political question. It's a question of economic reality that money is owed to real people and they are preferred within the law. They will get paid first. That's how bonds work. So if we hit some crisis.
00:33:16
Speaker
Congress will not be able to wiggle its way out of it. There will be actual consequences that have to be faced. And at that point, we're going to have to have a national talk. Likewise, there are provisions within the law that provoke automatic cuts to social security. If the so-called trust fund reaches a certain leverage ratio, I think is the right term,
00:33:48
Speaker
The demagogues can, if they want, stand up and bang the table all day and say, under my watch, there will be no cuts to Social Security. But there actually just will if finances reach a certain state of parlessness. That is not Congress's
00:34:05
Speaker
It's not in Congress's hands. The law requires automatic and steep cuts. So one way to look at it is this is actually going to happen unless we change course. Another way to look at it though is that the public has not at all been prepared for reality. When you say that was the scariest chart you've ever seen, I agree. And you said it blew your mind that no one is talking about it or doing anything about it, but they're not.
00:34:34
Speaker
If anything, we've gone in the other direction. In the last 10 years, we have gone from Barack Obama reluctantly saying that there was a problem that needed to be fixed and disagreeing with Republicans as to how the best way of fixing it might look, to both parties' major candidates promising not to do anything about it.
00:34:59
Speaker
Donald Trump, I hate the way the press talks about this, worked out in 2016 that this was a losing message. Well, it is a losing message, but it's also true. The math doesn't care about whether Donald Trump has worked out that entitlement reform is unpopular. And that leads me to worry about what will happen if the automatic cuts I've mentioned come into play because the public just hasn't been prepared for this at all. So will Congress try and
00:35:29
Speaker
Get around them will it try and delay them refuse to oblige its obligations I don't know I don't know I mean it's a great question what. What happens next because this isn't this isn't a sort of what what happens if the Japanese invade Pearl Harbor question.
00:35:48
Speaker
The approach to this for a long time has been that we can just will it away if we want to. And well, we can't, but I just worry the world try. This is the interesting thing about this debate for me is that it feels like everyone is trying to find.
00:36:06
Speaker
a magic solution to this problem. Most sensible people realise to sort this problem out, you need to address social security and or you need to address Medicaid. That's it. They're the two levers that you have to deal with this problem. I was hearing, I think it was on one of the, I think it was the remnant podcast, Jono Goldberg's podcast. And his guest at the time was saying that he ran a competition with university students every year to get their thoughts on how to deal with the national debt and the deficit.
00:36:33
Speaker
Apparently, 95% of the kids every year put one of their top priorities as taxing marijuana, as if this will magically set a deal with the debt. I think it's 0.0001%. Similarly, the Democrats' magic solution is just taxing billionaires. Again, that is a 0.001% answer to this problem. It just
00:36:57
Speaker
it it it feels like there is a conscious denial of reality which again reality has a habit of eventually coming and smacking you in the face. Yeah well the other problem here is that the entire area is marked out by lies and has been for years so. Right from the beginning in order to make it palatable and constitutional the.
00:37:24
Speaker
Characterization of social security has been as an insurance program that you pay into and then take out from once you reach a certain age. You'll hear politicians say this, it's your money.
00:37:42
Speaker
Well, A, not really, because people take out a lot more than they put in, and B, if it were a private insurance company, it would be classified as a Ponzi scheme because there's actually no way of making the books balanced. That's a big problem. Another problem, as you say, is that the Democratic Party for decades, maybe more, has successfully persuaded perhaps half the country
00:38:11
Speaker
that all of America's fiscal problems can be fixed if we tax the rich. Now, as I said earlier, that isn't true. It's also obviously not true because the Democrats have had to redefine rich over and over again. So the combination of those two,
00:38:38
Speaker
leads people to believe that social security
00:38:43
Speaker
is fundamentally solvent, but it's been screwed by people who just wouldn't tax the rich. And so you get this line you hear about the reforms that were signed into law by President Reagan in the 80s that capped social security contributions. And people think if we just increase taxes a bit on Elon Musk, social security is solvent and we don't have to worry about it. And it's just not true. These are all lies. And incidentally, even if that were true, all that would mean
00:39:13
Speaker
is that we wouldn't add anymore social security inspired debt to our existing thirty four trillion dollar debt it wouldn't get rid of the problem that you just highlighted which is that we're already spending huge amounts of money to service that debt.
00:39:26
Speaker
We at the moment, you and I right now, we're actually talking about how we slow the amount that we add to the debt. We're not talking about even stopping adding to the debt, and we're certainly not talking about cutting it back. And this is a problem that has become catastrophic in the last 25 years. Go back to the late 1990s, the projection showed that by, I think it was 2005, the federal debt in the United States was going to be paid off. And the thing that people worried about
00:39:55
Speaker
Then was whether there would be too much money in the economy whether there would be problems with that surface of cash floating around what a problem to have we were so close at the end of the twentieth century to.
00:40:13
Speaker
getting rid of the debt completely. We had balanced budgets for a couple of years. We had really small deficit projections in the long run and we blew it. And we've racked up another, I think it's $28 trillion since that time. And we have filled the voters heads with lies about how this works. And, you know, we've made it difficult. So it's not just that we don't want to face it. And it's not just that politicians are lying about it right now. It's that in order to fix this, they would have to go back.
00:40:43
Speaker
Here, let me tell you just one thing before I finish on this. During the Obamacare debates, there was this sign that went viral. Someone held up at a protest rally and it said, keep your hands off my Medicare. And progressives, they thought this was just so funny. And they went on about it for years. Ha, ha, ha. Look at this person. Keep your hands off my Medicare. It's a government program. How did they not know? It's a government program. It's not his.
00:41:13
Speaker
Well, why did that person think that Medicare was his?
00:41:17
Speaker
Why? Because he'd been told by the people who then mocked him right from its inception in 1965, you pay your paycheck in, you take your medical care out. That's not true. You pay in and you take a lot more out, twice as much, three times as much out in many cases as you put in. So we simultaneously tell people lies about how our system works and then mock them for believing them. And then we think we can fix our entitlement problem. It's crazy.
00:41:45
Speaker
move away from the economy to a similarly depressing issue of immigration and border security.
Immigration Discussions and Misconceptions
00:41:51
Speaker
I will do my best AOC impersonation, which admittedly doesn't come naturally to me. No person is illegal, Charles. Legal immigrants built this country. They're just trying to find a better life. You heartless monster. Your response.
00:42:10
Speaker
So the first two of those are untrue, the third is true and the fourth that I'm a heartless monster is a matter of opinion. The word illegal is appended or prepended to the word immigration to distinguish between the people our law allows in and the people our law doesn't. I don't know what this phrase no person is illegal means. I think it's...
00:42:40
Speaker
I think it's a really silly attempt to fight against a point that hasn't been made. I think the people who say that believe that those who are deemed to be illegal immigrants, because they are immigrants illegally, are being cast as illegal in their whole sense. There's something intrinsically wrong with them. But that's not what people mean when they say illegal immigrant. What they mean is
00:43:09
Speaker
That there are some people who've moved here legally and there are some people who have moved here illegally and that person is in the second camp. It is entirely reasonable if someone thinks we shouldn't have any immigration laws for them to say that, but they shouldn't try and change the language that we used to discuss it. I mean, that's like saying, well, I don't think law X should exist. Therefore no one is a criminal. No, we have criminals. There are criminals. And in fact, in order to make the case that somebody shouldn't be a criminal,
00:43:38
Speaker
You have to acknowledge that they are. That's how you get laws repealed. The idea that illegal immigrants built the United States is absolute nonsense. There are a lot of illegal immigrants here who work hard.
00:43:51
Speaker
They are criminals because they're being paid in violation of the law. Many of them have social security numbers and identity numbers in violation of the law, which is a crime that if I committed, by the way, I would be really profoundly in trouble for. But they didn't build the country. The United States was built by very many people, legal immigrants among them.
00:44:18
Speaker
You can get too cute with that because of course a lot of immigrants who came here and really did build up the country weren't subject to any immigration laws to speak of, except maybe an inspection at the port of entry. That's a fair argument if you think we shouldn't have any immigration laws to point out that we once didn't, but I don't quite know what illegal immigrants built the country is supposed to mean. The people
00:44:44
Speaker
who are coming in are coming in for a better life is mostly true, but it that actually cuts both ways.
00:44:51
Speaker
I mean, first off, of course they want to move to America because America is the best country in the world. And I have an enormous amount of sympathy for that because I also moved to America and from a country that was a lot better than most of the places that these people are coming from. There's no lack of sympathy on my part, but we have judged, I think correctly as a nation that we cannot just allow anyone who wants to move here for a better life to do so because we have a country of our own to maintain and we have limited resources. And as we've seen.
00:45:19
Speaker
We have border towns that get overrun. We have major cities like New York that can't keep up with what happens when the border is functionally open. The flip side of that is once you've acknowledged that most of the people who are coming in are coming in for a better life, you've actually damaged your position of your AOC. Because one of the ways that she tries to get around this is to say that everyone who's coming in has been persecuted. They're all asylum seekers. They're all fleeing terrible
00:45:49
Speaker
circumstances, and that's simply not true. There are people who are fleeing terrible circumstances and we have a system for them, but most people who come here, come here to make a better life, which is great. They should. That's perfect. Except we can't let them all in. I think, I think that this is an area in which the American left has lost its mind. And I think the reason that it's lost its mind is that it has come to see it as some sort of moral imperative.
00:46:19
Speaker
By which I mean, instead of treating it as it has been treated for most of the last 60 or 70 years as a normal practical political question, it has come to be treated as the equivalent of, you know, should we kill people.
00:46:38
Speaker
where there really is very little argument on the other side. We can have a conversation about how many people should come in and under what circumstances. We can have a conversation about what the tax rate should be. We can have a conversation about to what extent the Clean Air Act should be enforced. The reason for that is that everyone in those conversations acknowledges that there are trade-offs and that the government has an interest in setting the levels.
00:47:04
Speaker
But if you believe, as the American left has come to believe, that all immigration enforcement is per se a sign of racism or bigotry or xenophobia, then you can't have that conversation because you can't have a conversation about how much racism and bigotry and xenophobia should we have. This is the shift. This is why they've gone crazy. They've taken immigration out of its role in the normal political discourse and they've placed it in the
00:47:30
Speaker
A different category and as such, they just, they can't engage with it and they end up sounding absurd. And then they ended up doing what Joe Biden has done, which is basically to open the border. I find this shift so fascinating because in part Australia. Based a similar challenge in the 2000s and early 2010s with illegal refugees coming by boat. And I think you saw perhaps not the same loony extent, but you saw similar types of thinking on the left.
00:48:01
Speaker
But the difference is, I think through a very strong arguments from the right side of politics in Australia, you know, have near bipartisan consensus that you need to have strong borders and that strong borders can actually enable a strong immigration program. Right. And I just find, you know, I wonder kind of whether taking that example
00:48:25
Speaker
The right in America could have done a better job making the case for strong borders and whether that plays into this problem. Yeah, of course. This is where having Donald Trump as your avatar is unhelpful. I mean, in one sense, Trump is helped now by being seen as harsh hand on immigration because the backdrop is the crisis that Joe Biden has created.
00:48:55
Speaker
But you have seen in other circumstances, this thermostatic shift between the left and the right on this, where the voting public recoils at the extremism of both sides. And what you want is what you described, which is a coherent, rational set of arguments made by the right that then
00:49:22
Speaker
are adopted by the left and become the consensus. Donald Trump is not going to make his immigration rhetoric the consensus. He's going to make it the last refuge of people who are exhausted. So he might win the election and he might win in part on immigration in large extent because Joe Biden has just been inexplicably weak on this, but
00:49:53
Speaker
He's not created the roadmap for future. The moment that border is closed to the satisfaction of a majority of the American people, they will recoil at Trump's words. And back in 2017, I think it was perhaps 18, the Trump White House,
00:50:18
Speaker
proposed what I think was one of the single most sensible immigration reform bills I've ever seen. It was effectively the way that Britain's immigration system works. I think maybe the way Australia's does, it had a point system. That's right. Limited chain migration, which at the moment is 80 to 90% of American immigration, which is a problem because there's no rationale for it. You just, if you hear you happen to know someone and be related to someone abroad, they can come in.
00:50:47
Speaker
It set points for, you know, English proficiency, education. I think there was some given to countries that are more like the United States, have democratic institutions and so forth. And it was treated as if it had been written by Adolf Hitler because Trump's rhetoric and the rhetoric of the people around him, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and others,
00:51:17
Speaker
led normal voters reasonably to mistrust his instincts. So, sure, they might turn to Trump now. They might ask him to close the border.
00:51:30
Speaker
But the republican party under trump is not going to get even close to the consensus you've described in australia while he still describes immigrants as rapists while he says as he did recently they poisoned the blood while he makes it seem like a zero sum game and in fact what we saw during trumps.
00:51:51
Speaker
time as president was that once the immediate issue had been diminished, people started to tell pollsters they want lots more immigrants. So the opposite of what Trump wanted because of that shift. Charles, we've got through about a fifth of what I was hoping to speak about. So
00:52:10
Speaker
I would love to get you back on a bit later in this year to talk about the election. I said at the start, you are my favourite pundit on US politics. I think anyone listening will see why. Subscribe to the Charles CW Cook podcast and read all of your thoughts at National Review. The editor's podcast from National Review as well is probably my favourite podcast that comes out every week. Keep doing what you're doing and thank you for coming on, Australiana. No, thank you so much for having me.
00:52:40
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.