Matthew Continetti on Conservatism’s Next Chapter

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. Before we dive in, a quick word about who I am and why we're here. I'm Jim Bier, corporate lawyer and restructuring professional. I've spent the last two decades helping companies navigate their toughest transitions. And about eight years ago, I found myself having fascinating conversations with clients and friends about everything from venture capital to the broader shifts happening in our economy and society.

Those discussions were simply too good, so the puck was born. Now while we started on venture capital, hence the podcast name, the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, We've naturally evolved to focus more on the and beyond portion of the title. Today, we explore how business intersects with the bigger forces shaping our world. I still run my restructuring practice by day, but now I get to host these conversations by night. It has become one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

Today's guest continues that tradition. I'm gonna be honest with you. I think we have too many discussions in this country. I would prefer fewer discussions. I think a core of the American experiment is mind your own business.

There's always been a big part of conservatism in in The United States that is leave us alone. We don't want a central authority telling us what to do or how how to think. This week on The Puck, I sit down with journalist Matthew Cunninetti, the director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. He traces the GOP evolution from Reagan to Trump and what its past reveals about the future of American politics. We cover his perspective on the state of the GOP, the shift in foreign policy realignment, the limits of government in our cultural debates, and how to address the media algorithms in the social feeds now dominating our discourse.

There's a lot to cover, so let's get to it. Matthew Cunnennetti, welcome to the Puck. Thanks for having me. So before we jump in and, you know, talk about things like your book, The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, can you just take a minute and and give a little bit of a brief overview of yourself for our listeners? Sure.

Well, I'm the director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. It's a center right think tank based in Washington. It's one of the oldest think tanks in the country, long associated with conservative policy solutions of free market bent American leadership in the world, and I've been at AEI since 2019. Before AEI, I was the founding editor of a publication called the Washington Free Beacon. That's an online publication.

It's a investigative news site, approaches the news and reporting from a right wing perspective, from a conservative perspective. We follow all the canons of journalism at the Washington Free Beacon. We fact check our stories. We rely on multiple sources. We, make sure that stories are subject to legal review, that we always have quotes from the people that we're writing about or at least ask for quotes from the people that we're writing about.

But we're conservatives, and so we tend to focus on stories that the more legacy media institutions like The New York Times and The Washington Post do not. So I was editing that, from the free beacon's launch in 2012 to when I came to AI in 2019. And prior to launching the beacon, I had been an editor and writer at a magazine called The Weekly Standard, which was another conservative institution, a DC based, very Beltway politics oriented magazine, heavy on foreign policy, heavy on campaigns and elections, a fair amount of culture. I wrote for the Weekly Standard and helped to edit it, between 02/2011, and that's basically my CV. I do a lot of other things than writing and speaking about politics, but, you know, these days I write a column for the free press that appears every week.

I appear on the commentary magazine podcast, at least three times a week, and I write a monthly column for commentary. And then, I'm fairly regular on special report with Brett Baer on the Fox News channel as well. So impressive credentials, impressive activities, and have done a lot of reading and have have read your recent stuff on the free press and and follow you. I guess, you know, instead of just breaking into this gently, I'd like to kinda ask you in terms of where conservatism is today. When you look at the fights over the big beautiful bill, when you look at the fights over what we do about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and we look at what we do with respect to either nation building or jumping into the fight with Israel and Iran.

I can't think of a more intense environment for the Republican party in in the years that I've followed politics. And I'm just curious, does this blow your mind? Am I exaggerating when I say this is just at a new level of intensity? Or how do you feel, and what are you seeing out there? Sure.

Well, what I see is a Republican party that's actually at, near the peak of its strength over the past hundred years. I see a Republican Party that just won the popular vote for the first time in twenty years while capturing both chambers of congress. I see a Republican Party that dominates the state governments, in governors' mansions, in branches of the legislature, in trifectas where, you have unified Republican control of state governments in more states than the Democrats have. I see a Republican Party that has enacted much of its agenda, when you consider the fact that we have not had a tax increase, since 2011, and even that tax increase took us nowhere close to the previous tax increase, which was twenty years earlier. And even that tax increase in 1993, wasn't as large as the tax rates that prevailed when Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency in 1980.

I look at the Supreme Court rulings, ending the constitutional right to an abortion, ending the, race based admissions programs, in colleges and in government contracting. I look at the strengthening of second amendment protections to the Supreme Court, the regulatory rulings by the Supreme Court. Has to be a tremendous amount of conservative ideas being translated into public policy. On foreign policy, which which you mentioned, there is a big debate going on in the Republican Party and in conservatism. The debate has always been there.

There's always been a question on the American right, as there has been on the American left, by the way, about where and how America should intervene in the world. And, what I I would say would be the big difference is for most of my life, I guess actually, not gosh. I'm getting old, so it's not even most of my life. Most of my youth, between the time I was born in 1981 and really 2016, the Republican Party was associated with American international leadership, with hard power, military intervention, strong defense, activism in the world, mainly as a result of its history combating communism during the Cold War. And now since 2016, we have moved toward a Republican Party that is much more skeptical of foreign intervention, that is much less eager to become involved overseas.

It's not an isolationist party yet, but it's definitely trending toward a noninterventionist party. And this was very well expressed, I think, by president Trump in his speech at Riyadh during his recent Middle East visit. He said there are no permanent enemies. I want peace. I wanna make commercial deals with everybody.

But if at the end of the day, I have to use force, we're gonna have a strong military to do so. And when I hear that speech, it doesn't remind me of the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, but it does remind me of the Republican Party from the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties, the pre World War two Republican party. And so when I look at the Republican party today, I see it actually returning to its pre World War two views on some key policy issues, whether it's foreign policy. Prior to World War two, the Republican Party was non interventionist, did not want to get entangled in the world, opposed the League of Nations, opposed American entry into the second World War. Whether it's immigration, the Republican Party was restrictionist in immigration.

Republican presidents signed the immigration bans into law, which essentially ended immigration to The United States for about forty years, two generations. Even protectionism, when we look at Donald Trump today, the Liberation Day tariffs, the trade war with China, it's a reminder of the past where the Republican Party was the party of the tariff, was the party of protection. So I wouldn't say that it's a whole new level of confusion or debate. I would say, in fact, it's a reminder of very old republican principles and the republican version of conservatism. But the fact that it's very old makes it rather new to a lot of people, and I think that's why you have a lot of, you know, confusion and and sometimes anxiety over what's happening in the Republican party.

So I I love the way you frame that and taking the air out of some of the AI extremism and and and and just in a very calm way explaining where the party is today. But as I said, you know, the puck is trying to determine where the world is going. I understand as you're saying that a lot of these things go back to the old Republican party, and and the jury is still out in terms of, you know, how how effective these things are gonna be or not gonna be, so to speak. But what we do at the Puck was we do try to anticipate kinda where we're going and so forth. One of the things that's a concern of mine and that we spend a lot of time talking about in the Puck is deficit spending.

You know, at some point, both Jay Powell and Larry Summers, among others, have said this debt is not sustainable. And Ray Dalio and other people and Jamie Dimon, I mean, people are starting to get anxious about our deficit. We have a term called the bond vigilantes, and and they really haven't stepped in yet. If, as I suspect, we have a debt crisis in the next few years, how is the Republican party and conservatism going to respond to the this debt I'm gonna call potential crisis that we're staring at right now? Well, I really don't know.

I don't know if there's gonna be a crisis. I don't know how the Republicans will respond. I would say that in the history of financial crises, that is true sovereign debt crises. The party in power adjusts and does something about it pretty quickly because the alternative is worse than any political cost to the politicians making the reforms to the programs. But we're not there yet.

It's interesting that in most sovereign debt crises, especially in Europe, that for example, it tends to be center left governments that are in power when the crisis hits and when the adjustments to the entitlement programs, the drivers of the debt are made. And that might not be the case in America for the very reason I explained. I think the Republican Party is at a historic high. I think that the electorate has moved toward the Republicans in a way they really haven't done in a hundred years when you look at just the partisan composition of the electorate in the twenty twenty four election. So maybe Republicans who are holding the bag when our debt begins to spiral, bond yields spike.

We can't pay the interest on the debt because the dollar is sinking us as a consequence. I'd imagine that they would act as previous governments and crises have acted, which is they would do whatever it takes to settle things down. That's what happened during the global financial crisis. And, of course, many Republicans, opposed president Bush's recovery plan, the TARP, the bailout. It failed on the first vote in the house, which at the time was controlled by Nancy Pelosi's Democrats, but then the collapse in the market spooked enough Republicans to back it.

One result of the tarp vote in the global financial crisis in 2008 was the Tea Party, was the populist revolt against the elites, which pointed to that vote as a moment of betrayal where the politicians were acting on behalf of banks, but not necessarily the people who had the underwater mortgages or who were about to lose their jobs and very high unemployment for a time. So I don't know. I would say that our debt problem is bipartisan. I would say that, it's been very rare in the past century for Americans to have balanced budgets. The last time we had balanced budgets was at the very tail end of the nineteen nineties.

That balanced budget was a result of divided government. We had a democrat as president, Bill Clinton, and we had a republican controlled congress from 1996 to 2006. There are other unusual circumstances as well. It was the end of the Cold War, so president Clinton and the Republicans in Congress cut our defense spending. That lowered cost to government.

We had a time of a huge .com boom in the second half of the nineteen nineties. That meant revenues flooded into government. So that reduced our debt and deficit, helped the budget. President Clinton and the Republicans ended an entitlement, the aid to, families with dependent children, the the, well, unconditioned welfare benefit. And they were actually going to make progress toward reforming Social Security before, the Monica Lewinsky scandal happened, if you'll recall.

So that was the last time we had a balanced budget. Right. Since then, we've had two Republican presidents, and we've had two Democratic presidents, and the debt has exploded under all of them. And until we address the prime drivers of our debt, that is Medicare and Social Security, the debt will continue to compound. I agree it's a huge problem, but I don't see any political will for tackling it.

And I don't think the will will be there, unfortunately, until the crisis arrived. And just as a final note, remember that during Barack Obama's presidency, Obama increased the baseline spending by quite a bit. He had the stimulus bill, which then Joe Biden actually surpassed an expense in 2021. Republicans under Paul Ryan and then Mitt Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in 2012 proposed a budget, that would have reformed Medicare and would have, basically, you know, locked in benefits for individuals 55 and older circa twenty eleven, twenty twelve. That became a political issue.

The Romney Ryan ticket lost. Obama did nothing to address entitlements. He did cut Medicare as part of Obamacare. We can say that. But other than that, he didn't do anything, and we still have this debt crisis happening.

So I think we're just gonna have to wait and see. And I would I hope that we did something about it ahead of time, but I'd say the history of these crises suggests we won't. I wish I could disagree with anything you just said, and I I also agree that it's if you look at the numbers for the last twenty years, it's it's almost dollar for dollar, the same between the Democrats and the Republicans. And and I'd also say that to his credit, you know, Bill Clinton did have a balanced budget. And I actually remember when when, Greenspan was worried about that that that paying our debt down too too fast would be a problem.

Yeah. I remember it. Yeah. But I also do blame Obama for the the failure of Simpson Bowles. The last time we tried to have a bipartisan consensus on the deficit.

I think he made the wrong decision there. And so, unfortunately, I tend to agree with you that it is going to take a crisis for us to have the political will. And then you're right. Whoever's in power is going to respond to the crisis. But they all, in their toolboxes, have their own biases.

So for instance, you know, historically, the Republicans and and again, whether you go back to Hoover or otherwise, I mean, there was there was a fiscal conservative, you know, we're gonna tighten our belts during these situations. Then there's the other thing which is to spend. And I guess, again, trying to think through how we might respond going with what you said with the Republicans in control right now. What do you see as something that's politically feasible? And what do you think the instincts of the new Republican Party, so to speak, would be to respond to a debt crisis.

If, for instance, we have what happened in Britain happen about a year ago or two years ago where, you know, they tried to cut taxes and do things, and then all of a sudden, you know, the pound got decimated. How do you think this government will respond? Well, I think a lot depends on the shape of the crisis, and I don't have no idea what form it will take. But look, that's just you mentioned what happened in The UK. Let's look at what happened past couple months here in The United States.

April 2, Donald Trump announces his Liberation Day tariffs. These are tariffs on every country in the world, including uninhabited islands. He was tariffing the penguins. The tariffs rates range from 10% to over a 150% when you think about our tariff levels on the People's Republic Of China. What happened?

Markets went into a tailspin. Bond prices plunged. Yields went up high. The currency sank at the same time. It was a sell America moment, and we were headed, I think, toward an actual financial crisis.

What did Trump do? He walked back from the precipice. He delayed the reciprocal tariffs. He sent his negotiating team to meet with the Chinese, and, eventually, markets calm down. I think that's how Trump responds to stimuli.

What what is the answer? I would say Republicans have an answer right now. Their answer is economic growth. I think the Republican party in power believes in kicking the can down the road through economic growth. You have a vibrant economy.

An economy that does well provides more resources to the treasury. More resources to the treasury means the lifespan of our entitlement programs increases. You add to that Trump's mix, which is the tariffs. I mean, the tariffs have been delayed, but they haven't gone away. We're still generating more tariff revenue than we have in decades, and that revenue is going into the federal coffers.

Right? So it's actually helping us achieve some type of healthy fine fiscal mix as well. Now there are adverse effects of tariffs that I don't wanna downplay, but they do produce revenue. So I think if you ask Republicans as a combination of economic growth, tariff revenue, and then changes to discretionary spending, cutting back some of the subsidies to green energy projects, changing the financing of Medicaid, which has exploded in cost over the past decade. You do all these three things, and you might put us on a healthier fiscal trajectory.

It won't actually change the structure of the entitlement programs, but it may delay the day of reckoning. The Democrats have an answer too. It's raised taxes. It's increased taxes on the wealthy, imposed taxes on wealth, whether that is unrealized capital gains, whether that's just this your net worth. Right?

Let's raise taxes on corporations. That's really the Democrats' answer. So this is the political debate in this country. It's the tax raising versus this mix of revenue generation through growth and tariffs and changes and cuts to discretionary spending. And the public has gone back and forth.

Interestingly enough, though, even when Democrats are in power, like they were in power between 2021 and 2023 with the full control of the federal government, They couldn't raise taxes. They tried, but it didn't it just didn't work. Even the pressures within their own party meant that they couldn't get the tax increases they wanted. So seems to me like we're going to have to just rely on the Republican approach at least for the next several years. Where do you come down, and and where does the Republican party come down when it comes to things like monopolies and breaking up some of the big companies and or more checks and balances.

Again, if you you know, when you look at Teddy Roosevelt, I mean, at least my reading of his approach was that he did go after some of the big companies and and and abusers, so to speak. In terms of keeping the populist aspect of the party right now and continuing to expand the middle class base that the Republican party is experienced a renaissance of, how does regulation and or going after the big corporations fit into that at all? Right. Well, this is another place where there's a real debate in the Republican party. The traditional Republican view going back decades, going back to Ronald Reagan was we shouldn't trust bust companies unless we can show that monopolies are harming consumer welfare, unless we can draw a direct line between monopolistic practices and increases in prices that hurt consumers.

That was the previous consensus on the Republican side. Past couple years, that consensus has changed, and president Trump somewhat inadvertently because it's not exactly clear where he stands on these issues of monopoly. But he has allowed, a new generation of Republican trust busters to kind of come to the fore. We've talked about senator Josh Hawley. There are other members of Trump's regulatory team, the FCC commissioner, the FTC commissioner, the vice president, JD Vance.

They aren't so much interested in fighting monopoly because monopolies hurt consumers directly. They're more interested in fighting monopolies because they think there's a problem of size. There's a problem of gigantism. At a certain point, companies just become too big, too powerful, and you don't have to show a direct cost to the consumer in order to leverage the power of the federal government to break them up. And I think where president Trump comes into this is he has a special opposition or annoyance to some of the major tech companies because of allegations that those tech companies have censored conservative voices.

Of course, the tech companies pulled Donald Trump's accounts after the January 6 riot at the capitol. Right? So he is inclined to be tough on those companies for his own reasons, and then you have this other group of Republicans very close to Trump who think these companies are just too big, too powerful, and so it's the government's job to break them up. But I would also say that that view is still contested by the older understanding on the right, which is pro success. Put it that way.

If company gets big enough to acquire another company, fine. We don't wanna interfere with the market unless we can show that it will be a direct harm to the consumer. These two points of view are fighting it out in the Republican Party. Right now, the the trust busting view is, I think, ascendant. But it's not a totally one cause within the GOP.

There are still many Republicans who say, we don't punish success. These companies, especially the tech companies, are essential to our success as a nation. Right? They're they're huge driver of our economy, our market capitalization. They are promoting innovation.

They often are in the lead positions in our competition with China. Why do we wanna break them apart? That argument is still happening. Where do you come out in the area of the debate about it's fine to be a libertarian or an Ayn Rand capitalist or to believe that, you know, wealth inequality in and of itself is not a problem and lower taxes are better because they stimulate and grow the economy. But even the founding fathers and other people have said that capitalism without religion, without character, without values, without something to limit man's greed, ultimately will end badly.

From your own personal perspective, where where do you see the role of character and values in the whole idea of simplicity figuring into this debate? Well, I'm on the side of the founding fathers in almost every way. I agree with them. I think that in order to have liberty, you also need to have order. We use the phrase ordered liberty on the right.

And capitalism can't function if everyone is out to cheat the other person and there's no social trust. As a consequence, I think that America's biggest problems are social rather than economic. I am not bothered by income inequality. That's what makes me a conservative. K?

I am bothered by social inequality. I'm bothered by the fact that we've reached a point in America where so many people feel they have nothing invested in this in our society, in this shared project. And by the way, that's not just the forgotten men and women who are part of the Trump movement. It's also these college graduates and postdocs who are increasingly attracted to nihilistic radical ideologies. That's a cultural thing.

That's a social thing in my view. And so I think we need a healthy economy. And I happen to think that competition and choice and the market and innovation and entrepreneurship are keys to healthy economy. But I'm much more worried about the fabric of our society and the health of our institutions. And I think we need to spend a lot of time talking about trying to address, trying to act toward revitalizing the core institutions of society, the family, religion, local community, civil association.

These are the things we need to do. And so when I see I think by many statistics, our economy is doing very well, very well. It's certainly in relation to other economies in the world. I think that's a testament to American strength and ingenuity and also our market system. But what I wanna see is how do we address these underlying social conditions?

Here's what separates me from people on the left and some of the national populace is I don't think government can address those things. I think government can create the baseline. I think government can have sound economic policy. I think government can enforce the rule of law, right, and make sure we don't have crime out of control. I think government can enforce the rule of law when it comes to immigration.

Illegal immigration is illegal. We should have borders. I believe those things. I also think government has interfered too much with our education policy, and I think that's corrupted our educational institutions. But then I say, it's gonna have to be driven by human beings.

We have to recommit as individuals to our communities, to our partners, to our churches, and then we have to transmit that commitment to the next generation. I don't think government can make us do that, but I think government can provide the framework for it. So that's my own perspective on these issues. And I love that. And we we've had a lot of people on the podcast recently.

We we talked to David French. We had Curtis Chang. We had one of the authors of the Upswing in in talking about values and going from a I mentality to a we mentality and back again. And we've tried to look at that because I do think the government is a reflection of people. And if it if we, the individuals, do not take personal responsibility and we expect government to do what we're not willing to do, it it's all gonna collapse on itself.

And so I do think it all comes back to the individual. What I'm seeing that gives me hope is that we are having these discussions about what family is. And I'm wondering if you think the tent is big enough for the Republican party to deal with, for instance, alternative families. So to use a personal example, I am a Jewish white man, and I I mentored a six foot three African American boy when he was 14 or 15. He's now in his late thirties.

He's single. He's gay. He lives in a home in Hiram, Ohio with three or four other people, and they're taking care of the couple's kids. And it it is a completely foreign environment to anything that I ever grew up with, you know, with with the traditional mother and father, any of that stuff. He is an American.

His family is an American family. And we, I believe, have to make room for that and encourage those people to create stable foundations in the best way possible. Is is the Republican and the conservative tent big enough for those alternative families? I'm not gonna speak to that individual case. The the way I'll respond is this.

Look. I think one unexpected consequence of the Trump era is that there are many, many more gays and lesbians who are comfortable as part of the Republican coalition. And many of those people are married to same sex partners, same sex same sex spouses, and many of them are raise children. At the same time, I think American conservatism at its core does have a traditional view of culture and society and sexual relations. And I that I think is actually an essential part of conservatism.

If you ask me what the foundations of conservatism in any country are, I would say it does start with religion. I would say that it starts with the worldview that we are fallen creatures, that, we are creatures of God. We were created, that we have imperfectability, that at the end of the day, we cannot eradicate original sin or whatever that evil urge is in the Jewish tradition from the human soul. And we'd also believe in transcendent objective standards of value. That is there are there is right and wrong, and we do not create right and wrong ourselves.

This can either be discerned from the Bible or discerned by our reason, by thinking through about the natural purposes of human beings. I do think that that's the core of conservatism. Now I will say there are many nonbelievers who are conservative, but those nonbelievers tend to agree with everything that I just said, except the God part. Except they they they've reached the same views on imperfectability, on there being objective standards of value, on the fact that we will never be able to achieve our utopian desires without God. But they're a minority.

I just wanna mention that because there are many of them in the conservative camp. When you look at the world that way, you're gonna have to have judgments about certain ways of life and certain relationships. In in a postmodern world where women vote and we educate people and everyone can read and think for themselves, when you look at hypocrisy, when you look at mercy versus strict judgment, when you look at the Old Testament where you would stone someone to death for violating the Sabbath because they collected wood, or they would take the wayward sun out and stone them to death. I mean, these stories have to be dealt with in a modern setting, which is when is something strict justice? When is there equity?

Right? When is there mercy? How do you balance these things? And discussions that were very esoteric maybe 500 ago are now issues that we as a society, as a democracy, a republic where people are voting. We have to it seems to me make room for all of these discussions.

And what's your perspective on the ability for us as a country to learn to have these discussions in a debating them in a healthy balanced way? I'm gonna be honest with you. I think we have too many discussions in this country. I would prefer fewer discussions. I think a core of the American experiment is mind your own business.

Right? There's always been a big part of conservatism in in The United States that is leave us alone. We don't want a central authority telling us what to do or how to think. We don't want a central authority telling us what conversations we should or or should not have. So I think the answer to a lot of the issues you are raising is traditional American constitutionalism.

What that means is we have separation of church and state in this country. We have non establishment of religion. Right? But we also have religious liberty, and we have protections for religious groups and for conscience. We have a federal system.

That means the powers of the federal government are defined. Much is left to the states. Much is left to the localities. So let's decentralize the system. Let's mind our own business.

Let's have clear, simple rules to govern our lives, and I think we'll get by. So from your perspective, less is more, and that what we're doing is by putting all this in everybody's face, so to speak, we're picking fights where they they don't need to be had. Sometimes people aren't I think most of the time, people aren't bothered by things they don't know. Right. And we live in a globalized media environment.

Social media is the new public square. In all honesty, we have a group of social activists who want to force the country to talk about certain moral propositions for or against, and it drives most of the country crazy. Most people don't wanna talk about it. Most people have very simple and, I think, important concerns. They want a job.

They wanna live in a crime free environment. They wanna send their children to good schools, and they don't want The United States to get involved in long wars with ill defined objectives. Pretty simple. That's what the goal of politics should be. Considering history and the thirty year war that took place after the printing press, within a world where the big advertising platforms are designed to make us angry and afraid.

And I spend a lot of time on both the left and the right reading and dissecting what's out there. We have got these algorithms now that are feeding everyone what they wanna hear. I mean or that reinforces, I should say, their beliefs. And in my opinion, constantly keeping people in a in a state of terror and agitation because they're being told that the other is an existential threat. So when you say we should have fewer discussions, I can buy into that.

But how do we create an environment where people start to take responsibility for this constant bombardment they're getting so that they can mind their own business and actually, you know, allow government to do what it's supposed to do and then allow the church to do what it's supposed to do. Well, I'm gonna sound heretical, but one way is to delete the app. You know? Right. I mean, there we have a lot of people who are just addicted to these platforms, and it's a shame.

And, honestly, I'm of the view too that this might be one area where the government should think clearly, should laws be involved. And I am different from many free market conservatives And that I think when it comes to children, we need to take affirmative steps through law to protect our children from these platforms because I think experience shows they're not ready for it, and it contributes to radicalization. It contributes to anxiety, especially among young women. So I I'm very much supportive of these efforts, because I think that that's an area where the law is needed. But I think for adults, you don't have to be on these platforms.

You really don't. And there is this big world out there. And that's I would just encourage people to think about that. This is this is why I think my perspective is often unexciting in our political debate because for me, it's not about, well, we here's what Donald Trump needs to do, or here's what Kamala Harris needs to do. She's gonna create a plan to make us turn off our phones.

I don't want that. My business of journalism would go extinct, and we're already in dire straits if we didn't have Twitter. But I do think that people should just try to exercise self control. It can be hard. But I do notice that, you know, as they say, supply creates its own demand.

And once the app gets on your phone, it's hard to turn away. So maybe just delete it from your phone, and you'll find that actually you won't miss it. Yeah. I I think that technology is generally neutral, meaning, you know, you can use fire to heat your home and cook food, or you can use it to, you know, firebomb cities. And I think that we are gonna have to learn to live with this technology.

And I think that the challenge when I think about people deleting the apps is I'm I'm I'm watching, for instance, some young people today that are promoting a movie who were very, very adverse to things like TikTok. And they saw the danger and the false narrative on TikTok constantly and and so forth. And yet to market their movie in today's world, they need to be on TikTok to compete. It's a little like the the Jewish argument about the Sabbath. You know, if I'm coming to America and I can't work on Saturday, right, and everybody else is working, I got a problem.

And so, you know, when you had the blue laws and everybody was closed on Sunday in a Christian country, you know, it wasn't so bad to have to keep the Sabbath. I think the challenge with social media right now is if you want to stay relevant, if you wanna communicate with friends, if you wanna keep in touch with your children 3,000 miles away or promote business, or you're writing for the free press or this on Substack. I mean, it is something that's always there. I think that as individuals, we are gonna have to really make some tough decisions and resist this temptation that's always there. Yeah.

I agree. And, you know, if you have to market your product, understand that the technology is a tool to market the product and not get distracted by other things you may see on the platform. Right? I mean, what you're really arguing for is self control. You know, where do we learn self control?

My point is we don't learn it from the government. Oh, I agree. Yeah. We learn it from our parents, and we learn it from our character forming institutions. And so that's what I think we have to think about and how we get those character forming institutions strong in order to communicate, to the next generation.

I will say just on the TikTok example, they shouldn't be on TikTok because TikTok should be down right now in The United States. The United States Congress passed a law overwhelmingly banning TikTok. The Supreme Court upheld that law. And this is probably the thing that I disagreed the most with president Trump so far in his administration is he keeps extending TikTok's life. I don't think he should.

I think he should follow the law, and TikTok would end. And you know what? Life would go on. Yeah. Absolutely.

And and that's that's a very, very fair point. And I noticed that he did just extend Yep. Give them another ninety days. Third time. Yeah.

Yeah. No. I I agree with you. And so when you look at democracy, which if you take a long historical perspective, I mean, the type of representative democracy that we have right now in the in Republic is a pretty modern phenomenon. And what we're trying to do, we're we're breaking I don't know that it's ever been done like this in the history of the world, so to speak, because even the Roman Republic was, you know, limited to property owning men that voted.

It seems like what we really are requiring is for personal responsibility and individuals to really evolve and take on more and more responsibility as opposed to delegating it to the government. When you look at young people today, when you when you're out there having these discussions, do you think as a country we're ready for it? Do you think we're up to the task of preserving this republic? I do. We're about to celebrate our 200 birthday.

That's the longest such democracy in the history of the world. I think what worries me is we don't celebrate it enough. And especially the past five years, we spent a lot of time talking about what America has gotten wrong and not enough time talking about what America has gotten right. And I do think that there is a big cultural divide in America today over what America means and what American history represents. It does American history represent the triumph of freedom?

The fact that this place that started with a few settlements along the Atlantic Ocean became the richest, most powerful country in the world has had one constitution where other countries would have gone through several written constitutions, right, has been able to integrate not just its former slave population through great trial and and and pain, but millions of immigrants from every corner of the world. This to me is, like, the greatest story in the history of the species, and we don't spend enough time talking about what made it what makes it great. What makes it great is our political institutions and also a certain, in my view, providential meaning or blessing. This huge continent, all of the resources, you know, protected on two sides by friendly neighbors and on the other two sides by fish, and then have this group of men at the revolution who were geniuses, I mean, who were political geniuses to create this document and then to explain it in the Federalist Papers. That, I think, is just the story of of humanity, and we should be proud of it, and we should celebrate it.

And I don't see that. I think there are real divisions about how we should view our history. And those divisions are based on different values. What it means to be human even. Really deep, deep differences.

And I do think that there are many young people. They're torn right now. They are split. There are many young people who want a more traditional life, who are very much interested in this celebratory story I'm telling. And then there are young people who who have, in my view, fallen for the lie that America is nothing but evil and pain and that radical change is necessary to rectify a awful situation.

So that that's the divide. It's real. It's exacerbating social tensions. There's acts of political violence, which we haven't seen in quite some time in The United States, and that's worrisome. But I also look back at our history and I say, you know, always go long on America, because we seem to have these wellsprings of renewal, and we have these political institutions that have survived quite a bit and that I think will continue to function for a long time.

And I love that. I would note that it may not be that we should be having fewer discussions, but maybe we should be having different discussions. Because I remember when I was young, there was this whole issue about democracy and capitalism. This was during the whole, you know, better read than dead and all the debates in the seventies. And you were left with that America was the worst country in the world until you looked at alternatives.

Democracy was the worst system in the world until you looked at the alternatives. It does seem to me when I have discussions with people and I and they're telling me how terrible it is, I I ask them if they had a time machine, which year would they like to go back to? 1968? 1865? 1930 Europe?

'19 you know, it really is there isn't a better time to be alive. And those are the discussions, glass half empty, half full. To me, those are the discussions I'd like to see more of, where people really do focus on what unites us as opposed to what divides us, and and not letting perfect be the enemy of good, and realize we are the greatest multicultural democracy in the history of the world. And it's easy to tear ourselves down, But but when we look what we're trying to do by having all these diverse people live together without blowing ourselves up, I mean, Japan, China, there there's no other country in the world that's doing effectively what we're trying to do. I think that's true.

You know, if we forget about it, the costs can be real because I think we've experienced kind of the consequences of feeling low, of thinking that America is a a bad actor on the world stage. I mean, we look at the world. It's more dangerous than ever. Two big wars going on right now, different parts of the Eurasian landmass, of course, other conflicts throughout the world as well. We just went through a big spike in crime here in The United States.

We had all these fights over education, and we've had, I think, learning loss as a consequence of some of these theories. So we've had the reality test. I think that's what 2000 through 2004 was. It was a big reality test for America. And in 2024, the electorate rejected the previous four years, absolutely rejected the path that we were on.

And so now is the moment to strike a new path. And, yeah, there will be conversations, but a lot of it will be policy. A lot of it will be action. And the hope a hope informed by history that the right policies will be able to create a renewed sense of mission and make for a safer, more prosperous America, which will then, I think, emanate outward for the rest of the world. So let me ask you a final question.

From the perspective of government, and you say government can't do things. I mean, certain things, religion, cultural, social issues that we have. But when I grew up, I remember being told the story that George Washington could not tell a lie. You know, he chopped down the cherry tree. That was a role model for me.

I look at the office of the presidency, and I look at the office. Just like we used to have values in this country, when an old person would walk in the room, you'd stand up. You'd call your teacher by their last name as a sign of respect. You didn't call them by their first name. When we look at how politicians talk to each other, when we look at, on the left and the right, the manipulation and the lack of truth telling and the name calling, How do we, as a people, demand that our politicians speak with respect, tell the truth, and get back to a place of dignity?

Or am I living in an ivory tower where I'm expecting too much? Well, I don't think the demand is there, to tell you the truth. I don't think the demand is there. I don't think it was there in the nineteen nineties when Bill Clinton emerged from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, more popular than he was before. I don't think it was it's been there since Donald Trump came down the escalator and said, look.

I'm a rough and tumble guy, but America is in such dire straits. I'm the only one who can tell you the truth about what our problems are and how to deal with them. So I I don't see the demand in the public. I mean, I've I've been quite frankly surprised that Trump's business enterprises that are happening during his administration have not caused more public opposition. Now down the road, if the Democrats gain control of the house of representatives, it might cause them a lot of trouble, but there's no public outcry.

And I just think that our public has become very cynical about our political leaders. They don't expect much, and what they basically want is results. And if you give the results, you can get away with a lot as a politician. Until we have a different set of expectations from the public, I don't really see our behavior changing. I mean, I will say this, though.

President Trump gets away with a lot that other politicians do not. He is a very he's a very lucky politician. He is a very talented politician, and he is able to do things no one else can. So it's always important to distinguish, I think, between what Donald Trump does and then what the other politicians do. Because I don't think the public holds him to the same standards as career politicians because the public doesn't view him as public as a career politician.

They the public views him as just Trump. So there might be some hope in a post Trump era that the public begins to demand a different level or different type of behavior from its most prominent public figures. Well, it was a pleasure. I really enjoyed this. Thanks for having me on.

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