37:43here’s a story when they did the Podestaemail Hawks when they got the Democratsemails somebody took the data fromWikiLeaks and decided it was called geolocate the data in other words what werethe place names that the leadingDemocrats who are the last part of hermentor represent all of us rememberright not the elite Republicans whatwere the police names that he talkedabout and their private communicationsand their selection what was the numberone most frequently named place in theircommunications can you guess have aguess Martha Martha’s Vineyard yeahnumber two Eastern Southampton then NewYork then San Francisco then I think itwas Ellie in DC and the rest of thecountry two standard deviations out sowhat’s the imaginary of a party thisseeks to represent all if that’s all theplaces did they talk about becausethat’s where the money is and it’s notjust to castigate the Democrats theBritish Labour Party was like this underblare of the German SPD under shorterit’s done that’s the left issystematically failed the people that itsupposedly represents so why should webe in the least surprised that theydefect and then go to any one at allthat actually says here I know thateveryone’s ignored you for 25 years I atleast hear the fact that you’re cryingand I understand why people’s everydayexperience is very different from anational average walking out and tellingpeople that the price of iPods hasfallen which means that really they’vegot more money than they think at a timewhen they can’t afford to send theirkids to college or their kids would beinsane to take on that much debt becauseit’s like having a house with no ASSAit’s just parts on izing and the exampleof immigration occupied to that one it’svery different depending on where youliveimmigration to me is another person fromanother interesting country who has aphd but that’s what it means where Ilive right but that’s because I’m in thetop 20% if you’re living in publichousing in France right and thoseresources are been finite and thoseresources are being cut and you’re theones are confronted with incrediblydifferent cultures coming and notintegrating with you taking theresources from you at least as youperceive it and that’s what’s beennarrated by the National Front don’texpect them not to make end roadsbecause it gels with everybody’s commonsense regardless of whether we can saywell on average and migrants benefit theeconomy no one lives in an average nowthe problem here now close with us is.. prompted the following response I thinkthe election of Trump has been good forclimate change because it stops the restof the world waiting around for Americato solve the problemso if the gentleman’s and the Chinesenow get together and do technologgreentech bring it to scale China forexample has installed more solar in thepast few years in the United States hasright if they end up doing that we’rethe suckers because we should have beenleading the investment we’ll be buyingit from thembut in a way if that forces them to dothat and that’s good in a global sensego for it so does that mean Trump was agood leader in that regard well that’s adifferent question right but it can havea positive effect so the mark like let’snot summit all up to you know the oneleader the genius the charisma whateverthe doesn’t that’s not good we arethinking about it they can’t make adifference but the key thing is whenthey’ve actually got the trust ofeverybody who’s who wants them to leadthat’s when societies work better butwhen you have leaders who are divisivewho pet people against each other Inever walk so for anybody that’s thetype of populism you want to avoid all
What Are Conservatives Actually Debating?
What the strange war over “David French-ism” says about the right.
In March the religious journal First Things published a short manifesto, signed by a group of notable conservative writers and academics, titled “Against the Dead Consensus.” The consensus that the manifesto came to bury belonged to conservatism as it existed between the time of William F. Buckley Jr. and the rise of Donald Trump: An ideology that packaged limited government, free markets, a hawkish foreign policy and cultural conservatism together, and that assumed that business interests and religious conservatives and ambitious American-empire builders belonged naturally to the same coalition.
This consensus was never as stable as retrospective political storytelling might suggest; even successful Republican politicians inevitably left many of its factions sorely disappointed, while conservative intellectuals and activists feuded viciously with one another and constantly discerned crises and crackups for their movement. But the crisis revealed or created (depending on your perspective) by our own age of populism seems more severe, the stresses on the different factions more serious, and it is just possible that the longstanding conservative fusion might be as dead as the First Things signatories argued.
Among them was Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor at The New York Post, whose public career embodies some of those shifts and stresses: An immigrant whose family fled the Islamic Republic of Iran, he began his career on the right as an ex-Marxist secular neoconservative at The Wall Street Journal editorial page and has since become a traditionally inclined Catholic (a journey detailed in his striking memoir, “From Fire, By Water”) and also more Trump-friendly and populist into the bargain.
In the last week Ahmari has roiled the conservative intellectual world with a critique of something he calls David French-ism, after David French of National Review, another prominent conservative writer. This controversy, like the debate over Tucker Carlson and capitalism earlier this year, has been a full-employment bill for conservative pundits. But it probably seems impossibly opaque from the outside, since superficially Ahmari and French belong to the same faction on the right — both religious conservatives, both strongly anti-abortion, both deeply engaged in battles over religious liberty (where French is a longtime litigator). Indeed it is somewhat opaque even from the inside, prompting conservatives engaging with the dispute to wonder, “What are we debating?”
I’m going to try to answer that question here. We’ll see how it goes.
Basically the best way to understand the Ahmari-French split is in light of the old fusion, the old consensus, that the First Things manifesto attacked. French is a religious conservative who thinks that the pre-Trump conservative vision still makes sense. He thinks that his Christian faith and his pro-life convictions have a natural home in a basically libertarian coalition, one that wants to limit the federal government’s interventions in the marketplace and expects civil society to flourish once state power is removed. He thinks that believers and nonbelievers, secular liberals and conservative Christians, can coexist under a classical-liberal framework in which disputes are settled by persuasion rather than constant legal skirmishing, or else are left unsettled in a healthy pluralism. He is one of the few remaining conservatives willing to argue that the invasion of Iraq was just and necessary. And he opposes, now as well as yesterday, the bargain that the right struck with Donald Trump.
Ahmari, on the other hand, speaks for cultural conservatives who believe that the old conservative fusion mostly failed their part of the movement — winning victories for tax cutters and business interests while marriage rates declined, birthrates plummeted and religious affiliation waned; and appeasing social conservatives with judges who never actually got around to overturning Roe v. Wade. These conservatives believe that the current version of social liberalism has no interest in truces or pluralism and won’t rest till the last evangelical baker is fined into bankruptcy, the last Catholic hospital or adoption agency is closed by an A.C.L.U. lawsuit. They think that business interests have turned into agents of cultural revolution, making them poor allies for the right, and that the free trade and globalization championed by past Republican presidents has played some role in the dissolution of conservatism’s substrates — the family, the neighborhood, the local civitas. And they have warmed, quickly or slowly, to the politics-is-war style of the current president.
But what, specifically, do these conservatives want, besides a sense of thrill-in-combat that French’s irenic style denies them? I don’t think they are completely certain themselves; in a useful contribution to the Ahmari affair, R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, describes their animating spirit as a feeling that something else is needed in American society besides just classical-liberal, limited-government commitments, without any certainty about what that something ought to be.
Still, you can see three broad demands at work in their arguments. First, they want social conservatives to exercise more explicit power within the conservative coalition.
This may sound like a strange idea, since, after all, it is social conservatism’s growing political weakness, its cultural retreat, that led the religious right to throw in with a cruel sybarite like Trump. But there’s a plausible argument that even with its broader influence reduced, religious conservatism should still wield more power than it does in Republican politics — that it outsources too much policy thinking to other factions, that it goes along with legislation written for business interests so long as the promised judicial appointments are dangled at the end, and that it generally acts like a junior partner even though it delivers far more votes.
The Italian Economy’s Moment of Truth
Unlike many other European countries, Italy still has not restored economic growth to its pre-crisis level – a fundamental failing that lies at the heart of many of its political problems. Now that a new anti-establishment government is taking power, it remains to be seen if the economy will be remade, or broken further.
.. Italy has become the first major EU member state to be governed by a populist coalition... M5S and the League both openly question the benefits of eurozone membership, though neither party made leaving the euro a specific commitment of their governing program in the election campaign, a failure that Italian President Sergio Mattarella seized upon in vetoing key cabinet pick... They also disdain globalization more generally.. The League, in particular, is obsessed with cracking down on immigration... promised to tackle corruption and topple what they see as a self-serving political establishment, while introducing radical policies to reduce unemployment and redistribute incomes... There are rumors that the parties want to write down Italy’s sovereign debt.. In such a scenario, Italian banks currently holding considerable amounts of government debt would suffer substantial balance-sheet damage. The risk of deposit flight could not be excluded... Italy’s nominal (non-inflation-adjusted) growth is too weak to produce substantial deleveraging, even at today’s low interest rates... Italy’s real per capita GDP remains well below its 2007 pre-crisis peak.. a worldwide retreat from globalization and growing demands for national governments to reassert control over the flow of goods and services, capital, people, and information/data... For years, global market forces and powerful new technologies have plainly outstripped governments’ capacity to adapt to economic change... Italy could soon find that its leading export is talented young people... the Italian government needs to root out corruption and self-dealing, and demonstrate a much stronger commitment to the public interest... Italy needs to develop the entrepreneurial ecosystems that underpin dynamism and innovation. As matters stand, the financial sector is too closed, and it provides too little funding and support for new ventures... collaboration between government, business, and labor has played a key role in the countries that have adapted better to globalization and technology-induced structural change.
How Globalized Capitalism Drives Worldwide Fear And Discontentment
The right and the left seem to maybe agree on one thing. They oppose globalism. Not everyone on the right, not everyone on the left, but there is a commonality there. Do they oppose it for the same reasons?
ROBERT KUTTNER: No, they oppose it for very different reasons. The progressive critique of globalization is very simple. It is a critique of the use of a certain kind of globalization to dismantle what used to be a manage form of capitalism that delivered broad prosperity. The democratic nation-state after World War II was able to regulate markets in the broad public interest so that ordinary people would have economic security and economic prosperity. Beginning in the ’70s and ’80s, trade deals were used to undermine the ability of governments to regulate banks. They were used to put cheap labor that had no labor standards into competition with labor in the United States and in Europe that benefited from protections. And so globalization was used to return to a more primitive version of raw capitalism. That’s the progressive critique.
.. But I think if you want to get elected, you can’t ignore the plight of ordinary working people at the same time you’re asking the voters to open their hearts to immigrants and to other claimants for social justice. It’s asking too much of people whose living standards have gone down the drain to expect them to be liberal on social issues.