The Senior Moment With Jonah Goldberg

Joe Biden: [00:00:00] The bottom line is all the polling data right now, which I think is premature because the campaign really hasn't even started. I mean it hasn't started in earnest yet. Most of the time it doesn't start until after September, after Labor Day. A lot can happen, but I think I'm the best qual I know, I believe I'm the best qualified to govern.

Niall Ferguson: Hello, it's Thursday, July the 11th, 2024. Welcome to Goodfellows from the Hoover Institution. I'm Niall Ferguson, the Milbank Family Senior Fellow, and I'm sitting in for Bill Whalen, who's off enjoying himself. We don't quite know where. I'm joined as usual by my esteemed Hoover colleagues and friends, the economist John Cochrane and the former national security advisor H. R. McMaster both best selling authors. We've had a month off. I don't want you to think we were on vacation. We were preparing for this show. But having been off air for so long, we have a packed [00:01:00] show for you today. And to kick it off, we are extremely fortunate to have as our guest, the one and only Jonah Goldberg.

Jonah's the editor in chief and co founder of The Dispatch, available at the dispatch. com. He's also the host of the Remnant podcast and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist at the LA Times and contributed to something called CNN. And the author of two books at least, Suicide of the West and Liberal Fascism.

Jonah, welcome to GoodFellows.

Jonah Goldberg: Great to be here. And I particularly appreciate the subdued, but nonetheless pronounced rolling Scottish Rs and various pronunciations in there from the Akron to several others. But anyway thanks for having me.

Niall Ferguson: Jonah, I know you're having accent envy, a lot of people have it but I wasn't called Niall Campbell Ferguson because I was born in Southeast England.

This is Glasgow talking but Glasgow [00:02:00] I think softened by Californian years in the company of the GoodFellows. We're going to kick this off this is going to seem a bit egotistical, but it's what they told me to do. by talking about a column that I just wrote for the Free Press for our friend Barry Weiss with the provocative title, We're All Soviets Now.

I actually wanted to call it, Are We the Soviets? And I'm going to just, for those who haven't read it, and there probably are some, I'll summarize the argument which was essentially that although there are obviously enormous differences between the two political and economic system, there is something There's something going on here that makes me think of the late Soviet Union.

When I look at the United States, the obvious one, which I want to talk a bit more about is gerontocracy, old men too infirm to be in positions of supreme leadership. And there were a bunch of others I threw in [00:03:00] soft budget constraints and public finance. a military that's simultaneously very big and expensive and somehow doesn't win a war in Afghanistan, total public cynicism about nearly all institutions, and for me, a clincher, this really severe decline in life expectancy that we've seen in the United States.

in the past couple of of decades, which I really haven't ever seen anywhere else in any other advanced a country than in the Soviet Union. And so that was the thesis and I was fortunate or unfortunate to incur the disagreement of none other than Jonah Goldberg, who shot back, it must have taken him half an hour to write, no, we are not living in late Soviet America.

And so Jonah can you recap for those who didn't read your brilliant riposte, why you don't agree with my, are we the Soviets question mark?

Jonah Goldberg: Sure. Um, uh, and like [00:04:00] you, I'm perfectly happy to leave this debate in the dustbin of history alongside the Soviet Union, but I'll start from the sort of a big picture.

perspective. I grew up in a very anti communist family. I grew up, I spent 20 years at National Review. I spent most of my career in and out of the American Enterprise Institute. And I so I come from a milieu that finds a false moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union to be fighting words.

I think the Soviet Union wasn't even an empire. I think it was founded on fundamentally anti humane, anti human principles against human nature and it's and I was perfectly happy, and I'm still perfectly happy, to concede many of, if not all, of your concerns about the various things going wrong with America.

My point was pretty narrowly focused on saying that the analogy to the Soviet Union, I think you gripped it too tightly and hung things [00:05:00] on it that don't quite fit. belong there in the sense that it's a false diagnosis. If you're looking to say, if you're looking to describe, to fix the problems in the United States by looking through the prism of comparing us to the Soviet union, you're going to fix the wrong things the wrong way, because our problems don't stem from the same origins of the Soviet unions.

Even if we have some similar symptoms like gerontocracy and some of these other things. And And I think this is a good and decent and noble country and that has problems and is making mistakes. But our problems stem from things like an excess of freedom and from a failure of institutions. The Soviet Union's problems stem from a lack of freedom and a non existence of the similar institutions.

And so I just think it's the comparison doesn't work, even though I, again, totally concede. It's bad whenever we can even superficially look like the late Soviet Union for all the reasons that you delineated in your piece.

Niall Ferguson: I'm eager to get the wisdom of John Cochrane and H. R. McMaster on this question, and in order to [00:06:00] help us have some focus, let's agree that the points of origin couldn't really be more different.

Yes, two revolutionary republics, I suppose you could say that, that threw off monarchy, but they are in almost every other respect different at origin. And yet somehow there's been convergence, if only in that we have this senile elite problem, senile leadership problem, and the deaths of despair.

And I want to start with you, John. The thing that really made me want to write this piece was that the sudden realization that all that I'd read by Angus Deaton about deaths of despair. This really shocking increase in overdose deaths, alcohol deaths, suicides, had only one point of comparison that I could think of.

I couldn't think of any other case where there had been such a major deterioration in public health and such a deterioration in life expectancy other than the Soviet Union. How do you think about it? Because it is an economist, Angus Deaton, the Nobel laureate who coined the [00:07:00] This phrase, death's despair.

Am I right to see some kind of worrying resemblance with what happened in the Soviet case?

John Cochrane: I don't think so. Actually, I think the deaths of despair stuff has been overstated. It is also a problem on the very bottom end of society. The people who don't work. I think a lot of social program disincentives and another Problems of the government are at work as much as, but it doesn't necessarily reflect and touch the rod at the top in the way I think the Soviet Union does.

It is not, our economy is not dying in the way the Soviet Union was dying in the 1980s. It's not a pervasive thing. It is a problem of an American underclass heavily involving the government that I think is separate from the other issues. On the other issues, I'd like to challenge both of you or find a consensus.

I don't think gerontocracy is the problem. And merely the fact we're in a moment of gerontocracy, which I think is more of a [00:08:00] historical accident. But remember Bush, Obama, Clinton, they were all fairly young. All these interesting things that are going on in Europe and political realignments and in stagnate political and economic stagnation are happening with fairly young people.

leaders. So I'm not sure. I think the gerontocracy is just an accident of the current moment together with some of the, our political parties are a little bit stuck. But the other things you guys the other analogies that your little debate, I think brought up are variants.

There is a sense of end of empire with analogies like Rome, like Byzantium, like all sorts of other empires. There is, In the moment with Joe Biden, there's a sense of the aging senile emperor and the knives are coming out, which is fun to watch and a 2000 year old story. But the decay of institutions, John brought up institutions, which I think is the real problem, the decay of institutions, that institutions are being substituted by people.

Personal and political power, rather than the words. And the, and I'll finish with this [00:09:00] one. The word salad ideology that nobody believes anymore, I think, was together with a the Pravda, otherwise known as the New York Times, who passes on the lie of the day. The obvious fact that the leaders are lying to us and everybody knows it, and they don't even really believe their own propaganda anymore.

Those seems those seems like things that are. Analogies to the Soviet Union, but analogies to many other empires on the edge of decay, which sometimes is met by reform and sometimes it's not.

Niall Ferguson: Okay. One for you, HR. You have been close to, closer than any of us to the seat of power in the United States.

You've been in the White House, you've been in the Oval Office. Give us a sense of whether One should be president of the United States at the age of 81 or even in one's late 70s. Just pure and simple. Would you want to serve under a general in that age group?

John Cochrane: No, let's not, guys, age is not the issue.[00:10:00]

There are sharp 81 year olds. Cognitive decline is the issue, which can happen to people in their 50s.

H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I would say it's cognitive decline, but it's also really, endurance, right? Your ability to, especially on long trips abroad, for example, to keep up your energy level to continue to be able to listen and engage effectively.

And so I think, for generals that, you had General Blooker, who we've talked about before, who was pretty effective on a horseback leading a cavalry charge at over 70, but He did have the practice of getting a garlic oil rub down every night.

So maybe that's what, maybe that's what we must try that. But the there was a problem with this, as Niall in the British army in in world war one, at the beginning of world war one and GFC fuller wrote this great pamphlet called general ship it's diseases and their cure which was part of a big reform effort within the British military.

In the U. S. military, it was also the case really up to the war of the war of 1812. When we had a [00:11:00] lot of older generals who just couldn't make it on some of the, on some of the campaigns. And there was a reform effort then. We've been through this in the military, but I do think you need somebody who obviously has the, the disciplines.

of the stoic philosophers, is consistent with cognition and so forth. And and then also the energy, just the energy to see through a long trip, and I have a few stories about this to tell, but this is, it might not be the right time about it, but I think what you need is I think vibe, vibrant leadership. And I think, one of the other big issues is to get away from this performative leadership and get back to formative leadership with leaders who really have a clear vision and are helping to get to the politics of addition to bring people together so we can work together to, to overcome the challenges we're facing today, which are quite significant.

I want to bring

Niall Ferguson: it back to you. I don't really understand. I understand why the Soviet Communist Party ended up being led by old guys in its final phase, because in a sense [00:12:00] that there was an exhaustion to that particular political monopoly and the hazards of being at the top of Soviet politics in the Stalin era had left this kind of somewhat hollowed out group Of men who were mutually untrusting, but why would a two party system in a democracy with a constitution that we all admire produce the same or at least a similar outcome?

Help me understand why that the candidates at present, and I shouldn't speak too soon, but right now the candidates for the highest office in the land are both. old guys who don't seem at their peak of cognitive performance. How did that happen?

Jonah Goldberg: Yeah. So I have a bunch of different theories about this and I think we can score the circle a little bit with John's objection that the problem isn't really gerontocracy per se but I think you could make the case that maybe the problem is with gerontocracy when it involves the most self indulgent, self serving generation of baby [00:13:00] boomers who once they get power, want to hold on to it for all sorts of psychodramatic reasons.

But, regardless, I think one of the reasons Why we're in the mess that we're in. And this is something I'm mildly obsessed about is is we have incredibly weak political parties. Their weaknesses are manifest in a whole bunch of ways. Campaign finance reform basically took the power of the purse out of the parties, the primaries, um, which came in with the McGovern rules in 72 and were quickly followed by the Republicans have been a disaster for the country and a disaster for the But the parties themselves and we are the only advanced industrialized democracy in the world, with arguably the exception of Argentina, whose parties voluntarily have given up the ability to pick their own candidates.

And and so what you get is you get performative, rather than formative leaders who perform. People asked used to ask me all the time, why did that George, was Why did the Republicans [00:14:00] even let him run? Their answer was because he filled out a form and filed a check for 35 bucks.

And that was it. Anyone was allowed to, any Tom, Dick, or Harry can walk in off the street and run for the nomination of one of these two parties. And then you get this real confusion, which Joe Biden is relying on right now, at least in his more lucid moments, to say you can't overdo, overturn the will of the voters of the Democratic Party.

The idea that the parties have to be answerable to 9 percent of the electorate, who are the people who vote in primaries, who tend to, according to the social science data, the amazing thing is, the base of the parties don't actually like their own parties. They just hate the other parties more. And everyone is voting on the most dysfunctional, performative people that will own the libs or, annoy the other side rather than actually thinking about people who know how to get things done And work the institution.

And so I think that's a [00:15:00] big part of it is democratizing the political parties has ruined them, has innervated them completely.

John Cochrane: I want to just riff on this because I agree entirely. Rooms full of old white men, smoke filled rooms would never have picked these two because they want to win and they want to govern and they want to win durably.

Jonah Goldberg: And they would tell Joe Biden to get out and then he would have to go, but like they have no power now.

John Cochrane: Exactly. And we are, we forget, this is a larger problem of America not understanding who we are. We are not a democracy, we're a republic. We don't vote on everything, and there's too much, oh the will of the people, whatever they voted on is right.

That's not how our founders set it up with very good reasons. The parties are supposed to be private organizations that put together reasonable candidates, and then you choose among those.

Niall Ferguson: But I don't know if I entirely buy your argument, Jonah. I think it might apply to what's happened to the Republican Party.

But I'm not at all sure it's true of the Democrats, because after all, it was the party elite that decided Joe Biden should be the [00:16:00] candidate back in 2020, because they calculated that only he could beat Trump. They told the other contenders before Super Tuesday, sorry, you're all out. It's a male.

obediently got out. And in a sense, Biden, I think, represents the persistence of the Democratic Party's curious organizational structure in which there's a Chicago faction of the donor class, there's a Californian element, then there's the sort of East Coast people, and they still run their party.

That's why they made the mistake of having Hillary Clinton as a candidate in 2016, when, by the way, Biden would have been a better candidate. And I think that what we're witnessing right now is the death throes of that political party because it's got itself into this tremendous bind. It has Biden who's whose cognitive decline they could not conceal for the entire four years.

But they also have Kamala Harris as [00:17:00] vice president and then none of them seriously believe that she's up to the job of being president either. So the question is what do they do? I think they're still in control of the process. But they don't seem to have a good option that they can all agree on.

Am I right in thinking that they're in a different place from Republicans, who I think have become captives of a MAGA movement that the party long ago lost control of?

John Cochrane: But even the MAGA movement represents politics. Trump did go out and get the endorsement, everybody, and is able to threaten, you don't fall in line, you're with me.

So Even the Republicans are more of a party than they look and you've made a great point about the Democrats. They have, they can threaten people. You go along or else. Sorry, Jonah, go for it.

Jonah Goldberg: Yeah. No, look I don't dispute that. I would say in 2016, both parties were under threat of being hijacked. And Donald Trump successfully hijacked the Republican party.

Bernie Sanders almost did, right? Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. He spent most of his life being a giant pain in the ass of the [00:18:00] Democratic Party. A serious party would say, I don't care that you're calling yourself a Democrat to run for president. You can't run like you've been an independent. You've run against Democrats your entire career.

You supported people who have hurt this party. You can't run on our primary, but they let him in and he almost took over right in the wave of populism. I do agree with you that the democratic party has more of these mechanisms Because it's needed them in the past the whole idea of super delegates was created by democrats in the past To deal with threats from populism.

The democratic party is the natural home of populism And so it has some internal mechanisms left to deal with the problems of populism. The Republican party has not been the home of populism. And so it's cultivated and cultivated. And then all of a sudden it was like, Oh my gosh, we have no idea how to deal with these people and they swamped the party, they took it over.

And now the Republican party is wholly a subsidiary of Trumpism. And the democratic party is [00:19:00] this weird hybrid thing. Nobody, nobody is a cultist follower of Joe Biden. You just, you can't do that. He has no cult of personality, but there is this. negative partisanship thing that is sustaining him a little bit.

I would disagree with you with slightly. I agree with your point that the elites had a big role in getting him a nomination in 2020, but a bigger part of it was the fact that, and this is something that screws up a lot of political analysis these days. The most conservative major segments of the democratic party today are African American women in their fifties.

And they, like when we were growing up, the black left was code for. Or the black, black Democrats were code for the left wing base of the party. Now the left wing base of the party are these open toed shoes with closed minds, baristas, socialists, jack wads. Who do all this woke stuff. And it's the black ladies in South Carolina who said, you guys, we're not voting for Kamala Harris.

We're not voting for Cory Booker. Those [00:20:00] people are crazy. We're voting for the conservative old white guy. And so it's fascinating to me that they're now not they're the ones that are still clinging to Joe Biden at the expense of preventing Kamala Harris from becoming the president of the United States.

It's an interesting development. But I agree if they're not perfectly symmetrical because Trump has transformed so much, but I think they both suffer from more from weakness than from strength.

H.R. McMaster: Hey, Jonah, but don't you think that there are those in the Democratic Party and maybe the progressive far left who see Biden's weakness as an advantage, right?

Because then they can. Manipulate him, use him, as a cipher almost for their radical agenda.

Jonah Goldberg: Oh, I think absolutely. And I don't even think it's just manipulation, scheming. Biden came in and promised Elizabeth Warren and all those people, just gave them the store and said, I'm going to be your guy in here.

And that's why a lot of those people are sticking with him is because they've got investments in the Biden administration, Lena Khan and all [00:21:00] that, that all stems from that. And I think that,

H.R. McMaster: And they've gotten all their people appointed, the assistant secretary level in all of our departments and agencies, for example, those in, those in Homeland Security and borders who just basically, said, give parole to anybody who comes across the border illegally.

All, the people who have put into place These policies are all the far left people.

Jonah Goldberg: Oh, I agree with that entirely. And also it's just one last point I'll shut up is that people think that Joe Biden got elected because people thought he was a centrist. He's never been a centrist. He's been a centrist within the polls of the democratic party.

So as the Democratic Party has moved left, he's moved left with it. There are no Sam Nuns to pull him right? And he is good at reading Democrats. He's not great at reading the median American. And the irony here is that if he was going to beat Donald Trump, those are the voters he would need to go for, but he doesn't have those instincts and the people around him really don't because he is surrounded by a lot of those sort of Elizabeth Warren types.

Niall Ferguson: Can we just [00:22:00] get the crystal ball out here? Because what we need to figure out. is what's going to happen. And my spidey sense tells me Joe's not going to make it because he's lost not only the New York Times, he's lost Hollywood, he's lost some major donors. It looks like President Obama is not on board.

And so my sense is he's not going to make it. And I, at the same time, don't easily imagine Kamala Harris. Smoothly inheriting the nomination or for that matter, the presidency. But this gets us into some historically interesting territory because it's been a long time since we had a contested convention.

There might've been one in 68 if Bobby Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, but there wasn't. You have to go back to what, 1952? I'm digging into my US political history when both parties had contested conventions Is it conceivable, Jonah, that we're going to [00:23:00] go back to those days when the nomination actually gets decided at a convention?

Is that possible or am I just dreaming?

Jonah Goldberg: I hope it's possible. I honestly don't know. I, my prediction is as good as anybody's. If Biden makes it through to this zoom call, which happens like before the convention, he gets the nomination. That makes all of this stuff more difficult and weirder.

I agree with you entirely. I think Joe Biden's first major fundamental presidential blunder wasn't Afghanistan. That was the second one. The first one was having. Harris as his running mate. It was not necessary. And the way he did it was he basically told the whole world that she's a DEI candidate, I'm going to pick a black woman. And it has to be approved by, the progressive left. And he could have just said, I'm going to go find the most qualified person possible, and then pick Kamala Harris, and it would still have been better than the way he did it. But yeah, so I don't [00:24:00] know, it would be, ideally, they would get rid of both of them, or have some sort of open process, and you hear that a lot in Washington.

People talking about how you'll have this sort of sped up process, where anyone can throw their hat into the ring, and these mini sort of debates, and all that kind of stuff. I think it's really hard, I think, Kamala Harris, if she wants it, to do this sort of suicide pact move that Biden is doing right now.

That's not great. She's not very good.

John Cochrane: Does it really matter? They're not doing this because they've suddenly discovered, oh, Biden has cognitive decline. They knew that a year ago. They're doing this because they've just, the rest of us have found out and they just realized he's going to lose.

They would nominate a potted plant if they thought the potted plant was going to win the election. So the real question is there any path for them to actually win the election after this? And that seems, although it'll be entertaining to watch the knives comes out that, that seems fairly doubtful at this point, right?

Jonah Goldberg: I personally think a big fight [00:25:00] would be great for the Democrats or could be great for the Democrats. It could also be disaster stipulated, but it would be interesting. The odds that all of us sitting on this podcast would watch the full democratic convention. If it was a real open process and people were, really duking it out and vying for it, it would create drama.

It would grit. It would pull people in. And I feel like that kind of fresh boldness weirdness kind of thing would be very good for fixing the narrative that Trump is inevitable to win.

John Cochrane: And whether or not they win, this would be the step to revitalizing the party. We have a party elites who are running things.

It would blow that completely apart. You guys have completely screwed this one up. Whether they win this election or not, it might be the catalyst for reforming their party.

Niall Ferguson: But it would also be great for the media if I'm running CNN, a contested convention is even better than a debate. between the two late Soviet leaders.

It's, actually I discovered when I did some homework on this, that the TV ratings for the 1952 contested conventions [00:26:00] were huge, an enormous number of Americans watched the events that ultimately produced Eisenhower v. Stevenson. So I can see, I wanted to ask you about this Jonah, the role of the media.

Is it significant that the New York Times, a. k. a. Pravda, in my Soviet analogy, suddenly flipped, having sustained the myth that for, what, three and a half years that Biden was fine that he had a stammer. Remember the stammer story? That was such a tell when that ran. But they suddenly flipped and really quickly after the debate between Trump and Biden to, he's got to go.

How do you interpret that? Is this a sign that the media, at least the New York Times, is still a very powerful force within the Democratic Party itself? Or is it going to reveal that it's not that powerful because Biden's actually going to ride it out?

Jonah Goldberg: Yeah, I'm of the school of media is, I think there are a lot of right wing critic media critics and I was, I have been one at [00:27:00] various times in the last 30 years, quite a bit who inflate the power of the mainstream media beyond the reality.

Like everyone, this whole talk about how it's been a cover up and they hid this from the American people. We've been talking about how Biden's too old for 18 months. Saturday Night Live has done skits about it, right? They couldn't hide the fact that it happened. They couldn't, the censorship stuff on Hunter Biden's laptop was bad.

The information still got out. Two thirds, three quarters of American people have said Biden's too old for two years now. Regardless of how much the media tried to cover it up. That said I think what is grotesque about all of this and gets you closer to the sort of moral similarities with Pravda is that the New York Times position on this.

is first and foremost about power, right? It is not this guy's unfit to serve as president right now, that this is dangerous to have this guy in charge of the nuclear codes. It's that this guy could lose to the Republicans and that freaks us out. And [00:28:00] I don't blame them for being freaked out. I despise Donald Trump. If you don't think just as a matter of civics, you would think the primary issue is this guy up to the job of being the commander in chief of the United States now, or for the next four and a half years? That's the primary question. It seems to me as a sort of a patriotic matter, not can he beat Donald Trump?

And yet That's completely inverted in the public debate watch George Stephanopoulos's interview. It's all about how he can whether he can win or not It's not hey, who's the president of France or what if we're attacked after 8 p. m When you go to bed, can you handle it?

It's all just partisan politics

Niall Ferguson: I wanted to bring HR in just to remind ourselves that there's a geopolitical It kind of matters who is president of the United States not just from the point of view of domestic policy, but because we are in a very dangerous geopolitical predicament. And more and more of us have come to the view, which we've discussed on this show [00:29:00] before, that there is now a kind of axis that unites China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, poses threats all over the world.

And so the stakes in this election are global stakes. How do you think about that, HR? You are also somebody who had his differences with Donald Trump when you were in the Trump administration. I don't know how you feel about the prospect of a second Trump term, the probability of which has gone up substantially since the debate between Trump and Biden.

So what are the geopolitical stakes here and what would be a good outcome? Is a good outcome even available to us?

John Cochrane: And could you remind us that the president matters? You've been there. You can't just have it run by the aides. The president matters.

H.R. McMaster: Yeah, the present matters for a broad range of reasons.

Niall, you've already alluded to the, I think the primary one, which is how do our adversaries perceive the president of the United States? And I think what is provocative is the perception of weakness. And I think we've seen this in a series of cascading [00:30:00] crises. I believe that the massive reinvasion of Ukraine, for example, is a direct result of the disastrous really self defeat And withdraw from Afghanistan.

I think that our inability for quite some time to sustain support for Ukraine contributed probably to the decision made in Teran to, to activate the ring of fire against Israel on October 7th of last year. So what is going to prevent us from these crises, from cascading further into the looming crisis, including the looming crises?

In the Pacific, I think a lot of it has to do with how the United States leader, the president, is perceived. And so I'm very concerned about this election for that reason. Now with with President Trump, I think, it, it's really a comparison I think we can make between Biden's weakness, His cognitive decline and what I would describe as the fecklessness of his administration and Trump's erratic nature.

What Donald Trump do you get in a second term? We don't really know [00:31:00] because he has, quite a bit of dissonance that he has to deal with himself. Is he going to come in and be sympathetic to peace through strength and recognize that, forward positioned capable U.

S. forces as part strong alliances. Is the best way to prevent a war and hell, you know It's a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to fight one if he if you get that donald trump that's great if you get a retrenchment donald trump who thinks that we've all these stupid people for so many years of Underwritten the security of allies who can pay for security themselves.

It's time for all of our troops to come home that's exactly you know, what? What xi jinping and vladimir putin want to hear so You know, I, I think we're in a difficult situation. And we, I think and the person has to be strong too, just for the administration to operate effectively, right?

Because you need a leader who can integrate really all the elements of national power, harmonize efforts across the various departments and agencies. And if you don't have that, there's really nobody else who can step in and fulfill that role. It can't be the first [00:32:00] lady, it can't be the chief of staff.

It can't even be the vice president. It has to be the president.

Niall Ferguson: So let's pivot to some other elections that have just happened. It's always nice if there's a global trend you can hang on to. There was one in 2016, the populist trend that Jonah talked about earlier. Hard to spot a trend if you look at what just happened in the UK, where I find myself sitting as we speak, and in France, because in the UK on July the 4th, Britain celebrated independence from the Tories day by voting the Conservatives out in an enormous national revulsion and propelling the Labour Party into power with almost as big a majority as Tony Blair won back in 1997.

Meanwhile in France, the story was that actually the right appeared poised to take power after the first round of their parliamentary elections only. for that pendulum to swing the other way in the [00:33:00] second round resulting in a hung parliament. I don't know what kind of trend this this is. It's actually quite hard to discern one.

And I'm curious to know how my fellow Americans on the show viewed these events. John, I don't know how much time you even spend thinking about British and French elections, but give me the economist's take on what just happened and why the outcomes were so very different.

John Cochrane: This is actually more the the amateur political scientists.

I do follow these now, maybe I'm more Europhile than many other Americans. I think they're interesting. And cause I was going to ask you for a report from the UK, but I'll tell you what I see. First of all. There's a throw the bums out. And that always happens whenever parties in power shows itself to be incompetent, especially these days, we throw the bums out.

But in both the UK and France, a gentle shift to the right among the left electorate produced a massive win for the left. in the actual results, which reminds us that the rules matter. We are not it's [00:34:00] not, one person, one vote that goes in. The rules matter. As I understand it in the UK the Brexit party took a lot out of the Tory party so that in fact, The combined the vote share for labor didn't go up much at all.

What just happened is first past the post, you had a spoiler on the right, and they took, they, they won the majority with typically 30 percent or so of the actual vote. Same in France. Marine Le Pen was the, is the story. And of course, demonized in the media as the far but it was gaining real ground.

What happened? The rules matter. The parties on the left stopped squabbling, got together and decided we'll only have one person fight against Le Pen in each district, even though Le Pen rose up to the 35 percent ish and is the largest party. Nonetheless, the combined other ones who stopped squabbling on each other took over and now we have a far left parliament in France.

So the overall trend I still see in Europe is a gentle shift to the right, which is of course derided as the populist, the racist and so forth. But a lot of it is [00:35:00] the common sense, right? Who looks at gas prices in Europe and says no more, thank you very much. But combined with the eternal reminder, the rules matter.

Niall Ferguson: Jonah, how do you view these these elections on the other side of the Atlantic? Do they concern you, interest you, bore you?

Jonah Goldberg: Oh they certainly interest me. I'm very much where John is on this. I think the through line that I think is relevant for America is there's definitely an anti incumbent mood out there.

So the conservatives were clearly the incumbents, overstayed their welcome, they get thrown out. People are really bored, tired of him. He gets thrown out or his party's getting thrown out. And they'd like to throw him out. And in America we have. It's a fundamental, certainly in the television age, an completely unprecedented thing where we have in effect, two incumbents running against each other.

And I, if we had the strong parties that I, wax, nostalgic for you would go get some fresh face governor. No, barely anybody has heard of [00:36:00] spend a half billion dollars, putting them in everybody's room as a fresh face guy. We're going to throw all these old people out.

And I think you would get that anti incumbent sentiment. Pretty squarely on the side of that candidate. I also just, I can't help, and you guys know more about European election or European politics than I do, but I can't help but feel like consistently for the last 10 years, we just see political parties and ideological movements catching cars that they don't know how to drive.

And it is not obvious to me that the French right, and I don't, my last name is Goldberg. I'm not a huge vicious right kind of guy, but it seems to me if you look at Georgia Maloney in Italy, she's actually been fairly responsible as a, as one of these right wing, neo fascist types.

I can't see how she's been so terrible. Populist movements are terrible at governing. And so the two things usually happen when they take power. Either they stop being populist boobs and they take their job seriously, [00:37:00] or they get thrown out in short order. Or they run the country into complete ground, right?

I guess that's a third option. It seems to me having a hard French left win this election to stop the right may bite everyone in the ass because some of those people are really terrible. No less. anti semitic, some of them than the supposedly anti semitic right. And in some cases, I would argue much more anti semitic.

And I just wish more people took the careful what you wish for advice more seriously in Western politics, instead of constantly swinging for the fences for like total victory, which always invites humiliating defeats. And instead try to do these incremental work with parties to do formative leadership as HR is talking about, would serve the parties and the politicians better in the long run, but no one's in the mood for it.

Niall Ferguson: I learned a word in Paris a couple of weeks ago Melonization. And this was what the French elite was talking about as they contemplated Jordan [00:38:00] Bardella, the the young gun of the French right, and wondered if they could turn him into Maloney. If he actually got into power, and it turned out that they don't need to melanize him because he didn't make it into power.

I think the British system has once again delivered one of those terrific punches to the nose that it's designed to deliver. Just for those who don't follow these things closely, might amaze you to learn that Labour won two thirds. Of the seats in the House of Commons, 412 out of 650 seats with barely a third of the votes cast.

And in fact, Labour's total share of the vote barely changed relative to the last election in 2019, when they got completely crushed. The increase in the share of the vote was less than two percentage points, and it was nearly all in my native Scotland, where the Scottish Nationalists. The reform party, which is the supposedly far right, but let's just call it new right party, actually won 14 [00:39:00] percent of the vote, came in third in vote share, won just five seats.

So if you think America's electoral system is quirky Britain really has got non proportional representation and it has done for a very long time indeed. And I will fight and die on the hill of justifying that system, because I think what the British public wanted to do was punch the Tories on the nose, not necessarily to give Sir Keir Starmer a massive mandate for change.

We are almost out of time in this segment of our show, and I don't want to detain Jonah too long, because I know that he has He has things to do in that exotic location where we see him. You look as if you're trapped inside a museum, Jonah, but it's it's a very appealing looking museum.

I'm going to just ask you to conclude this segment with a prediction. Who is going to be the President of the United States inaugurated in January of [00:40:00] next year?

Jonah Goldberg: Oh, gosh. If this were the Simpsons, I would say the inanimate steel rod, but and since we're not there desire to be held accountable to this, unless I'm absolutely correct.

I am going to say Kamala Harris.

Niall Ferguson: There is a shocking thoughts with which to buy gold of gold is available at all good minds donut. Thank you so much for being our guest. We always love having you on the show. And thanks also for a really good debate about late Soviet America. It made me glad I, I'd signed up with Barry because it's a while since I've sparked that much disagreement with an article.

Long may we continue to disagree civilly, and hopefully over a drink soon too. We are going to wish you a very enjoyable summer. Look forward to seeing you on the other side, and very much. And if you turn out to be right, and it is President Harris, you get a free copy of Ben Steele's recent book on what might have happened [00:41:00] if a certain vice president had gone on to become president after the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

As we all know, it wasn't the man of the left and a fellow traveler,

Wallace, but of course, Henry Harry Truman who became president. But who is vice president matters. It matters a lot if you've got an old and potentially sick president. Thank you so much, Jonah. We'll see you again after the summer.

Jonah Goldberg: My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks Jonah.

Niall Ferguson: And we now turn to the lightning round

It's that moment when the good fellas have to give short answers i'm gonna start with one for you hr it seems like a long time ago, but there was a time eight years back when everybody was convinced that the Russians were interfering in the U. S. election, and that was the decisive variable that led to the election of Donald Trump.

We didn't hear so much from the Russians in 2020, [00:42:00] but it seems like they might be making a comeback into the narrative in 2024. What's going on and is it serious?

H.R. McMaster: It's serious, Niall, because really, the Russians don't give a damn who wins our elections. What they really care about is that they want a large number of Americans to doubt the legitimacy of the result.

I don't think, I can't believe that they have a preference for Donald Trump over an enfeebled President Biden. I don't think it matters to them. And I don't think it mattered to them in 2016. It's really important to remember. I know this is lightning round, so I'll be quick about this. But in 2016, they had a campaign ready to go that said Donald Trump was cheated out of the election by Hillary Clinton.

They actually rolled out that disinformation campaign, and then they were as surprised as Donald Trump was when Donald Trump won. So they reeled it back in and changed the campaign to Trump would have won the popular election if it hadn't been for all the fraud perpetrated by the Clinton campaign.

They don't really give a damn who wins. What they want is they want us to doubt our democratic principles, institutions, and [00:43:00] processes.

John Cochrane: This was an intelligence leak once again. Let us remember the 2016 Russia stuff was a hoax. It was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and written down as a legal fee.

H.R. McMaster: No, actually, John, let me finish in Russia's yet

John Cochrane: in 2020 51 intelligence officials wrote that the Hunter Biden laptop was all Russian disinformation lying to us again. Here we are again. We that they are trying this this gambit once again is just amazing. We don't need Russia to provide disinformation.

We're perfectly good at redoing our own disinformation. I

H.R. McMaster: agree with that. I agree with that. We're almost enemy. Absolutely. Absolutely. But I think in the Kremlin, they're just like clinking the champagne glasses. They look at the Americans are tearing themselves apart again. Absolutely. Oh, it matters.

John Cochrane: The intelligence agencies are now leaking this kind of rumor in order to influence the election again.

H.R. McMaster: Playing into Russian hands. Playing into Russian hands.

Niall Ferguson: We'll turn as it's the lightning round with lightning. [00:44:00] to a question from the mailbag on an unrelated subject. It comes from Bill who's a viewer from Atlanta, Georgia.

And he wants us to give our thoughts on an editorial published in the Wall Street Journal just the other day by the former speaker of the house, Paul Ryan, in which Mr. Ryan argued that we should want and encourage Dollar backed cryptocurrency, so called stable coins, because if those thrive, that will strengthen the position of the dollar internationally because of course a great many people around the world are quite attracted to stable coins that are dollar linked.

John, this is a question for an economist. Is Paul Ryan right about this? Could more relaxed attitude towards stable coins that say the SEC pay off for the U. S. dollar?

John Cochrane: Oh boy, 50 50. And boy, you're challenging me to do this [00:45:00] in the constraints of lightning. What are stable coins good for?

They're not very good for regular transactions. Traditional technology is much faster for regular legal transactions. They're great for illegal transactions. And being able to use the dollar for illegal transactions is a great benefit. use of the dollar. Now, we don't want to enforce every law.

For example, China's currency laws or laws it's a great way to, or Venezuela's currency laws. So there's an optimal amount of illegality there, but it is not stable. Coins are not a great technology for regular everyday transactions. They are a great technology for avoiding sanctions, for avoiding laws and so forth.

So he's right. And, but if he, if you think about the actual You know why that would be useful as opposed to money market funds or zelle or every other means of electronic transactions

Niall Ferguson: I must admit to quite liking Paul Ryan's article. I'm also struck, John, by the way things are shifting, the way adoption of crypto is happening in traditional [00:46:00] finance, even the Bank for International Settlements, which used to be doggedly hostile.

To every single blockchain related innovation has come out arguing that maybe there could be tokenization. Maybe there could be something salvaged from this though. They don't want stable coins. I said it would be a lightning round and we've got time for just one more question. And it's a very personal question.

If you'll forgive me, gentlemen undermounting pressure from my younger children, I need to get a dog. But, the question is, what kind of dog should I get? Who wants to go first?

H.R. McMaster: I would just say don't get any, a dog that has any pit bull in them. That's, that would be my only advice. John, have

John Cochrane: you got any advice on

Niall Ferguson: dogs?

John Cochrane: Portuguese water dog, as our beloved Angie and Bia, current Bia are Portuguese water dogs, non shedding, tremendously loving, as active as your young children, and come on over and visit someday. [00:47:00]

Niall Ferguson: That is a fantastic solution to the problem. Of course, regular viewers and listeners to GoodFellows may have their own opinions about what kind of dog I should get.

I would like to hear from you. If you have a strong case to be made, what kind of a dog would get on well with the idiosyncratic parents and 12 year old Thomas and 6 year old Campbell? This is one of those life decisions that I need to crowd.

John Cochrane: I just wanted to add, the Obamas were notorious for having Portuguese water dogs, so remember, find a conservative Portuguese water dog.

Niall Ferguson: We will of course put them through the traditional Hoover ideological test of soundness. I suspect, although the producer hasn't told me, that we are out of time. And I therefore need to wrap this edition of Goodfellows up in the hope that Bill will come back soon and allow me to lapse into my more passive role as a Goodfellow rather than [00:48:00] moderator.

You have been listening and watching the Goodfellows, H. R. McMaster and John Cochranee and Niall Ferguson. And we will be back because although it's summer, we don't entirely rest at some future date. Enjoy the summer, give us thoughts on dogs also on politics, also in geopolitics. We're always looking through your mail, looking for good questions for the lightning round.

And with that, I think it is over and out from the Hoover Institution. Have a great summer.

Announcer: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring H. R. McMaster, watch Battlegrounds, also available at hoover. org.