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John Podhoretz
Based on years of listening to him, and on everything I’ve heard about him, John Podhoretz is a gentle, humane, and thoroughly decent man. I envy him his ability to pluck precisely the right word from his obviously vast vocabulary, and to speak, when he chooses, with extraordinary nuance and precision.
Sure, he’s prone to outrageous hyperbole (a quality hardly unique to him in this, the Age of Trump), is unduly proud of his Judaic morosity, and has a sense of humor that resonates with 12-year-old boys and Jonah Goldberg (but I repeat myself). But still, I enjoy listening to him.
But he often lands a clinker, as he did in the June 6 podcast (here) when he averred, at about 1:10:00, that, should the Democrats win in 2020, the right is “certainly going to turn anti-patriotic in the event of his defeat. … So you’re going to have the right hating America and the left hating America.”
I’ve mentioned this before about our own Rob Long, and I’ll say it now about John: I think too many conservative intellectuals have a poor idea of what actual conservatives are like, and of who makes up “the right” out in that vast unexplored and boring portion of America that people who don’t live in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles call home.
Thank G-d we still have VDH.
Published in Culture
We don’t need a crystal ball. The left has openly stated what they want, and where they plan to go when they have power.
Biden has never held a principle, and he is too weak to even pretend he might stand up for a “thing.”
His #2 at best will be a stronger ally to the left, if that’s even possible.
Then, there is Pelosi and Schumer and the AOC Klan. If there is any systemic racism in this country, they most certainly lead the charge.
The Media. The only thing they do not lie about is how much they hate Trump.
If Biden wins, everyone will be wishing all they had to cry over is Trump’s tweets. The left plans to excoriate and disembowel anyone who does not obey and conform.
This will not improve if Biden wins.
Vote as you wish.
But prepare for new levels of persecution and hell if Biden wins. Because you are absolutely not voting for Biden, but for whomever is behind his candidacy.
Look it up.
My point isn’t that no one knows the intentions of Biden-Harris, only that no one knows how bad the consequences of Biden-Harris will be.
It’s like when Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992. Clinton told everyone that we would only raise taxes on the rich. But once in office Bill Clinton proposed a gasoline tax and other taxes on the middle class.
So, simply reading the Biden-Harris platform doesn’t tell us enough to predict the future with 100 percent accuracy. It can only give us a sense of how bad things are likely to be.
Take the coronavirus for example. Trump did not say in 2016, “If you elect me, we will have a pandemic.” That could not be predicted by anyone in a deterministic way. Perhaps one could have said in 2016, “There is a 2 percent probability that there will be a global pandemic in 2020.”
So, my point isn’t that we have zero idea what Biden-Harris intends to do once in office. It’s only that we don’t know exactly what the condition of the country will be by 2024.
I agree. And I think it requires a lot of wishful thinking to try to make the indirect case. I continue to believe that people who attempt it generally do so because, deep down, they know they’re making a mistake, and want to try to rationalize it.
All, the point of the post was a pretty narrow one — that our extremely well educated urban conservative intellectuals are often out of touch with the vast majority of normal, conservative Americans. I’ll stand by that.
What the post was not intended to be was a general swipe at Commentary. In particular, this week’s July 7 program was very good (and no, not merely because Noah was absent). As a Wuhan shutdown skeptic, I very much appreciated the similarly skeptical tone of John, Abe, and Christine. Well worth listening to, in my opinion.
(And, on the topic of podcasts, I still think Andrew Klavan is among the wisest men in podcasting.)
Save The Klavan.
Regardless of whether John Podhoretz, Abe Greenwald, Noah Rothman and Christine Rosen have their finger on the pulse of the typical, normal conservative, I still prefer listening to the Commentary podcast then any other podcast.
I don’t expect a commentator to be some composite character, reflecting the beliefs of millions of human beings. I only expect that commentator to communicate his or her beliefs in an interesting way.
Back in 1993-94, one of the things the far left Democrats were angry about was that Bill and Hillary didn’t do nationalizing health care first when they took office, so that it was scuttled by the 1994 midterms. And they remembered that for the next time they held both the White House and Congress in 2009-10.
What they were irked at Obama with in ’09-’10 was he didn’t immediately use big government to shut down Fox News and other conservative sites and organization when he had the chance. Something to remember if the Dems sweep everything this November.
I think the Jimmy Carter example is an example of where someone could, retrospectively, say that the 1976 defeat of Gerald Ford exposed to many people how ineffective Democrat policies were.
You and I, as conservatives, do not believe that Leftist policies “work” (based on some definition of “work”). But many mushy-middle voters are undecided on this issue.
Will four years of Biden-Harris convince these mushy-middle voters that Leftist policies make their lives more miserable rather than less? We can’t know the answer to this now. But if Biden-Harris wins in November, which seems very likely given Trump’s incompetence as a candidate, we will find out.
I make no case for Biden-Harris, given their Leftism. I only argue that there is a possibility that after four years of Biden-Harris the voters will be begging Republicans to get back into power to clean up the mess Biden-Harris-Pelosi and Schumer have made.
Of course, it would be better if there was no mess to clean up. That’s the case for Trump.
It is a certainty that if Biden-Harris wins this November, they will attempt to implement many Leftist policies. They will raise taxes. They will increase regulation. The will nominate liberal judicial nominees.
The only thing we don’t know is the exact content of these policies and what the condition of the country will be by November 2022 and November 2024, the first and second times when voters can hand the Democrats a report card on their performance.
Regardless of whether one is terrified of a Biden-Harris administration or mere opposed to one, it is beginning to look like a Biden-Harris administration is in our future. Trump is blowing it.
I think it is a little preposterous to try to project an election four months down the road when news cycles run about 48 hours and we are coming off the tail of an epidemic and a unique economic crisis, murder rates are skyrocketing, the left is going crazy, and the opposition candidate is obviously and increasingly senile and has yet to announce his hard left identity pick of a vice president who will be the de facto president if his party wins.
I’ll start worrying in late September.
I think when you see the left’s current bravado about Biden’s poll numbers, mixed in with columns by Karen Tumulty, Thomas Friedman and others, positing the question “Does Joe Biden really have to appear at any debates?” you get the idea that they’re not completely sold on their own candidate’s chances or his ability to hold up now through Nov. 3, either (though they might breathe easier once Joe gets his VP pick confirmed, since at the moment the more lucid liberals are worried if Biden goes south prior to the convention that would give the Bernie bros justification for saying their guy’s next in line).
An anonymous brand of cotton swab!
They’re hiding their identity because they don’t want to be sued by Johnson & Johnson.
The equation then becomes “Do we lose more votes by Biden debating than we do by Biden appearing gutless by not debating?”
I suspect that those advocating for no debates may be really thinking about one debate as a fall-back. It’s possible Biden, properly rested and prepared, can do that without disastrous consequences, and he dodges the issue of not debating at all.
I wonder if some Democrats want Trump to win, but are more muzzled than Republicans.
I hope it is more than some!
If I were a betting man and I were in Las Vegas and had to bet ten thousand dollars on the outcome of the presidential election, I would bet that Biden will defeat Trump. This doesn’t mean that Trump has zero chance of winning.
But you understand that the better choice, were it available, would be not to bet right now. Right? Because we’re in a chaotic moment, and all kinds of things can change between now and November.
That is trivially true. The bottom line is, in my opinion, Trump is headed for defeat this November. Some of the causes of Trump’s defeat are his fault and some of the causes of his defeat are not his fault. That is my honest assessment of the situation. Perhaps you think I should withhold my assessment until September or even the day after the election.
Let’s say Trump wins this November. By 2024 many of the same people who are expressed terror at the thought of a Democrat victory this November will be expressing terror at the thought of a Democrat victory in 2024.
In the eyes of some, we are always one election away from the end of the Republic. I don’t buy it.
I’ve already noted, based on Biden’s St. Patrick’s Day debate with Bernie, that at least as of mid-March, if he gets his adrenaline going for a major event, he can hold it together for more than 2-3 sentences at a time. Combined with his crude & rude routine at the 2012 debate against Paul Ryan, if i were Trump and his team, that’s the Joe Biden I’d prepare to face in the first debate, not the incoherent Joe of his other recent appearances, when the juices aren’t going and his thought processes wander off to the point a Silver Alert has to be issued to find out what he was trying to say. (The other danger of downplaying Biden as a drooling idiot is you set the bar so low for the debate, any sign of lucidity can be spun by the media as a show of rhetorical skills on the level of the Oxford Debating Society.)
I think they question is which way would the Democrats as a whole go ideologically if they lost a second straight election to Trump?
In the era of the modern primary system, 1972 to today, the Democrats have moved left every time they’ve lost control of the White House, based on their belief that their last candidate lost because they weren’t progressive enough. But after a second straight defeat their game plan has been at the very least to try and publicly moderate their beliefs, even if their candidate is still a progressive (Obama’s ‘present’ votes on key issues in the run up to 2008 was done so swing voters could project him as being less liberal than he actually was). Carter and Dukakis both ran to the right of where McGovern and Mondale did, while three straight losses caused the left to completely shut their pie-holes in 1992 and allow Bill Clinton to get away with his Sister Soljuah moment.
That’s the 2020-24 dynamic. History says if Biden loses this year, the Democrats will tone down their wildest rhetoric for 2024, after being chastened that the nation is not in reality on the brink of going full-bore Socialist. Trump of course is the X-factor here, as is the fact that Biden wasn’t the furthest left guy in the 2020 Democratic field, but may end up being perceived as the guy who can’t control parts of his own party that make Sanders look like Reagan. But past performances says a Trump win in November would produce a less openly crazy Democratic Party in 2024, no matter who the GOP nominee turns out to be.
I’m not sure why we are having a discussion on what Joe Biden thinks or will do as President. He will have almost zero input on what happens if he becomes President. Decisions will be made by AOC, Omar, BLM, etc. They will find Pelosi and Schumer easier to bully than republicans. Jill Biden will attempt to do an Edith Wilson, but won’t be successful. As I said previously, letting this happen would be the worst thing we could do for our children/grandchildren.
I’m noticing a trend here. Those who now believe Biden will win tend to be those who are on the spectrum not especially enamored with Trump to despising him.
Now these people are believing polls, run by media conglomerates, who never mention or report the sample, whether they are likely voters, or just “adults” etc, four months out of an election and in the middle of two manufactured crises that have yet to play out.
Biden isn’t even the nominee and Trump has his hands pretty full right now. But he will campaign, and do so effectively. There still debates, a VP choice ( careful Joe!) and the somehow the Democrats have to choose whether they are going the progressive path or the centrist path, either way they will lose votes once that becomes clear.
There’s plenty of time and there are a lot of unreported positives that they aren’t hearing, or when they hear them, dismiss them as Trump supporter irrational optimism.
M’kay….
We don’t know what will happen with these crises, but these things usually fall into a pattern whereby they lose their efficacy once people begin to see the realities. I’d say that’s happening now.
Who knows which comes first, the dislike of DJT, leading to listening to the MSM and the likes of JPod, bringing in confirmation bias, or the reverse. That is, listening to these same outlets with an ‘open mind‘ and believing they reflect the electorate and the polls the report on are objective.
Either way, the near certainty expressed by some here is a red flag for me.
If people on ‘our side’ trust the media, even a little bit, they have no credibility with me. They are just regurgitating what they are being told with no vetting, no fact checking and no analysis.
I am refusing to be a Pollyanna, however I can’t believe these committed partisans in the media are playing fairly. At all.
So here’s my suspicion: This is the perfect moment to push the Trump is losing narrative to depress the R vote and try to increase enthusiasm from their base. Watch the “polls” get tighter as they try to keep their troops from being overconfident and staying home. That will happen in October, along with some other crisis. None of this is new.
The pessimists are trying to protect themselves claiming any loss will be on Trump alone. That is, nothing to do with us! he’s a loser, we should have nominated someone else (How, exactly?)
This is a GIANT tell. If Trump loses it won’t be his fault. (Not because he’s a perfect candidate) It will have been by absolute lying by the media, continued traitorous behavior from the deep state intel agencies and other bureaucrats, regular cheating and amplified cheating, and more lying and gaslighting from media outlets.
Oh, and not to forget the lack of enthusiasm from the globalist, elitist fake conservatives. Any errant tweet Trump can make pales in comparison to the damage they are doing being despicably underhanded.
For these people to claim that it’s all on Trump reveals how clueless they are, or how they refuse to blame corporate media and Democrats for creating this environment. Or even care.
I don’t want these people in my Party. Go vote for Biden or stay home I don’t care…
And now for a trivial piece of appreciation.
I listen to the podcast daily and it’s really improved. They’re real journalists and they research stories.
But here’s the trivial part: segues. For those of us spoiled by the Ricochet podcast, watching Lileks masterfully go for the layup while Rob throws himself into defense, Podhoretz brings us a refreshing counterpoint:
The Lead Pipe Segue.
“And you know what else is red, Noah? Sponsor. Sponsor brings choice cuts of meat to vegetarians looking for a change…” yadda yadda rote reading.
“And now it’s time to talk about Sponsor. Sponsor is the one of a kind service that makes you your own …” read, read
I listen to every commercial faithfully. They’re darkly hilarious.
Neither did many in Weimar Germany…..or modern Venezuela, if the former is too dramatic for you. The ‘one election away’ doesn’t become apparent until after the fact.
Next to James and Andrew Klavan, JPod probably throws himself into to the live read ads more than anyone else among the podcasts on the website (Jonah’s gotten slightly better in recent months, but there’s still a “I’m totally embarrassed about doing this/Why isn’t this commercial-free like NPR?” tone to his voice when he goes into some of his live reads).
JPod has some of the best live reads ever because he is so absolutely horrified to be giving them.
Exactly. No one knows the future.
We sided with Stalin when the alternative was Hitler.
I’d like to think that losing to Trump twice might have some sobering effect on the dems. It’s possible it will empower the left even more, but it also might lead to sanity prevailing.
I *know* to a metaphysical certitude that Trump losing in 2020 will empower the left.