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We open with some thoughts on the just concluded Democratic convention, and then segue into our guest, Avik Roy. His interview with Vox has been discussed extensively on Ricochet, and we give him the full court Ricochet Podcast press. Is the GOP on life support as Avik suggests and can be saved? Or, is everything just fine, and the party should stay the course? We delve into all of that with Roy in a very provocative (but civil!) conversation. Also, some thoughts on auto-promotion and the new version of Ricochet. If you’re reading this and you’re not a member — what are you waiting for? Join NOW. We need you!
Music from this week’s podcast:
You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Rolling Stones
The brand new opening sequence for the Ricochet Podcast was composed and produced by James Lileks.
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All signs point to EJHill.
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I was! Of course I was. And it cut me to the quick! But here’s the thing – as the designated Format Cop, my eye is on the clock and my ear is on the flow. For me it’s about moving the show and shuffling the voices. There are five priorities – guest, spots, Rob, Peter (or Peter, Rob) and then me. Peter and Rob (or Rob and Peter) are really, really bright guys with great questions, and I’m content to let the Founders roll and pop in when there’s space.
If it doesn’t seem as if there’s an imposed structure to the whole thing, but a happy natural organic flow, then I’ve done my job.
I think he would say the same thing that every conservative says. “This is a group with a culture that is really good at generating wealth.” Then he would say, “We need to get them to vote Republican and to do that we need to throw away white identity politics.”
I think part of this issue is that it sounds really bad to say you vote for the party who is promising your racial “group” the most benefits at the expense of another, larger one, so, if even on a subconscious level, it has to be rationalized as the other party being “racist”, thereby deflecting blame onto others.
What could be more civil than an intra-party civil war? Talk about collegial!
Great show as always guys, thanks for the consistent level of awesomesauce you all infuse into each lovingly handcrafted artisanal (mostly cruelty free) podcast.
I wasn’t making an argument… just asking questions in light of what seemed like conflicting rationales.
That’s certainly the game Trump is talking: more spending, bigger government (perfectly befitting the self-described king of debt). It’s one of many reasons I won’t support him.
It’s a challenge to persuade people who rely significantly on government for sustenance that their lives will be freer and richer in a society that upholds conservative values. But I believe that message can be channeled into a pragmatic and winning politics, even if the leaders and great communicators that requires aren’t presently in the arena.
I’ve been saying the last few years that Hispanics becoming a majority will be the worst thing to happen for them as a political entity. They will no longer have minority status, and non-hispanics will be free to not care about their issues, except for the SJWs of course. The country will further slide towards a third-world like state, and drugs, crime and corruption will make their lives worse. The Democratic party will be happy though.
Only whites will ever have non-minority status. Your definition, while touching for its naïveté, is out of date.
Just finished reading his interview at Vox, and still need to finish the podcast, but seriously it reads like Sore Loserism to me.
Americans and especially Republicans need to get a grip and get over themselves.
I swear its like some of you have never met a foreigner.
To compare here you go. I think the picture says it all.
http://tvo.org/blog/current-affairs/steve-paikin-how-patrick-brown-won-the-ontario-pc-party-leadership-race
If you liked James Lileks today you should hear him when he visits Duane Patterson on Fridays during the “4th hour” of the Hugh Hewitt show. It’s Screedblog worthy commentary. You have to subscribe to Hewitt to get it, but I find it worth it. Unfortunately, I currently must fast forward through much of Hugh’s show as he gamely tries to advocate….
Bring Avik Roy back in a month or so. I’d like to hear their opinions about a month from now because they will have been refined. It was one of the best podcasts in some time.
Great podcast. Really good example of civil discussion.
James referred to screening Birth of a Nation at the White House. Which Birth of a Nation was he talking about? Probably the current president (B.O.) will screen 2016’s Birth of a Nation, the story of Nat Turner, before he departs.
I suspect that Avik, as savvy as he is brilliant, will be spending his time working up a cover page article for The Atlantic followed by a bestselling book you will see carried outside the handbags (but not much read) in New York, Boston, DC et al. next year.
It is intriguing that the legacy of race hatred is only a pathology in states which vote Republican. Between the wars KKK membership exceeded 4,000,000 in a country with a population of 120 million (that 4 million is ten times the audience of Girls!). KKK membership was high in many states that are rock-solid Democratic states in POTUS voting (and where whites reliably vote Democratic).
@peterrobinson, Correct me if I’m wrong but I’ve heard it said that Reagan struggled/stumbled on racial issues at times because he just couldn’t, or didn’t want to, believe in his heart anybody could be racist. It didn’t compute for him.
Listening to the podcast and reading the subsequent discussions make me believe that we really are the party of Reagan in this regard. Naive to an ugly reality.
@roblong Says late in the podcast that you can’t drive through any small town without seeing an Asian guy running a hotel. Ok, but does that mean the townsfolk aren’t ridiculing that guy over Sunday dinner?
Trump was winning primaries with what? 25%? If 5 of that 25 (or 5%of the whole) is racist, then we have a problem. They’ve tipped the scale. They have influence. Even if the other 95% are pure gold.
I realize that facts rarely and uneasily intrude into race discussions, but here are few which might unsettle Mr. Roy’s argument of a white nationalist GOP:
First, a remarkable piece just published at The Federalist (which to its credit has moved beyond posh opinion on race controversies recently):
http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/25/the-chart-the-racial-grievance-industry-wont-talk-about/
Second, the Asian American vote in 2014:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/9/asian-vote-breaks-for-republicans-in-midterms/
I suspect Rubio or Walker paired with Haley could have gained further with Asian voters in 2016.
@roblong @peterrobinson @jameslileks please go read Hillbilly Elegy. It’s important, buhlieve me.
The fact that none of the hosts pushed back on the muslim immigration issue moves me to despair. The fact that across the board our “great conservative thinkers” accept on its face a position that a nation has no right to choose whom it will welcome into citizenship is appalling. We are a nation founded on liberal ideas and preserved by respect for them. We should choose immigrants who we believe are most likely to uphold these ideas – the feature of our nation which truly makes us exceptional.
BTW, is there any religious group that Roy would endorse turning away at the border? Are there any belief systems that he would acknowledge are antithetical to US citizenship? I realize that there are many muslims in the world that would make excellent US citizens, but there is no dearth of potential excellent citizens who have been raised in belief systems more compatible with ours. Let’s welcome them first. Perhaps after islam has its great awakening we can revisit the issue.
Won’t legislation like this just keep good Muslims from immigrating to the US and the terrorists will find their way in anyway? It seems a bit like gun control laws in this way. The bad guys will just lie. They’ll say they’re Christian, Jewish, Ba’hai, etc. So, to me, this approach will not prevent bad guys from coming in and it will make it even less likely that the good Muslim men and women will work with us.
A friend of mine won a state representative contest in an urban district that skewed about 58% D in a very simple way: he ignored the state GOP playbook and knocked on the doors of as many registered voters as he could.
The state committee does numerous mailings on behalf of candidates. He insisted on approving anything within the district he was running, and to be honest, they didn’t think he could win, so they weren’t anxious to throw too much his way anyway.
He came in as a bit of a pariah to the other reps because he didn’t listen to the state committee, but he got the job done. He did it by seeking people out, looking them in the face, and sometimes sitting in their living rooms to simply listen for a bit. Not all candidates have the wherewithal to do this, but it was simple and effective. My reading of Mr. Roy’s comments was this is precisely what is needed.
The only way to overcome a voting affiliation that is, for whatever reason, embedded in someone is to change perception. Mailings don’t do that. “Message” does not do that. It is one-way communication. Engagement does. Time to reexamine the playbook.
Astonishingly enough, he does.
With a Rubio/Haley ticket the opportunity to win a near majority of the Hispanic and Asian vote was there to be seized. Trump is likely to win less the 20% of each. I attribute much of Roy’s uncharacteristically pockmarked analysis to that lost opportunity. It’s more a wail than an analysis.
Regarding the African American vote, let’s be real. The black vote is the most completely bought and paid for tranche of votes in American political history. Bought at the local, state and federal levels. Bought with not only money, but with an embarrassing set of racist quotas, bad faith violations of basic constitutional meanings and manipulative pseudo-self loathing on the part of liberals.
Stand on the corner of Lark Street and Central Avenue in Albany, the very Democratic capital of a very Democratic state. Walk one block south into the Bobo shopping and dining playland that the government set enjoys. Then walk one block north into the neighborhoods African Americans have bought into by allowing their votes to be purchased. It’s heartbreaking.
Tim Scott won what? Seven percent of the African American vote in 2014.
The answer is to limit or stop immigration based on country of origin. Just don’t take people from Islamic nations. Of course some will find a way in, but it’s a start.
I just want to say thank you to everyone involved in that podcast, which I think is one of my favorite ones the flagship Ricochet podcast has ever done.
I was biking through the Lahemaa national forest in Estonia this morning listening to it. I stopped several times to pull my phone out and re-hear some of the arguments made. It’s been on my mind since.
And although I don’t agree with most of Avik’s argument, there was at least some of which (the “real America” comments that Republicans have made for a long time, for example about the large cities) did make me think hard about how the GOP, and I, even in my interpersonal interactions, have been representing our ideas.
Outstanding listen, everybody.
Re: Growth
Rep. Tom Emmer and Rep. Steve Scalise are working on the best and largely only way to restore growth. Overhaul the Fed and the financial system. Get rid of the Fed dual mandate and decentralize finance and lending.
Congress will be too dumb and venal to get this done until after the bond market collapse.
#1
#2
Basically, technology and globalized labor has been killing the West, and all of their governments and central banks are making it worse.
The PC party refers to the Progressive Conservative party, which is no longer a force in Canada’s federal elections.
And one thing I observed about the photo in your link is that I had to look pretty hard to find a white face in it. In the back. What’s that supposed to mean?
Admittedly I didn’t read the article because I’m not interested in a washed up political party, at least outside of the Province of Ontario.
Supposedly it only takes 25% of the black vote to go GOP and the Democrat party is toast. 12.5% Social conservatives and 12.5% libertarians. I suppose you have to minus out the government workers etc., so the bar is higher than that.
I don’t know what he was referring to, but I strongly suspect that he was referring to Woodrow Wilson who did screen it when it first came out, and was famously sympathetic towards the former Confederacy and how they treated their black populations.
I found myself agreeing with just about everything Avik said. Mississippi and Georgia suddenly voted R in 1964, after voting D for the previous 100 years. Of course it is because Goldwater rejected the civil rights legislation. What else would be the reason for the sudden switch?
And black voters, who previously had been 35% Republican, moved almost entirely to the Democratic party after 1964.
The Republicans are now repeating the same mistake with Hispanics. Recent polling has Trump with about 12% Hispanic support. We’ll see what the aftermath is after the 2016 election, but I suspect it will mirror 1964 in many ways.