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This week, we mix it up across a wide variety of views with guests from all over the right side of the ideological map. First up, AEI’s Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men. She wrote a Tweet this past week that set social media on fire. So we talk about that. Then, the main event: Charlie Sykes is a longtime time talk radio host in Wisconsin and is the newly minted host the The Daily Standard podcast right here on Ricochet. Charlie and our own Peter Robinson get into on the current occupant of the Oval Office, and well, let’s just say they don’t see eye-to-eye. But they do give a master class in how to disagree civilly. Take notes, people.
Music from this week’s podcast: Why Can’t We Be Friends by War
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Feeding anger to liberal media outlets which hates a Republican president with a passion even more than you do is a trick than many insider Republicans pull. That has been done to other Republican presidents too.
Many Republicans politicians refuse to go on talk shows unless they can also attack a Republican president.
Conservatism and its strains are about explaining ideas, and most of these guys are too disengaged, unintelligent, lazy, and most importantly frightened to explain anything to a hostile media. Twitter might be a rotten thing, but half the amateurs on twitter might be able to explain conservative positions (with real life examples) better than a bunch of elderly senators.
I agree but I still laughed when he said it.
Yeah but Peter was getting pretty hot under the sweater too.
The problem with insisting on men of good morals is that it needs to be an American thing and not a Republican thing. Otherwise it only becomes a cudgel for one party to use against the other and it becomes meaningless to the raising the standards of the national character.
Imagine if you had two children and from one of them you expected perfection while the other you let away with murder AND rewarded him with everything he wanted. It would create an enormous amount of resentment. And eventual rebellion.
And that’s how you got Trump. He was the only Republican that said, “OK, let’s play by the Democrats rules.” And a large percentage of the electorate said, “Hell, yeah.”
At age 71 you’re not going to get Trump to change. And frankly, rewarding his enemies is only going to make it worse.
Methinks Peter doth protest too much
As a listener, that’s consistent with the impression I had at the time, in context.
True, but it’ll never be an American thing any more if there’s no one left to insist that good moral character is important. The Right will be reduced to saying t’s nice, but it’s not necessary. The Right can say that marriage, fidelity, and fatherhood are valuable things, all things considered, but (gallic shrug, wink) it’s apparent it really doesn’t matter much.
Charlie’s been using that nickname since before the primaries (I’m one of his long-time Wisconsin listeners), and it used to make me laugh too. I suppose the climate of opinion has changed a lot since then, but I was really surprised that Peter and others in this thread were so offended by it. It’s a joke, folks!
Charlie has spent his time since the primaries maligning those who chose to support Trump as crazy, unprincipled members of a personality cult.
It’s not a joke. That has the ring of a teenager’s “Just Kidding.”
No doubt it plays well at MSNBC and WNYC and the Weekly Standard.
Apparently it didn’t play well with Charlie’s listeners.
did he not say something like “we bow to the orange god king”? if that is how it went (I’m having a beer at Peaks and can’t check the audio just now) that’s an insult directed at us, not a joke.
So how do you change it? If you don’t have the stomach to fight, if you acquiesce or claim you won’t “dignify” the most outrageous of charges à la the Bushes and the Romneys you get both the Democrats’ morality and their policies. But if what’s really important is to make you feel better as the ship sinks…
I don’t hate President Trump. I don’t like him, but that is a far cry from hating him. I criticize him occasionally, but that is hardly “passionate hate”.
It is funny, a good Trumpian epithet. What bothered me were statements like “We bow the knee to Donald Trump. We basically decided that Donald Trump is the leader of our movement.” We don’t and didn’t.
You may have meant east, but you said west. I just checked it again. I would say there was probably smoke on both horizons. ;-)
By far the most revealing statement of the hour:
PETER ROBINSON: “Charlie, the President of the United States obviously supported Roy Moore reluctantly. When he went down and made it very clear that he was supporting Roy Moore … because he wanted the seat … and the moment Roy Moore lost Donald Trump said, ‘See? What a lousy candidate he was.’”
Just imagine if Obama had supported a Democratic candidate facing similar allegations and what our reaction would be when he did so, and how we’d respond to, for example, Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell excusing the endorsement on the grounds that it was made “reluctantly.”
We’d be up in arms, of course. Apoplectic. And rightly so.
But we are now at the point where we willingly excuse heinous behavior when A) it’s our own guy doing it, and B) we tell ourselves he’s doing it “reluctantly.”
“Yes, he did it. Sure he did it. I admit he did it. But he did it reluctantly.”
Unbelievable.
Let’s suppose a Republican candidate running in the general election in 2024 is a successful governor who has cut taxes, spending and regulations while successfully reforming education (vouchers, charters etc.) and state welfare programs. Let’s also suppose he or she is learned, verbally dexterous and a committed conservative with a broad liberty impulse.
But our candidate is now married to his or her third spouse, having committed infidelities during each of the first two marriages. Not a neglectful parent, but not reminiscent of Ward or June Cleaver either.
He or she is running against an Obama clone. Faculty lounge leftist with fine family values. Eschews Washington party scene to spend time with the kids each night.
Anyone voting for the Obama clone?
I’ll be upfront and say that I have not read the previous 105 comments. So my apologies in advance if what I say has already been said.
It sure would be nice to hear what James Lileks has to say. Peter dominated the conversation with Sykes, and then – thankfully- said that he was finished and would let James ask him questions. But right after Sykes responded to James’s first – and, unfortunately, only – question, Peter jumped back in to argue with the guest and speak over him. Peter was rude, and it was hard to listen to. It’s also hard to give much credence to his assertion that he didn’t know any conservatives who had been corrupted, so to speak, by their support for Trump: Really??! Gosh, I’m sure Peter knows far more conservatives than I do, but it doesn’t take me long to think of a few. How about Dennis Prager? He was a crusader for character when Bill Clinton was in office, but now good character is a luxury item that the country can’t afford.
It would have been nice if Peter had remembered that he wasn’t the only host.
Could it possibly be because quite a few of Trump fans behave like crazy, unprincipled members of a personality cult?
And does anyone else think a true “master class in how to disagree civilly” wouldn’t have invited comparisons to pro-wrestling or prompted Yeti to close with the song, “Why Can’t We Be Friends”?
I don’t know of a single person here at Ricochet who could fairly be so described. But if you want to name names instead of indulging in wholesale slander like Charlie, please do.
Do you label everyone who disagrees with you about the practical political reasoning of supporting Trump at the present moment as crazy and corrupt?
Here’s the obvious option: Don’t nominate someone with a very flawed character to begin with. There are likely to be better people available, and there especially will be if it’s known that conservatives require decency. No one’s perfect, of course, but it should be possible to find candidates who are not fatally flawed. Then you won’t have to face the choice you outline above.
Oh, yay! A whole new set of podcasts from partly informed, historically myopic
Not for me, Karen. You may be a fan, but I found him long-winded and marginally informed. He seems the kind of debater who thinks he will win if he talks the most. I honestly think Peter was too kind to him.
I appreciate that Ricochet gave us a preview of what is sure to be a hard-hitting original series program detailing various virtue-signaling hosts telling us, variously how much they hate Trump the man but are in varying degrees okay with “some” of his policies. Some predictive bromides:
“Even a stopped clock is right twice a day”
“Trump continues to stumble into success”
“Making America Great Again apparently includes x”
“Conservatives are pleasantly surprised”
The proliferation of redundant and repetitive (and boring) podcasts at Ricochet is one of the reasons I’m letting my membership expire next month. I tend to binge listen to my podcasts a couple nights a per week, and it gets pretty brutal by the third time you have to hear about the tweet storm of the day.
But what is clear to me is that the Daily Standard podcasts will follow in this tradition and will be added to my list of must-miss ‘casting.
Appreciate that.
Of course not. I completely understand those who do not condone or ignore Trump’s character defects, but who nevertheless saw him as the only available option. I get that. I also get those who might not like him, but who are perfectly willing to give him credit when credit is due (I’m in that category).
I don’t know what “fight” means in this context. If we’re talking about the importance of character and behavior, it means fighting for the policies of the Administration that are good for the country, and fighting the impulse to make excuses for Trump’s personal character.
I’m not talking about responding to charges and hitting back hard. Hurrah for that and more, please – but in a cogent style that also advances an argument, not a juvenile series of insults and half-arsed taunts.
BTW, I don’t like “orange-haired god,” and think it’s a sign that the speaker’s animus towards Trump swamps everything else, and calls his ability to judge the administration’s accomplishments fairly.
C’mon.
“Time will come when we’ll know what happened here/ Change will come in time and make it clear…”
— Jackson Browne (from the song “Anything Can Happen”)
It may be years … possibly a decade or more … before we understand the full ramifications of Trump’s scorched-earth manner of speaking, and being. Personally? I think we’re going to look back in despair at the PR damage Trump and those giving him oxygen have done to the Conservative brand. He is toxifying good ideas — discrediting them in the eyes of a whole generation whose support we are going to need in the coming years. But that support won’t be there.
He is like a billion grains of sand inside a billion oysters, creating a billion Democratic pearls.
Fight in this context means you don’t let someone else define the rules of engagement unless you yourself are willing to play by them. The left said all sorts of nasty things about every Republican that, at one time, would have simply been out of bounds previously in American politics. The charges of racism, of cruelty, even being personally responsible for giving people cancer… and they do it without regret. Like Harry Reid said, “Hey, it worked, didn’t it?”
Trump won pluralities against a 17 person field, and the a rotted Convention would not let delegates vote their consciences. A majority of Republicans voted against Trump but he gamed the system.
I agree with the last paragraph. Ironically, the best thing Conservatives can often do now is to vote for Democrats, until we purge the Trump cancer from our party.
And so, your definition of “fight” means that if your opponents are nasty, vicious liars, one must become as nasty, as vicious, and as willing to lie. And you think this takes the country in a good direction? How does that not continue the fraying of the social fabric? Say goodbye, then, to any hope of returning civility and decency to public discourse.
No-o-o-o, I don’t see that course as an option. But you’re joking, right?